Coupon site startups share a problem with most web startups that benefit from network effects: a serious chicken-or-the-egg problem, or a catch-22. You want to attract publishers to add coupons to your site, but to do so, you need to already have coupons and traffic! At first, it seems that the solution to getting a lot of coupons on your site is through a feed – but unless you already have original coupons, your site will not rank well or attract any attention if it shares the same data feed that thousands of other sites are using. It needs something unique to please both your users and Google; if you base your site entirely off of feed-based coupons, you run a high risk of Google considering it to be a clone of existing sites, and users will not find much value in your site either.

The Solution

To address this initial hurdle, you’re going to have to start with a large amount of manual data entry. You will start by finding coupons listed on existing sites – especially the sites of the businesses that publish their own coupons, since these coupons are often not listed on other websites, and are therefore relatively unique. Often, these coupons are image-based and are not even indexed yet in search engines.

To do this at scale, you will need to build functionality into your site that allows for outsourced labor to contribute to your coupon site; this data entry and management feature should include multiple user types: data entry users and data entry reviewers.

The data entry users are responsible for finding, categorizing and entering coupons into your site’s database. To ensure that a high level of quality is maintained (good coupons with accurate category tagging, descriptions, valid URLs, etc), your data entry reviewers will have privilages beyond the data entry users. They will be responsible for ensuring that your coupons meet your standards, and the links to coupons on external pages do not point to expired sites (they need to be checked regularly to maintain quality, since you’ll be linking to sites that often go down, have their URLs changed, and have coupons taken down). The data entry reviewers need to provide feedback to the data entry users, letting them know why their coupons were rejected. The data entry reviewer needs to have higher trustworthiness and skill then the data entry user, since the reviewer acts as a moderator that controls the coupons entered by many users.

A very difficult level. Will cause more pain than joy. Avoid.

Download the above level to play it*

Impossibly-difficult level. Avoid at all costs. Attempts to play may lead to suicidal behavior.

If you really want to play the level above, here it is. It’s fun*

Reddit Jetpack comments.

To play jetpack online, visit JetpackHQ.

* Seriously, don’t bother. These levels are just too difficult. Afaik, everyone has quit before completing them.

More generally, just recognize that you find yourself shifting among various states, and then use your peak mental states to address your most significant decisions. At the same time be aware of when your mind is weak, saving yourself from the consequences of decisions made in that state.

Religions generally maintain that free will allows for us to be responsible for our actions from a god’s-eye point of view. At least, there is an implied teaching that we ultimately hold enough responsibility for our actions and that God sees us from a perspective where it makes sense to label us as good or evil.

The problem of free will poses a challenge to religions: without free will, morality and in turn, the teachings of religions that depend on free will, fall apart. Although we (society) can still discuss morality because of the benefits to society, we can’t claim that we are morally responsible “from a god’s-eye point of view” if we are not the ultimate cause of any part of our decision making process, but are merely cogs in a machine.

We can speak about responsibility that only exists from our limited perspective, but not from the perspective of a omniscient being, who would both completely understand and determine our behavior as a function of a predictable cause-and-effect system. In this system (the universe), which is completely controlled and understood like a simple machine by an omniscient being, it would not make sense to speak about our actions as “good” or “bad” with respect to the system’s creator.

The thoughts in this post are inspired by William Ramsey‘s intro philosophy course at Notre Dame and Shuan Nichols‘ work.