Airbnb sounded like a horrible idea to me. Who the heck would rent out a single room? Sounded like a recipe for murder.
Pet rock. Then my son showed up.
Selling bottled water. Door dash.
I feel like Door Dash is “successful” in that it’s a household name but they still aren’t a profitable company
I don’t know if I found this dumb, weird or smart, but I was shocked about this business that makes money giving away Free Water
These guys basically get sponsors to pay them to put their branding across 1000s of water bottles.
They then go to a specific area that matches their brands target audience and hand out all these bottles away for free. (Events, college etc)
Not only do the sponsors get exposure from street traffic but they actually get 100s of thousands, some times millions of views from the bottles in their viral TikTok videos
Pool noodle
They sell higher end pool noodles at Costco now! Instead of the cheap ones for a dollar at the grocery store, they’re made of like a dense foam that doesn’t scratch you while you’re floating on it
NoPhone Air was literally selling empty packaging as a joke yet had a net worth of $15 million as of 2021.
Reminds me of the “send your enemies glitter” business that was super successful but was supposed to be a gag gift. Even the creator didn’t understand the success and ended up selling. What a win for that guy!
The pet rock .
How did this work in the beginning? How has anyone the guts to market that shit? I can’t imagine myself doing that with s straight face lol
Can we agree that whoever invented the pet rock is actually genius?
That one app that proceeded TikTok. The one where you lip-synced to popular songs.
Musically, I believe it was called.
Wasn’t that just Tik Tok? I thought music.ly rebranded as Tik tok
Exactly
I kinda thought TikTok would fail because Vine already had
WeWork. Why would you pay money to work in a public space if you can just stay at home in a comfy sofa and not have to deal with all these distractions?
I mean, the market seems to agree with you. WeBankrupt.
Work spaces still exist. When they are run by scam artists they are doomed to fail.
Kids & dog can be distracting when the schools are off, idea seems legit to me
WeWork’s business model initially made some sense. They recognized that startups didn’t want to get locked into long-term office leases if they didn’t have a sustainable revenue stream yet. So it was better for them to rent month-to-month. Where they saved money was in sharing that workspace with other startups - which made the space cheaper (initially, anyway), and had the added benefit of enabling networking between startups and their employees. Win win for everyone involved.
The big mistake (among others) that WeWork made was in thinking that every company under the sun would want to rent their space. They tried to capture global real estate space that far exceeded their niche target customer (startups) and obviously couldn’t find customers to fill all those spaces.
And this was all before the pandemic hit.
The other mistake was in thinking they were a technology company when in fact they were just a real estate company. They burnt a lot of cash investing in useless tech in order to raise additional dollars in the name of being a “tech company” whereas if they had just owned the fact that they were a real estate company, things might have gone differently. Their founding CEO was (and is) a moron.
Sounds like you don’t have kids. Working from home can be extremely difficult if you do.
As an entrepreneur wfh, I’m considering doing something like a we work very soon…I’m getting bored as fuck being at home all day.
They declared for bankruptcy so you were right.
pretty sure thats still a dumb idea
Subleasing and co-working spaces is nothing new and been around for ages - he was just able to fool investors that it was tech like innovation.
I always wished people would just use a library. We already pay for them and it would be a cool way to support your local library.
Coworking spaces where people can network to make friendships and business relationships instead of sitting home and alone… that doesn’t make sense?
Its like you saying you don’t understand why people go to bars when they can drink at home.
What you call distractions, most others call opportunity.
You must be an extrovert. As an introvert I quite enjoy and like working from home. It’s peaceful and pleasant.
Also, I’m assuming you’re an advocate for getting employers back into the office and away from remote work?
Eh, the networking at the wework locations I’ve been to was very lackluster
idk man i think he’s right we work went to a dollar and filed for bankruptcy
It could’ve probably worked if it weren’t for an inept founder
He also committed massive fraud so
As someone who has worked on their own projects for more than 15 years, working from home can be very isolating. You think that you will fill your days with all sorts of fun activities but in reality everyone you know is at work so you end up spending most of your time alone. I’ve never done it as I’ve gotten used to being alone but I can definitely understand the appeal of co-working spaces.
