Show HN: Ponzi.es – Startup sticker ponzi scheme | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ponzi.es – Startup sticker ponzi scheme

ponzi.es

332 pointszachlatta125 comments

From Wikipedia:

Ponzi's original scheme was based on the arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps; however, he soon diverted investors' money to make payments to earlier investors and himself. ...

The profit that could be made by taking advantage of the differing postal rates in different countries to buy IRCs cheaply in one country and exchange them for stamps of a higher value in another country was the intended profit generator for a scheme operated by Charles Ponzi, which became the fraudulent Ponzi scheme.

For anyone interested in more information on this, or on Ponzi himself, I'd highly recommend giving Ponzi's Scheme[0] a read. It's a great book on the subject.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812968360

"Ponzi: The Incredible True Story of the King of Financial Cons" is good too: http://smile.amazon.com/Ponzi-Incredible-Financial-Library-L...

Why not ask for "one or more" stickers? (Still promising only two total in return). If you're not being purist about the ponzie part, that is. Then you might be able to carry it on a little longer.

Because they're being purist about the ponzie part

Which of the examples is considered to be a "startup"? The featured one is a 15-year-old spinoff of a public company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The second one is an actual public company with 4000 employees. The third one might be sort of a startup, but they have over 100 million dollars in VC backing.

For the sake of simplicity, we're using it as a blanket term for "tech company" and are happy with stickers for anything from a tiny 1 person company to a behemoth like Google (or an event like a hackathon).

Wouldn't it be better if you use "tech company" term instead? If the blanket term is already widely accepted, I see no point in using "startup" instead, as that will probably cause much more confusion.

We originally had "tech company" on the site, but after showing it to a few friends and people that were crashing at our house, it was clear that people had a better understanding of the site when we used "startup", so we decided to go with it.

That's a huge sample bias there. Cool idea, but 'startup' in the name was a bit confusing at first.

Yeah, totally fair. If we get enough feedback to the contrary, we'll change it :-).

Or just add a sentence of clarification to the website.

You all over think everything on this forum. I guess that's part of the beauty of it and likely how some people get stuck doing nothing.

What, I'm over thinking things because a bunch of SF techy folks preferred the world startup to company?

Self sustaining version:

Send us 3 stickers and postage. Get 2 unique stickers back. You get all the profits of the excess postage (assuming bulk rate) plus the extra sticker can go to a bin / advertising page of ALL THE STICKERS.

Then it wouldn't be a Ponzi scheme though. The whole point is that you depend on future investments (receipt of cards) to satisfy current investors.

You are correct.

Why not ask for 50 cents or a new stamp in the envelope? Including a stamp is easier in an envelope, and it should make prepping a return envelope simpler. Require "forever" stamps to protect yourself from a postal price hike.

Ah, we should update the website! If you send us a forever stamp instead of 50 cents, we'll honor it.

Fun project, cheers!

You should let people know not to send coins, too. Coins can get violently ejected from postal sorting machines and cause injuries.

(And as general advice, if you're going to do a mail campaign like this in the future, it might be a good idea to actually chat to a postal carrier about it first.)

You're right that people should not send coins in regular envelopes. But of course people mail coins, keys, and binder clips pretty frequently. Do you think USPS employees stand around an open sorting machine just waiting to get hit in the face with a paperclip?

I actually know someone who has worked on those machines for decades. He never told me anything other than that the machines might reject your letter, or your thumb drive might fall out and they'd not be able to find where to send it.

That way you are losing 1 cent in profits.

Or just have people mail you a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE)? Then you can just put the stickers in it and drop them in the mail (plus, you don't have to buy or address envelopes)

Keep the forever-stamps for a couple of years and return everything using a postal meter. Forever-stamp arbitrage should be full of all kinds of win.

I believe this was a plot on "The League".

To the top !

Because when the scheme crashes, they'll keep the money. Like somebody else has said already, they're purists :-)

I bet a lot of companies would just give you their stickers, simply to take advantage of your distribution network. It would be funny if this became a legitimate business idea (while the trend is alive).

We've actually already had a couple reach out, but we've turned them down because we want to see how long we can sustain this by "crowdsourcing" stickers (i.e. being a ponzi scheme).

Purists :P. Good luck!

He also lied. So keep that in mind while thinking of being true to the original, and just keep it going! :-)

The nit picking in these comments seems, for once, to actually be in good spirit, but this is a really fun idea!

I would love to do this with startup / event t-shirts so I could (eventually) clean out my drawers...too bad sizing clothes is a little more complicated than stickers.

I'll take your smalls ;)

One advantage to being a small built female at these events, t-shirts in my size are always left.

If they have female sizes, otherwise we've aquired new dresses..

This is awesome in every way. Talk about a fantastic project

This is an Internet age Ponzi scheme.

Not really; while it does use some of its mechanisms, it lacks the crucial one: recursion.

How so? Each new "investor's" sticker goes to "pay off" a previous one, and then they are in turn "paid off" with the stickers from two new "investors."

