I can't figure out what this would tell you. Would it tell you that initial ideas were often better or worse than subsequent ideas? The sensitivity of teams to how product market fit occurred? I can't figure out how it would be actionable, due to the wide gamut of ideas and execution.
It's the 'knowledge gap' trick. Create a bit of mystery - a mental itch if you want to call it that - and readers start drooling like Pavlov's dogs. The writing is good though, so I didn't mind.
I think the key difference is that Grubhub and Seamless offer restaurants an additional revenue stream without the overhead or operational headaches of doing in themselves.
"SinglePlatform is your connection to the top search engines, travel and review sites, online listing directories and mobile apps used by over 200 million people to find local businesses." (from website)
Sounds more like digital facing store front management, way beyond centralized menu management, which would be a clear value add for local restauraunts.
> But fantastic if you can make it work a la Grubhub and Seamless who got $360 million in revenues primarily by selling to restaurants.
Grubhub, Seamless, Doordash etc aren't selling to restaurants, they are buying from restaurants and reselling the product to consumers. Like Amazon or Staples or your local corner store.
I'm missing the bit where there was a word of appreciation for the paying customers and I suspect that they didn't rate a mention is a factor in why this company was unsuccessful.
He also kind of shittalked his cofounder. Implicit in the setup of the piece is the fact that his cofounder was essentially clueless about everything.
"I asked my close friend of 20 years how he was doing. Dmitry answered, “Awesome! I love what we’re doing these days!” ... It was obvious that my most sarcastic friend genuinely meant every word. Little did we know then, that Dishero, the company we had co-founded a year and a half ago, would be shut down within the next 72 hours as a direct result of his answer."
Even worse, he contrasted "mediocre success" against "failure", whereas anyone outside of the tech bubble would have looked at the numbers and rightly called it a failure outright.
The bubble is not in valuations, the bubble is in people's heads - the naive delusion that you can disrupt all aspects of human nature by applying enough technology and holistic ideology.
>the naive delusion that you can disrupt all aspects of human nature by applying enough technology
This. Absolutely this. Superior software/technology has, is, and will lose to crappy stuff from time to time. And here is why... psychology trumps technology. If your technology doesn't align well with psychology then you have an enormous uphill climb to conquer. If your solution requires people to fight their nature, best of luck to you.
The bubble is not in valuations, the bubble is in people's heads - the naive delusion that you can disrupt all aspects of human nature by applying enough technology and holistic ideology.
It may be true that there are aspects of human nature that can't be disrupted by technology, but the problem is recognising which can and which can't. Often when something fails you don't actually know because it may succeed under slightly different circumstances. The failure of a startup is evidence that there may not be a market for "disrupting human nature" in that domain, but it definitely isn't proof.
As someone running a bootstrapped small business that lives and dies on cashflow while we try to reach larger success that statement struck me as crazy.
It would be fun to spend some time working in a venture backed company since it's so different from the reality I operate in currently.
That's a great read. I'm flabbergasted that founders don't model their expected finances. I mean, Jesus, what are they thinking? How, then, do they make decisions?
Even if the model turns out to be grossly incorrect at least you get some idea of critical factors and milestones. And, it's fun! So you update it regularly. Here we are nearing the end of Q2....
Many founders have never had to do anything remotely like running a business. Particularly when they started the company more to build something they wish existed than to make crazy amounts of money.
"the goal to replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence."
"Our business was seemingly working and from 30K feet — it looked great:"
"We had had happy customers and revenue almost from day one. Our revenue grew continuously for 11 months in a row."
"Despite of all of the above, Dishero was still in a mediocre category: we were burning $100K/m and making $9K/m in revenue. The revenue continued to grow, but the growth was painfully slow and unpredictable."
The article doesn't mention "45 sales people" for Dishero, but for the previous company of their "VP of sales". Curious about the number for Dishero tho.
Worse to sell to a restaurant since if you have a chance of success if you are running a restaurant.
There whole SMB market is a death trap for technology companies. It looks so attractive on the surface; great demand and no competition, but the reason there is no competition is the cost of acquiring a customer in this market is greater than the lifetime customer value.
