Honest question if anyone knows more details. VCs these days are very focused on the "SaaS Quick Ratio": https://www.cobloom.com/blog/saas-quick-ratio-how-to-measure... (Blue Apron isn't quite a SaaS business but close enough for this metric).

The idea is that it not only measures growth, but measures new customers in relation to churn, with the idea that it's a lot easier to have a long term successful business if you have, say, 1000 new customers and 50 that leave in a month (net 950 new customers) vs. 5000 new customers and 4050 that leave in a month (though also 950 net new customers).

Blue Apron was legendary for its huge churn rate and commensurate high customer acquisition costs. Curious what its quick ratio was, and whether it was just basically ignored.

The metrics, "rules of thumb", and "conventional wisdom" that apply to SaaS businesses do not extrapolate well to non-software subscription businesses. The main reason for this is SaaS has enormous gross margins, often upwards of 90%. This makes revenue a reasonable proxy for (gross) profit. The margins on physical goods are tiny by comparison, for food often in the low single digits, and subletting real estate is not much higher (if at alL). When profit is such a small percentage of revenue you have to be a lot more detailed in the math for lifetime value, acquisition cost, and so on, and you can no longer rely on simple formulas based on revenue and run rate.

While I agree with many of your points, I'd add that adding in the additional metrics you mention (lifetime value, acquisition cost, etc.) would make Blue Apron look even worse.

My main point is that basically the only thing Blue Apron had going for it was topline growth, but by pretty much every other metric it looked horrible and unsustainable. SaaS quick ratio alone should have clearly highlighted how unsustainable that topline growth was given their through-the-roof churn rates.

I gotta say, I do hope Blue Apron survives. After all, if it goes under, who will sponsor the entire podcast ecosystem?

Zip Recruiter, until they fail also. I honestly use the ads in my podcasts as a way to know what companies not to invest in. Anyone want a used Quip toothbrush or some Me Undies?

Good thing you didn’t buy an Audible subscription, or use an Epson printer, FreshBooks invoicing, LastPass. Other podcast ads I’ve heard are for AmEx, Deloitte, LinkedIn, various conferences and educational institutions, and more. I agree that certain names always show up, but I’ve also been quite surprised over the years by who’s enlightened enough to advertise in podcasts. I’ll admit, though, I never did buy that Harry’s shaving kit. ;-)

One advertisement I've heard a few times is the "Drive sober or get pulled over" campaign from the NHTSA.

But to JohnJamesRambo's credit, there are a lot of people who don't 'invest' in the US government either.

Recently I've mostly been hearing one from the Irish government telling residents of Ireland using a UK drivers license to convert it to an Irish one immediately (they'll become invalid if there's a no-deal Brexit).

Of course, I'm not sure I'd want to invest in Brexit, so maybe it still holds.

Those are free placements.

I was just about to post the same thing. Clearly a lot of companies do negative-EV blanket podcast advertising to juice their customer numbers before an IPO. Sonos was another famous example (although I like Sonos a lot). There's no way ZipRecruiter is getting payback from their insane ad spend.

It's been a long time ago that I heard the last Blue Apron ad in a podcast.

Seems as if the stick was handed over to a suitcase company whose "smart" suitcases cannot be checked in to flights due to batteries, that already-mentioned annoying prefab website company and underwear manufacturers offering to put decorative metals around my testicles.

Maybe Hello Fresh will expand their sponsorship from Youtube Sloggers...

Square space maybe

Definitely Squarespace and Skillshare. I still can feel the moment where I can exactly predict the Youtuber or Podcaster is about to launch into their canned sales pitch for how life got so much better and easier when they learned how to do xyz on zyx platform.

I'm surprised Youtube made the "tap here to move forward 30 seconds" feature because it always takes me right to the end of the "native ad"

>VCs these days are very focused on the "SaaS Quick Ratio"

VCs are focused on whatever metric reels in the next layer of suckers. GAAP exists for a reason.

Except that VCs themselves are highly focused on SaaS Quick Ratio to decide where to invest their own capital. That's quite different than coming up with some vanity metric to hoist a loser onto the public.

