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Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

buildwithtract.com

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Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#41

Post by jimnotgym »

88 wrote: post #31
brudgers wrote: post #2

Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…

Exactly this. Housing land supply in the UK is bottlenecked by politics (NIMBYism) and economics (private developers seeking to maximise profits) not software.

Moreover, prime building land never gets put on the open market. People know people and approach them directly. Why would you give that kind of advantage up to a software company?

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#42

Post by SilverBirch »

mellosouls wrote: post #11

Depressing that the main lesson learned is "Move to the US", the others also pretty standard HN/PG/SV tropes I think. A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think. Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder: https://www.henrydashwood.com/

The "move to the us" thing seems to just be absolute twitter brain. The biggest problem London founders face is raising funding and these guys seemingly raised plenty based on an idea that that didn't seem to understand the market they were targeting.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#43

Post by jimnotgym »

youngtaff wrote: post #13
mellosouls wrote: post #11

Depressing that the main lesson learned is "Move to the US", the others also pretty standard HN/PG/SV tropes I think. A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think. Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder: https://www.henrydashwood.com/

But what problem does move to the US actually solve in this case? House builders don't seem to have a problem acquiring land and rights to develop it Indeed there're permission granted for over 1mn yet to be build residential properties in the UK The problem is UK house builders drip feed houses on to the market to keep their profits up, and slow down building when house prices fall

Hence Andy Burnham's threat to build council houses again. It is a good threat, get on with building the houses before we reduce the demand

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#44

Post by jimnotgym »

sjducb wrote: post #35
youngtaff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what problem does move to the US actually solve in this case? House builders don't seem to have a problem acquiring land and rights to develop it Indeed there're permission granted for over 1mn yet to be build residential properties in the UK The problem is UK house builders drip feed houses on to the market to keep their profits up, and slow down building when house prices fall

They get away with drip feeding because there’s no competition, because it’s really hard to get permission. A simpler planning system would allow smaller developers to operate and they would buy, build and sell as fast as they can. The reason big developers drip feed is that they have 100 identical houses in the pipeline so they don’t want the price to drop at all, because it affects the price of the houses in the pi…

Small developers struggle to get hold of land though. You have to be in the know to get hold of building land

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#45

Post by steveBK123 »

pydry wrote: post #19
steveBK123 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market. This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population. So there was relative political power in the working age, and a l…

Boomers are a scapegoat, used a bit like immigrants, minorities and AI as an excuse for attacks on the working class. The US is an plutocratic oligarchy, not a boomerocracy: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 The candidates which would pursue popular policies tend to get nixed via underhanded political means before ascending to higher office. The oligarchy uses campaign financing and the media they…

Boomers in the US are a scapegoat because they benefited during the great build out of housing in suburbs by moving there, and then became NIMBYs insisting everything remain "just so" now that they own all the houses.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#46

Post by bcjdjsndon »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #36
cryptopian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.

Actually- there is.. if you give up on the idea of "stopping at the station".. you just pick up a car that raced ahead and up to speed- and drop a car that gets left behind and pulls into the station.. okay maybe not with the UK-Rail.. Basically the train never stops- it just reorganizes.

....wot

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#47

Post by bcjdjsndon »

gilleain wrote: post #3
brudgers wrote: post #2

Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…

Reminds me of an interview I saw at the height of the NFT/crypto craze, when the interviewee was challenged to come up with a use-case, and they threw out "buying a house". So there is (AFAIK) just one part of the process to buy a house that blockchains could address, and that is transfer of ownership. The rest of the process is an estate agent (realtor) communicating between buyer/seller/legal/etc to make it all hap…

It doesn't even solve the ownership problem... any disputes still get settled in court just like a paper contract. In fact the database with which you store the contract is largely irrelevant to anything. If counterfeit contacts, MAYBE Blockchain has a use.... but even then it's debatable

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#48

Post by bcjdjsndon »

brudgers wrote: post #2

Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…

Man I wish I had half a million to blow "exploring business models"... There is definitely too much money in the hands of stupid rich people

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#49

Post by youngtaff »

pjc50 wrote: post #30
youngtaff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what problem does move to the US actually solve in this case? House builders don't seem to have a problem acquiring land and rights to develop it Indeed there're permission granted for over 1mn yet to be build residential properties in the UK The problem is UK house builders drip feed houses on to the market to keep their profits up, and slow down building when house prices fall

> what problem does move to the US actually solve in this case? None of the specific ones, but the general problem of startups that the UK is a poor environment for funding. Source for million unbuilt homes: https://www.terraquest.co.uk/news-and-insights/more-than-a-m... It's not sounding like a very simple to resolve problem :(

Lack of tradies is part of the problem but house builders tend to rely on sub-contracting so they don't have to bear the cost of employment, training etc and want someone else to solve the problem for them

House builders essentially buy land, get planning, pay a bunch of sub-contractors to slap together a house and then sell it to some poor sap

Saying they build houses is a bit of a misnomer in my view

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#50

Post by bcjdjsndon »

nickdothutton wrote: post #39

Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems", and therefore have a good chance of being solvable by software. Sometimes you'll even encounter a problem that looks like something else, but is in-fact an information problem in-disguise as something else. However I do not think the UK housing crisis is an information problem, either plainly or in-disguise.

> Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems

Common silicon valley misconception, but when all you know is a hammer everything looks like a nail. This is similar to the app that was meant to solve a drinking water crisis in some African nation

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