Corporation gets taken advantage by another corporation.
E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
141–150 of 184 posts
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#142A rotten offer will never sell no matter how many ads you buy. This thread says that the scooter is a whitelabeled product. The margin priced it out of the market. Most people comparison shop. What is really new to learn here that isn't common sense?
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#143If you give $700 to a company that promises to deliver a scooter, and they spend that money on advertising, that’s fraud. They have no plausible argument that they didn’t know they couldn’t deliver or refund customers after they started spending pre-order funds. I hope customers get successful chargebacks and there’s a class action lawsuit. This wasn’t a crowdfunding campaign. Consumers were lied to, and the law shou…
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Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
>what's to stop the same employees and founders from following that method ad infinitum? Informed consumers
Part of the task of marketing is to disinform customers. Companies existing to scam people are necessarily marketing-heavy.
>Companies existing to scam people are necessarily marketing-heavy.
Consumers can absolutely that.
I certainly have.
If you're screaming in my face and hurrying me along to pull out my wallet and buy something ASAP, 99 times out of 100 it's a scam.
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#145There is a strict set of conditions that a Kickstarter donation should meet:
1. The product should require relatively large upfront costs such as design or tooling. If I'm ordering a pair of hand-knitted gloves there isn't much fixed cost so it should not be a Kickstarter.
2. The excess value of the product to the donor should be more than the expected loss if the delivery fails.
3. The product should be on the "bubble" of being produced so that the donor's contribution makes a material difference towards the product actually being produced.
4. The team should be qualified to deliver the specified product with the funds raised. Qualified teams can fail but unqualified teams will certainly fail.
5. The money should not be significantly impactful to the lifestyle of the donor.
6. The product’s market should be small enough that it will likely be produced in one “batch” with no opportunity to buy it on the open market afterwards with the execution risk removed.
An example of such a product for me would be a display platform for one bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku fountain pen ink, made out of Japanese cypress wood (hinoki). The ink bottle is beautiful and I've always thought it should have a hinoki stand (just a thin board of wood with a small depression routed out of it). The product would need some CAD and CNC design work, but not too much, there is not that big of a market for it, and I would be happy to pay $100 for such a thing even though it should only cost $5-10 to produce. Let's say it sells for $30, I'd be expecting $70 of excess value so I could accept even a 50% likelihood of failure.
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#146They sold 350 scooters at $700 each. So just under $250k in sales. They decided, right before Christmas, that they would tell all those people their $700 has been thrown right in the trash. The founder of this company is the founder of Tile, a VC-backed company worth $XXX million that has raised $104M+. If this person had any morals he would cash out $250k of his shares in Tile and pay back the people who ordered his…
Yeah you're not wrong. What a jerk.
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, how many Kickstarter projects will it take to convince people preordering on an unsure thing is a gamble and basically an investment in an idea that interests you. Tons of billion dollar projects, let alone those with only a few million, have been delayed for years, changed half way through, or have died before finishing. The failure rates for new businesses is pretty high, 50% in the first year. One could qu…
> preordering on an unsure thing is a gamble Even though you are trying to warn people, you've accidentally fallen into Kickstarter's "dark pattern in broad daylight" by using the word "preordering." Kickstarter donations (I consider it a charity) are not pre-orders. If I preorder a book on Amazon and it is late, tough for me. If the publisher closes down, Amazon gives me my money back. Kickstarter donations, on the…
Amazon only charges you when the pre-ordered item ships. :)
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#148They sold 350 scooters at $700 each. So just under $250k in sales. They decided, right before Christmas, that they would tell all those people their $700 has been thrown right in the trash. The founder of this company is the founder of Tile, a VC-backed company worth $XXX million that has raised $104M+. If this person had any morals he would cash out $250k of his shares in Tile and pay back the people who ordered his…
Tile was a company that always rubbed me in a weird way, too. They spent an incredible amount of money on marketing, yet I never heard of anyone using them. For years.
Seems it didn't work out for him this time.
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#149Ironic name of the company, comes off as a Onion article, sad that it's true
Onion articles seem to write themselves these days
Re: E-scooter company goes bust after spending big on Facebook ads
#150If you give $700 to a company that promises to deliver a scooter, and they spend that money on advertising, that’s fraud. They have no plausible argument that they didn’t know they couldn’t deliver or refund customers after they started spending pre-order funds. I hope customers get successful chargebacks and there’s a class action lawsuit. This wasn’t a crowdfunding campaign. Consumers were lied to, and the law shou…
You're not wrong, you're an idealist, which typically are very closely intertwined when it comes to reality. If you gave $700 to a company who promised to deliver you a scooter a few years down the line if all of the dominoes fell exactly as planned... I would argue that you got what you paid for even if it amounts to nothing tangible in the long run. Which is to say, you paid for a pricey digital lottery ticket with…
This was not a crowdsourcing product. I ordered two scooters because they were advertising scooters for sale. Nothing in my purchase order stated that my order wouldn’t be filled immediately. It was once they had my money that they kept pushing the date back for shipping.