I actually still use Blue Apron. It's not that much more expensive than grocery shopping (I live in New York so groceries are expensive) and you never end up with wasted food. The recipes are generally very quick to make and far better than anything I could make on my own in a comparable amount of time. While the business may not have worked out so well their service is still pretty good.

Blue Apron just seems so unnecessary. You still have to do all the work! Just go to the grocery store and buy stuff there? You can get recipes online for free. I do all my shopping on Saturday at Trader Joe's and spend very little for lots of food which I then cook. There's so much wasted materials and trash with Blue Apron.

I don't get it, but then I don't have any trouble cooking for myself and my family. I didn't grow up learning how to cook. I spent a little bit of time figuring it out and then it became easy and didn't require a subscription to some sketchy company.

There's also no way that you're coming close to the prices at a supermarket when you're buying individual meal's worth ingredients instead of bulk, a bag of potatoes, or a bottle of seasoning instead of one potato and one pinch of whatever inside some single serving plastic wrapping.

> Blue Apron just seems so unnecessary. You still have to do all the work!

Not to mention the impact of the packaging materials and shipping. I can't speak to Blue Apron but my daughter used Freshly for a bit and I was shocked to the point of laughter at what was showing up at our house once a week: a big cardboard box with this thick, plastic-wrapped insulating material fitted to all six faces, and inside were nestled six individual meals, also packaged in cardboard with some plastic. My daughter told me they claim some level of recyclability for the insulating material, and of course the box can probably be shredded and re-boxified, but I bet 90+ percent goes right in the can and out to the curb.

Certainly not as much, but there is still quite a lot of invisible packaging you don't see up the grocery store supply line.

Just about everything in the grocery store comes in a big cardboard box.

However grocery stores and other businesses in that chain have bailers for the cardboard and other processes to insure recycling.

blue apron's fault is trying to enter a space too easily replicated by others including the very grocery stores who have everything mostly in place except for the recipes.

it wasn't long after services like Blue Apron came about and were newsworthy before many grocery stores started having prepackaged fresh items you could mix and match for a quick meal.

And just about everything that Blue Apron or any of these other companies package comes with similar invisible packaging, so the delta is still the same per amount of veggies. Or is your point something different that I missed?

Also note that the delta is a big big percentage of the base packaging, and I am willing to bet it's over 100%, if not 500%, just cause there are so many packages made from few large boxes.

Plus the existing physical stores have the advantage of economies of scale. I always wonder what that means for the whole B2C e-commerce supply chain compared to individual traffic to brick and mortar stores.

> but I bet 90+ percent goes right in the can and out to the curb

Source? Or are you just speculating based on nothing?

Just to elaborate: The comment is basically saying they are lying without any proof of such. Is it OK to blatantly and unfoundedly accuse companies of fraud like that?

This isn't an accusation of fraud. Note that the post you quoted includes the words "I bet", so you should know its speculation. Accusing them of fraud would be claiming the packaging materials aren't recyclable. Note that the OP's claim is that most of the packaging probably doesn't get recycled. I don't find this at all far-fetched, as many people who are environmentally conscious enough to care about recycling everything will also be bothered by the amount of packaging material.

Recyclable materials that end up in a landfill are no better than non-recyclables in that same landfill, as even organic materials don't really decompose in a landfill.

> Just to elaborate: The comment is basically saying they are lying

The comment absolutely does not accuse them of lying. They claim the material is recyclable, not that it is actually being recycled. I don't contest their claim that it can be recycled, and I simply speculate that most of it isn't.

It's the same reason, I sometimes still like to watch classic television; rather than choosing specific programmes to watch, I want them curated for me. And while television channels offer a mediocre experience on average, watching something I wouldn't have picked myself is a way to expand my horizons.

In the same vein, Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, I'd imagine, are there to expand your horizons in terms of culinary options. If it's just me going to the grocery store, then I'll just get for any old recipe I know.

They both remind me of a Danish company, Aarstiderne, which has been around since 1999, where the sales pitch is fresh organic vegetables with curated recipes by chefs every week. Particularly in 1999, when organic vegetables were harder to come by - even in Denmark, it made a lot of sense. Now they have so many different subscription choices (that offer different kinds of culinary experiences), that it's akin to picking the channel on television, but letting the programmers pick the programmes.

That's the appealing thing to me, it's actually less the convenience.