Exactly. People see the few companies that manage to succeed in this market and assume it is easier than it really is - the few survivors hide the thousands of companies that tried and failed.
It is not impossible in this market, just very hard. The key is getting your cost of customer acquisition down below your lifetime customer value. You can do this two ways - use a low touch sales model or offer a sticky product with high margins at a relatively high price.
The problem is not many products can be sold successfully into the SMB market with a low touch sales model - the decision makers are just too busy running their businesses to investigate what technology products will make their life easier on their own (hence the need for sales staff).
Once you need sales staff you need a product that is going to give you a high lifetime customer value and there are not many technology products aimed at the SMB market that can offer this. I sell into SMB market, but I sell a very expensive SAAS product in a tiny niche. This makes a great lifestyle business, but it has no interest to investors because the total market size is just too small.
I recommend you don't even think about the term SMB. It's such a broad category.
You can't just group all small businesses together and say you can't sell to this group. They all have different pain points and problems. Some products address them (slack), others don't (op)
They went from a company trying to sell to restaurants to one that will sell to developers?
Developers are some of the cheapest people I know. Many refuse to even pay for tools that save them a lot of hours per month (i.e. PyCharm). They don't know how to value their own time.
So unless they start targeting the C level management this product is probably doomed.
Developers are cheap in that they won't pay for something themselves if they have a remotely functional workaround. Development teams, however, are much less frugal about spending their employer's money to save them time and pain, and it's pretty easy to get management to sign off on purchasing something that will save their developers time, pain, or just plain make them happier.
I've worked for companies that would never pay for those, companies that would pay for pretty much anything if we made a case that it would help us, and my current employer, who will pay for things that we can prove delivers value, but don't default to saying "yes, we'll pay for," and who also audit every subscription they're paying for quarterly.
I work for a smallish company, as a developer. We get to choose our own tools. I think the reasoning is valid -- who would know better than the developers what actually will make them more productive?
In practice, I don't need to approve any purchase with management. I have a company credit card, and if I feel I need license for Sublime Text I'll just buy it.
But you are right -- as a private person I'm quite a bit more price sensitive about my tools than as a professional who is expected to deliver.
Having grown up in a restaurant to become a developer, I would say it's a lot harder to sell to a restaurant.
My parents would never spend any budget on anything tech at all. They would still have a hard time seeing the benefits of something like JustEat or Deliveroo, where an outsider might think it was obvious. I suspect there's a lot of restaurant businesses with very conservative owners.
A dev can easily go and pay a few hundred buck for some IDE that they turn out not to use after a few weeks.
Every time I read one of these (less and less frequently) I find that the core problem is the management writing the article.
None of the insights they talk about are particularly noteworthy or trade secrets. They could have been discovered as part of coming up with their business plan. It's more than fair to assume they'll make the mistake again.
I mean I don't think they ever literally did any testing on the usage of their website. They have some nice settings for using their website, but they don't have a landing page for it so they allow you to have lots of great functionality in searching for food, it is about useless.
Not only do they not show them at the start, they also have absurd and odd defaults on the ones that would be most generally useful at the start
For example:
The distance setting starts at infinite distance instead of the 5, 10, or 15 increments they have.
This would be a great app if they just had you go through the settings each time you started using it, as they have lots of details, like times, ambience, payments, and whether alcohol is served.
They could even expand this to if you logged in they could list the settings you used previously or you could save some as presets for going out with friends or something like that.
It is clear that it had potetntial, but I think they didn't have a clear idea of the service they wanted to provide at the start and got too bogged down in both the implementation and problems to recognize the things that made them want to do it in the first place, along with the investors that liked it.
Consider a menu to be like the API documentation for a restaurant. Keeping printed documentation in sync with what's available online is actually quite hard, especially if it's something that changes regularly. It feels like something that can be improved by keeping everything digital.
If a user insisted on written documentation for a project that moved quickly, how would you manage that? Would you give them a printed copy? Or would you say "the latest docs are at <uri>"?