In what industry have you worked that 15 years just from home?
I know everyone’s used to home working now but I think there’s value in going to a place that isn’t home to work, be that an office, a coffee shop or a co-working space. I think it helps some people focus with fewer distractions and provides a divide between home life and work life.
Pet rocks
diamonds
Bitcoin. Heard you can buy a digital coin that has no use for only 20 cents. Why would I want a fake coin that can’t be used for anything?
Barriers to it being used was it’s main problem, but it showed how good currency could be if there’s a limited amount of it (i.e. there isn’t a bank printing billions of new ones to cause inflation)
Couldn’t you say this for any type of currency? It only holds power if the general public believes it does. Otherwise, why not just use the barter system.
Right but you had “experts” hyping coin as an investment, and then sold as the price skyrocketed. Classic pump and dump.
This comment strikes me as uninformed. The creator of bitcoin wasn’t an entrepreneur. It wasn’t a business idea, at all. It’s a technological experiment.
Bitcoin isn’t about “having a fake coin.” It was about a global, decentralized, (theoretically) secure and impossible to hack technology that would allow anyone in the world with internet to access effective banking services.
If I want to send money to someone in Japan right now, how do I do that? We both need banks, we both need accounts, I have to tell my bank to send money to his bank, it has to go through clearing houses, exchange rates, etc. And if there are political issues that prevent capital exchange, you can’t do it.
With bitcoin, the global network was decentralized and secure. That was the goal of it. Saying “it’s fake money” is just meaningless; ALL money that is not heavily commoditized, all fiat money, including US Dollars, are fake
The real problem with bitcoin, the reason that IMO it cannot ever become ubiquitous as an actual currency, is that it is deflationary by nature. Everything I’ve ever learned about economics tells me that deflationary currencies don’t work.
Can you please roughly describe the issue with deflationary currency? I’ve only looked into it briefly but I just found people saying it encourages saving, not spending, which isn’t exactly a bad thing.
What happens to the acute price of a currency when holders overwhelmingly decide to save rather than spend? Too much friction for the price of the currency to go up. Crypto is a zero-sum game.
I view it more as a financial instrument with unique properties. You don’t necessarily have to use it as a day to day currency. But if you want something in your portfolio that is a hedge against inflation then it certainly has it’s place.
We know that people don’t stop spending when saving generates more wealth, because:
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The vast majority of people spend most of their money on necessities, so they can’t save more than they spend by default.
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Those with additional wealth can choose to invest it for a greater return than inflation, essentially being in the same position as having deflationary wealth, and instead still have a social life, hobbies, entertainment, vacation, impulsive spending, and needless waste.
People will still spend on these things. Those that care about finances more than the above are already investing rather than spending.
I’m talking deflationary currency as an idea, but specifically about crypto as I don’t know enough to say.
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Deflationary currencies can work. The problem was always divisiblility. You start working with decimals.
And you also inverse the problem with wages. The richest need to constantly keep up with what the actual price of a banana (rather than the poorest need to keep up with the value of their labor).
Why would anyone hold a currency with infinite supply?
Paving
Why is that a horrible idea? We seem to have lots of roads that need paving lol
I thought Microsoft would never make money in the software business. All the computer nerds I knew would pirate software and pass it around, I didn’t think they would sell enough to make any money. I was wrong.
Tesla cars. Making cars is a very tough competitive business. Hundreds of companies have failed, some run by very smart guys. I was surprised they ever go into production, surprised they lasted more than a year or 2, surprised they have not been overtaken by old established companies like Ford and Toyota getting into electric cars, surprised they are still in business and making a profit. I know they get criticized for quality control glitches but it is amazing they can produce a car as good as they do.
isn’t Tesla subsidised?
