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.
The failure of Sprig
21–30 of 86 posts
Re: The failure of Sprig
#22slightly 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.
Let's put that another way, then:
Why use Twitter for the whole post, rather than using it for a summary or above-the-fold section of the post, with the actual post hosted somewhere else and linked to from that summary tweet?
It's not as if any of the individual tweets, other than the first one, were formatted usefully as soundbites worth an individual retweet. The only thing people were sharing/responding to was the first tweet. So, AFAICT, that's the only part that needed to be a tweet, right?
Re: The failure of Sprig
#23Why 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…
Which startup business model do you have in mind, that would survive Uber entering the same market, selling the same product but losing money on every transaction for five years?
Re: The failure of Sprig
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Let's put that another way, then: Why use Twitter for the whole post, rather than using it for a summary or above-the-fold section of the post, with the actual post hosted somewhere else and linked to from that summary tweet? It's not as if any of the individual tweets, other than the first one, were formatted usefully as soundbites worth an individual retweet. The only thing people were sharing/responding to was the…
Clicks through drop off really fast. I know I almost never do it. The tweet thread format is good for information in small bites. I know that each tweet has got to have more information and I can just stop at the first that is meh because it's written for insiders.
Articles on the other hand are written for an audience that usually likes more background etc. because that audience will complain if the background is absent.
Re: The failure of Sprig
#25What a refreshing read. We need more stories like these to ground the industry in reality. The investment machinery and the publication makes it such that we only hear about the “successful” ones. Then there are the “gurus” who amplify those rare successes to bait followers: “If xyz did it so can you if you just invoke the universe to assist you. Let success find you. Move fast and break things.”
Re: The failure of Sprig
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's put that another way, then: Why use Twitter for the whole post, rather than using it for a summary or above-the-fold section of the post, with the actual post hosted somewhere else and linked to from that summary tweet? It's not as if any of the individual tweets, other than the first one, were formatted usefully as soundbites worth an individual retweet. The only thing people were sharing/responding to was the…
Clicks through drop off really fast. I know I almost never do it. The tweet thread format is good for information in small bites. I know that each tweet has got to have more information and I can just stop at the first that is meh because it's written for insiders. Articles on the other hand are written for an audience that usually likes more background etc. because that audience will complain if the background is ab…
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 tweetstorms; you could just decide to only follow such people.
Re: The failure of Sprig
#27My insight into Sprig's business was limited, but my impression from being in the industry at the time and knowing several of their vendors and folks working for them in operations was that they were a typical Bay Area startup operating in an industry they understood poorly, without much interest in learning it from people who had made it their lifeblood for generations. You won't get far in the food industry if you don't appreciate that relationships are everything -- you can't treat vendors like APIs that hand you some resource, while building a reputation for low pay among the people making and delivering your food.
Good relationships with your vendors are how you earn pricing to support good margins even at "low" scale (compared to say Kroger) and unlock doors that will take you to 10x and higher. Good relationships with your employees is how you make people in the industry want to see you succeed -- no one wants to see yet another player show up in their industry driving down wages (allegedly in the name of efficiency while wasting orders of magnitude more food than your typical corner market with approximately the same revenue). And while none of this will get you all the way there when it comes to city government, it certainly doesn't hurt.
Re: The failure of Sprig
#28What a refreshing read. We need more stories like these to ground the industry in reality. The investment machinery and the publication makes it such that we only hear about the “successful” ones. Then there are the “gurus” who amplify those rare successes to bait followers: “If xyz did it so can you if you just invoke the universe to assist you. Let success find you. Move fast and break things.”
This, so much. Successes are so amplified it’s impossible to find truthful opinions on shortcomings with primary evidence. These posts were very refreshing.
Re: The failure of Sprig
#29Why 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 love companies like Boston Dynamics.... Any amount of money that Microsoft + Apple + Google all combined can throw billions and billions ...
I hate to burst your bubble, but BD was OWNED by Google for years, until they sold it to SoftBank because they couldn't figure out how to make money on it.
Re: The failure of Sprig
#30> 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…
The people of San Francisco are not "left" on local matters like planning and permitting. In fact they are absurdly conservative or reactionary. And they have plenty of reason to be: the people who own San Francisco property are riding a dynastic money machine. A surprising number of them can trace their family wealth back to literally Mexican land grants, or similar historical accidents. All of them enjoy a state tax system that disallows increasing their property tax rates and allows them to pass real estate to their heirs, tax-free, without ever marking them to market. So of course the people who have a vested stake in this fucked-up system will fight to freeze it in amber.