What I can't figure out is how you get around menus, does everybody use a tablet? I know Chili's has something a little like that these days, but seriously, I don't want to hold a tablet at dinner.
It's not strictly off-topic, but it's a nasty, generic dismissal. Piling onto other people's mistakes ("They could have been discovered as part of coming up with their business plan") is a lousy thing to do, and if you're going to do it here (though please don't), your comment should have at least have some other redeeming quality. Instead you draw contemptuous conclusions about someone's character, kicking them when they're down.
This is the sort of comment that, even assuming it's 100% correct, says more about the commenter than its subject. I'm ashamed to see things like this on HN and particularly ashamed that they routinely attract upvotes.
There are many options for mobile app debugging / analytics already, I feel like these founders just want to start something... anything... Maybe it's time to take some time off and reflect? I've never started a company so I don't know these things, but it seems like a desperate move to me.
> I feel like these founders just want to start something... anything...
Wantrepreneurship... I've been there too. Taking some time off is definitely the best cure but $1.8M in the bank is very tempting to keep diving into anything as long as you can keep deluding yourself you're working on the next big thing.
You know that standard VC advertising line "we invest in the team"? It's not always bullshit.
And if you've already seen the team in action and like how they make decisions you're better off effectively giving a known quantity a new $1.8M investment (with zero transaction cost) than taking a flyer on not only a new business idea but a new team as well.
I’ve worked in the food industry for about 20 years now. For the last 3+ years my business has done nothing but sell to restaurants. I sell them food. Perishable food with a short shelf life. The most common responses to our products by people who have eaten them are. “I love them” and “That’s the best I’ve ever had.”
On average, my customers resell my products for about 2.5 times what they pay me. Depending on the customer, my products requires anywhere from no labor to 20 seconds of labor from restaurant staff.
The business was profitable its first month and has shown year-over-year growth every year in both product sales and revenue. Everything is done by myself and one other person (who joined after two years). We’ve spent $40 on marketing from that time I had business cards printed. We have higher per-month revenue than Dishero and there’s never been a monthly loss.
As food industry people, we use our understanding of the food environment to help our customers. We know the awfulness that is restaurant life and we accommodate our customers’ needs using what we know, what customers tell us, and what we see that isn’t stated.
Probably my favorite action is when I show up delivering what my customer has ordered, only to cancel the order because I know the customer does not need the items. These are not products I can simply sell some other day. When that happens—and it always does—my customers know our focus is taking care of them, not making every possible sale.
In short: We have relationships with customers, and relationships are always give-and-take arrangements. I’ve found that focusing on the giving ensures we make enough to keep giving.
All those self-congratulatory things said, I have no doubt that our success thus far can be attributed to customer service. No, that’s not saying anything novel, but—as always—it requires listening, watching, adaptability, frustration, flexibility, and a host of other behaviors/actions. It’s hard work and it’s not easy to get out of my own head to get inside someone else’s head.
The economic and non-economic results have been good. We haven’t lost any customers. The majority of our customers have found ways to get more products from us. All new business has come from word of mouth.
But I don’t think there’s anything novel in what we’ve done. I say that because I believe the success of every business come down to three factors: cash flow, logistics, and people skills. I don’t know of an instance in any industry where a great product overcame deficiency in those areas.
I was unfamiliar with Dishero prior to this piece. From what was shared, it’s hard to see if they did well with logistics or people skills (the author says they missed on cash flow). The author noted they had trouble overcoming the logistics of interacting with restaurant staff. If so, it’s difficult then to build relationships, so there goes people skills.
It certainly sounds, though, like the people behind Dishero had some good product-making skills. And I have nothing but respect for the decision to cut their losses. I can’t imagine the difficulty of that choice, and the accompanying pain, despite the apparent wisdom of that decision. My best to those people in their next pursuits.
>Probably my favorite action is when I show up delivering what my customer has ordered, only to cancel the order because I know the customer does not need the items. These are not products I can simply sell some other day. When that happens—and it always does—my customers know our focus is taking care of them, not making every possible sale.
What do you do with the food from the cancelled order?
