It seemed like it was scaling pretty well to me, so I was a bit surprised that scalability was cited as the problem. What went wrong?
Airbnb is different because the relationship is long distance and trust, payments, insurance, etc are a much larger issue. It's also typically a one-time transaction and there's little need to take the deal offline. I'm sure they deal with this with people wanting to stay beyond their trip date or trying to book directly, but Airbnb can easily track this stuff with the scheduling feature and seeing discrepancies when users try to go offline.
As strange as it feels to say it, we had a business that could grow over time, and that's something we'll always treasure. What we didn't have was something that we could grow at the rate we wanted, at the economics that we thought made sense.
You assert to have had a good, long-term business going; but screw that when you can take another spin of the VC wheel, right?
I guess if the yard stick is always "become the AirBNB of <random industry>..."
I suppose I was mostly nit picking on the portrayal of "oh, hey, we had a good business, but, meh, so what."
When, for a lot of people, myself included, that sounds pretty nice. E.g. (from another reply) 2-3% monthly growth is meh? I suppose...
But, yes, as you said, different goals and circumstances (I of course know nothing about the company/VCs/etc.).
So, yeah, akharris, sorry for being an ass--shutting down a company definitely sucks, and you have to do it in front of your friends/hecklers on HN. Good luck on the next thing.
If they can apply themselves to something that has greater economic benefit to themselves, and thus society, they are doing a disservice to society by underutilizing their abilities.
If the only person in the world who can cure cancer decides to be a janitor and nothing more, is he not greedy, or is he lazy?
You're misjudging them and treating them as if they are somehow stealing money through their startup(s). Not making enough money is just a way of saying they just feel they can contribute to society in a bigger way.
For the tutor as well, once they find a good client, they may get many other referrals from the same client. For example, if Jimmy's math grades all of a sudden improved, his parents may attribute it to the tutor, which gets the tutor a lot more calls for work within that community.
All of the above means that beyond a finders fee, there isn't too much of an ongoing role for Tutorspree.
You know what I hate doing? I hate printing paper that says "Tutor available" with my name and credentials on it, and those little paper tails that you rip off on the bottom with your email and phone number, and then going to the local university and posting it up everywhere. I will pay money to a service that solves that marketing problem for me.
Edit: to put it a different way - dating sites have this problem even worse than tutoring sites, because the presumably monogamous members of a couple meet each other, they don't need the dating sites anymore. Tutoring sites have a smaller problem because the tutor-tutee relationship isn't exclusive.
Are you willing to take a 40% cut in your rate for someone to do this for you?
I think this illustrates nicely why the market is a graveyard. It's competing with a super-simple task that cannot be replicated at scale.
Just curious, what recourse does Airbnb have when discovering these discrepancies?