Question...
How is this a $2M startup? They raised $2M but wouldn't that have been on a higher valuation. I feel like the norm is to report the "$N startup" with the valuation, not the finding round haul. And that's still the BS machine's version. A company that never turned a profit isn't really a such-and-such dollar startup so much as loss, bad gamble, write off, or the like - in non-BS parlance
I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Ha, I think the internet needs a new term like Godwin's Rule or Gell-Mann Amnesia or whatever for the constant claims of "This only happens in America" or "This problem is worse in America than anywhere else" and then the reality is that the US is in line with averages or norms in other countries or cultures.
Can we also have one for "Europe does X better" where Europe really just means France, Scandinavia the wealthy half of Germany, and maybe UK, and not the more irreputable countries like Belarus or Serbia?
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#33Funeral industry needs an intervention, the way some states fight against pay day loan predators. These are people at their most vulnerable and are being taken for a ride.
in some US States, the elected representatives have close and vocal ties to the Pay-Day loan industry
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#34Maybe a new COO would have been a better move. Her figure of $5-10M for a crematory seemed way off to me - it's basically a glorified oven in a building - so I did a little research and found this: https://howtostartanllc.com/business-ideas/crematorium It says to budget $100-250K to get started, which seems a lot more reasonable than $10M.
The nummer wasn’t for the crematorium, it was for the entire runway of the business which included a crematorium in order to become profitable and get to the point where they would be an attractive acquisition target.
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#35I 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.
The business idea is solid at its core but he describes getting turned down because he didn't superficially "fit" as a funeral director. People tell sob stories for little gain all the time, so I don't think telling a small one to get his company off the ground makes him a psycho.
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#36Isn’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…
Not everything has to happen via the medium of commerce or government. Funerals are something that is ideally suited to being a communal effort, or it would be if communal living weren't dying off.
Wishing that a service should be provided by a community instead of a business does not address the fact that it is a service, and one which has a constant demand and an inherent need to be offloaded to a third party.
Once specialization is demanded from the service, the "communal" label becomes meaningless.
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everything has to happen via the medium of commerce or government. Funerals are something that is ideally suited to being a communal effort, or it would be if communal living weren't dying off.
Wishing that a service should be provided by a community instead of a business does not address the fact that it is a service, and one which has a constant demand and an inherent need to be offloaded to a third party. Once specialization is demanded from the service, the "communal" label becomes meaningless.
It /did/ used to be provided by communities. Funerals are traditionally handled by the church, an arrangement which seemed to work for a long time and doesn't contain the dilemma of impersonal and potentially exploitative interactions that entail commercial transactions. Communities have specialisations too. Unfortunately the community seems to be dying with the secularisation of society which only leaves government and business to tackle things.
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wishing that a service should be provided by a community instead of a business does not address the fact that it is a service, and one which has a constant demand and an inherent need to be offloaded to a third party. Once specialization is demanded from the service, the "communal" label becomes meaningless.
It /did/ used to be provided by communities. Funerals are traditionally handled by the church, an arrangement which seemed to work for a long time and doesn't contain the dilemma of impersonal and potentially exploitative interactions that entail commercial transactions. Communities have specialisations too. Unfortunately the community seems to be dying with the secularisation of society which only leaves government…
> Funerals are traditionally handled by the church,
You're somehow assuming that a religious organization does not operate as a corporation, even down to the invoices.
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It /did/ used to be provided by communities. Funerals are traditionally handled by the church, an arrangement which seemed to work for a long time and doesn't contain the dilemma of impersonal and potentially exploitative interactions that entail commercial transactions. Communities have specialisations too. Unfortunately the community seems to be dying with the secularisation of society which only leaves government…
> Funerals are traditionally handled by the church, You're somehow assuming that a religious organization does not operate as a corporation, even down to the invoices.
Charging money does not make something a corporation. Though I'm aware of the financialised nature of some American churches, I'm talking from a British perspective where that isn't the case (as far as I am aware, I don't personally attend church).
Either way, I don't think there's as much moral hazard if you're charging someone at cost as part of a communal service, compared to trying to squeeze as much profit as possible out of grieving families.
Re: I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I did look this up and found slightly different numbers: https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/how-much-d... https://nfda.org/news/statistics But I would maintain that the invasive practice of embalming is unnecessary and unusual elsewhere in the world.
I think those are consistent with the numbers I found