I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster | Hacker News Reader

I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

theguardian.com

85 pointsActsJuvenile49 comments

Isn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run those but does funeral services be government run? If no, then making profits is necessary and someone needs to do it.

Someone does, but not a a growth at all costs VC-backed startup.

While fictional, HBO's Six Feet Under touches on this.

Thomas Lynch wrote a book that I remember as interesting as far as I read it, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334876 .

Death services tread a very fine moral line. You're working with people who usually have no idea what they're doing, who are in a time of crisis in their lives, and who are trying to fulfill the wishes of someone who is now dead and can't provide any input.

There's a very fine line between providing someone services that will help them reach closure, and selling someone nostalgic snake oil so you have a few more dollars than you did yesterday.

It's not something I would get involved in. I feel like the only two ways it could go for me would be either compartmentalizing and becoming a greedy monster, or not compartmentalizing and becoming totally swallowed up by the sorrow I'm exposed to every day. Many kudos to the people that can be around that sorrow, be unaffected and yet still not become a monster.

Pushing overpriced useless junk to emotionally vulnerable people? No. There is a necessary service of digging a hole and putting a corpse in a box into it, but the whole business of $10k coffins and embalming and such is both unnecessary and quite unique to the US.

Expensive funerals are far from "unique to the US". The US spends substantially less as a proportion of income than Japan, China, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, and New Zealand, and is within a couple percent of a half dozen other countries.

[1] https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/S...

Ha, I think the internet needs a new term like Godwin's Rule or Gell-Mann Amnesia or whatever for the constant claims of "This only happens in America" or "This problem is worse in America than anywhere else" and then the reality is that the US is in line with averages or norms in other countries or cultures.

Anything that's a cheap way to get midwit upvotes is an unsolvable problem as far as I can tell.

Can we also have one for "Europe does X better" where Europe really just means France, Scandinavia the wealthy half of Germany, and maybe UK, and not the more irreputable countries like Belarus or Serbia?

I did look this up and found slightly different numbers:

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/how-much-d...

https://nfda.org/news/statistics

But I would maintain that the invasive practice of embalming is unnecessary and unusual elsewhere in the world.

I think those are consistent with the numbers I found

Not everything has to happen via the medium of commerce or government. Funerals are something that is ideally suited to being a communal effort, or it would be if communal living weren't dying off.

Wishing that a service should be provided by a community instead of a business does not address the fact that it is a service, and one which has a constant demand and an inherent need to be offloaded to a third party.

Once specialization is demanded from the service, the "communal" label becomes meaningless.

It /did/ used to be provided by communities. Funerals are traditionally handled by the church, an arrangement which seemed to work for a long time and doesn't contain the dilemma of impersonal and potentially exploitative interactions that entail commercial transactions. Communities have specialisations too. Unfortunately the community seems to be dying with the secularisation of society which only leaves government and business to tackle things.

> Funerals are traditionally handled by the church,

You're somehow assuming that a religious organization does not operate as a corporation, even down to the invoices.

Charging money does not make something a corporation. Though I'm aware of the financialised nature of some American churches, I'm talking from a British perspective where that isn't the case (as far as I am aware, I don't personally attend church).

Either way, I don't think there's as much moral hazard if you're charging someone at cost as part of a communal service, compared to trying to squeeze as much profit as possible out of grieving families.

> Charging money does not make something a corporation.

In your opinion, other than the different taxation schemes, what's the difference between a religious organization and a corporation?

Specially if both types or org charge to provide the exact same service.

if you mean some televangelist megachurch then sure, they're basically the same thing.

I was thinking of local parishes, which have historically existed as a communal centre and hub of support for a community.

I genuinely don't understand how you'd think that enlisting a professional service versus your local community to deal with a bereavement would not be different? That's like saying that the only difference between paying somebody to be your friend versus having a legitimate friend is only different because money changed hands?

Even when the church holds the funeral - often at no charge if its a member of the church who has died, and for a small suggested donation for others - a funeral director handles the body. And that costs thousands and thousands of dollars. My Dad's church funeral cost NZ$15,000 and the church would have seen less than NZ$1,000 of that.

That's a tremendous amount of money. I'm sure the church bringing in professional services to handle funerals is a more modern innovation too. The ideal in my head is that it would be entirely handled by the community - I presume this ideal existed in the past, though I'm not sure how far back you'd have to go per-locality. In the UK where I live, churchgoers also are typically buried by a funeral director, so I'm not talking about something that still exists AFAIK.

Also, I'm sorry for your loss.

Maybe a new COO would have been a better move. Her figure of $5-10M for a crematory seemed way off to me - it's basically a glorified oven in a building - so I did a little research and found this:

https://howtostartanllc.com/business-ideas/crematorium

It says to budget $100-250K to get started, which seems a lot more reasonable than $10M.