I give away as much of it as possible. Mostly to random strangers, but also to friends, work and home neighbors, and some to other customers who may have a use. There are times product gets thrown out, too. Unfortunately, local food banks and shelters don't accept products like I make.
You've probably thought of this but -- sample it to the next restaurant you drive past who looks like they could sell it? Back of house is always hungry, so you just need to make sure the manager or chef actually gets one, along with your business card.
I have thought of it. Still, thank you for the good suggestion. The reason I don't do it is logistical: until I'm in a larger facility I have limitations on production, and I make certain I don't create insurmountable complications on my end for supplying my customers.
>Back of house is always hungry....
True, but maybe even more potentially valuable is that getting to eat something other than what they usually eat makes the "new" product seem even better. This was learned as we often give away products to the food establishments where we pick up our lunch.
You are describing a traditional, organically grown local business. And absoulutely nothing wrong with that, but quite different from the Dishero situation of needing to find a viable path to an exit or at least the next round.
You hit it on the head, this is everything wrong with the startup community, your path should be to a viable business, doing something you love, not just wealth.
I don't think it is possible to scale a business before you've validated the concept on a smaller scale. Validation really should come first and that includes the business model.
I think with Dishero, the issue is product-market fit, and without it, none of the other stuff matters. My guess is the restaurants understand your product better and can more easily see how they can make money with it.
Shouldn't there be a lower cost way to figure out WTP, CAC, churn rate, customer purchase journey map, etc. etc. before starting a company and having a large-ish sales/marketing team?
I can expand on that: Selling to small-to-medium-enterprises is a dead end. They are entirely focused on the near-term, and usually their finances are hand-to-mouth each month. Unless you can demonstrate that they will be making real, actual money with your product from day one, without any extra effort, save yourself the bother.
The core take away here is that unless you are one of the top 3 employees in a start-up, or even moderately successful business, you are trivially expendable. No matter if you put in hours of overtime, poured your hart and soul into your job, all of that is null and void on the whim of the owners. Of course they will have a rational justification why you lost your job. Unless you control your destiny you will forever be subject to the destiny of others.
Take all of this into consideration when next interviewing and negotiate for the best possible deal, knowing that no amount of possible "future" prospects is a solid as hard cash in the bank now, be as predatory and hard nosed as you can possibly be. You are working for Me(Inc) and its dependants, you are morally obliged to extract every last drop of value you can from your current employment relationship, because, as you can see from this example, the converse is a given.
If they don't want to work on a restaurant service, that's fine. But I'm not sure their learnings are spot-on. Looks to me like the raised a lot of money which wouldn't be a problem unless they started over-spending (which they did; 17 people & 3 countries???).
For an offering like that, get out of SF and find a "small" city like Des Moines or Tallahassee that has 1,000 restaurants but not a million Silicon Valley sales bros calling them every 5 minutes. Prove the business with a lean team before opening up the purse strings.
They didn't throw "millions" at the idea. If you read the article carefully, they stopped after spending $1M, i.e., with 2/3 of their investors' money still in the bank. Yes, maybe they could've stopped/pivoted sooner, but once you are experimenting with something, you need to be patient enough to give it a shot.
And it looks like the investors opted for sticking with the team for their next shot as opposed to taking that money back - an option that was on the table. That's an indicator of trust, so maybe the team isn't that clueless after all.
I don't necessarily agree. Some businesses simply can't be started without a ton of cash (like building cars like you mentioned). I don't think you could bootstrap a new supermarket concept. Sometimes you just have to get investors to try out an idea.
If you assume that other people are stupid, nothing is easier than to conclude that they're stupid as well. This is good for attracting upvotes from others who feel the same way you do in the first place. But it's deeply bad for thoughtful discussion.
Not all of WP's idioms are valuable, but there aren't many community management problems they haven't engaged with (and none of the ones they've missed apply to HN) and this is one of their better results.
Post-Dang HN has been pretty great. Thanks! Level it up again. :)
Gotta love hacker news: I think I just lost half my karma points near me for asking a question, suggesting that maybe, just maybe we shouldn't rush to judge people so negatively. Haters gonna hate...
