361–370 of 840 posts
You either die as a cool edgy app/platform or you live long enough to face the innovators dilemma.
Surprisingly, I think its a good thing on balance. It creates room for disruption from newcomers.
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I ran a startup making something similar to this pre-covid, it wasn't just date night, it was "find something to do in under 5 minutes". Groups of 4 to 6, partnering with local businesses who hosted the events. You opened the app, said what you wanted to do and when, and you were automatically put into a group. You could select how many people you already had going with you (date, or just a group of 2 friends who nee…
You weren't able to scale enough initially to be profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate? This is a fantastic project. I also briefly worked on something similar, but left when I learned more about my coworkers.
Bootstrapped, COVID hit right before the launch date.
Infra costs were ~$200 a month to support 10k DAU. I'd just come off of working on embedded, so I was used to writing really efficient code. :)
> At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?
Just needed to cover my living expenses mortgage and salaries!
Obviously to scale money was needed for ad campaigns, but people are lonely and offering to solve loneliness has a high conversion rate!
Thoughtful article that doesn't even mention Youtube Shorts, perhaps the most glaring example of the trend. When online services maximizes the number of daily users, perhaps in the hundreds of millions, the vast majority of them won't be very interested. So of course any data driven service will optimize keeping uninterested users occupied. That does explain a lot actually.
Basically all these platforms use dwell time as an indication that you liked (or at least were interested in) a video. So then these sites got flooded with completely inane videos of the "Just wait for it!!!" variety that last for 5 minutes, always making it seem like something is going to happen, but it's just video of an intersection or people at the grocery store or whatever.
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It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.
They were a YC team. They were always on VC funding - and they were not exactly a tale of profit and success. Essentially, Reddit always had to IPO.
See how many people worked at reddit in 2021 and in 2022.
It went from something like 500 to 2000
And even if, the CEO said that reddit was never profitable and that's or bullshit or a clear sign of how badly can a company be managed.
The problem is that short-term profitability isn't compatible with the long-term health of society, because often the easiest way to make a lot of money quickly comes as a form of societal exploitation. The most direct examples being chemically addictive products like painkillers and cigarettes, and now ad-based attention sinks like TikTok and Instagram.
I’ve seen B-corps - those seem good, social/environmental focussed. No idea how widespread they are.
Are there other corporate structure models that could become mainstream and solve some of these issues? At least for the companies adopting them and therefore customers signed up to them.
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I ran a startup making something similar to this pre-covid, it wasn't just date night, it was "find something to do in under 5 minutes". Groups of 4 to 6, partnering with local businesses who hosted the events. You opened the app, said what you wanted to do and when, and you were automatically put into a group. You could select how many people you already had going with you (date, or just a group of 2 friends who nee…
Theres a YC video that goes over tar pit problems. If i am not mistaken, this exact scenario is covered as a tar pit.
Yeah the final end goal was either to make lots of deals with local businesses (hard to scale) or to license an ML personality matching model to companies.
The app had a handful of personality questions that I copied over from research done at one of the Nordic universities (I forget which one) on what makes people get along together in a casual setting. The American universities have mostly done research on group cohesion in corporate settings, which maybe hints at what is wrong with American society at large!
Cruise liners and casinos would pay a fortune to know what guests would vibe together.
I had a partner website that allowed for self onboarding, but of course b2b2c is never that simple. :)
The operating costs were so absurdly low (~$200 a month per city it was running in) that letting people create their own events for free was in the near term road map, no reason not to.
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I ran a startup making something similar to this pre-covid, it wasn't just date night, it was "find something to do in under 5 minutes". Groups of 4 to 6, partnering with local businesses who hosted the events. You opened the app, said what you wanted to do and when, and you were automatically put into a group. You could select how many people you already had going with you (date, or just a group of 2 friends who nee…
Why did you shut it down?
I burned through my savings and was ready to launch in earl 2020.
Oops.
I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It's not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But…
The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that's a real shame.
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Reddit seems to have easy sales. Specific subreddits can be targeted with specific ads really easily. So it should be easy to sell things there and easy to keep the users happy.
Reddit ads sadly didnt work well. They really tried all sorts of things. I feel that they may have been a media firm, and not a platform. When Victoria conducted AMAs, Reddit was a burgeoning cultural force. Maybe if they had gone that route they would be their “ideal” state. However that leads to no billionaire club IPO/Exit.
Reddit is like a distillation of that, the logical end point of it ... if that is a dead end, Google is in for a rough time with the pathway they are pursuing with Chrome.