Dude, no one will ever buy that online. AKA how incumbents get Pwned in tech

There are something like six of these boutique foam mattress startups, of which Casper is one of the newest, cutest, hipster-i-est versions. I've had a Keetsa mattress for about five years now. It's fine -- it was about 20% cheaper than a TempurPedic when I bought it, and the fact that it came vacuum-packed was a gimmick that made it possible to get it into my apartment. It's a little on the firm side, but that's what you get when you have no choice.

(As an aside, nearly twenty years ago, I bought a mattress from the Denver Mattress Company, who were (and are) selling and manufacturing great mattresses for a fraction of the price of the big players. You want to talk about innovation? Talk about those guys, not three hipsters in Brooklyn who got some VC money last year and used it to buy generic foam mattresses from a Chinese supplier.)

That said, there's no way in the world that this market is big enough to support this many startups. Mattresses weren't sold in stores because the companies didn't think people would buy them online; mattresses are/were sold that way because they're like cars -- people buy a new one once a decade. It's hard to build a big business unless you're extracting maximum margin per item sold. It's even harder when five other identical "scrappy insurgencies" are competing on price in the low end of the market.

But hey, cheap VC dollars means cheap mattresses for you. Everyone is thinking about gross revenue and "disruption", but nobody is thinking about business models.

Any time someone says "will never do that online," I have an almost Pavlovian response of "sounds like doing that online is a good startup idea." In pretty much every case where people have shown an interest in doing offline, once the experience has been replicated closely enough online, it's ended up working well. The first company I worked at out of school, BuildASign, started as a software to design signs online (incredibly, the founders were the first people to build an online sign designer, at least that they've found). They intended to sell it for a few grand to a local sign shop, as they were all in grad school. All the sign shops they approached said "No one wants to design a sign online! They want to come in and see samples and get help from a person." So the founders threw up a site, planning to do all their fulfillment at a store to demonstrate why they should buy their software. The response was so strong that they quickly decided not to sell, and bought a printer. Today, they have a 100K sq ft manufacturing facility and have had at least 5 straight years of high growth revenue in the high 8 figures (and have been profitable since year 2, plus - until a very recent PE investment - were entirely owned by 3 people).

Point being, once something can be done well enough online, people will do/buy/use it.

...Oh and these beds offgas for days if not weeks. I ordered one from Leesa, a similar company offering the same kind of memory foam mattress. They have the same 100 day return policy but it turns out that you have to wait 30 days. Casper has the same 30 day wait period. Presumably this is to give the bed enough time to stop stinking. I don't know about the Casper bed but a week into it the Leesa is very comfortable but still really smells. I knew about the offgassing before I ordered the bed and I'm not a fussy person. I did not know how bad it would be.

"Oh, and they’re [Casper mattresses] a fraction of the cost of traditional Serta, Stearns & Foster, Tempurpedic mattresses."

That's just not true. Their queen mattress costs $850, equal or above many of the listed competitors.

"If you’re not aware of Casper, they’re a web-only millennial focused mattress company"

As a millennial, I'm really dying to know what it feels like to sleep on a millennial mattress.

Similar to Tucker Max and Lioncrest, I heard him on a podcast the other day about how people kept asking him how to self publish and he would go into great detail and they would lose interest, until an entrepreneur yelled at him, she basically said, "this is my problem find a solution" and he came up with a completely novel way to self publish, that was unthinkable before.

I bought a bed from Casper a few months back, and the experience has been nothing short of spectacular. When I tell friends who don't work in startups or are older, they are baffled until I explain it. Buying a bed has to be up there on the list of "I see why someone would hesitate to do it online, without trying it out first," and Casper has figured it out.

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:J5cH6Ct...

The article cited in this post is actually quite interesting for being 25 years old.

https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obl...

Huh, I was wondering about the returns, and how you could pack it again if it's so tightly compressed. From the FAQ, the answer is that a courier picks it up and drops it off at a local charity.

I hate to nit pick at the design of the site but I found the light green links on a white background very hard to read.

Seems like a plug for Zipments which is funded by VC the author works for. Disclosure please.

cringing at use of “AKA” instead of “i.e.” or simply “or:”

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