boldpanda

Facebook takes a 40% rake from advertisers. Ouch!

$2B income from $5B in ad revenue.

Hopeful businesses just keep running ads and lining Facebook's wallet. If Mark really wanted to give back, he'd give us more clicks per $.

$12/meal + shipping. Price is obfuscated on the website. I'd imagine that Gobble will struggle with the same things that every food delivery business in the world struggles with - low margins.

People just aren't willing to pay high margins for food that gets delivered. There is constant pressure to offer more food at lower prices.

Their most likely exit strategy is to build a brand strong enough that they can get a line of frozen prepared meals picked up by major grocery retailers or sign a licensing agreement to do something similar.

As a Reddit user and advertiser, I was disappointed when they doubled their ad CPM's in June without notice to advertisers (as mentioned in the article).

I can understand incrementally increasing the price with demand, but doubling the cost of CPM's without notice is a big fuck you to advertisers.

Now they're more expensive than Facebook and with less targeting capability and you can't change or edit your ads once their live.

Yes, can be used when you have a larger list.

Quality will be better than average because it will be only topic interested subscribers.

So Google, Facebook, and Apple are bad because they come to secret agreements to not poach each other's employees and now Uber and Lyft are bad because they'll do everything in their power to poach each other's employees?

Make up your minds.

This sort of poaching is good for the drivers, and this sort of ruthless competition is a good indication of a market that is good for riders.

I must be getting downvoted by Facebook employees.

Instead of complaining about Facebook and their ads, use it as a competitive advantage in your life. And by use it, I mean don't use it.

Just as gambling is a tax on the ignorant, Facebook is a tax on the bored and undisciplined.

If you can use Facebook even half as much as the average person, you'll have a huge productivity and happiness advantage.

What do you mean by "Traffic is dirt cheap if you know where to look"

Are you talking about where to go find traffic for your website? Do you mind sharing?

I don't think we should pile on these tech execs. It happens elsewhere. I'd speculate it's rather widespread.

I worked for a Fortune 500 market research / consumer data company and I know for a fact that the Senior VP of our office would call Fortune 500 clients and kindly request they not "poach" our employees.

Most of it is done casually and "innocently". I doubt most execs even thought they were breaking the law before this came to light.

I'm assuming Bitcoins can be bought in fractional denominations?

The only startups that are "lucky" are those that never validate before development and still find traction.

I define validating as getting 3 paying customers before building a viable app.

You could have built an abridged or simpler version of your game and asked people to pay you to play it. If that posed problems, you could have pivoted to a different premise for the game.

Thanks for the feedback. Scaling to 4,000 is goal as that'll bring me to the $100K revenue mark. It should be interesting. I have ~75 customers.

The website doesn't play well with office managers who are a big target customer. I want to sell and ship the jerky to offices who want healthier snacks that don't put employees in a food coma or spike their insulin.

It also falls flat among strangers who don't trust a one-pager and a paypal link.

Smart idea. I can say that the fully loaded cost of an online marketing manager (OMM) is somewhere between $5K-$8K a month.

We do a lot of BS like social media, but really we're measured on our ability to bring in trials and paid users.

If you can deliver more leads than the average OMM then you'll be delivering a ton of value and putting some OMMs out of work.

No, that's the same mistake I've made in the past. You sell your idea first, then you build it. You get customers before you dump a bunch of time and money into it.

Hey visakanv,

If I can show you a viable solution today will you pay me $100 as you claim in your blog post? I have a viable solution for you, but I bet you won't pay.

1 - Sign up for Gmail. It's free.

2 - Open Google Calendar.

3 - Click Create

4 - Add your motivational prompt in the 'Untitle event' field. For example, the one I'm using is "Ryan, you will die someday. Are you doing exactly what you should be doing right now to reach your goals before you die?

5 - Click the Repeat text box and set it to repeat Daily

6 - Set one pop up reminder and one email reminder.

7 - Click save.

8- Rinse and repeat for every motivational firestarting prompt you need.

9 - send paypal of $100 to ry8881@gmail.com

Good luck, -ryan

This book will sell more copies now that it's been banned by Kickstarter.

I'm curious how the funding was going before this, I can't imagine it was getting much traction.

I quantify this as a paranoid over reaction by Kickstarter, if the post wasn't breaking any of their terms of service.

The writing in these research briefs is horrible. It's nearly impossible to even deduce what point they're trying to make.