Did you adjust for LA real estate prices?

The nummer wasn’t for the crematorium, it was for the entire runway of the business which included a crematorium in order to become profitable and get to the point where they would be an attractive acquisition target.

The headline is a lie, right? There no "Uber" part. I guess that's the point of the quote marks, to contrast all the bullshit lies and phony origin stories and pitch decks of the VC world , against the reality of the work your business does.

There's plenty of room for ethical mortuary companies to make money providing value and distrupting a deeply exploitative industry. But maybe it can't be done with (ironically named in this case) culture capital.

The “Uber for …” came to mean any kind of service that you get by pressing a button on your phone. Hence the overuse. It’s just a startup trope now.

Or maybe ^that^ with a business model requiring it to be operated as a heartless, profiteering vulture for success. That's usually where my mind goes when I read "Uber" - not as succinct as Evilcorp but whatever.

Uber = you own nothing and use your digital platform to connect the people doing the actual work (cremation) with those that need it (grieving families)

Owning their own crematory as proposed in the end would have been much less of an “Uber for” business.

I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this.

I thought the article was an indictment of our culture’s relationship with death more than anything being wrong with Grace itself.

So many families simply don’t have a plan for what happens after they die. They leave it until the death actually happens, a time when nobody really wants to be talking money.

Of course, Grace never actually turned a profit. While the author felt like he was being dirty, simultaneously the payments he was taking weren’t even covering the cost of doing business. I’d say the only clearly shady behavior was the hospital data integration, something that I’m sure is a fixture of funeral services companies.

For sure, the business of death isn’t for everyone. I could make an analogy to how I’d never be a power line technician or wind turbine maintenance person. Nothing you can say and no safety mechanism will ever convince me to willingly climb a ladder higher than 3 feet tall.

Perhaps the lesson here is to think about why you’re starting a business before you do it. Who are you doing it for? Is it your idea or someone else’s idea? Is it a product or service you’re already passionate about?

If it is, you’re probably going to have a much easier time with it.

Just a funny thought, but ladders about 3 feet tall are significantly more dangerous than the ladders in wind turbines. Not that they are more pants poopingly scary though.

https://cultureofsafety.thesilverlining.com/safety-blog/2013...

If elderly would climb wind turbines I guess those numbers would change.

Or if people climbing 3 foot ladders did so in full harness using an ascending device.

Similar thoughts on the same idea here.

Taking The Emergency Exit From A Wind Turbine - Tom Scott

https://youtu.be/UWSckm8zTc8?t=80

I thought of my original comparison because I had watched that video!!

I guess I'll have to bump my ladder limit down to 2 feet! ;-)

> I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this

I dunno, the whole "business turned me into a monster" bit is a little thin given that he opens his story with a VC pitch that he secures by melodramatically faking grief over his uncle's death.

The guy seems like a little bit of a psycho, who became a little more of a psycho through desensitization.

The business idea is solid at its core but he describes getting turned down because he didn't superficially "fit" as a funeral director. People tell sob stories for little gain all the time, so I don't think telling a small one to get his company off the ground makes him a psycho.

De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose. Faking crocodile tears over a family member's recent death is well over the psycho line for me, and "but he had to if he wanted to get money!" is not an especially convincing rebuttal.

A common source of loss for investors. Funding someone in a moment of strength who ends up not having the nerve to follow through on what they said they could do. Or weakness, depending on whether you look at it from a business perspective or a moral perspective.

Yeah, they should have found a stronger con man.

Yes. If you're going to hire a mercenary, you should hire one who is unbothered by killing. But don't just take their word for it; many people will be confident they can do a job that few actually can.

Isn't this also what Empathy ( https://www.empathy.com ) does?

Grief and death are a business as well, and being good at it does not make you a monster. You just have to have the stomach for it.

It's kind of like those guys whose sole job is to come in and fire people, like George Clooney in Up In The Air. Someone has got to do it.

I thought the point that movie was making was that George Clooney's character was not a good person.

Is manipulating people into buying a $1800 necklace when they are at a vulnerable moment “being good at it”? I think you missed the gist of the story here.

Question... How is this a $2M startup? They raised $2M but wouldn't that have been on a higher valuation. I feel like the norm is to report the "$N startup" with the valuation, not the finding round haul. And that's still the BS machine's version. A company that never turned a profit isn't really a such-and-such dollar startup so much as loss, bad gamble, write off, or the like - in non-BS parlance

Funeral industry needs an intervention, the way some states fight against pay day loan predators. These are people at their most vulnerable and are being taken for a ride.

in some US States, the elected representatives have close and vocal ties to the Pay-Day loan industry

/shrug, I would have taken over given the chance.

You weren't a monster, just an effective capitalist.

Tomato, tomato.

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