etsy

I know a little bit about Etsy - just enough to know that artists like the ones on Zatista complain about being undeserved by Etsy.

Which could kick off a whole wave of independent coffee businesses a la Etsy but for coffee and purely offline.

Really, Etsy doesn't have anything worth copying other than the basic idea and well, their success.

Ask any young lady what they think of Etsy and you'll see why that's dumb.

In which context, they might see dropping these war sim games as no different from, say, Etsy dropping confederate flag t-shirts.

The only problem was they were from an Etsy store and the artist just collected random, but plausible, image from the web.

Add in some Skyline (based off the Etsy project), graphite, and collectd, and it makes for a flexible and extensible monitoring solution.

I could see someone making stuff on Etsy stitching/drawing this in as a signature that links to their homepage.

> As mentioned, Etsy and others have gone against the cloud tide and seem to be making it work.

Why is the Etsy IPO plan so exceptional?

I was at Etsy when this was being built by a consultant, ostensibly for us to use to test our morass of stored procedures in perpetuity.

I once designed a site where the client basically asked us to clone Etsy screen by screen, to the point where we were even using their copy and I had to majorly intervene (etsy has some major usability problems).

I have over a dozen emails that say "please revise to work like etsy.com.

Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea told me that the online marketplace has discovered "very real cost savings" and higher utilization by running in its own data centers.

We've since grown to be the industry-leader for our area - "good enough data" for the startup and SME market - and count Etsy, KickStarter, WordPress and Lonely Planet among our clients.

It was a ridiculous project, they had an India team that took the "just like Etsy" wording so literally that if I designed a screen that didn't look & function 100% identical to Etsy (ie: I improved it) they would have a hissy-fit.

Etsy's pool of sellers is quite different in that prices stay for the most part under a hundred bucks.

And Etsy's model ($.20 per listing per four months) exploits that volume.

Etsy also takes a percentage of the sale, which Zatista is doing.