Okay, I can't just let people keep repeating this. $30k for a promo of this magnitude is not absurd in the least. This thing blew up huge, and it went off huge without a hiccup. If you just hire some low-ball bidder who knows how to slap together some APIs what guarantee do you have that it won't crash and burn under load? If that happens in seed-stage startup, oh boohoo, you disappointed your 100 early adopter friends, you learn from the mistake and you iterate, no experience necessary. If you do it with a viral promo that cost you hundreds of thousands to produce you just threw 90% of your potential millions right down the toilet and you probably end up crawling back to your bitter paymasters who are not feeling particularly generous after being cut out of the last big deal.
You hire people who know what the fuck their doing. No one here knows all the edge cases and planning that went into it. It looks super simple, but that is the brilliance of it. It looks effortless because it so well achieved. It's disappointing to me that HN members would dismiss this as just combining a bunch of commodity components and calling it a day. Just because you fancy that you could churn this out in a week of working 14 hour days with your buddy like you do for your startup doesn't mean that people doing this professionally shouldn't charge $250/hr to do it. Remember, they have no upside, and should charge a proper fee for their expertise.
I'm not really arguing about whether $30k was too much or too little. That's beside the point.
The point is that it shouldn't cost every comedian who wants to follow Louis CK's lead $30k to setup their own site. It would be a total waste of time and money, not to mention limit the number of people capable of emulating him.
Think about why Shopify, Weebly, Blogger, Wordpress exist. Every person who wanted an online store or web site of any kind used to have to pay people thousands of dollars to get a custom one made.
Alright then, my UX-nerd-rage having subsided, I agree with that. However I think there still is room for a custom crafted experience. Just reading both Gaffigan's and CK's pitches you can feel the difference in polish. Gaffigan is funny, but his message just isn't as on-point.
You hire people who know what the fuck their doing. No one here knows all the edge cases and planning that went into it. It looks super simple, but that is the brilliance of it. It looks effortless because it so well achieved. It's disappointing to me that HN members would dismiss this as just combining a bunch of commodity components and calling it a day. Just because you fancy that you could churn this out in a week of working 14 hour days with your buddy like you do for your startup doesn't mean that people doing this professionally shouldn't charge $250/hr to do it. Remember, they have no upside, and should charge a proper fee for their expertise.