I agree with you that the comment you replied to was unduly negative. It was probably unfair to downvote yours, though it wasn't particularly substantive.
Interestingly, I found this post to be full of answers and opportunities in the restaurant space.
-> "replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence"
This isn't a task of selling to a restaurant. Restaurants don't make their own menus, they go to designers. Designers are the customer for new paper menus. They are currently being threatened by Canva, which is making it easier for non-designers to get a better product.
->"[restaurant owner] doesn’t have a spreadsheet estimating how many people show up on a Tuesday night"
Uh, HUGE opportunity. Machine learning across what is going on in a city and how that would affect restuarant sales. Network effects (if you're getting data as well as selling answers) and you get to sell the same product again and again and again.
I'm maybe not so sure they were looking at the opportunities enough.
How is spending 100k/m, while only bringing in 9k/m is a "moderate success"? Their lessons learned is basically "tech startups in the restaurant space is a stupid idea"!
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[ 1980 ms ] story [ 3011 ms ] threadBut fantastic if you can make it work a la Grubhub and Seamless who got $360 million in revenues primarily by selling to restaurants.
The restaurant business is indeed hard, but lucky (or good) sales people have had tremendous success and profitability tackling it.
Sounds more like digital facing store front management, way beyond centralized menu management, which would be a clear value add for local restauraunts.
Grubhub, Seamless, Doordash etc aren't selling to restaurants, they are buying from restaurants and reselling the product to consumers. Like Amazon or Staples or your local corner store.
"I asked my close friend of 20 years how he was doing. Dmitry answered, “Awesome! I love what we’re doing these days!” ... It was obvious that my most sarcastic friend genuinely meant every word. Little did we know then, that Dishero, the company we had co-founded a year and a half ago, would be shut down within the next 72 hours as a direct result of his answer."
There's all that needed to be said, right there.
The bubble is not in valuations, the bubble is in people's heads - the naive delusion that you can disrupt all aspects of human nature by applying enough technology and holistic ideology.
This. Absolutely this. Superior software/technology has, is, and will lose to crappy stuff from time to time. And here is why... psychology trumps technology. If your technology doesn't align well with psychology then you have an enormous uphill climb to conquer. If your solution requires people to fight their nature, best of luck to you.
It may be true that there are aspects of human nature that can't be disrupted by technology, but the problem is recognising which can and which can't. Often when something fails you don't actually know because it may succeed under slightly different circumstances. The failure of a startup is evidence that there may not be a market for "disrupting human nature" in that domain, but it definitely isn't proof.
It would be fun to spend some time working in a venture backed company since it's so different from the reality I operate in currently.
1 http://paulgraham.com/aord.html
Even if the model turns out to be grossly incorrect at least you get some idea of critical factors and milestones. And, it's fun! So you update it regularly. Here we are nearing the end of Q2....
It's dead, Jim (unless you can increase that revenue FAST)...
"Our business was seemingly working and from 30K feet — it looked great:"
"We had had happy customers and revenue almost from day one. Our revenue grew continuously for 11 months in a row."
"Despite of all of the above, Dishero was still in a mediocre category: we were burning $100K/m and making $9K/m in revenue. The revenue continued to grow, but the growth was painfully slow and unpredictable."
We're not in a bubble....
Definitely not in a bubble. I run my own bootstrapped company that does $5k/mo recurring and my expenses are sub $750 a month.
There whole SMB market is a death trap for technology companies. It looks so attractive on the surface; great demand and no competition, but the reason there is no competition is the cost of acquiring a customer in this market is greater than the lifetime customer value.
The problem is not many products can be sold successfully into the SMB market with a low touch sales model - the decision makers are just too busy running their businesses to investigate what technology products will make their life easier on their own (hence the need for sales staff).
Once you need sales staff you need a product that is going to give you a high lifetime customer value and there are not many technology products aimed at the SMB market that can offer this. I sell into SMB market, but I sell a very expensive SAAS product in a tiny niche. This makes a great lifestyle business, but it has no interest to investors because the total market size is just too small.