Seems pretty recursive to me.

It's not a Ponzi scheme if startups donate stickers for them to give away.

I wonder if they'd honor the deal if I sent them a letter internationally...with an Australian 50¢ piece

If you send us an international stamp instead of a 50¢ piece, we'll honor it ;-).

not sure how to get a stamp for sending mail from the US to where I live honestly. But the idea is cool and thanks for considering internationals as well ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon

Might work if they are still sold in your country.

A bit expensive though and not sure if they are willing to accept these, because they have to be exchanged for a stamp, they don't count as a stamp themselves.

If we can exchange it at a standard postal office, we'll do it.

The article linked by thesimon states "UPU member postal services are obliged to exchange an IRC for postage, but are not obliged to sell them" so it looks like this would work. They cost 2€ here in Germany ($2.20) compared to $1.20 for a USPS First-Class Mail International Letter, so it's not that bad. Really cool!

And this would nicely keep with the whole theme, since Ponzi's original scheme involved arbitrage with IRCs, before he decided it would be easier to just rip people off.

To save any UK peeps from having to Google, the Royal Mail no longer sell these as of 2011 (http://www.royalmail.com/reply-sender). :(

The answer to your question was actually the basis of the original Ponzi scheme: An International Reply Coupon.

if i sent international + the cost of sending in usd (i have no idea how much it costs to send a letter from the us, only sent postcards), will you honour it?

(i have a fuckton of us coins at my place that i have no use and it's not worth to exchange them)

Yup! As long as it's enough money :-).

Nowhere does it say US only. Going to send them 50c with a reply address of Halley VI.

Can I just mail you postage instead of heavy quarters? I think that would be nicer to the USPS.

Yup! As long as it's a Forever stamp, we'll honor it :-).

What about a BTC address worth 50¢? 8D

Exchange rates can and will change while in transit.

Update: Received two stickers in response! Very cool. Thanks Max for running the scheme. http://imgur.com/uwnXc86

That moment you see this and then wonder where your pile of stickers went.

In case anyone was curious, mailing cash is legal according to this Snopes Article - www.snopes.com/legal/postal/sendcash.asp

Can't find a current USPS FAQ, though.

Who would think this was not legal, and why?

Mailing physical cash? Because it's a security concern? (theft)

You never got a birthday card in the mail with a $10 bill inside?

Just socks, maybe the $10 bills were stolen ;-)

A transient mailing of discrete paper cash is different than a call-to-action requesting coins that will be delivered to the same address on a regular basis.

Why would a security concern (which would apply to mailing anything of value, not just cash) imply any legal issue?

If a particular address was known to consistently receive cash in the mail, wouldn't that make it a target of theft?

As someone who lives in the Bay Area and has seen car windows smashed for the change in the cupholder and a friend's motorcycle knocked over to get the flattened soda can that was being used as a stabilizer, yes, that's a security concern.

How would you know if a particular address receives cash in the mail?

Well, in this case visit their website :-)

It is illegal in Denmark.

I think it's just one of those factoids that gets passed around through pop-culture because nobody takes the time to verify it.

Before reading the Snopes page just now, I would probably have said that I was pretty sure mailing cash was technically illegal. But thinking about it now, I have no idea where I got that idea from.

The Postal Service advises against it. You probably heard some postal official say "Don't mail cash" and mistook it as a citation of law rather than simple advice.

I can't be the only person who remembers taping a penny to a Columbia House mailer.

If I want to just buy a load of different startup/saas/tech stickers, is there a place I can do that?

Stickermule[0] and RedBubble[1] come into mind.

[0] https://www.stickermule.com/ [1] http://www.redbubble.com/

And http://www.unixstickers.com/

I don't recommend Redbubble, I just ordered some and they're cheap but the printing quality is just not very good.

I have a few from Unixstickers though, they're printed properly.

(no affiliation, just a customer)

Some sell their own, like Github. http://github.myshopify.com/products/octodex-sticker-packs

Given how many useless stickers I've been given at conferences this might go on for quite a while.

Looks like they ride on the Notifuse successful initiative: "Free dev stickers, worldwide shipping" https://notifuse.com/stickers

Inspired by what you guys done. I created one based on favours :). http://ponzifavour.com/

Ah! This is awesome. Just subscribed :-).

Curious to know what the privacy policy is with this thing.

Nit, but: it's not actually a Ponzi scheme. What made Ponzi's scheme a Ponzi scheme was not the postal coupons. It was pretending that investors were making huge profits to make them keep their money invested, and paying them with each other's money. At that point the coupons was just an alibi.

Of course I don't know ponzi.es' long-term plan, maybe they'll start taking investment and promising huge returns. That'd be pretty funny. Though I don't know if you can legally run a Ponzi scheme, even an ironic one.

Isn't that exactly what this is? You "invest" a sticker, and you get a 100% return on your investment by receiving two stickers. It's not explicitly stated, but given the name and the context, I assume that the stickers you receive come from new "investors."

