This post may only be tangentially related to TFA but these were my thoughts that came to my mind when reading this article and I'd like to get some alternative perspective as someone who "doesn't get it."
Dollar Shave Club, apparently, delivers Dorco razor blades once a month. The exact same ones you can buy straight from Dorco for a fraction of the price, or if you prefer, Amazon. Razor blades are so small that several months worth can easily fit in even a dorm room. The CEO apparently believes that he's adding value from the subscription model.
>[Dollar Shave CEO Michael] Dubin said his service offers greater "convenience." "Are there similar razors out there? Sure. But our goal is to create value." I pointed out that I can get the Dorco razors delivered conveniently to my front door, too. "Not once a month," he said... Bottom line, if people want to buy in bulk, there's a bazillion other places on the web to do that. Dollar Shave Club offers value beyond just the price of blades & convenience.(1)
What does HN think about this? Would you pay a markup for the "convenience" of a subscription? Is this a real thing people find value in?
(Personally I find 'create value' to be a suspect phrase in this context. I also, personally, find subscriptions to be inconvenient 99% of the time)
I started using DSC early on because their marketing video was hilarious, and I was always forgetting to buy razors when I needed them. Now they've expanded out into a whole range of bathroom products, most of which are about the same price as they would be in a store, which makes it an easy choice.
When I put my account on hold, they don't spam me, begging me to come back. When I switched to every other month on razors, there was no dramatic emails or price changes. When I switched versions of the razor, they just shipped me a new handle. They've been doing this razor thing for ~7 years, and in that they haven't given me a single reason to complain. Its nice to have a transaction with a "startup" that does exactly what it says it's going to do.
Eh, I don't think Dollar Shave Club fits in with the article's examples. The value created is that many people want to spend more money and less of their time with consistent results. The company doesn't try to ratchet up margin with unnecessary tech, it just satisfies a legitimate customer demand. That might be a customer demand you don't identify with, or which you believe shouldn't exist; it's still a legitimate demand.
The article is mainly talking about companies that augment existing products with shallow improvements for the sake of large margin increases. Dollar Shave Club is novel in that it adds a service to abstract away the thinking portion of buying a razor. It makes no attempt to increase profits with shitty tech.
While I agree DSC seems insane, you are looking at it from the wrong end: most customers were used to paying crazy prices at the grocery store. DSC is cheap by comparison, even if you can get the same blades for less elsewhere. Dorco could have run the same business, but DSC figured out how to market it.
A service like DSC that I thought was brilliant is that one that does air conditioning filters. I forgot its name, but I always forget to change my filter, and you're only supposed to do it every 6 months. Then because it's been so long, I invariably forget what size I need, buy the wrong one, have to go back... Ship me a filter every 6 months? Awesome! THAT'S a company I see as "adding value".
No affiliation, not even a subscriber -- just had a "duh" moment when I saw their ad.
My life is much better when I optimize for convenience instead of saving money when the money is in the "handful of dollars" range. And yes, never again having to think about having to buy a routine item is convenient. It seems patently obvious that a subscription is more convenient than having to remember to buy something on a regular basis; I can't believe there's even debate about that. You can certainly debate whether the additional cost is worth the convenience, but I don't see how you can claim that there is no difference in convenience.
so what % of the margins on "subscription box" services comes from people forgetting / being too lazy to cancel? all of it? perishables and other time sensitive stuff notwithstanding, there is no reason getting something shipped monthly is going to be a better deal than buying in bulk. these people are obviously just trying to make a buck. they are full of shit if they say they are trying to create value, but they aren't really hurting anyone i guess. its mostly on the consumers for buying it.
I bought a medium sized package of Schick Injector razor blades about five years ago. At this rate, that might be a lifetime supply - they don't really get dull, and you can use them almost forever.
Granted, I like my beard and don't shave daily, but even when I was keeping up the same routine and using Gilette-style cartridge razor blades, I was burning through them much faster.
Why convenience? So people can go 'do what they love'? Or in reality, so people can spend more time on vapid social apps and feel like they're on top of trends?