Download their online recipes and do a rand on them.

It's 100% about convenience. They offer nothing more than you picking up your own food. Plus they ship as much packaging as food so it's probably far from being the most ecological solution.

The problem with that approach is that often they include ingredients in very small quantities that most people won't have, and buying the ingredient yourself requires getting a container with 1000x the amount you need. Even if it's cheap, people balk at that.

But yes, the packaging is insanely wasteful, not to mention the ecological cost of shipping itself.

I definitely cooked more often when I had a HelloFresh subscription. And when I do cook now, the variety of things I make is much smaller.

>The problem with that approach is that often they include ingredients in very small quantities that most people won't have, and buying the ingredient yourself requires getting a container with 1000x the amount you need. Even if it's cheap, people balk at that.

This is more of a problem with how fucked American supermarkets are and how much food wasted is generated not just by too much being packaged. I go out of my way to shop at Asian supermarkets because at least I can buy alot of produce individually and not massive bags of shit that'll spoil before I can eat it like American supermarkets push.

That's interesting because, by the nature of needing to appeal to everyone, I find Hello Fresh recipes to be very safe and often quite bland tasting. If you already know how to cook it's easy to make them tasty according to your preferences but if you don't I suspect people just churn out middling-tasting food.

I have no experience with Hello Fresh, but Aarstiderne in Denmark strives on making their offerings uncommon. They arrange their subscriptions by how difficult they are. Of course, there is no 'chef' level, so to speak, because if you're at that point, you don't really need something like this.

But as someone who is reasonable acceptable at cooking, I do like the idea of something where I can get outside my comfort zone.

Everything you said is accurate, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place in the market for Blue Apron.

People are paying for convenience. Think of it like a house cleaning service. You don't NEED to hire someone to clean your house, but it makes your life a little easier and for some, that's worth it.

Except this is like buying a small package of cleaning utilities for one cleaning and then cleaning the house with it yourself. In your analogy, the cleaning service would be ordering food from a restaurant.

The utility here is very marginal, and there are alternatives that make your life even easier.

You need to understand that people do irrational things all the time but feel like they get a positive benefit from it. Meal kit delivery is easier than picking out recipes yourself and then buying ingredients yourself. It's certainly not easier than ordering takeout from a restaurant. But there's the "feel good factor" of doing the cooking yourself but removing some of the prep and decision-making. It's not all about utility; emotion factors in heavily sometimes.

With services like Blue Apron and HelloFresh, you're paying for convenience. Perhaps you don't want to go to the grocery store, look up recipes, etc.

As a terrible cook I love that they do all the work of finding an achievable recipe and shopping for all the (sometimes obscure) ingredients. I've improved my cooking skills significantly as a result and I'm almost ready to move on from them now.

Agreed, I've tried blue apron, home chef, and green chef and it has been an overall positive experience

It's a valid first choice. Once you order and see what you get and understand how it's made reordering would be a challenge. The problem is the product teaches you how you don't need the product.

I am surprised that M&S did not make it work in the USA - M&S food stores would seem a natural fit for Cities like NYC.

I have a coworker who puts in fairly insane hours and he and his wife do Blue Apron every single day.

They haven't missed a day in a few years. I only realized the importance of Blue Apron in his life when he told me he does about 8-10 hours at work and 2-8 hours at home most days.

Blue Apron affords them the time to get to even be a family.

I would still just do Whole Foods delivery and cook together if that’s what they’re after. It sounds like they’ve memorized the recipes if they really cook them that much.

Or order take out and save even more time and share dinner together.

> I spent a little bit of time figuring it out

And yeah I dont want to do that! :)

I’m glad Blue Apron and other services are like “hey thats a valid perspective and is underserved” instead of being dismissive

Isn't this a re-run of 'Dropbox is unnecessary when we have rsync'?

Except the average Joe has no idea what rsync is let alone how to set it up. Not sure we can say the same thing about grocery shopping

You can criticise a company without being in a Dropbox<>rsync situation. Especially when that company is not doing so well.

I hate shopping and I hate having to constantly figure out what to cook.

I use an equivalent in my country and it's worth any premium I'm paying.

Me, too. I already owned a bunch of cookbooks and knew how to cook before I started this sort of service. I still hate shopping and planning, after years of getting a box.