You can't just group all small businesses together and say you can't sell to this group. They all have different pain points and problems. Some products address them (slack), others don't (op)
Developers are some of the cheapest people I know. Many refuse to even pay for tools that save them a lot of hours per month (i.e. PyCharm). They don't know how to value their own time.
So unless they start targeting the C level management this product is probably doomed.
Whooa, where is this mythical land of milk and honey, and can I but tickets to get there?
Managers will also pay to increase the quality of a developers output. This includes testing/QA and code review tools for example.
In practice, I don't need to approve any purchase with management. I have a company credit card, and if I feel I need license for Sublime Text I'll just buy it.
But you are right -- as a private person I'm quite a bit more price sensitive about my tools than as a professional who is expected to deliver.
My parents would never spend any budget on anything tech at all. They would still have a hard time seeing the benefits of something like JustEat or Deliveroo, where an outsider might think it was obvious. I suspect there's a lot of restaurant businesses with very conservative owners.
A dev can easily go and pay a few hundred buck for some IDE that they turn out not to use after a few weeks.
That's probably most restaurants, given how shitty the margins in that business are. An owner can ill afford to make a mistake.
None of the insights they talk about are particularly noteworthy or trade secrets. They could have been discovered as part of coming up with their business plan. It's more than fair to assume they'll make the mistake again.
Not only do they not show them at the start, they also have absurd and odd defaults on the ones that would be most generally useful at the start For example: The distance setting starts at infinite distance instead of the 5, 10, or 15 increments they have.
This would be a great app if they just had you go through the settings each time you started using it, as they have lots of details, like times, ambience, payments, and whether alcohol is served.
They could even expand this to if you logged in they could list the settings you used previously or you could save some as presets for going out with friends or something like that.
It is clear that it had potetntial, but I think they didn't have a clear idea of the service they wanted to provide at the start and got too bogged down in both the implementation and problems to recognize the things that made them want to do it in the first place, along with the investors that liked it.
But ok fam
The trade secret is in what's not mentioned: what's wrong with paper menus?
If a user insisted on written documentation for a project that moved quickly, how would you manage that? Would you give them a printed copy? Or would you say "the latest docs are at <uri>"?
It's not strictly off-topic, but it's a nasty, generic dismissal. Piling onto other people's mistakes ("They could have been discovered as part of coming up with their business plan") is a lousy thing to do, and if you're going to do it here (though please don't), your comment should have at least have some other redeeming quality. Instead you draw contemptuous conclusions about someone's character, kicking them when they're down.
This is the sort of comment that, even assuming it's 100% correct, says more about the commenter than its subject. I'm ashamed to see things like this on HN and particularly ashamed that they routinely attract upvotes.
I am a single poster/person, not a group of people or a pattern of commenting.
Wantrepreneurship... I've been there too. Taking some time off is definitely the best cure but $1.8M in the bank is very tempting to keep diving into anything as long as you can keep deluding yourself you're working on the next big thing.
And if you've already seen the team in action and like how they make decisions you're better off effectively giving a known quantity a new $1.8M investment (with zero transaction cost) than taking a flyer on not only a new business idea but a new team as well.
On average, my customers resell my products for about 2.5 times what they pay me. Depending on the customer, my products requires anywhere from no labor to 20 seconds of labor from restaurant staff.
The business was profitable its first month and has shown year-over-year growth every year in both product sales and revenue. Everything is done by myself and one other person (who joined after two years). We’ve spent $40 on marketing from that time I had business cards printed. We have higher per-month revenue than Dishero and there’s never been a monthly loss.
As food industry people, we use our understanding of the food environment to help our customers. We know the awfulness that is restaurant life and we accommodate our customers’ needs using what we know, what customers tell us, and what we see that isn’t stated.
Probably my favorite action is when I show up delivering what my customer has ordered, only to cancel the order because I know the customer does not need the items. These are not products I can simply sell some other day. When that happens—and it always does—my customers know our focus is taking care of them, not making every possible sale.
