Maybe I'm just naive but I find it strange how so many companies focus so long on acquiring users and not on making money, thus forcing them to continue to get outside funding. For something like Facebook I can understand how this makes sense, but it seems as though this strategy is currently the norm rather than the exception.
We're a YC-12, VC-backed company. We were profitable within a year of the seed round. We still have the bulk of our Series A in the bank but went ahead and raised a $40 million Series B because terms were extremely good (low dilution plus we can ride out any downturn). I suspect some of these high valuations are simply investors paying a premium to buy in, not an expectation that the company is or isn't worth that much.
When I walk around SF with my PlanGrid shirt on it isn't other people in tech that say hello or know who I am... it's the guys working at construction sites. People in hard-hats and boots who tell us our software has changed their lives.
The tech press and insular SV community obsesses about the ultra-unicorns. Some of us are just busy quietly solving people's needs (usually in industries that have been long-ignored by SV/tech) and we're doing quite well for it.
There may be a bubble but if you build something that provides real, immediate value to customers then the rest of it is just noise.
1 - this is getting forwarded to our construction manager. This should help them tremendously.
2 - I got a bit of a funky layout on 6+ (safari). Not sure if it's me or not but a heads up, regardless.
Thank you sir.
[edit] sent screenshot from phone via support email [didn't want to reply and hijack thread]
could you send along a pic of the funky layout?
If nothing else, if you have a construction project that has paper plans, PlanGrid is the best way to make them digital, shareable, usable by multiple people.
Is the point to be a full document control type solution (e.g. - in the same vein as Aconex) or is it a collaboration tool focused on construction? It appears to be the latter?
I guess I could just ask one of the guys I know from DPR...
- ELI5 what "free for 50 sheets" mean : This means that you can upload 50 PDFs that contain your plans (Blue Prints). So if you are undergoing house renovations and your Architect drew up plans that are 25 pages, then half of your quota would be used.
- Is there any benefit in using it for small, private projects : That depends. If you're outsourcing your work and have a contractor, then yes. The plans are initially updated on the service and any revisions that occur throughout the project would be instantly synced.
PlanGrid, from my limited exposure, is a markup tool for the initial plans. Their goal is to keep everyone in the "know" with a project that constantly changing. If you and a buddy are working on a deck, might not be useful. If you are contracting/sub-contracting work, it will be very useful.
My 2 cents.
If this was a tech-only forum then the business guys & gals probably wouldn't even be welcome, & vice-versa if it were a business-only forum. It's an interesting mix here that probably wouldn't normally have a lot to talk about together. But I do think it puts stars in a lot of programmers eyes who might not otherwise care about that kind of stuff.
That is so great, this is what it's all about in my opinion.
With consumers, an item like Snapchat is the hot item today, but AIM was the hot item before that, then it was Skype, etc, etc, etc. Consumers don't have the loyalties that enterprise has. Facebook was smart because it has built an ecosystem around its graph, others haven't and I fear eventually those "utlra-unicorns" are going to face reality and that is going to hurt firms, even your own.
And with some firms their path to profitability is total nonsensical. Monetizing is extremely difficult when you can't actually charge your customers in any significant way without completely driving them away.
If you think of a VC as a conglomerate, startups are money losing R&D and market research divisions, searching for the next goose that lays golden eggs.
So you could claim a company is spending too much on user acquisition, but another way of framing it is financing their fixed costs and working their ass off to get to a point where they can sustain their fixed costs from the variable costs of their user base.
Sometimes the generating revenue part itself is expensive to build, if you can't even get tons of people to use your product for free you're going to have trouble getting there (but that's a lot more for advertising-based revenue).
I think a lot fewer companies have no revenue stream that you're suggesting. Sometimes very early companies haven't figured out revenue, but they also haven't figured out product. Sometimes they're closely tied together, sometimes they're not.
Then they shouldn't be considered a business.
If you know how to turn $1 into $2 (of value) you should be spending as much money as you can.
I can easily turn $5 into $10; buy candy bars and sell them to my neighbors next time I watch a sports game in person.
So I'm really confident I could double $5. But could I double $50? I'll definitely get caught trying to sell $500 worth. So I just sell a little more all the time while remaining cash flow positive, and that's how I learn the limits of the market without going bust.
More recently it's monetizing the data that those users generate.
There is also value gaining a particular segment, such as Activison-Blizzard purchasing King gaining access to all the casual mobile gamers.
Essentially, its that those users could be used to generate money, and thus are valuable.
>Atlassian was founded in 2002, but it hasn't taken any outside investment. The last two funding rounds from Accel and T. Rowe Price were done to let employees sell some of their shares, and Atlassian says the cash wasn't used for operations.