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The failure of Sprig

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Re: The failure of Sprig

#51

Post by kjs3 »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #46
kjs3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly...I'd like to understand that as well. I really don't want to eat food where someone is 'innovating' (disrupting?) safety and hygiene regulations without some check and balance. And I don't think this 'attitude' on the part of health inspectors would be unique to SFO...

Probably some skirting of the rules around temperature keeping for pre-made items.

Let's be fair...if they've truly come up with a better, or at least equivalent but different, way of maintaining food hygiene that's more efficient that isn't being accepted because of regulatory ossification, then yeah, that needs to be addressed.

But I'd bet you're exactly right, and it's just "we're betting there's not going to be a major food poisoning incident before we find an exit and make it someone else's problem".

Re: The failure of Sprig

#53

Post by draw_down »

It was everyone else's fault: mean old City Hall and Uber did them in. Well, okay. The margin thing sounds like the real problem to me, but what do I know, I'm just a coder.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#54

Post by derefr »

renewiltord wrote: post #48
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have to click the tweet to see the thread anyway. What's the difference between clicking through to the thread, and clicking through to open the article in the embedded webview? Either way, you're stuck synchronously looking at the story until you click "Back." If it's just a matter of journalistic style, I assume there are people out there who write articles the same content-dense way people write tweetstorm…

I don't know what to tell you except that tweets are way more information-dense than anything else. The Medium audience demands "modern long-form" style with personal anecdotes and all that. The Twitter audience demands the punchy short stuff. So I know what I'm going to get on Twitter.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting someone write for some other audience or site first and then share the results on Twitter. I’m suggesting that someone write for Twitter, starting off by writing essentially the tweets they were going to write, but offline in a text editor; then edit the resulting paragraphs for readability/flow; then slap that prose into a Gist and take the https://gist.io/ view of it (or do any other equivalent "pastebin to clean, unlisted-but-linkable HTML page" flow); and then publish the first of those tweets, as a link to that HTML page.

In other words: maintain a blog on Twitter, where the tweets serve as the blog’s chronological index / human-readable RSS-feed and interactive comments section; and floating text pages hosted in arbitrary other places serve as the blog’s content. This idea is what “microblogging” was supposed to mean, before the media re-interpreted it as being equivalent to “really enjoying this poop I’m taking”-style life-logging.

I’ve always been surprised that Twitter itself doesn’t have a built-in first-party workflow for this. Tumblr, the other 20-year-old microblogging platform, does: you can publish a post with an embedded “Read More” break, that will hide everything below it in your feed but show it when the static-HTML version of the page is viewed, with the “Read More” link at the bottom of the post in the feed, linked to said static-HTML page. It would make a ton of sense to me for Twitter to have something that’s half this, and half Reddit’s approach to text posts: giving you the ability to create a tweet that, instead of having a linked URL to go with the tweet, has a longform text body to go with the tweet.

Think about the fact that you can “attach” a multi-minute-long video to a tweet as a first-party workflow, and Twitter will host the video for you — but you can’t “attach” a multi-minute-long blob of rich prose text, where Twitter will host the text for you. Seems silly when I say it that way, doesn’t it?

Re: The failure of Sprig

#55

Post by xmprt »

parliament32 wrote: post #41
fasteddie wrote: post #2

I loved Sprig. I used to use them as my example of a favorite product when asked in interviewed. Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook. Solution: As the founder notes, once signed in, it was literally three taps to get food to my door really quick. Also the design was beautiful. Doordash, UberEats, et. al have certainly (glactically) widened the variety of food I could order, but I always find m…

>I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up This whole analysis-paralysis trend seems to be a thing not just in food delivery, but Netflix et al as well. I've lost count of the number of times I've kept scrolling through Netflix with a bunch of "okay" options at the back of my head, but searching for something better. Ditto for DoorDash. I wonder how well an "I'm feeling lucky" button wou…

For the decision paralysis thing it helps to start a timer and force yourself to come to a decision by then. Or else come up with 2 or 3 decent options and then flip a coin/roll a die for the final decision.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#56

Post by xmprt »

marcell wrote: post #32
opqpo wrote: post #21

That's why you should never start the Uber of X and the Amazon of Y. Because if the actual Uber and Amazon see that the market is good they will massacre you unless you're fortunate to get an offer from them.

Fwiw Instacart had the same problem, and it succeeded, even after Amazon acquired Whole Foods. It's really case-by-case, and depends on so many factors.

Instacart is doing well but I think it's still too soon to call it a success. Hell I don't even know if I'd call Uber/Lyft a success yet.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#57

Post by s1mon »

Sprig's food and delivery was pretty good at times, but the whole thing was so archetypical of venture backed insanity in SF and Silicon Valley. "We're going to throw a ton of money at X and disrupt it with our complete lack of industry knowledge and make a fraction back."

It was essentially a decent restaurant with convenient delivery, and no eat-in option. There's no magical hockey-stick growth curve to be had in the restaurant business. The marginal cost to delivery another meal or add a new customer is pretty similar at N as it is at N+1 or N+1000.

How did they get investment with that (lack of a) business model?

Re: The failure of Sprig

#58

Post by renewiltord »

derefr wrote: post #54
renewiltord wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what to tell you except that tweets are way more information-dense than anything else. The Medium audience demands "modern long-form" style with personal anecdotes and all that. The Twitter audience demands the punchy short stuff. So I know what I'm going to get on Twitter.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting someone write for some other audience or site first and then share the results on Twitter. I’m suggesting that someone write for Twitter , starting off by writing essentially the tweets they were going to write, but offline in a text editor; then edit the resulting paragraphs for readability/flow; then slap that prose into a Gist and take the https://gist.io/ view of it (or do any othe…

Haha, I get what you mean, but the people who want that get that from the Thread Unroller apps so the need really isn't there. The Twitter restriction ensures that I get Tweet-style content.

Re: The failure of Sprig

#59

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The failure of Sprig

#60

Post by briefcomment »

parliament32 wrote: post #41
fasteddie wrote: post #2

I loved Sprig. I used to use them as my example of a favorite product when asked in interviewed. Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook. Solution: As the founder notes, once signed in, it was literally three taps to get food to my door really quick. Also the design was beautiful. Doordash, UberEats, et. al have certainly (glactically) widened the variety of food I could order, but I always find m…

>I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up This whole analysis-paralysis trend seems to be a thing not just in food delivery, but Netflix et al as well. I've lost count of the number of times I've kept scrolling through Netflix with a bunch of "okay" options at the back of my head, but searching for something better. Ditto for DoorDash. I wonder how well an "I'm feeling lucky" button wou…

When you don't see something that's a definite "yes" after a couple minutes on Netflix, why not just stop looking? And if this happens often, why not just drop Netflix altogether? Curious about what proportion of the time Netflix is just a time pass at best. I can count the number of shows which I would recommend to a younger me who is deciding whether to watch those shows on one hand.
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