None of the above apply to mattresses or suitcases. (It more-closely applies to razors.) There is limited fat to trim that would overcome incumbents' economies of scale and distribution advantages.
An Uber for home cleaning was never going to work because it is tough to commoditize inviting someone into your home and both the cleaner and the user have an incentive to cut out the middle man as soon as a solid working relationship is established.
An Airbnb for massage therapists was never going to work because there isn't a huge supply of people who are capable of providing the service but are unable to find customers themselves.
An Uber for delivering food works because no one cares who delivers the food and because it is a service that almost anyone can perform.
I'd think "an Uber for creative work" is at least prone to the same incentives to cut out the middleman.
There's really no way for them to stop it. It's all just about if they want to deal with invoicing and other stuff themselves or go direct. Many don't want to bother. But every wall they throw up makes it more likely people will jump off after that initial aquisition.
But many of these jobs ARE just one shots. Tho I usually go back to the same folks who did good work and communicated well with later tasks.
In the case of creative work, it's arguably less hassle to let Fiverr handle things than to sign into a bunch of one-off contracts, and reserve "cut[ting] out the middleman" for cases where someone has consistently delivered work to your standards (or, on the other side, has consistently paid well) and there's a desire to make for a more long-term arrangement than one-off jobs.
We always politely decline because of the layer of perceived security Rover offers with their insurance.
This conversation actually made me curious what the actual value of that insurance is.
According to this source, at retail prices dog walking insurance costs 500$ a year for comprehensive coverage, or about 40$ a month: https://www.petsits.com/petsittinginsuranceusa
Rover takes almost 40$ in service fees for one weekend of boarding my single dog!
I appreciate the value of insurance, I kind of appreciate the Craigslist+ role they serve, but at the point where more than 25% of my payment is never making it to the sitter... Rover is just burning my money to fund a bloated payroll and lofty valuations
Platforms offer a way for individuals or small businesses to get started in a new sector without doing a lot of marketing for themselves. It's a bit like being part of an alliance.
I am not arguing for the continued domination and rent-seeking practices of Silicon Valley middle-men corporations. I'm arguing that the existence of any online bazaar/marketplace and the ability to search and compare, makes for excellent dynamics.
To go even further, I advocate for an emerging alternative that has been termed 'Protocol Cooperativism':
Instead of monopolistic rent-seeking platforms, it focuses on open source economic protocols that allow full negotiation between peer to peer users. Check out Ceptr.org, MetaCurrency and Holochain. It provides the frame and framework for ever evolving protocols (comprehensive versioning tech).
Eh, I've started using Helpling in Singapore (on-demand home cleaning service) that seems to be quite stable/successful.
Of course, I doubt they're Uber-scale profitable, and I don't know how much capital they're burning (if any), but there definitely seems to be business value there.
That's an oxymoron, Uber are massively loss making.
People eat carryout often - sometimes every meal/dinner. Just pitch the service as "call Ma for dinner" or somesuch
Things are at least a little better now, in that at least the DTC companies have a clear set of options that get sold at reasonably clear price points.
Based on the data, I think we can conclude that opacity and user hostility are insufficient criteria for a DTC play. (Unless consumers are willing to pay a premium for the removal of said opacity and hostility.)
I think the DTC companies mostly can't build the moats needed to make that kind of money. So I think a reckoning is overdue. But once key players can no longer subsidize each sale, we'll find out for sure where the store-vs-DTC balance is.
My personal guess is that plenty of people will keep buying DTC goods, and that many categories will be more than competitive with brick-and-mortar competitors. So I expect DTC mattresses will be a good business, even if none of the current big players survive the culling.
Buying a foam mattress on Amazon sounds like inviting some sort of toxic mess of outgassing junk into your bedroom. No thanks.
DTC at a 40% discount from "I can buy it walking into a show room staffed by a dozen salesmen in a Manhattan shopping district" is not enough of a discount. Make a discount 85% of that every damn day and we can talk.
Casper basically became the modern version of the opaque mattress store.
https://www.sleeplikethedead.com/bed-mattress-review-home.ht...
I bought a Spa Sensations mattress back in 2010, and that's actually just Walmart's label on a Zinus mattress. (They even call it "Spa Sensations by Zinus" now.) Phenomenal mattress, super cheap, has lasted me forever. I suspect that many of the DTC vendors were doing the same and being a little less overt about it (so they could pocket the markup).
