173600+ entries in 0.043s
mircea_popescu: Better had one of the best consumer user experiences out there but that isn’t enough. "
mircea_popescu: this'd be an epic car theft ring, really. "kicstarter decentralized on demand carbon conscious valet service!"
mircea_popescu: in the immortal words of seinfeld, "i give some guy the keys to my car because he's wearing a vest"
mircea_popescu: ay but it was just not working. Our model was no longer valid and were forced to cease operations in the city on September 7th."
mircea_popescu: We started VATLER during the summer of 2014 as an on-demand valet service in San Francisco … We received a phone call from the police department telling us that our permits had not been granted and they gave us a warning because we were operating illegally in most of our locations…In 2 weeks, we lost major accounts and 30% of our revenue streams without any perspective of growth. We tried to make some restaurants p
mircea_popescu: this is like, fundamental abdication from humanity. these people aspire to be bugs.
mircea_popescu: any mention of "i suck as a manager" eerily absent. "i don't suck as a manager - i gave all the people who had no responsibility in the matter all the data about what a shit job i was doing. this means i wasn't doing a shit job! this is also how i went through school - i told my parents about all the Cs i got! this is actually better than getting As!"
mircea_popescu: Each member of our now pared-down team knew exactly how much runway the company had remaining, the status of our strategic talks, and the acknowledged long odds we faced as a going concern. To their credit, they remained focused, productive and on-task until our final day — a remarkable expression of dedication to the mission and to each other. Sadly, and in spite of the achievements, we simply ran out of time and ca
mircea_popescu: "oh, we were going to change the world on someone else's dime. what do you mean "wut" ?!?!?! WE ARE GENIUZ!"
mircea_popescu: We had a user acquisition problem, and the best route involved a competitor…The best acquisition method I saw was tapping into an existing network of people who had filed 1099s: like Intuit’s hundreds of millions of tax returns, many with 1099 income. Unfortunately, Intuit released an identical competing product to us. It’s not ideal when your best user acquisition strategy is partnering with a company who has a
mircea_popescu: Escribano said that the company’s main problem was user engagement and retention. “In every marketplace you have the chicken-and-egg problem with buyers and sellers. We tried to capture them both organically and via paid marketing, but it wasn’t enough. Getting sellers was somewhat easy, but buyers much more complicated”
mircea_popescu: Steering the ship — handling all of the engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and retailing, even when you’re taking 90 percent of the subsequent profits — was ultimately too expensive of a proposition, especially in comparison to other, less-handholding-oriented start-ups. “The reason why Kickstarter makes a ton of money is they don’t have to do anything besides put up a website,” Kaufman notes.
mircea_popescu: ” and its unnamed acquirer a “no-show”. Adds Graj: “They backed out leaving us with a huge legal bill both for Dine In and myself personally, a huge debt to note holders, and no VCs to turn to. A hard lesson to learn and one I’ll be taking into my next venture.”
mircea_popescu: “We knew acquisition was the best course of action,” says [Evan] Graj. That eventually led to Dine In being approached in February by a major Internet company active in the online food space, and it’s my understanding that by April — and significant legal fees later — a sale had been agreed. Then at the eleventh hour the deal unexpectedly fell through, leaving the restaurant delivery startup “high and dry
mircea_popescu: alternative and private, seriously ? what, like your wife & daughter ? why are they chained in my closed then, if they're this private an' alternative ?
mircea_popescu: but anyway, there's going to be A LOT of busting kneecaps of uppity ustard "capitalists" who imagine they actually get to have a say and whatnot.
mircea_popescu: nobody in china ever saw their faces before the day they were locked in a hut and burned alive, but hey. THEY thought they were part of the conversation.
mircea_popescu: this is a little like being a chinese diplomat reviewing the records of this obscure tribe, meanwhile crushed, that apparently thought it had sent lots and lots of ambassadors, expeditions, generals, so forth.
mircea_popescu: all the things nobody heard of from all the people nobody heard of.
mircea_popescu: o-founders said they saw “little chance” that they would be able to generate revenue, pivot their product or secure additional funding."
mircea_popescu: In the email, co-founders Karthik Balasubramanian and Brian Moyer stated their belief that the movement of investor interest away from consumer-facing applications for the technology was also a factor. Balasubramanian and Moyer wrote: ”While investment and activity continues to occur it is focused on private and alternate chains rather than bitcoin or other public chains where Bonafide operates.” As a result, the c
mircea_popescu: epic. "i am exactly who i wanted to be : a failure. unfortunately, this also means i die now. so long!"
