61–70 of 176 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess that's a function of how relatively few HNers may be Pinterest users? I actually use Pinterest. It's just how often does the opportunity to mention Pinterest comes up? My pins are fashion (boots, athletic wares, etc..) and haircuts.
Pinterest probably has an amazing tech stack. I am surprised that it doesn't get more love around here.
Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, except for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotte…
Another way in which Pinterest is an outlier in this list is that its user base skews heavily female (>80% according to one source: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/pinterest-statistics/ ). I wonder whether some "Moneyball Factor" could be at work, in that this led to it being underpriced for its potential. Snapchat users also skew somewhat female, but they are also quite young compared to other sites, and "youth" may…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ouch, HN showing off its gender bias I guess. Pinterest is also supposed to be popular with dads, so we must be showing off our age bias as well.
Maybe. Or, Pinterest is just a narrowly scoped and realistic product while this audience is more interested in pie in the sky ideas.
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Not this dad. My wife kept trying to get my 14-year old daughter interested, but so far she's not. I think, based on these three data points in my family, that I have pretty conclusive proof it's a not-quite-young-but-of-course-not-old-female demographic.
Pinterest has cornered the market for women who (1) are planning a wedding or (2) have a child under five in their family. And I don't just mean brides and mothers, but everyone involved with the wedding/baby shower/birthday party planning process: bridesmaids, mothers of the bride, future mother-in-laws, aunts, grandmothers, and godmothers. And of course everyone who's paid to be involved with those events uses pint…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another way in which Pinterest is an outlier in this list is that its user base skews heavily female (>80% according to one source: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/pinterest-statistics/ ). I wonder whether some "Moneyball Factor" could be at work, in that this led to it being underpriced for its potential. Snapchat users also skew somewhat female, but they are also quite young compared to other sites, and "youth" may…
Don’t want to overgeneralize, but women seem to be more likely consumers (of things) & regular users of social media. [I’m sure niche exceptions abound] I don’t know if anyone has run the numbers, but I’d expect ladies to more valuable on all kinds of KPIs of a good customer. My feel is that men gravitate towards large purchases around a hobby or two (bikes, outdoors, cars, computers, video games). While women are mo…
Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, except for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotte…
The City of London is having a skyscraper boom at the moment - two major 100+ floor buildings are going up and you can hardly turn a corner without some crane or building work going on. I personally (and without any empirical evidence) think that there is no way London needs this much more office space, partly because "Brexit China Tariffs", but mostly because remote working and "just not in the office five days a we…
Paying for an office space is an extremely inefficient use of resources, especially when plenty of cafe space - or just, you know, your living room, kitchen - or garage - are useful even for teams of 20+ because will be rare to need everyone in a single space at once, and then you can just rent something larger for that event.
I kind of have a challenge with myself to work towards launching the fastest growing projects/platforms using as few resources as possible. whether I'll reach that goal is moot, though - it's more or less a mantra for me to pay attention to whether I am rushing or not.
I’m good friends with the founder of the first and long-dominant tech/creative co-working space in my Australian city, and I served on its advisory board in the past couple years, through what turned out to be a distressed sale of the business to its landlord, after it became insolvent and unsalvageable.
There are several fundamental flaws with the concept that make it very hard for this kind of business to work:
1) Difficult/unpredictable/uncontrollable customer retention
Most of your customers are individual freelancers and early-stage companies up to about 20 people. If they become successful, they outgrow the space and leave (possibly after a period of tenancy on negotiated discounted rates because “hey it would really hurt you guys if we left”). If they are unsuccessful, they go out of business and leave, possibly after a couple of months of non-payment (“oh man we’re just waiting for a big payment/financing, we’ll be able to pay next month for sure”), which is hard/impossible to recover once they’ve left. And even where people remain eligible customers, the transient nature of the customer-supplier relationship means it's easy to jump ship if a cooler space opens around the corner.
So you’re running this revolving-door business, where retention is only partially within your control, and having to invest heavily on new customer acquisition (often involving free trial periods and other incentives) to keep up with churn.
Your most reliable customers in terms of tenancy and payment are remote workers/teams for bigger interstate/international companies, but too many of them and the culture can become too corporate-feeling and less appealing for everyone - them included.
2) High setup costs and fixed running costs
Rent, fit-out, furniture, facilities, utilities, cleaning/maintenance, staff, etc. Most of these costs are largely independent of occupancy levels/revenues.
3) Difficulty finding/keeping good staff
The “community management” job in these places is highly specialised and demanding. All day you’re dealing with human problems that are exacerbated by people’s stresses about their business or job, as well as all the minutiae of things like the toilets/kitchens being clean/stocked, meeting room booking windows being adhered to, ensuring that the people in the space are all people who are meant to be there.
Emergency calls from people who e.g. left their wallet in the space that day and “just need someone to let me in to grab it” (at 9.30pm) become routine occurrences once you reach a certain scale.
Beyond these practicalities, the people in these roles set the mood for the whole space, and can make all the difference between it being a welcoming and happy place or a dull/miserable one.
Finding people who can not only do this kind of work all day every day, but do it with an enthusiastic and friendly demeanour, is very difficult, and burnout/turnover is common.
In general, the kinds of people who can do this job really well can get a less-stressful/better paid job elsewhere (quite possibly for one of your resident companies).
4) Competition/substitution
The market in many cities has become saturated (partly thanks to WeWork itself). This pushes market rates down, acquisition/retention costs up, expectations up (“the other place has FOUR types of kombucha on tap”), and dilutes the pool of potential residents and staff.
And after all, what you’re offering is not essential for freelancers/small companies anyway. They can easily work from home, cafes, borrowed/subleased space with other companies.
It seems the only way to make these businesses financially viable is by partnering with something like a startup accelerator/investment company or an R&D body backed by industry and/or academia.
But this requires deep links with local community/industry, and is a huge amount of work to establish and manage.
For a player like WeWork, this kind of work is hard to do as it can’t be done with a cookie-cutter approach, and local collaborators for these kinds of partnerships often prefer to work with locally-owned businesses rather than big outsiders.
So, we’ll wait and see. Maybe WeWork has something up their sleeve that will allow them to build a model that works.
I’ll be interested to watch it play out.
Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, except for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotte…
Ouch, HN showing off its gender bias I guess. Pinterest is also supposed to be popular with dads, so we must be showing off our age bias as well.