Is it more feasible in less expensive countries? I'd imagine you could pay a tech in Indonesia considerably less than in the Midwest and they'd still consider it a good deal (assuming funding levels are comparable).
I suspect part of it is just lack of knowledge; if someone showed up at your front door offering you money for some random item in your garage you'd be tempted to politely decline; because if someone is going out of their way to offer you cash, it's probably worth more than they're offering.
From the NPR story, it sounds like the business is ultimately constrained by customer acquisition costs and being in the US might actually be an advantage since the digital advertising market is more mature.
In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
You seem to not understand the point of an interview. It's not a quiz where you get a mark at the end and the best marks get the job. It's a series of intentionally constructed questions to help talk through someone's thinking and process in order to understand if they would be a good fit. The actual answer at the end is largely irrelevant.
My point with saying "almost all wrong" is that this is one of the questions where you have like, 50 different ideas that seem like they could work and wouldn't work if tried when you try it and maybe 1 or 2 actual strategies, not a question where you have 30 different things that all work with different pros and cons and you need to compare between them.
But you said yourself that you don't know what will work and what won't.
You say that the answer at the end is largely irrelevant, but then claim that there is only a couple of good solutions in the problem space, implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected.
Either your position is not coherent, or there is a communication deficit here.
> implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected.
No, you're implying that.
Definitionally, I don't know the answer to the question. If I knew the answer, I wouldn't be interviewing you, I'd be off making millions buying R12. And if you knew the answer, you should be off making millions buying R12 instead of interviewing here. That's clear to everyone at the start of the interview.
You seem to be attaching a moral valence to the word wrong, that people are somehow failures if they come up with the wrong answer to a question. The opposite is true, most of the things we try in life are wrong, we try something, it doesn't work, we learn from it and we try again.
edit: The reason why I think it's a good interview question for marketing people is because it's a business that seems like, if the customer acquisition piece is figured out, the rest of the business is relatively trivial. But empirically, it's not a common business so the customer acq piece must be pretty hard to figure out. At the same time, it seems like there's at least a few businesses so it also doesn't seem like it's impossible to figure out.
If I hire you, I'm going to constantly be asking you to do things that, as far as you're aware, you're the first person in the world to have ever done. If I'm asking you to do it, it means I don't know if it can be done or not, I don't know the "right" answer to the problem. Most of the time, the answer back is that the thing I want done looks impossible and probably isn't worth pursuing which is a great answer in the context of a job but not very illuminating in the context of an interview.
This question looks that hard but there's also a proof point that it can be done which means you can't give a "this isn't possible" as an out and are forced to explore deeper into how someone could actually do it. At the same time, it's a question with relatively little context which means I can explain all the relevant facts in the span of an interview.
That's why I think it's a potentially great interview question. It's not designed as a trick brainteaser for you to figure out the answer. It's designed for you to exercise the same parts of your brain as you would when I come to you with any other crazy request that probably can't be done.