If I had to buy another mattress right now, I'd just buy direct from Zinus, as it looks like they have a reasonable retail presence in the US now.
Although I agree with your statement, no one tried to solve the actual problem with purchasing a mattress: finding a mattress that fits you well. The process changed from trying many mattresses in a uselessly-short[1] in-store test (with almost no information about what you're buying), to buying a "One size fits most" item for a product where that doesn't actually exist[1] – and without even trying it.
[1]: From "Choosing the Best Mattress: An Experiment in Testing Whether Individuals Choose a Bed That Leads to Improved Sleep," https://www.rti.org/sites/default/files/resources/rr-0016-11... : "The mattress that individuals chose as optimal before the randomized, controlled phase of the study did not predict either the actigraphically determined best mattress or the best mattress as determined by reported sleep quality." Lots more in the paper.
I've found that one of the most time-efficient heuristics for getting a quality product for these product categories is simply "buy whatever Costco is selling".
I didn’t like it and I returned it without issue.
Costco explicitly commits to never making more than 12% on anything they sell. It’s a major part of their brand and part of the reason people trust them.
If anything, that sounds like an average, which doesn't tell you anything as they could be screwing you on mattresses while losing money on hot dogs and rotisserie chickens to even it out to a 12% gross margin.
“Costco has stated that the highest margin they will take on a non-Costco brand is 13 percent and they strive to keep it closer to 10 percent.”
https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a35749/costco-the-...
And why the arbitrary 12%? Why not 15 or 21?
Who is this startup, and can they help me identify what I love about my current mattress so that when it's done, I can buy one much like it?
The site I like best these days for purchase decision support is Wirecutter. Here's their mattress guide, which seems sensible to me: https://thewirecutter.com/guides/buying-a-mattress/
I would love if they stated doing more in-depth pieces about different niche markets.
My personal favorite part is that you don't have to do this mental math of "the frame is this much, then pick lenses you want depending on your budget, etc." The price of the frame is the only thing you pay, all the fancy lenses and such are free, whether you need them or not (in case of sunglasses). With frames being noticeably cheaper than other brands and lenses being free (usually the bulk of the cost of prescription glasses), they are welcome to put their hand in my wallet.
The only reason I don't shop there much anymore is because of LASIK. Back then though, I had about 4 different frames from Warby Parker, and those were my favorites, despite previously wearing the usual "known" eyewear brands (and that's even without factoring in the cost).
P.S. There are some extra charges for lenses in rare scenarios, like if you have a very very strong prescription, they charge you a bit extra if you want to make the lenses thinner. Still not comparable to traditional glass brands though in terms of how much it costs.
P.P.S. There are other affordable online eyewear places, but I have been appalled with the quality and look of those. A couple of friends of mine tried Zenni Optical before, and those frames felt flimsy and they didn't look good at all imo. Warby Parker seems to have found a really solid niche between "cheap and flimsy" and "overpriced brand name eyewear", which is "the quality and looks of premium eyewear, but with a much more reasonable pricing".
I prefer smaller, traditional wire frames because that's what I've always worn (and at this stage in life that's unlikely to change). Unfortunately, wire frames seem to be out of fashion and no-one seems to have a good selection.
Furthermore, I have a fairly strong prescription and with my current frames, the lenses are about 8 mm thick at the edges, and my frames are the smallest I could find. The larger the frame, the thicker the lenses end up being. I could go with a higher-index lens material, but then chromatic aberrations become way too distracting, and I'd rather have a thicker lens than deal with that again.
P.S. Those "rare" scenarios you refer to are not that rare. My mother gets her glasses from WP, and they end up costing several hundred Canadian dollars, about the same as Costco. My mother's prescription is also not that strong or unusual; like most or a lot of old people, she is both near-sighted and far-sighted, and while bifocals might be an option, most people seem to prefer transition lenses (I think that's what they're called).
That, along with the other severe distortion brought on by a -10 diopter, is why I mainly wear contacts now.
I still have high-index lenses, but ones with a lower index of refraction and therefore a higher Abbe number. I don't remember specifically which material I have, but I think it might be high index 1.6 (index of refraction) with an Abbe number of 42. Chromatic aberrations are minimal enough with these lenses that they don't bother me much anymore (although still present).
