mschaecher

You're correct. Which is why most reports of revenue for Uber, or even Airbnb, almost always use numbers in the hundreds of millions. However, both companies have gross sales in the billions.

Couldn't you space them out a little and rather than backing up it would expand and flow like regular wind? (serious, just curious)

If I read various parts of their website correctly it sounds like they aren't in the turbine business(yet), but building this funnel thing around many existing turbines.

You could do this without having to "move" the exhaust back up to the top I think.

Just stack them in a line at different elevations so that one's exhaust turns into the fuel for the next one. If speed of the exhaust increases after a cycle you'd be creating stronger "breezes" as you go down each step.

It wouldn't be 'perpetual' but pods of 3-4 like this might be able to increase the yield substantially.

Then again I don't know much about this and I'm just trying to comprehend it all.

I had to dig into that one too. I lost where I found it, but it's actually "up to 600%." Range is 85%-600% with average of like 315% or something.

Really need to put some social sharing options on that page.

Great idea though!

I've only had to use uber support once, and it was for an extreme edge technical error. I received immediate email reply from the SF CM at 2AM. She followed up twice in the following week to keep me updated on the status without me ever having to write back.

Here's the above the fold of their How it Works page as seen on an apple LCD.

http://d.pr/i/ltch

Is how it works clear or am I missing something?

Here is their FAQ

http://d.pr/i/beRt

It takes over 2800 characters and 507 words before a single mention of a membership charge with no mention of recurring until the following paragraph.

Is that clear?

As someone who spent a lot of time optimizing conversions, it painfully obvious that they are optimizing to not be clear. If the subscription was so valuable, they'd message it as a top level value prop. But you're not dumb, their not dumb, so I don't have to tell you that.

I honestly can't believe they get away with, nor have the balls to even do it in the first place.

I actually wrote the ATD reporter who held their feet to the fire a little bit last week. He should've done far more.

While we're at it, let's take a look at above the fold of the how it works page on A BIG Apple monitor. http://d.pr/i/tCVH

So obvious it's a subscription there right?

How about the homepage? http://d.pr/i/1BVn

Clear as day right?!

I mean your rewards page makes it sound like you're telling a friend about personalized recommendations. Might as well be messaging those units at the end of an article "Selections recommended for you...."http://d.pr/i/YmIT

I can't even tell if your gift card page is signing up the person buying a gift card for a subscription or what is going on there.

And btw, might want to have legal look at this language at the bottom of your gift card page because I'm pretty sure it's a violation of California's gift card/certificate laws. http://d.pr/i/SDS

It's also funny that the phrasing "no obligation to buy" is all over the place.

When in fact obligation is legally defined in the civil sense as a contractual compelling promise for a course of action.

And that the word buy is also defined as the exchange of property from one part to another by way of an agreement.

And I'll talk slowly, property in that sense doesn't have to mean goods.....property can be money too.

So by purchasing on JustFab you are most certainly signing an agreement that compels you to exchange property with another party unless you cancel the agreement thereby removing your obligation.

So really, during a 5 day window at the beginning of every month you have no obligation to buy.

Miss that window and you don't even have a say in the matter!

It's also very telling that the FAQ section contains no section on "how do I cancel my VIP membership and stop getting billed every month?"

my guess would be instacart, goldbely or teespring. But there are probably some B2B contenders I haven't thought of

I don't think you'd ever hear anyone whose created something truly great say this.

For a lot of them, good enough, just isn't. (partial Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, quote)

Sure good enough MVPs might be alright. Once you find product market fit, build "whole product" and customer experience. Stop building new stuff, take what you're already doing good enough and make it great.

Fab deliveries used to take 1-2+ months a year ago. Now it takes less than two weeks, sometimes same week. Not holding inventory, inbounding post purchase and MVP pick and pack is the easy way. Since they stopped doing things the easy way, I know my friends and I order 2-3x as much.

At Airbnb, we were technically international from day 1. We could've kept doing internationalization like we were doing....good enough. Instead we chose the hard, increased our language and currency support 2-3x, and spent a painful 2-3 months taking all consumer facing localization forward be leaps and bounds, not steps. We pry wouldn't have doubled the previous 3 years of nights booked in 3 months if we hadn't.

At Munchery, a lot of stuff is currently good enough because they were focused on finding product and operational market fit.

