171500+ entries in 0.052s
mircea_popescu: "Our first beta test was a disaster when Amazon (who was our payment processor) suspended our account for not complying with money transfer issues. Fans were able to participate in the sale, but we were unable to capture their billing. We ended up paying the artist out of our own pocket and giving everyone his music for free (and we never told him that happened until now)." <<< derps were going to bypass amazon on an a
mircea_popescu: hard to beat "cheap calories" as a warm blooded lifeform.
mircea_popescu: "More importantly though, people really didn’t really LIKE anything about our product. No one that used the service thought it was that cool. In fact, some people that participated in the sale didn’t even like our “dynamic pricing” system."
mircea_popescu: punkman i never had a tailor go "breathe in" "now exhale" before.
mircea_popescu: a) the people who had a dacha were happy as is, no need to chase it
mircea_popescu: why didn't "Better Homes And Gardens" exist in 1980 Moscow ?
mircea_popescu has enough experience with 1990s state of the art 3d modelling for games on basis of laser scanning nude female models to not need the first part explaiend.
mircea_popescu: "The single factory willing to work with us said they’d quote on our items while showing us around the facility. When our guide accidentally led us full-circle, we caught their product team copying our patterns and that was the end of our sourcing trip."
mircea_popescu: recast of 5000 units per style was daily output for these guys."
mircea_popescu: We added a line of jersey basics to our denim line, packed up our lives, ended the lease on our house, loaded our portfolios and patterns into suitcases and boarded a plane for Malaysia, where I had some contacts in the manufacturing industry. At one factory after another, we were wooed by the boss, we got the grand tour, we were asked our volume projections…. and we were shown the door. Our (very inflated) annual fo
mircea_popescu: "So we decided to wholesale, on the condition we could establish a cost-effective supply chain. This might all seem like a juvenile, ill-informed, poorly researched, gamble. And it was mostly, but I heard an irrepressible voice day and night,asking what if it works?
mircea_popescu: "Why did we launch with 12 million variants? Because we thought we needed to. Would the market have been happy to customise just the length? If we’d done proper validation, we would have known, that yes, it would have been happy — thrilled even. It only became apparent, too late, that 90% of our orders were for very typical jeans from atypically tall women. Stonewashed stovepipes with a 36-inch leg, anyone?"
mircea_popescu: s hours, and when I went off to a night job managing a restaurant, she’d code, with Sex and the City for company, until 1 or 2am when I stumbled in again from night shift."
mircea_popescu: All of them said the site we wanted was impossible, apart from one who quoted upward of $40k for build, excluding the photography and image editing that would be needed. At this stage we only had $20k total capital for the entire venture — sampling, pattern making, inventory and production. So my co-founder taught herself to code. She worked day and night — we did all the operational planning during busines
mircea_popescu: customers needed to see exactly what they were going to get.
mircea_popescu: "Partnering with a uni friend, we pitched our concept to a whole bunch of web developers we knew. The challenge we posed was that it couldn’t be customisation by drop-down list or radio buttons (solutions we were offered repeatedly). This was 2005. We needed to show customers high-quality photographic customisation, where every selection changes your product. Custom-made product required a strict no-refund policy, so
mircea_popescu forces slavegirls to eat livers. it's a show, i tell you.
mircea_popescu: yup. take chicken liver. i love it. so does everyone who had sane enough parents to have it as a kid.
mircea_popescu: "flowtab joined my two life's passions, inept geekery and strip clubs"
mircea_popescu: rly in those bars without being there. It quickly become a distraction to our operations in San Francisco."
mircea_popescu: "We hired a local operations manager in Denver (Sasha Juliard) and soon launched at Shotgun Willie’s (the highest-grossing strip club in CO) and two other bars. We made about $1,200 on each deal (50% went to DexOne, we spent $800 on each launch event and we had $500 in hardware costs), this was the only sales revenue Flowtab ever made. We were tightening up our sales process, but it was hard to market ourselves prope
☟︎ mircea_popescu: asciilifeform complicated. but their key people don't actually buy into the stupid.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform if you're wondering why the figure's so low (srsly, palantir raises 200mn, whatsap sells for 20bn ?), the reason'd be that most of this has to be actual turkey buying dollars.
