I don't think patio11 would be the right choice for this particular market.
cperciva certainly seems smart and capable enough to grow his business in that direction if he so chooses, without handing it over to a 'suit', even if that suit is well thought of for his bombing of HN.
If it helps, remember that patio11 leveraged "Bingo Card Creator" into a position from which he dispensed "expert" advice, and then from there, into paid business consulting gigs. It's his job to plaster the internet with advice, and HN was (and perhaps still is) one of his main advertising outlets.
Truly successful people are generally busy being successful; people who are telling you they're successful and that they can sell you advice to help you be successful too ought to send your alarm bells ringing.
The whole idea of white labeling it would be that we'd be trusting cperciva with the technical aspects under the hood, which he is Freakin' Awesome at, and patio11 with wrapping it in the kind of sales pitch / UI that I can show to a non-technical person and say "Yes, let me spend the company's money on this".
Someone as smart as cperciva can figure out how to "wrap it up in a sales pitch" if he wants it wrapped up in a sales pitch, even if that means hiring someone to do it.
It'll be authentic, and he won't give a disproportionate amount of the value of his creation to someone who has a much less complex job.
The two options aren't "the original owner releases a new layer on top of his service" and "no such layer can exist". That's the whole point of white-labeling, and I doubt cperciva would mind people releasing layers that use his service as a backend, in the same way he releases a layer that adds value to Amazon's storage.
He wouldn't be giving away any value, somebody else would be starting a company that happened to pay him for service.
> He wouldn't be giving away any value, somebody else would be starting a company that happened to pay him for service.
If he wouldn't be giving away value, then how could there be enough margin for said company to survive? The point of white-labeling is to let other people build solutions outside of your core competency, using your system effectively as a commodity.
For someone like cperciva, that would be giving away an awful lot of value to people whose sole contribution would be marketing and extremely high-level software development.
He should hire to fill this gap, not give away his margins to marketing suits.