A ponzi scheme would require a larger upfront sticker investment from new investors with large but unsustainable sticker returns over time.

This is just a straight up 'sticker + $.50' for 2 stickers exchange.

I thought that a Ponzi scheme was simply one where returns to existing investors are paid from the capital contributed by new investors.

It is, but for it to work you have to give the appearance that it is actually working for a long enough period of time. That requires exponential grow or most people reinvesting returns (so they don't realize there's no actual money to pay them back).

If you give the returns immediately (the two stickers) with no option to reinvest, the ponzi scheme is going to run out of steam very quickly and there's no way this is going to attract a lot of people.

In summary, this is a Ponzi Scheme, but not one that has a lot of chance of being sustained for very long.

Wouldn't that be a pyramid scheme?

I believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that in a pyramid scheme the individual participants receive money from new participants that they recruit (and the people your recruits recruit, and so forth down the line). If you join a pyramid scheme and then do nothing else, you receive nothing.

A Ponzi scheme is centralized, with new participants joining directly with the scheme, and proceeds paid out to all existing participants.

As structured, this sticker scheme is a Ponzi scheme, since it's all centralized and you don't do anything besides send in your sticker and postage.

No you're totally right, it's not a pyramid scheme. I still don't think it's a Ponzi scheme though because I don't think a sticker and return postage constitutes an investment. It's just a normal, if unsustainable, trade.

For now. It would be totally consistent with how Ponzi schemes work in real life to start with something legit that turns out to not be sustainable, and then turning it into something fraudulent. Say once people have started sending in stickers they should choose to offer a service where they hang on to your stickers to save you the trouble of mailing back and forth, and doubling your holding every 10 days. Then a sticker would be an investment and it would be a Ponzi scheme.

I can only hope they'll do something like that. It'd be totally in the spirit of Ponzi.

Obviously it's not actually a Ponzi scheme if you take the whole "stickers" thing into account. Which is presumably why they aren't being raided by the authorities right now.

But it's definitely meant to mirror the structure of one, just with stickers instead of money. If they had you send in $10,000 instead of a sticker, and promised $20,000 back, it would clearly qualify.

So I'd say it's "a Ponzi scheme, but for stickers."

If I send 2 stickers will I get back 4?

To (somewhat) rate limit it, we'll only send 2 stickers back per envelope (regardless of whether the envelope has 1 sticker or 10 stickers in it).

Can I also send you a dollar and get back four stamps for return postage?

the amount of time and effort I'm willing to spend to get start up stickers is probably about equal to the effort it takes to type in the address to mail them to. probably less.

Always wanted that github sticker, never knew where to get from :)

go to a conference that they sponsor (or at least have a booth at), they will be everywhere. I went to a small regional Python conference a couple years back and they were there.

http://github.myshopify.com/products/die-cut-github-stickers

You got something here

Would you send it to the EU and take euros :)?

Are you going to do all this work by hand?

To be honest, we weren't expecting this large of a response. But yes!

I want PONIES!

Why.

Because they've got 5000 GitHub stickers left over from a conference and don't know what to do with them?

Personally I love it.

No, seriously, why is this even worth spending time on? WTF? This isn't even amusing. It's just random.

You've just defined modern art.

LOVE IT

32 points, 35 minutes ago? Is this a voting ring?

Edit: As mentioned below, also with 0 comments at the time (this was the first comment)

I already print the address and get a mail envelope

You print the address and then an envelope arrives? Sorry, I'm not following how this relates to the voting ring

"I get a mail envelope": I mean I search and found an envelope, and I'm ready to put the address on it, to later send it to the postal office.

I was stating my enthusiasm with the idea.

Not common to see the top story on HN have 0 comments, as it did when I loaded the page ...

Honestly not sure. I've never had a post rise this quickly, though it's definitely fun to watch! Here's a screenshot of where people are visiting from: https://i.imgur.com/Of5xKOk.png

Perhaps it's just that great an idea :) Quick, grow and monetize it!

Take a percentage cut of the stickers (or postage cost)

Weeeeelll...if postage is 49 cents and people mail in 50 cents, that's your immense profit opportunity right there ;)

Indeed, and they don't have to tell anyone what the postage actually costs :)

What did you use to generate this?

We're using piwik(https://piwik.org) for analytics, which has a nice map view.

I'm really surprised how few visitors were from the bay area, is that normal? Does anyone know the location breakdown of hacker news visitors?

Edit: oh that was at 6am PT

I agree, especially with the tremendous amount of votes... Usually for the first 30 minutes or so you'll be lucky to get a handful of votes, which rapidly accelerates your post.

The submitting account has other stories which didn't earn many points, FWIW. But I agree that this is.. silly and IMHO not deserving of #1 spot on HN, there are some serious topics being discussed!

Hm, not sure I agree with that second part. HN can find a number of non-serious things interesting, and I think this is at least a little interesting. The issue is, was it really THAT interesting?

No ponzi scheme is complete without a set of fake satisfied customers and bogus tesimonials!

/joke

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