AnyPerk (YC W12) Gives Your Startup Employees The Same Perks As Pinterest | Hacker News Reader

AnyPerk (YC W12) Gives Your Startup Employees The Same Perks As Pinterest

businessinsider.com

25 pointstarof12 comments

You guys do realize that BetterWorks had this EXACT same model and they shut it down 8 months after raising an $8M Series A from RedPoint, right?

I recommend reaching out to the founder, Paige Craig, to get his insights.

Just adding to what MediaSquirrel mentioned:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/24/betterworks-shuts-down/

Ok, that's one data point. Without further explanation, that's hardly an indictment of the business model. They could have failed for any number of reasons.

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that it wasn't a business thing but instead a founder-disagreement thing for BetterWorks

BetterWorks and AnyPerk didn't revolutionize employee benefits; they've had these types of arrangements for decades. All they really bring to the table is a web interface. Thus, the problem of scale (especially as it relates to customer generation) matters.

The problem was that the business model doesn't scale. In order to generate partners and customers, they needed a fairly large sales force. BetterWorks was simply never able to generate sufficient revenues to make the model work.

Thanks for the advice, I have reached out and learnt a great deal from some of their team members and hope to continue to learn from both failed and successful startups in the space. There are other similar and very successful companies in other countries, and thought it would be great to have US startup employees be rewarded as well.

As an employee, knowing this only costs the company $5.00, this wouldn't even register in my "total compensation" calculations. I mean, it would be like them sliding the offer letter over the table and saying with a wink, "Annnnnd we'll buy you a double venti latte every month. Unbelievable, right?"

And don't get me started on actually trying to navigate these group buying offers. Every time I've tried to redeem one you're shunted off to some obscure buy flow: "Oh, you'll need to talk to our corporate accounts representative, do you have your company contract id?"

And to get a little meta here for a second: how lazy is ez-pr.com that they just link to their half-assed Google Spreadsheet. Or for that matter, how lazy is Business Insider that they just regurgitate this PR crap. And why are we even linking to this low-effort content?

So this isn't really anything like the employee perks at Pinterest or Google. This is a group buying discount. It's not a bad thing to offer--I've worked in big companies and it's occasionally nice to be able to buy discounted tickets. Nobody should confuse this for a benefit that a company would brag about, though.

Yeah, I noticed that too. They describe free food and massages, then they offer coupons and group buying deals. Didn't even seem remotely the same.

It's like Tickets at Work, but without a UX stuck in the 90s. This space needs a shakeup.

Thanks for the support, we just redesigned our site! Please let us know if you have any other suggestions, design or otherwise.

buckets of opportunity to move into the boring but more lucrative space of pooling group pension plan, life insurance and healthcare costs to synthetically provide "big corporate" perks.

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