We found fit. Now we're circling back and taking everything we're already doing good enough, and making it freaking great.

You can check back in with me in 3 months and see if doing the hard work was worth if you want.

But I'd bet a lot of money that it will be.

As Mark Cuban said "everyone tells you they're going to be special. But no one does the work. Do the fucking work."*

*I added fucking to Mark's quote

San Francisco, SFBA, INTERNS(too)

Munchery is changing something so fundamental as your nightly dinner, and giving local food entrepreneurs the economic freedom to fully leverage their skill, passion and creativity.

We're looking for software engineers, senior designers, senior front-end. Hacker, designer & data interns. Operations roles, city management roles, and more postings soon.

Only apply if you like zero bureaucracy and tons of empowerment. Working on awesome stuff is only limited by how much you can get done.

email me at michael@munchery.com if interested and check out munchery.com/about/jobs

San Francisco, SFBA, REMOTE, INTERNS(too)

Munchery is changing something so fundamental as your nightly dinner, and giving local food entrepreneurs the economic freedom to fully leverage their skill, passion and creativity.

We're looking for software engineers, senior designers, senior front-end. Hacker, designer & data interns. Operations roles, city management roles, and more postings soon.

Only apply if you like zero bureaucracy and tons of empowerment.

Working on awesome stuff is only limited by how much you can get done.

email me at michael@munchery.com if interested.

Just make a dozen variations, break into groups of three, put each set on it's webpage with a header question "Which sudoko game would you rather play?" Install click tracking via your tool of choice GA/Optimizely/VWO/CrazyEgg/Clicktale. Then head on over to either mechanical turk, usertesting, gorillatesting, or one of the other many services out there. Target your expected demographic and pay for a 5-20 individuals (or whatever volume of people will make you comfortable) to go through each set clicking the one they'd want to play. Take the winner from each set, create a new page with the three winners, select a new group of testers. Take the winner and make it the first one you go with. Then over time you can try switching some in and out of the actual app store. But increase the chances that your first one is your best!

I've never used SnapChat, but hypothetically if you wanted to limit data going back to facebook here's one potential approach.

For this example, let's say you have an app that you want to use facebook for account creation and friend finding, but not necessarily distribution inside of Facebook.

- force facebook login for account creation - upon auth redirect back to your app, force signup completion with password and other credentials you might need. - next step is invite/follow people from your facebook friends list. - When users come back to your account from now on, only allow login via the credentials you had them create (password) and the email address you pulled from facebook. No facebook logging in after the first time.

They'd still be able to see how many people used facebook to signup. But if you don't let people continuously login with FB, or interact with their API outside of one time or explicit actions, they won't be able to get a good picture of your retention and engagement.

If you're still looking, I might be able to find you some temp contractor work asap, as well as introduce you to people looking for more permanent (or at least medium term) remote devs. michael@munchery.com

I agree, don't read techcrunch.

Unless you're interested in startups generally.

Or if you want to learn about new companies.

But really only if you're interested in learning about hot new spaces in trends, yea then it's ok.

Or if you want to see what external thought leaders have to say, reading on the weekends is ok.

But don't read it for funding.

Unless you're looking for funding, then maybe it's ok to read it to help you narrow your investor pitch focus by seeing who is active and wear.

But certainly don't read it for product. Yeah, that'd be stupid.

Unless, and only unless, you want to see what early adopters who see more new products in a month then most people do in a year have to say about new technology, trends and spaces.

On second thought, yea read TechCrunch.

Just be a good enough entrepreneur to know that reading or not reading TechCrunch won't make or break your company, and is a really lame scapegoat.

The only thing that will make or break your company is you and your idea.

Riiiight, because this opaque give us money and we'll buy off some anonymous people's debt is a beacon for piece of mind.

A non-profit marketplace for this built similar to Kiva, LendingClub, etc. increases transparency dramatically.

They're basically already doing all of these in some form or another.

1. They'd never describe it as this, but sign up as an advertiser and you essentially get all of this.

2. They're essentially doing this with their new interest based targeting for advertisers, i.e. mining users for interests and then letting advertising pay to target those interests.

3. Promoted tweets all the way. While they don't have follower count as a targeting vector yet, they do have everything from device and location, to gender and interests, to @handles and time of day.