For comparison, crown glass and CR-39 plastic have Abbe numbers of about 58, but will result in much thicker lenses at stronger prescriptions. Regular high index plastic lenses have the some of the worst Abbe numbers, and the higher index you go the worse it gets (Abbe of 32–36), but lenses can get very thin with high index 1.74. More on this at [2].
I've worn contacts several different times, but not only could I not get used to removing them from my eyes, I didn't like how much they worsened my close-up vision, and you can't just take off contacts like you can glasses.
This[1] comment by @mindslight on HN last year was a big help. In the end, I did have to switch providers when Costco didn't have any other material options (I got my glasses from Zehrs Optical in Canada). I payed about $325 altogether, but there was some sort of deal on so I don't know how it would be normally.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19315769
[2] https://www.2020mag.com/article/does-material-abbe-value-inf...
Wish I could find glasses with ear hooks. They only make them for kids now.
I found a style of frames I really like and now I just keep buying them in different colors so all my lenses are interchangeable.
At Costco you can try and choose the frame directly and at the end walk away with higher quality glasses for the same price. Same with contact lenses - you can’t buy same brands of contact lenses cheaper even online.
(A theory certainly could be that customer acquisiton was cheaper when Warby Parker was started and there were fewer direct to consumer businesses, it was more novel).
If the difference between companies that succeeded and failed was just "do they have a good product at a good price" there wouldn't be much to write about!
It's not as universal as Luxottica, as I said, but it's pretty widespread.
This led to a lot of people having favorite hacks. E.g., a friend bought his mattress from a hotel company. His theory was he was probably paying a little more, but the incentives were better, so he trusted the hotelier more.
Who is this Mattress Powerhouse? From whence they came?
Add $100 for labor and you arrive at a mattress that that is about $900. That’s about the floor for a mattress most people would be happy with.
The 100% foam mattresses are much cheaper (less labor, cheaper materials) and many people are happy with those, but not all.
Fortunately a mattress seller became famous at the time in Germany for breaking the monopoly here and getting all the hate from the lobby. You know what he did? He sold the same mattresses everybody else sold but significantly cheaper. The margin was just ridiculous.
After being "banned" and not being supplied shortly after he started, he came up with his own mattress. 100€. Just foam. We had it for ~5years now and I never slept so good before. The mattress have been tested as the best mattress on the market for many years here in Germany so it wasn't just us.
I know the US market is different because people seem to value ridiculous sizes and design over health and usability but this is what actually helps this scammy market to rise to those ridiculous prices.
What's the brand from the guy with the good 100 EUR mattresses?
It's most definitely not as simple as "cut them, and roll them for shipment."
My old school mattress was like $700 and is fine. I’m a huge fan of IKEA, and have bought everything from furniture to a kitchen from them. But their mattresses are garbage.
Cheap foam is why (what can you expect for $200?!). My parents got a 100% foam queen-size mattress more than 30 years ago, and it's still in very good shape with full-time use. They flip and rotate it every month or so, which probably helps a lot (most mattresses today aren't supposed to be flipped). I think it cost about $1000 in 1989 (about $1800 today).
Purple and Casper are both only five years old yet I bought a Casper-like queen sized mattress in 2011 from overstock.com for like $300.
The only downside I have with online glasses is you making adjustments to the fitting of the glasses. Your eye doctor will usually do this for you when you buy glasses for them, but online glasses require you to do it yourself or go into a store (if they have one). With that said, still not a big enough negative for me to go back to buying from my eye doctor.
I think online eyewear sales and awareness have been spiking over the last 5 years, and they have serious product market fit. You tell anyone about the existence of online eyewear and the price and they are sold. Luxottica is winning based on market ignorance at the moment IMO, it's only a matter of time.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/256664/sales-of-the-lead... [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/zenni-optical-cele...
The problem with DTC mattresses specifically (and DTC cars, for that matter) is the logistical hell on Earth that is actually getting that product "direct to consumer" (the products themselves are pretty huge and heavy), the higher pricetags (a mattress or a car is considerably more expensive than even a pair of eyeglasses, let alone razors or soap), the inability to reasonably handle returns or repairs, and the inability to "try before you buy" like you can in a brick and mortar store or a dealership.
Tesla worked around some of these problems by having actual physical storefronts/showrooms and service centers (which in turn caused issues in states like Texas that disallow auto manufacturers from owning/operating their own dealerships). The only DTC mattress company I know of that has physical storefronts (at least where I live) is Sleep Number, and it's one of the incumbents.