PriceZombie is shutting down
<i>Our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely, leaving us wondering if anyone was listening</i><p>I was once in a room with Dave McClure and a ~50ish companies he had funded.  He announced that he was taking a tour of partnership teams at two members of AppAmaGooBookSoft and asked for who wanted to come with.  A handful of hands were raised.<p>Dave McClure got frothing mad, and not his normal frothing character mad, but I think actually angry.<p>"LISTEN UP.  80% of you are building on these platforms.  If you do not have a direct line to God at their HQs you ARE NOT TREATING THIS LIKE A BUSINESS.  You will %(#)%#0 fail.  If you are working with one of these companies, and you are not on that bus, you are dead to me."<p>I don't think I'd phrase it like that, but the core message is exactly correct.  The standard platform deal is, indeed, in the event of an issue you can write to an inbox that no one reads.  You <i>do not want that deal</i>.<p>You should, as early as practical, identify <i>an actual human</i> inside the mothership and convince them to like you.  You should then lateral from that actual human to other actual humans so that you do not lose your beachhead if your actual human is re-assigned.  If you do not do this, when you inevitably have a problem, you will be reduced to taking it to the HN front page and hoping an actual human takes pity on you.  Pity is a much less likely outcome than convincing an actual human than you are scads better than their median semi-anonymous participant in the partnership program, which is pretty easy, because their median participant is terrible <i>and all processes are designed to treat them as such</i>.<p>I am aware that this some people will perceive this as unfair because getting better-than-publicly-available access to one's business partners seems like you're at a position of advantage vis-a-vis the people who can only send mails to /dev/null.  Is this an advantage?  Yes.  If you believe this is an unfair advantage, I would strongly counsel you to negotiate honestly and in good faith with your counterparties at your largest business partner and source of existential risk, and not worry so much about other putative businesses which are not sophisticated enough to negotiate honestly and in good with faith their core suppliers.