Teslas days are numbered however. Now that the old established companies are making all electric vehicles and with Elon’s erratic bahvior I dont see a bright future. Tesla was useful in establishing an Electric car market and doing the heavy lifting of converting people to electric cars and for a longtime they were the only game in town. Musk was also seen in a better light. But things have been going down hill at an accelerated pace since the Twitter acquisition. People now would much rather buy a different electric car then support Musk
the future of tesla isnt cars, its ai and batteries
I was thinking of buying a Tesla years ago. Now? Nope. Choice and Elon are why.
Who hates musk except for Redditors?
Meh, they’ll probably fire Musk eventually, and if they do manage to ever pull off full autonomous-driving, that will be huge.
Although yeah, in the short term, electric cars are becoming fairly common and Tesla is basically just one of many options. Considering the CEO seems to be having some kind of very public mental breakdown, I wouldn’t be very confident about buying a Tesla anymore (especially considering future software updates have a huge effect on their cars).
I still think they’ll be around a long time though, or at least the brand name will be.
More like legacy auto’s days are numbered.
It is very very very hard to survive a technology paradigm shift in an industry. Could probably count on one hand the number of typewriter companies that survived to today as PC manufacturers. I think IBM was the last, when Lenovo sold to a Chinese company.
The money is in all the data Tesla is collecting and their charging infrastructure - which can sell or license to insurance companies, other car makers, and self driving software companies. When we buy/drive a Tesla - we just paid to be a data collector and beta testers.
Ford loses over $30k per EV sold at the moment.
Middle management needs to justify their jobs. With their staff wfh, it’s all too clear that most provide no value.
They need physical eyes the peons. And the ability to judge their staff’s future income by fire well or poorly they play politics—which is difficult to do remotely.
“You need physical eyes on your staff” is a relatively easy sale.
😂 actually it was Microsoft’s strategy to let people pirate their os to get mainstream adoption, and force companies to buy license.
Netflix back when it was all done by mail. Why wait for a DVD to be mailed to you when you can just go to the video store right away?
Are we like choosing to ignore the reasons with this comment?
Video rental stores were expensive, as much as one rental a month would equal a Netflix subscription. You were at the mercy of their inventory which you couldn’t check ahead of time before wasting a drive and was often only one copy each of older favorites plus new releases and didn’t have a lot of fringe options or foreign releases. Getting a movie in a mail and keeping it until you watched it, with no late fees, no “by 9pm” bullshit, etc, was awesome. Netflix was the perfect improvement over the video store!
I watched so many odd movies, old classics, and foreign films thanks to Netflix DVD by mail. In many cases, some of those haven’t made it to digital distribution and now aren’t available except through the purchase of an out of print DVD or pirating.
Netflix’s DVD by mail service exists but it isn’t maintained, and some of these important old DVDs are getting broken and not replaced.
I was about 10. The economics weren’t front of mind for me.
I too didn’t get Netflix when it first came out, and your reasons weren’t my experience at all.
Video rental stores were expensive
My experience new releases were $4-$5, and often older releases were $1-$3, while Netflix was $20 for the month.
You were at the mercy of their inventory…only one copy each of older favorites… and didn’t have a lot of fringe options or foreign releases.
Blockbuster had a “guaranteed to be there or it was free” deal for the major new releases, with whole walls dedicated to just one movie. It was rare to miss out on the blockbusters. Older movies and fringe/foreign options though I agree with you.
For perspective on my experience: was a college-aged kid, who got together with friends on the weekends to watch a movie, you’d rent about 4-5 movies per month so Netflix was roughly the same cost.
Mostly rented major new releases but an occasional cult classic, inventory was never a problem, nobody wanted obscure stuff.
Video stores seemed more convenient. Everybody (in my friend circle) had a Blockbuster <5 minutes from their house and well all drove. So easy to pick up a movie and drop it off on the way home. Plus you didn’t know what you wanted to watch until you’re about to get together with your friends: what if everyone wants to watch the Comedy blockbuster, but you got the Drama blockbuster? I want to be able to survey my friends and decide at the last minute or be able to pivot, I don’t want to have to decide a week ahead of time or not make a last minute change if everybody is in the mood for something else.