Anyone know if the reasoning behind not being able to buy individuals debt is legal or if technical/execution?

A marketplace for this kind of relief a la Kiva could be hugely powerful.

The title of the article should actually be:

"Meet the man who's getting his ass kicked by Airbnb in Europe"

Your title is pure link-bait. You offer no specifics AT ALL in your article about how HouseTrip is beating Airbnb. In fact the one potential metric for success that you list for both company is money raised. If that is your success metric, then HouseTrip is getting demolished by Airbnb.

Let's try a different publicly available metric of success. Let's look at supply in Europe. Let's compare the offering of 'entire homes' in a few major European markets, this number will only compare like properties and remove Airbnb's shared spaces from the equation. If those had been included, Airbnb's numbers would almost double in each market.

London - HouseTrip - 1784 London - Airbnb - 4329

Berlin - HouseTrip - 717 Berlin - Airbnb - 4155

Paris - HouseTrip - 2991 Paris - Airbnb - 9096

Barcelona - HouseTrip - 2175 Barcelona - Airbnb - 2459

And for fun,

NYC - HouseTrip - 1000 NYC - Airbnb - 10,249

PS - Airbnb has not already raised $220 million, they have raised just under $120 million.

Here's a plausible explanation for what is happening:

For any given user on facebook, there is a limited amount of promoted posts that facebook will show in their feed at any given time/day so that their feeds don't become overwhelmed with promoted/sponsored content.

So like other ad platforms, i.e. auction based, you are competing for that limited space with other brands and pages that are promoting/sponsoring content. If everyone is competing for the high value fans, i.e. us based fans, it would be easy to get "bid out" by putting in to low of an amount.

But since no one is likely targeting India/Indonesia/Philippines, those are cheap. And if your fans there are all that are available to you because of bid optimization constraints, facebook will most likely end up sending a disproportionate amount of your views to those fans.

Now for some sample math: If you have, let's say 5 friends in Indonesia, let's see how that could play out. Indonesia and Phillipines facebook users generally have more fb friends on avg then the rest of the world. Call it 170. So your potential audience of 'friends of fans' in indonesia is = 850.

Since not many, if any brands, are attempting to target those 850 people, you could saturate them with your promoted/sponsored content. Users in that part of the world also 'like' stuff more frequently and at a higher volume. No let's say that you get 15 likes from those 850 'friends of fans'. That like action will create an organic story in those peoples' friends newsfeeds. So 15 people, with avg of 170 friends each, like that sponsored post and an organic feed story is seen on avg by about 14% of any users friends you could reach 357 more organic impressions.

That cycle can continue on and on.

Why is this post not full of data and heatmaps to support this case? All I see is a "conversion" expert trumpeting anecdotal and gut opinions, without any supporting data one way or the other.

I'm not saying he is necessarily wrong, but this is an extremely broad generalization that is not backed up with any evidence in the post itself.

At Airbnb we respected them as a competitor, enough to know that we needed to crush them. Forgive the sports metaphor, but it's like in sports when you have respect for an opponent that you will face, but come game time you're at war.

Gotta say though, it was damn fun absolutely decimating them in a global game of 'Risk'.

I'll just leave these numbers here....

Airbnb vs Wimdu in Berlin - home of Rocket & Airbnb clone Wimdu - Airbnb - 5830 listings (https://www.airbnb.com/s/berlin) - Wimdu - ~504 listings (http://bit.ly/P3XcLA)

Airbnb vs Wimdu in San Francisco - home of Airbnb (and yes, they tried to compete with us here) - Airbnb - 3904 listings - https://www.airbnb.com/s/san-francisco) - Wimdu - 294

So since you launched last week I'm guessing the testimonials are bunk?

Kelli Anderson did most the visual graphics in Airbnb Picks: http://dribbble.com/kellianderson

I was blogging on startups while living in the midwest getting ready to move to SF. Blogging got me meetings with people at Google, Twitter, Square and Airbnb. I ended up as employee #17 at Airbnb. So yea, it helped.

Hey, I'm from Nebraska, work at Airbnb. Made the move with no job though. Drop me an email if you want. schaecher.michael AT gma

another example: http://www.curebit.com/

http://500friends.com/

Yea, we're actively working on tackling it from all angles.