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Comment by kartikkumar | Hacker News Reader

What's the business model?

in the short-term, people are very willing to pay for gift/status-boosting content related to faces and identity. plus stickers. LINE is a $10bn public company basically off of selling stickers. this has very high margins combined with viral nature of product that has low distribution cost. so good economics.

longer-term it is about the data and using it for other technologies.

Thanks for the insights. I've never bought a sticker, which is why I guess why I wasn't sure what the play is.

> longer-term it is about the data and using it for other technologies.

I'm not sure what this means. Better adtech? Or is there something else unique about this data that I'm not seeing?

AI that knows how you want to be seen => VR avatar and personalized advertising applications. lots of other ideas, but no sense in thinking too much about them so early.

Thanks for your reply. Curious to see how the business develops. Good luck!

Be bought by another company ;)

we don't want that. we think there's a big business model/opportunity related to being the best in the world at understanding how humans perceive their own faces and the faces of others.

also i'm very fortunate in that i already have one company that was bought, plus another that will hopefully go public. so want to build something bigger. plus in Silicon Valley nobody truly respects you if your only goal is to be bought by another company.

Looks like something facebook would buy. Do you consider them as competition ?

Facebook are clearly a very smart and capable team that is very interested in this exact area. So yes, they are competition.

But it is a classic case of that for a large company it is hard to execute on many priorities at once and dedicate a lot of organizational resources and attention. Plus they seem to have bet on going directly to VR.

We are laser-focused on doing this particular usecase extremely well, have a large/growing/strong engineering team, and have business leaders that don't have any other priorities beyond making this product excellent.

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