I don't use DSC but the value they provide is that you always have a razor. A lot of people have to shave for work and forgetting to buy razors at the store sucks. It means you have to shave with an old, dull razor. They charge you to avoid that situation.
My favorite part of this article is the hypocrisy. It's a huge rant about how stupid an unattractive people are if they buy into the new hot thing from Silicon Valley that doesn't do anything new; and then there it is, on line 2 of the page: "This is an automated feed of the blog posts at http://fredrikdeboer.com".
It seems like he forgot one line item in his list:
2012, Medium: At last, a way to post text on the internet!
It's not hypocrisy, it's offloading traffic to a company who hasn't quite figured out how to make money, but is willing to provide the author with analytics and hosting in exchange (... for what exactly???)
My interpretation was that he didn't think that improving posting text to the Internet was inherently bad, just that the Silicon Valley hype around what are just improvements to an old model is strange. I think you can say the hype around a thing is ridiculous without saying that it is worthless
Rents aren't high because fat cats are charging more money. Rents are high because of supply and demand. That's literally all there is to it. Someone is going to get the house and someone isn't, and the one who gets it will be the one offering more money. The only thing the fat cats change is what proportion of the money goes to which people. The amount of money comes from supply and demand.
> Rents are high because of supply and demand. That's literally all there is to it.
Except that's literally not all there is to it, that's just one component of the problem. It turns out housing is just a tiny bit more complicated than your first day of Econ 101. The half dozen empty skyscrapers lots of us pass by each day seem to indicate that.
"High Rent is just supply and demand" is the new "I could rebuild that whole app in one weekend".
Rent is high because supply has been restricted by low-density zoning regulations, especially in San Francisco and Seattle.
Policy-market mismatch is partially due to low participation in local politics, and partially due to high-income neighborhoods influencing local politics to keep their area low-density (raising their property value and the surrounding area's rent).
Do you remember the mass foreclosures? Do you see the sea of For Sale signs everywhere? Do you know who bought the lion's share of the defaults? It isn't the privates who fueled the housing/rental costs. You don't need to click ZeroHedge or formulate conspiracy theories, just visit the county assessor's site and try to unravel all the LLCs and "trusts" to determine who controls the market.
Never have to look far in a thread like this to find the kid who thinks economies work like Econ 101. Here's a piece of advice: anytime you find yourself concluding with "it's that simple" you're probably not thinking critically about the issue.
Also, this is mostly true for rent in big cities; big corporations are essentially forcing people to move to big cities where the quality of life is lower by promising them a better future. This increases house prices and makes everyone miserable (except wealthy shareholders and landlords).
Back in the 90s there were real utopian dreams that the Internet could free us and form a world "more humane and fair than the world your governments made before" (Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, 1996).
Instead, over the past 20 years, Silicon Valley went from being a land of dreams to an accelerator of the conditions that make middle class life so precarious in the developed world.
Nobody in the valley seems to care. Many, including those on this thread, seem to be ignorant of the fact that over the last 10 years, Silicon Valley has transformed, in people's minds, from a place that makes the future better to a place that makes the future worse, yet slightly more entertaining.
> "add a touch screen manufactured by Chinese tweens, call it “Smart,” and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair."
As someone who spends hours pondering the same NYC subway ads, this captures what I'm seeing better than I could ever put it.
> and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair.
Whilst that was amusing in a bitchy kind of way, it rather meant I stopped listening to anything said after that point.
We're not dealing with a someone capable of great insight - or at least we're not dealing with someone who values insight over snark.
EDIT - I read it to the end and I'm slightly more forgiving. I came to understand the intent a bit more. I initially came to it expecting something less literary/stand up comedy and took it in the wrong context.
Pretty good! That ad about "doers" is particularly ghoulish. And just generally I feel like I see the ideology of overworking as right and good all the time now. Things are not great.