In short: We have relationships with customers, and relationships are always give-and-take arrangements. I’ve found that focusing on the giving ensures we make enough to keep giving.
All those self-congratulatory things said, I have no doubt that our success thus far can be attributed to customer service. No, that’s not saying anything novel, but—as always—it requires listening, watching, adaptability, frustration, flexibility, and a host of other behaviors/actions. It’s hard work and it’s not easy to get out of my own head to get inside someone else’s head.
The economic and non-economic results have been good. We haven’t lost any customers. The majority of our customers have found ways to get more products from us. All new business has come from word of mouth.
But I don’t think there’s anything novel in what we’ve done. I say that because I believe the success of every business come down to three factors: cash flow, logistics, and people skills. I don’t know of an instance in any industry where a great product overcame deficiency in those areas.
I was unfamiliar with Dishero prior to this piece. From what was shared, it’s hard to see if they did well with logistics or people skills (the author says they missed on cash flow). The author noted they had trouble overcoming the logistics of interacting with restaurant staff. If so, it’s difficult then to build relationships, so there goes people skills.
It certainly sounds, though, like the people behind Dishero had some good product-making skills. And I have nothing but respect for the decision to cut their losses. I can’t imagine the difficulty of that choice, and the accompanying pain, despite the apparent wisdom of that decision. My best to those people in their next pursuits.
What do you do with the food from the cancelled order?
>Back of house is always hungry....
True, but maybe even more potentially valuable is that getting to eat something other than what they usually eat makes the "new" product seem even better. This was learned as we often give away products to the food establishments where we pick up our lunch.
Money quote for me.
I can expand on that: Selling to small-to-medium-enterprises is a dead end. They are entirely focused on the near-term, and usually their finances are hand-to-mouth each month. Unless you can demonstrate that they will be making real, actual money with your product from day one, without any extra effort, save yourself the bother.
Take all of this into consideration when next interviewing and negotiate for the best possible deal, knowing that no amount of possible "future" prospects is a solid as hard cash in the bank now, be as predatory and hard nosed as you can possibly be. You are working for Me(Inc) and its dependants, you are morally obliged to extract every last drop of value you can from your current employment relationship, because, as you can see from this example, the converse is a given.
Well presumably you got paid. I'm not sure what else an employee has a right to expect beyond that.
For an offering like that, get out of SF and find a "small" city like Des Moines or Tallahassee that has 1,000 restaurants but not a million Silicon Valley sales bros calling them every 5 minutes. Prove the business with a lean team before opening up the purse strings.
Can we please get rid of the word 'bros'? It's quite annoying.
"We shut down our startup"
Thanks for letting us know.
That is how startups in America work: a) take any idea b) find enough believers c) throw money at the problem until it either works out or fails.
I mean are those people for real? It's like watching 5y olds playing monopoly
How about: If you need millions investment for your idea then your idea is just BAD (except you are building Teslas maybe)
If you assume that other people are stupid, nothing is easier than to conclude that they're stupid as well. This is good for attracting upvotes from others who feel the same way you do in the first place. But it's deeply bad for thoughtful discussion.
2. Consider adding AGF at the same time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
Not all of WP's idioms are valuable, but there aren't many community management problems they haven't engaged with (and none of the ones they've missed apply to HN) and this is one of their better results.
Post-Dang HN has been pretty great. Thanks! Level it up again. :)
I agree with you that the comment you replied to was unduly negative. It was probably unfair to downvote yours, though it wasn't particularly substantive.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11926020 and marked it off-topic.
-> "replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence"
This isn't a task of selling to a restaurant. Restaurants don't make their own menus, they go to designers. Designers are the customer for new paper menus. They are currently being threatened by Canva, which is making it easier for non-designers to get a better product.
->"[restaurant owner] doesn’t have a spreadsheet estimating how many people show up on a Tuesday night"
Uh, HUGE opportunity. Machine learning across what is going on in a city and how that would affect restuarant sales. Network effects (if you're getting data as well as selling answers) and you get to sell the same product again and again and again.
I'm maybe not so sure they were looking at the opportunities enough.