☟︎ mircea_popescu: We achieved what we set out to do, even if the final result didn’t end up with us becoming the next Buzzfeed. We never wanted to be the next Buzzfeed. We always wanted to be who we were, Pixable. And it was working. Unfortunately, circumstances [despite reaching 9.4M active users and 58M monthly video views] … made it difficult to raise money and continue on."
mircea_popescu: btw asciilifeform the same iac/spamcorp owns the princetown review, your favourite!
☟︎ mircea_popescu: ah, as per intel they actually bought okcupid for 50mn, so prolly should shed some zeros.
mircea_popescu: of only practical interest here, remember that for every $1000 added to your 401k, you can expect to buy about a cent;s worth of turkey at some point down the road.
mircea_popescu: numbers are probably not exact, but they are certainly & guaranteedly closer to reality than the bizarro view where "apple has 1 dollar means apple has 1 dollar".
mircea_popescu: also, seeing how InterActiveCorp ( NASDAQ: IACI ) consists of at least 10% okcupid and claims total assets of 4bn, we can estimate the value of the bezzle! if 4k worth of okcupid is perhaps 10% of the business self-valued at 4bn, then every dollar a us corporation owns is worth ~0.001 cents of actual, honest to god, turkey-buying dollars and 0.999 cents of pure bezzle.
mircea_popescu: this puts the per-capita value of an ustard (that LTV thing discussed in some earlier links in log ) somewhere in the 1 to 10 cents.
mircea_popescu: on the basis of all the foregoing, i would say the market value of okcupid is definitely under 10 btc and perhaps over 1 btc.
mircea_popescu: on the other hand, of those 2-300 people, should you have the curiosity to include a link strategically in your profile, you might discover that exactly... 0%, as well as 0 per thousand actually click.
mircea_popescu: as the boost takes about an hour, this caps the okcupid revenue from this line to somewhere around say 20 bux an hour ? which sounds just about right.
mircea_popescu: this is practically a straight advertising deal, and i have the numbers : out of the ~150-200k people onlione they claim perpetually, the 1-2 dollar thing buys you about 300 over an hour, so that's superficially 1.5-2 per thousand but i suspect might be as high as 10% given that obviously, not everyone actually pays any attention to them.
mircea_popescu: the other, and this is the lulzy part, is a "boost", where you pay them a buck or two and they "show your profile" to VERY MANY ppl!!1
mircea_popescu: but anyway. i imagine it's making a decent penny for them, being exactly the fuctarded "sit by lakeside and carefully dip toe in" thing that today's women of both sexes obsess over.
mircea_popescu: in unrelated news : okcupid makes money in two ways that i can see. one is to sell you "A list" status, which brings no obvious benefits other than "browse invisibly". they advertise the shit out of it too, "you are browsing visibly". what the fuck sort of deranged ustardian would actually make an account of a site specifically dedicated to finding people and then wanting stealth!
mircea_popescu: i do, actually. this line-at-a-time business is almost perfect.
mircea_popescu: jurov quite. i recall reading that thing years ago, too. understood as nothing of it then as now, obviously.
mircea_popescu: <nubbins`> jurov seems you're making some progress << ironically, the operator= nonsense was JUST linked in a basic piece about how c++ sucks that we've all read and yet it made nobody else click.
mircea_popescu: today like in athens 3k years ago, a good chunks of "thieves" are the merchant's own adolescent sons.
mircea_popescu: should just move the fucking capital already, who needs the queen.
mircea_popescu: deedbot-: [Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski » Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski] << hey, maybe stick some more pete dushenski in there, pete_dushenski ? just in case tis not clear!
☟︎ mircea_popescu: next time ima be sure to spread the media coverage wider.
mircea_popescu: there is apparently OTHER seminal legal work in "The space" than my semen the sec chicklets guzzled. fancy that.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes: bryan reyhani has been in the space since 2013 having handled seminal legal work that garnered widespread media coverage. <<< bwaghaghaga fuckuing epic.
mircea_popescu: they're taking the "i've been part of the bitcoin through talking" to the next level : "in my head, i could have been talking abotu this in 2012 so why the hell not!"
mircea_popescu: !v assbot:mircea_popescu.rate.TheNewDeal.2:72f205feb029a54e96e08dbde50f07860dd069d6aa8b8021f0286fe3999b943a
mircea_popescu: !rate TheNewDeal 2 Put a decent chunk of change into the Bitcoin Foundation back when it wasn't fashionable yet.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: danielpbarron wow no shit ? 2mn ? that's like... almost minimum wage ?
mircea_popescu: he's been doing that, has a regular stable of noobs going from what i gather.
mircea_popescu: anyway, you wanna invest in a game, why not go play eulora. danielpbarron will show you the ropes if you show him yours.