mircea_popescu: "1. No team. It’s really hard to do a startup by yourself, especially if you’re a non-technical founder. No kidding, right? However, being non-technical wasn’t my excuse since WordPress came to the rescue and I basically bought the development through using cost-effective themes."
mircea_popescu: tellingly, the nut in there ALSO thought time was the true issue. because hey, everyone's time is valuable now, in lalaland.
mircea_popescu: "III. WHY I SHUT IT DOWN (ALTERNATIVELY, WHAT I WOULD’VE NEEDED TO CONTINUE). Four reasons (in order of least to most important): No team ; No funding ; No longer aligned with my personal goals anymore ; No clear or predictable way to sustainability (B2C is extremely, extremely hard to monetize)"
mircea_popescu: "More importantly, it does a terrible job of giving people like me actual relevant information for gluten free: Does the restaurant train its staff? Do they have separate cutters for their gluten free pizza? Are they flexible and accommodating? Do they have a separate gluten free menu? What ingredients do they use? etc."
mircea_popescu: motherfucker, the entire city of buenos aires has like... ONE actual restaurant.
mircea_popescu: "|Yes, Yelp has a tag for “gluten free” but it only has 44 restaurants in San Francisco with that tag (do it yourself if you don’t believe me and NYC actually has double the number of restaurants tagged gluten-free), which is a very low and deceiving number."
mircea_popescu: While I know there might be a possibility I could hustle incredibly hard and try to set up partnerships, the time investment required far outweighed the already incredibly slim chances of generating revenue."
mircea_popescu: "I didn’t want a startup, but an actual business that generates revenue, and Cusoy would not fulfill that personal goal for me without a full-time team, 1-2+ years of funding, multiple years of hard work (3-5+ years at the very least?) trying to answer the if/when questions of whether or not Cusoy could make money (very expensive questions too, might I add — not only in money but time, my most valuable asset).
mircea_popescu: by the time your country has failed to the degree tsa exists, you ARE bee. whether you're ready to admit this or not is entirely in your own mind.
mircea_popescu: it will alright. for as long as TSA disputes end up in federal court rather than in burning baltimore, it'll be thinking right about how well being naughty works for its goals.
mircea_popescu: i don't get it, so the guy rewards the naughty child with attention in the hopes it'll stimulate it to... think about how it's been naughty ?
mircea_popescu: oh lordy... please derps, run more SV. mpex not good enough for you, by all means, go for it.
mircea_popescu: "Good’s final sale price down to $425 million, less than half of the company’s $1.1 billion private valuation. The paperwork also showed that Good’s board had turned down an $825 million cash offer just six months earlier, in March."
mircea_popescu: "r. In an investor document about the sale that was distributed to shareholders, employees discovered their Good stock was valued at 44 cents a share, down from $4.32 a year earlier. In contrast, preferred stock owned by Good’s venture capitalists was worth almost seven times as much, more than $3 a share."
mircea_popescu: "Page Not Found We’re sorry, we seem to have lost this page, but we don’t want to lose you." << apparently nyt piece you linked diappeared.
mircea_popescu: and all the talking heads i fucked to date were not common prostitutes but journalists and so forth.
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> gigantic dir full of straight-out sp4m0l4d3 << surely it was an accident for which nobody paid anyone inside two happy meals.
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> (why the everliving fuck should there be a sql interpreter in the binary? or runtime interpretation of hardcoded sql proggies ???!!!) << because at the time satoshbi made it he didn't have a clear design document and the usg stoolies anchored themselves on such chinks in the armor to "extend" and so forth.
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> even 2. << 2 is technically many in computing.
mircea_popescu: "To pay those taxes, some employees emptied savings accounts and borrowed money." << ahaha loot at the cute chumps!
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> lulzy, nyt reads the logz and rips off mircea_popescu's summaries <<< then forgets to mention this, muppets sit around and wonder who could this guy be etc.
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> 'cnn' hosts spam now ?? <<< the "mainstream media" is sinking, and has been, for twenty years now. there is no bottom for them.
mircea_popescu: "now fix it" "what ?!" "make it flat" "are you stupid ?"
mircea_popescu: in fairness, the guy wasn't exactly dumb, and the problem itself is not exactly trivial.
mircea_popescu: it didn't work (imo the best summary of the problem is - they ran into recursive cyclic graphs and couldn't recover)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform except that's the local symbolic name for the global that's HER OWN FUCKING GAZE\