Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The failure of Sprig

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 86 posts

Re: The failure of Sprig

#11

Post by skrebbel »

systemvoltage wrote: post #4

Why didn't they think "Oh geez, our idea isn't that revolutionary and anyone, including companies such as lyft or Uber with giant pockets can come in and swoop our lunch?" That should be the first day conversation. I am sure they had that, it would be stupid to not have, but the stupid part is about unsustainable growth whilst ignoring the competitive landscape with delusion. I know retrospectives are always easy to…

Comments like these are why many founders prefer not to share their failure stories so candidly.

It's a well written, extremely well summarized postmortem. Of course it's obvious after the fact what they did wrong. You're shooting at an empty goal and, frankly, it's not very interesting.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#12

Post by morley »

> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations.

What innovations did they make that the health department didn't like?

Re: The failure of Sprig

#13

Post by systemvoltage »

skrebbel wrote: post #11
systemvoltage wrote: post #4

Why didn't they think "Oh geez, our idea isn't that revolutionary and anyone, including companies such as lyft or Uber with giant pockets can come in and swoop our lunch?" That should be the first day conversation. I am sure they had that, it would be stupid to not have, but the stupid part is about unsustainable growth whilst ignoring the competitive landscape with delusion. I know retrospectives are always easy to…

Comments like these are why many founders prefer not to share their failure stories so candidly. It's a well written, extremely well summarized postmortem. Of course it's obvious after the fact what they did wrong. You're shooting at an empty goal and, frankly, it's not very interesting.

I recognize it is easy to take shots at failures and I prefaced it with this recognition.

It feels like this is repeating pattern for delivery businesses, and it deserves harsh criticism. Anything with Uber for _____.

Would you give a pass to Juicero which raised $118M? Doesn't it deserve harsh criticism? Or we want to learn from Juicero's insanely delusional value proposition and may be inspire others to try again? What about Theranos?

I don't give Sprig the same footing for a postmortem than say, Gumroad: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

Re: The failure of Sprig

#14

Post by notyourday »

sharkmerry wrote: post #10
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #3

> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying"). San Francisco's population leans quite left, but they seem to really hate change over there. I've never lived in a place so hellbent on ensuring that nothing changes. In fact--the entire bay seems to hate change, and the peninsula may arguably be worse. There's that old saying: "you couldn't get…

> 2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass. > We had epic revenue growth w/ burn rate growth. Soon we were burning $1.5-2M/mo! > We were always “1-2 months away” from managing the burn. I dont understand, how in good faith, he can bring up SF-regulations as issue #1. When issue #2 is the crux of all their issues. They lost mon…

People who are not in the actual retail restaurant industry do not understand that there's no way to make money with ghost kitchens. Theoretically, to make money with a ghost kitchen one needs it to be churning out a very large number of standard meals at a price that customers want to pay to achieve the economy of scale which at the same time requires an economy of scale in logistics, which has its own overhead. By the time you figured out how to make eick out money there, customer's preference changes and you need to start from scratch or a competitor shows up and cuts your margins.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#16

Post by derefr »

notyourday wrote: post #14
sharkmerry wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass. > We had epic revenue growth w/ burn rate growth. Soon we were burning $1.5-2M/mo! > We were always “1-2 months away” from managing the burn. I dont understand, how in good faith, he can bring up SF-regulations as issue #1. When issue #2 is the crux of all their issues. They lost mon…

People who are not in the actual retail restaurant industry do not understand that there's no way to make money with ghost kitchens. Theoretically, to make money with a ghost kitchen one needs it to be churning out a very large number of standard meals at a price that customers want to pay to achieve the economy of scale which at the same time requires an economy of scale in logistics, which has its own overhead. By…

> a very large number of standard meals

Or a number of meals all made of the same 5-to-7 ingredients arranged differently, i.e. the McDonalds / Taco Bell model.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#17

Post by danellis »

venkyk wrote: post #8

slightly off topic: what is the motivation to use twitter for writing very long posts? splitting your message up into so many tweets seems so distracting. what's the big idea of splitting it up?

They're going where the audience is, and where they can get maximum exposure (retweets).

Re: The failure of Sprig

#18

Post by renewiltord »

venkyk wrote: post #8

slightly off topic: what is the motivation to use twitter for writing very long posts? splitting your message up into so many tweets seems so distracting. what's the big idea of splitting it up?

It's the audience. That's where the audience is.

Also Twitter is amazing, you always see stuff only from the people you follow, so he knows his audience is people who want to listen to him.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#19

Post by danellis »

> Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley

What an odd thing to start with. People talk a lot about failure in Silicon Valley, to the point that it's a stereotype.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#20

Post by derefr »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #7
systemvoltage wrote: post #4

Why didn't they think "Oh geez, our idea isn't that revolutionary and anyone, including companies such as lyft or Uber with giant pockets can come in and swoop our lunch?" That should be the first day conversation. I am sure they had that, it would be stupid to not have, but the stupid part is about unsustainable growth whilst ignoring the competitive landscape with delusion. I know retrospectives are always easy to…

I don't think you can really pay much attention to potential competitors. It's common to have competitors but rare to have good ones. And so, yeah, a lot of companies have deep pockets, but also that works against them in a particular way. The line of business that's making most of the money is also getting most of the good talent and leadership.

I think the GP's point is that some business models are predicated on having no competition, where even bad competitors will beat you if they just have deep-enough pockets to outlast you.

Compare and contrast: individuals suing large corporations. Even if the individual is in the right (i.e. has the "competitive advantage"), the corporation will still often "win" because it can just afford to keep delaying the trial longer and longer, until you run out of funds to keep the suit going.

Or, to put that another way: you can't run a siege without a supply train. The city will always have more food than your army brought with it. Unless more capital is flowing in to match the rate of replacement, they're eventually going to win.

Post reply on HN