The introductory pricing was a reasonable deal for two people. We learned some new recipes (always nicely-printed and savable) and the meals were always tasty. But once the introductory pricing was over, and once we got tired of the obscene amount of packaging we had to throw away, we stopped it. Chalk up another churned customer.

Glad you like it and hope the price continues to be reasonable as they continue to cut expenses while trying to maintain food quality :)

For me I eat a very peculiar diet so I usually just pick up yogurt and fresh bread from the grocery store on my way home from work, and when I'm feeling particularly lazy I will order steamed chicken and steamed broccoli from the local Chinese shop who really have this amazing technique of steaming that I seem unable to grasp!!

Sometimes I feel for a company like that that at least 60% of their spend is on podcast advertising.

This was a pretty good article about Blue Apron from last week: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/recipe-for-disaster-the-...

This gets me thinking. They validated or at least thought they validated their idea because they gained traction at the start correct? But clearly they didn't validate the business because the price point wasn't at a profitable level? Was this the mistake?

Or is it that the price point allowed for marginal profits and they thought that by scaling up it would cover the fixed operational costs and thus lead to profits.

Where do you think it went wrong?

The cost of acquiring new customers once they reached scale was the issue. The cost went up significantly making their unity economics unfavourable.

Back the day I had a short stint at Flixbus in Germany. Being an ops / logistics guy I wasn't that impressed by their operations at the team I was at (their line business seemed different but grew out of one of Flixbus earlier acquisitions, mein fernbus). Also the tech didn't look revolutionary. What was top notch, and backed by serious money, was advertising and marketing. They had all the metrics, the strategy, the budget, knew the processes, everything.

It was that what gave them the market penetration in new countries, out spending and out performing competition until competition faulted or was bought out. So, the lesson I took, was that a lot of the latest b2c e-commerce start-ups are to a very large extent marketing driven.

It's easy to measure an LTV that doesn't turn out to be accurate many months later.

They had an excellent service, which upon having recipes we promptly dropped. It simply wasn't worth it and even cooking 3 means a night was too much.

Pinterest is next

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Google trends is probably not a good way to assess Pinterest.

Want to browse Pinterest? Open the app. Want to get Pinterest? Go to the App Store. Heard someone say 'pinterest' but don't know what it means? Search google.

Your link is only showing that last one.

Google Trends takes advantage of the Google knowledge graph for deeper understanding of entities and companies. This is showing "Pinterest the social network" not just "Pinterest the search term". You can toggle with the menu at the top.

>This is showing "Pinterest the social network" not just "Pinterest the search term"

I believe this is just a broader result set that includes searches for anything that Google deems to be related to 'Pinterest the social network'.

Google doesn't have access to internal Pinterest metrics.

Google also knows how many Android users search/download the app. I don't use pinterest, but if they use Google analytics or ads then Google also has a fair amount of data on usage.

Google is very much a panopticon, I doubt any other single entity has as much knowledge of the internet as a whole. Now whether this reflects in Google analytics I don't know, as I've never really used their analytics for anything serious.

Yet Google Trends exactly reflects (exhibits?) Google Play data of our app that has 37 million registered users.

And for "Facebook", Google Trends shows a 71% drop worldwide over the last 5 years. Their Q2 2019 earnings showed a 20% worldwide growth in monthly users over the last two years alone. "YouTube" shows a 45% drop over 5 years. "Google" itself shows a 60% drop over 5 years.

Google Trends can't reliably tell you anything useful about a site's growth or activity. I'm not denying it correlates with your specific app, but that doesn't mean it will work for everything, and it clearly works very poorly for popular services.

I honestly feel those numbers are correct.

Remember when everyone was sharing youtube videos. Or when you would sit and endless watch. I feel like that faded about 45%.

Google dropping makes sense. I visit less sites and the search results are not that great for discovery. Most sites I visit by typing a letter in the browser and auto completing.

Facebooks earnings raising 20% makes sense as more people are advertising on it. I notice 71% less people less original activity.. photos/status updates more groups/ads filling the gap. I spent 71% less time on and reduced my daily visits.

We're always chasing yesterday's tail. I bet twitter's numbers are down.

Facebook user growth was 20%. You said earnings.

