These four symptoms of Delusional Economics just became our new favorite meme, and they should send a shiver of recognition down your spine.

When we hear “Basing a business model on revenue from nonexistent advertisers or customers”, all we see is the famous “Dot-Com Bubble”, which burst in the year 2000. Online entrepreneurs were done in, not by Y2K causing all our data to go kabloowie, but by unrealistic, lofty expectations of money that just doesn’t come through.

Now, the thing with appreciating the value of a digital product is one we all struggle against. “What, this web design costs more than that web design? They’re all the same, aren’t they?” Like the article says, people will accept that with wine. Or for an even simpler example, pie. If you get a half a pie from one seller and a whole pie from another at the same price, you can see which one’s the best value, right? With web design, people don’t see the value. There’s all this back-end code that goes into it. The user doesn’t know, they just see black text on a white background with some pictures and say, “Yeah, it looks all the same to me!”