Re:What happens when you pour molten aluminium into an anthill?
by VLM on Sunday February 21, 2016 @09:10AM
(#11144535)
The point of this is being missed because of holiness spiral signalling noise. Yes yes, you need to show off your superior ethics because that's a competitive market, you've done so, now get out of the way of the "real" discussion.
The story at the end of the contact page (just click on 'contact') is the actual gold for HN. In summary, the life story of this "startup" begins with No demand, no money, no market. Post videos, one of which gets 6M views per day. Now the market is maybe 300 requests, and the artist claims most of the 300 are not responding and paying up when he's got shippable product. Its quite possible world demand for the product is only the 30 or so produced.
So there are startup lessons here. At least some of them:
1) Really cool videos and gets 6M daily views and tons of press can mean as few as a couple dozen sales. Conversion rate matters.
2) Artist thinks he's in the business of making art pieces, but no body is buying them such that he's offering to give them to science museums. Artist is actually in the monetizing viral videos business where he makes videos 6M people per day watch, while someone is selling those viewers cars and diet sodas or whatever is advertised. All the money is being made in his online videos, not his product.
3) Production rate is critical. Artist claims the interest he's got, weak as it is, is none the less so far in advance of production speed that it would take years to catch up. Scaling does matter!
4) Don't market something you can't ship for years. Maybe his conversion rate would be higher if he shipped when it was a "thing" not months to years later.
To some extent if you read the contact page this is a stereotypical startup failure story that we see every day on HN, its just this startup was doing strange things with liquid aluminum instead of wrapping someone else's project in bootstrap or writing copycat CRUD frontends or whatever is momentarily trendy for the entitled. There is at least some commonality in startup failure across the business world. This story was an interesting read. Go ahead, click "contact" and read it!
The story at the end of the contact page (just click on 'contact') is the actual gold for HN. In summary, the life story of this "startup" begins with No demand, no money, no market. Post videos, one of which gets 6M views per day. Now the market is maybe 300 requests, and the artist claims most of the 300 are not responding and paying up when he's got shippable product. Its quite possible world demand for the product is only the 30 or so produced.
So there are startup lessons here. At least some of them:
1) Really cool videos and gets 6M daily views and tons of press can mean as few as a couple dozen sales. Conversion rate matters.
2) Artist thinks he's in the business of making art pieces, but no body is buying them such that he's offering to give them to science museums. Artist is actually in the monetizing viral videos business where he makes videos 6M people per day watch, while someone is selling those viewers cars and diet sodas or whatever is advertised. All the money is being made in his online videos, not his product.
3) Production rate is critical. Artist claims the interest he's got, weak as it is, is none the less so far in advance of production speed that it would take years to catch up. Scaling does matter!
4) Don't market something you can't ship for years. Maybe his conversion rate would be higher if he shipped when it was a "thing" not months to years later.
To some extent if you read the contact page this is a stereotypical startup failure story that we see every day on HN, its just this startup was doing strange things with liquid aluminum instead of wrapping someone else's project in bootstrap or writing copycat CRUD frontends or whatever is momentarily trendy for the entitled. There is at least some commonality in startup failure across the business world. This story was an interesting read. Go ahead, click "contact" and read it!