This was my personal experience and why Netflix didn’t seem like a great idea.
For people watching tons of movies, and more obscure stuff, I can see how Netflix was a great idea. But people watching mostly blockbusters and only renting one movie a weekend with friends (which I thought was most of the population) I didn’t see the value.
You don’t need to tell me why I was wrong, clearly I was wrong, but that was my perspective at the time. And as a family-man now, one thing I didn’t consider was the families renting a lot movies (2-3 movies for the kids + 1 for the parents every week) - now that’s a huge market I hadn’t considered.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Same for me. I also LOVED going to the rental shops (Blockbuster and Hollywood) as a young newlywed. It was like our date night every weekend. Just browsing and browsing trying to convince each other and compromising over movies. I could not see how Netflix could replace the experience. Boy was I wrong hahaha.
Just browsing and browsing trying to convince each other and compromising over movies. I could not see how Netflix could replace the experience.
Oh they’ve replicated that browsing and browsing and trying to convince the other experience a bit waaaaay too well. Have to now plan for length of movie + 30-60 minutes browsing and selecting it of free time for movie night.
My experience new releases were $4-$5, and often older releases were $1-$3, while Netflix was $20 for the month.
Well, the 3-at-a-time DVD plan for Netflix was $18/mo in 2005, and I distinctly remember a one or two at a time DVD plan (my plan for under $10). This article confirms the $18/mo plan and alludes to the cheaper options…
Also, what made video stores truly SUCK was the late fees. Sure, a new title rental would be $5, but real people with real lives struggle to get a video back on time. The story of the start of Netflix was the co-founder owing $40 in late fees for Apollo 13–in 1995 dollars.
Sure, the American consumer was/is “I want it, and I want it now” and Netflix unlimited plans was always about “I want to see one of these 200 movies, surprise me.” Like I said, great for arthouse and fringe picks saving you $20-$25 per disc to buy–if you could find it.
I am sure even if that time… 2000’s until the early 2010’s… I would use a Blockbuster for new releases and patiently wait my next foreign or arthouse pick from Netflix.
Regardless, what is sad to me, is what promised to be the future of being able to see any movie, ever, on demand, is now clearly a reality of seeing what the services will pay money to make available to you, when they feel like it, and you’re stuck accepting it. There was a time I thought we’d see an end to piracy because the lame barriers of access were gone, now they’re worse than ever.
Netflix’s DVD by mail service exists but it isn’t maintained
Actually, it ended last month
Sad!
Blockbuster was such an amazing idea at the time!!
Great book by one of the creators of Netflix called “that will never work”.
"I explained to my daughter that when Netflix started they used to send you DVDs.
6yr old: (old lady voice) You know, back in my day, the internet used to come in the mail." - Donald Zimmer
As a car enthusiast, Turo horrifies me. Like I’m supposed to just rent my car to some stranger and expect everything to be ok?
I still haven’t used it. I’m just deathly afraid how much that front splitter will cost to repair when I scrape the rental I get on my one “relaxing” workcation a year.
Potato Parcel. Net worth $1.75M
I never understood we work or Regis whatever those rented virtual workspaces are. They are ridiculously expensive
To be fair they aren’t too bad for what you get.
I worked for a company where we needed an office space for our department separate from their main office. Regus had flexible contracts and provided everything we needed - internet / power / furniture / cleaners / parking / security etc and it was less than 2k a month for a 6 person office.
We work has flexible meeting rooms my current company has used, and when we were a startup it let them have affordable office space in a nice building with other people.
I worked for a small but growing company last year. The ability to scale the office requirements on a per hire basis, without having to furnish or worry about any of the workings - just give your staff a laptop and a badge, was brilliant. Expensive? Yes. But they have their place.
We also did work with a few 100% remote companies with employees across the UK, who would rent some space on an adhoc basis for small groups of employees who wanted to spend a few days working together on a specific project. The employees could choose which city the office was in, it worked fairly well.