MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thursday

Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by Waterluvian on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:03PM (#17626950)

Was the entire play of MoviePass to pay for people's movie tickets until they make it and then jack up the prices + negotiate with cinemas for better deals? What was the "make it" condition?

Is this a common strategy?

It also loosely reminds me of the dotcom era strategy. It doesn't matter if we're not making any real money, we have a lot of users. Surely that can be converted into money somehow. We're worth billions of dollars because we have 300 million users!

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by jondiggsit on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:17PM (#17627057)

Is this a common strategy? Are you kidding? The entirety of Silicon Valley is predicated upon and funded by this business model. Almost every service provided by a SV startup is subsidized.

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by maerF0x0 on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:34PM (#17627632)

Its subsidized in its R&D cost though. Not in the marginal cost of servers/apis ...

I sometimes joke like our first customer cost us $2M but our 2nd was wildly profitable!

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by rhizome on Friday July 27, 2018 @06:50PM (#17630101)

Not in the marginal cost of servers/apis...

Have you ever heard of companies that buy services from other companies under the same VC?

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by ChuckMcM on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:07PM (#17626977)

I think of Moviepass as the pets.com of 21st century VC madness. That said, they clearly had a great pitch, I'd love to see their series A pitch deck.

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by Spooky23 on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:20PM (#17627075)

I guess the upside is that they will fail fast!

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by mi100hael on Friday July 27, 2018 @04:11PM (#17628918)

I'm not sure 7 years and a mostly-acquisition counts as "fast." Quite frankly it's impressive their charade has lasted this long.

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by vonzeppelin on Friday July 27, 2018 @04:37PM (#17629139)

They were a lot more expensive until recently though.

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by stuckinarut on Friday July 27, 2018 @04:55PM (#17629316)

Did they have VC?

They are a part of a publicly traded company.

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by ehsankia on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:28PM (#17627157)

Yeah, they were hoping to sell user data, get partnerships with theaters or even businesses around. They even tried getting deals with specific movies. But yeah the whole SV strategy is disruption. Look at Uber for example.

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Re:MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thu... by darwin142 on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:18PM (#17627059)

What do you mean? This is literally B2C Strategy 101. If you even try to build a company that is profitable on day 1 or early in its life it gets labeled as a "Lifestyle Business" and VCs won't get near it.

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