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Comment by 02thoeva | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, Eve, a rival maker also just (around a month ago) IPO'd here in the UK. Their figures are scary at the moment, with a CPA hovering around £250-£300 and returns of 15% on the mattresses with the 100-night trial. All that with an average order value was only £450, on a product people buy every 10 years! They lost £11.3m last year on earnings of £12m, so no wonder their shares have been on the decline since IPO.

The mattress market may be big, but there are so many clones - surely only one or two can win out.

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That is a staggering CPA vis a vis product cost. Is that just based on the congestion of keyword bidding? Or does CPA actually mean conversion/sale and the path to close is very difficult?

I feel like Amazon could swoop in with a competitive offering and obliterate the competition, if marketing and acquisition were the only barriers to success. They've also got a lot of distribution infrastructure they can leverage, which seems like another large hurdle.

What competitive barriers can companies like Casper or Eve put up? Can they put up any? And how should that affect inclinations toward IPOs and valuations?

Anecdotally, I've only ever seen Casper marketing on the NYC subway. Never anywhere else. I enjoy the creative, but have no inclination to buy the product, neither now nor the time that I will need to buy a new mattress.

Part of the success of Casper is the lack of choices - this is briefly touched on in the article. They seem to want to take the Apple approach - offer few choices and do them right, charging a healthy premium along the way.

I don't see any competitive advantage that Casper offers beyond that - Amazon and WalMart have similarly lax return policies as Casper without the premium. I can likely get the same quality mattress at one of the two above retailers for slightly above half-price of the equivalent Casper offering.

I do see Casper billboards in Austin in the Domain, which is a mid-to-high tier shopping center where the demographic skews younger. I've also heard ads on podcasts. So they are advertising, though it doesn't seem like they are targeting the typical channels for a mass audience, but rather are marketing to the younger demographic.

Amazon is scary, startups can develop a new product and spend millions on consumer education and establishing a market, working out kinks, etc, and once it's proven Amazon can simply swoop in and dominate the market (almost any market with their breadth and network advantages).

Casper seems to advertise heavily in the podcast and music space - I hear their ads constantly on spotify, podcasts, etc

Or Ikea.

10 years is also quite optimist on this type of mattresses. Their compositions are usually very poor with low density foams that deform easily with time. I'd be surprised if models marked that cheap last more than 5 years on average.

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