And how do you know this is all wrong? At least I get to look at our app internal analytics and compare. Do you have access to their internal analytics? Also contrast this to https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... . Instagram is 9 years old

Wow, interesting, that map is really correlated with my (biased) perception of where "percentage of people under 40 who are married" is highest

Idaho’s killer app

Also, cold winters; scrapbooking; applique vests

FWIW (sample size of one) my wife switched from Pinterest to Instagram. Same shit, arguably better interface.

Their finance doesn't look bad. Revenue trended up. Flush with cash. Making money. The 5 year chart look bad, but they've stabilized in the past couple years and it looks like they've found way to actually remain profitable.

I'd think that at P/E of 65 you'd expect some future growth?

That actually looks catastrophic. Stock price doesn't reflect it yet. Shadenfreude isnt my thing but this looks bad and insiders must already be aware.

Can't believe the market is currently valuing Pinterest at 16B

Guess these guys didnt get the memo.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/42...

To be clear, I dont trade stocks and couldn't care less which way this moves. Just seems like the Google trends data is a bit of information asymmetry that the market hasn't caught on to, yet.

From the article you quoted (call me cynical):

"Disclosure: I am/we are long PINS. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha)"

>insiders must already be aware

The lockup period does not expire till mid-october.

I read their 10-Q and found this gem about "user re-authentication":

"Users

MAUs at quarter-end were 300 million, representing growth of 30% year-over-year. This represents an acceleration in user growth, in part due to one-time changes to SEO algorithms and user re-authentication that impacted Q218. International growth drove the majority of global MAU expansion."

I'm sorry, I'm an idiot. Wtf does "user re-authentication" mean?

They're counting MAUs as number of logins and not number of active users?

I can only interpret that they are talking about logged in users with accounts. The users were logged out during the pre-IPO and that resulted in some double counting in their second post IPO 10-Q.

I was researching this because I asked myself a general question: "Why is the stock price of non dividend paying companies correlated to the performance at all?"

Ah.

Amazon is a good case study for you. Didn't pay dividends for a decade or more. Reinvested everything. Pissed off analysts. And killed it.

In that world as long as you can keep delivering growth, you're good. Miss once and you're toast.

> Didn't pay dividends for a decade or more.

Amazon has never paid a dividend.

Looks very similar to the trajectory of Facebook (although very different in scale).

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

FB owns Instagram

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

and WhatsApp. I would argue that the market is a bit more rational there.

I got a phone call from them recently. Not automated. Asking "how the experience has been". I wonder if they're increasingly panicking. I ordered less than a handful of boxes in the past few years with them.

Ahem. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-forgive-us-at-blu...

That’s a parody from 2017. It’s probably more true now than ever. We actually cancelled our BlueApron last year in favor of another meal kit service - and might end up canceling them overall for grocery pickup from our local grocery chain.

Wonderful link. To be objective, one of my most recent handful of boxes arrived recently because I forgot to cancel it. Every few weeks, I login to turn off the next months' worth of auto-scheduled deliveries. The ingredient quality is still there. A third of the box is broccoli and it's still $60, so those features haven't changed.

I go to the grocery store and re-make a good number of the recipes. I'm appreciative of the expanded palate BA has given me as well.

BA was pretty decent. My wife subscribed us to it and we used it for a couple of months. Restaurant quality meals for real. But the whole business model is idiotic at the small scale. Amazon with its gigantic distribution network (as well as Whole Foods) could pull it off I suppose, but I just felt bad that this stuff had to be shipped to me from hell knows where, with lots of packaging, and an ice pack to boot. Not "environmentally friendly" in the least. Besides both my wife and I can cook perfectly fine without any help. So after 2 months we got rid of it.

Blue Apron and WeWork share a common problem, they’re viewed as tech companies, even when they’re clearly not.

Being tech companies means that they’re viewed as part of a group of companies who have pulled of billion dollars IPO, so they’re wrongly focus on “no less than the one billion”. Mentally the jump from 1 billion to 2 billion is also a lot less that the jump from 150 million to 1 billion, so why not go for 2 billion.

By any standard whatsoever a 100% jump is a lot less than one that's 500%+. What does that even mean?

What a true unicorn.

But the stock is going up now !