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I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

theguardian.com

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Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#11

Post by cafard »

sytelus wrote: post #5

Isn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run…

Thomas Lynch wrote a book that I remember as interesting as far as I read it, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334876 .

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#12

Post by jiofih »

lupire wrote: post #9

The headline is a lie, right? There no "Uber" part. I guess that's the point of the quote marks, to contrast all the bullshit lies and phony origin stories and pitch decks of the VC world , against the reality of the work your business does. There's plenty of room for ethical mortuary companies to make money providing value and distrupting a deeply exploitative industry. But maybe it can't be done with (ironically na…

The “Uber for …” came to mean any kind of service that you get by pressing a button on your phone. Hence the overuse. It’s just a startup trope now.

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#13

Post by jiofih »

chirau wrote: post #3

Isn't this also what Empathy ( https://www.empathy.com ) does? Grief and death are a business as well, and being good at it does not make you a monster. You just have to have the stomach for it. It's kind of like those guys whose sole job is to come in and fire people, like George Clooney in Up In The Air. Someone has got to do it.

Is manipulating people into buying a $1800 necklace when they are at a vulnerable moment “being good at it”? I think you missed the gist of the story here.

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#14

Post by jiofih »

55555 wrote: post #4

A common source of loss for investors. Funding someone in a moment of strength who ends up not having the nerve to follow through on what they said they could do. Or weakness, depending on whether you look at it from a business perspective or a moral perspective.

Yeah, they should have found a stronger con man.

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#15

Post by curryst »

sytelus wrote: post #5

Isn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run…

Death services tread a very fine moral line. You're working with people who usually have no idea what they're doing, who are in a time of crisis in their lives, and who are trying to fulfill the wishes of someone who is now dead and can't provide any input.

There's a very fine line between providing someone services that will help them reach closure, and selling someone nostalgic snake oil so you have a few more dollars than you did yesterday.

It's not something I would get involved in. I feel like the only two ways it could go for me would be either compartmentalizing and becoming a greedy monster, or not compartmentalizing and becoming totally swallowed up by the sorrow I'm exposed to every day. Many kudos to the people that can be around that sorrow, be unaffected and yet still not become a monster.

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#16

Post by rozab »

sytelus wrote: post #5

Isn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run…

Pushing overpriced useless junk to emotionally vulnerable people? No. There is a necessary service of digging a hole and putting a corpse in a box into it, but the whole business of $10k coffins and embalming and such is both unnecessary and quite unique to the US.

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#17

Post by wutbrodo »

rozab wrote: post #16
sytelus wrote: post #5

Isn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run…

Pushing overpriced useless junk to emotionally vulnerable people? No. There is a necessary service of digging a hole and putting a corpse in a box into it, but the whole business of $10k coffins and embalming and such is both unnecessary and quite unique to the US.

Expensive funerals are far from "unique to the US". The US spends substantially less as a proportion of income than Japan, China, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, and New Zealand, and is within a couple percent of a half dozen other countries.

[1] https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/S...

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#18

Post by wutbrodo »

dangus wrote: post #2

I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this. I thought the article was an indictment of our culture’s relationship with death more than anything being wrong with Grace itself. So many families simply don’t have a plan for what happens after they die. They leave it until the death actually happens, a time when nobody really wants to be talking money. Of course, Grace…

> I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this

I dunno, the whole "business turned me into a monster" bit is a little thin given that he opens his story with a VC pitch that he secures by melodramatically faking grief over his uncle's death.

The guy seems like a little bit of a psycho, who became a little more of a psycho through desensitization.

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#19

Post by rightbyte »

foxyv wrote: post #6
dangus wrote: post #2

I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this. I thought the article was an indictment of our culture’s relationship with death more than anything being wrong with Grace itself. So many families simply don’t have a plan for what happens after they die. They leave it until the death actually happens, a time when nobody really wants to be talking money. Of course, Grace…

Just a funny thought, but ladders about 3 feet tall are significantly more dangerous than the ladders in wind turbines. Not that they are more pants poopingly scary though. https://cultureofsafety.thesilverlining.com/safety-blog/2013...

If elderly would climb wind turbines I guess those numbers would change.

Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

#20

Post by AndrewOMartin »

foxyv wrote: post #6
dangus wrote: post #2

I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this. I thought the article was an indictment of our culture’s relationship with death more than anything being wrong with Grace itself. So many families simply don’t have a plan for what happens after they die. They leave it until the death actually happens, a time when nobody really wants to be talking money. Of course, Grace…

Just a funny thought, but ladders about 3 feet tall are significantly more dangerous than the ladders in wind turbines. Not that they are more pants poopingly scary though. https://cultureofsafety.thesilverlining.com/safety-blog/2013...

Similar thoughts on the same idea here.

Taking The Emergency Exit From A Wind Turbine - Tom Scott

https://youtu.be/UWSckm8zTc8?t=80

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