Yea, I loathe those fiverr ads. When I end up in a subway car filled with them it really sours my mood. I used to have no feelings about fiverr but now I absolutely would never use it.
tl;dr; marketing adds a glossy veneer so people will overspend on useless crap, companies will screw you if it means margins are greater. So much of what society produces is meaningless nonsense.
SV doesn't have that world cornered by any means.
counterpoint: Capitalism sucks, but it seems to work better than most things we've tried thus far.
> Are you the kind of person who is so worn down by the numbing drudgery of late capitalism that you can’t summon the energy to drag a 2 ounce toothbrush across your gums for 90 seconds a day? Well, the electric toothbrush has been a thing for a long time.
OK. OK. Not defending other practices in the article, but as someone who long thought electric toothbrushes were a silly gimmick but finally got (a fairly cheap) one a couple months back: they are. not. a. gimmick. Oh man. Life changing. First time I used it it felt like I'd had a professional cleaning. No amount of brushing with an ordinary one had ever done that. I could never go back. Even when I'm lazy and only do half the cycle it gets my teeth much cleaner than a manual brush could. The difference is dramatic and they're not really that expensive as long as you don't go for a bunch of stupid features.
Free trade is voluntary, we choose to participate in trade because it benefits both parties. I'm interested in seeing arguments that attack SV/society but start from this principle?
The most desirable, and most physically constrained cities, are mostly coastal. Could something like this work in a place like Vancouver, Seattle, or SF? There is always the threat of bureaucracy or regulations getting in the way, but the incredible pressure of the housing crisis might be enough to encourage open-mindedness on the part of the relevant local leaders.
For the endangered artist community, I could see this working better than it does for someone who works in a specific building. Certainly not a small undertaking, though.
For those who don't like YT links, this is a short professional documentary/interview about a couple who built their home from scratch, on the ocean. Most materials are salvaged, and everything was built by hand. It is beautiful. For a Canadian bureaucrat, the whole thing probably doesn't even compute.
"the three hot trends in Silicon Valley horseshit... An industry that never stops lauding itself for its creativity and innovation has built its own success mythology by endlessly repackaging the same banal functions that have existed for about as long as the Web"
Pretty funny coming from an academic who would gladly make a living pushing standardized testing at the undergraduate level.
While rising rents in SF/Bay Area are due to more & richer tech people, overall costs are declining thanks to tech companies. The cost and reliability of taxis is much much better with Uber than it was previously. The cost of many goods that one has access to is lower via Amazon for so many people. A lot of local businesses are probably more profitable working with Google than they were previously with the Yellow Pages.
Yes, there will be spectacular failures, but right now 3 of the 5 most valuable companies in the U.S. did not exist ~21 years ago (Google, Facebook, Amazon), and 1 of the 5 was a tech company which many had written off (Apple).
It's easy to laugh at the failures, but the real entrepreneurs just don't care. I don't think Larry Page or Jeff Bezos minds if you want to laugh at them over Google Knol or the Amazon Fire phone. For their 100 failures, their one big win was with no doubt worth it e.g. AWS or Android.
The irony is that the overwhelming majority of marketers who come up with those nonsense "Doer" posters and the like have never had to stay up all night and "eat coffee" in order to meet deadlines.
The article is a swipe at evil silicon valley corporations who hide their products' lack of value behind fancy advertisements; but are consumers with freedom to choose not responsible for their choices?
I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I do want to point out, that if you lived in another country unlike USA, it would be hard to even come up with a product like the quip or the juicer (however useless you may think it is). You would have funding barriers, you may find it hard to find people who have the engineering skill set to come up with a product that works the way it does etc, or worse you may not even have a local market for your product initially.
It's harder to make pointless, bullshit companies that add literally nothing and instead contribute to degrading conditions and pay.
I have zero sympathy for someone not being able to spin up a useless, zero-effort company. Put some effort in and come up with something worthwhile that contributes instead.
I'd like to add that the MTA allows the most manipulative, screaming-at-you ads (depicted in this post). It's the least pleasant part of using the subway in my opinion.
I would say my least favorite part is seeing that empty car and not realizing the reason why it's empty is because of the smell inside until the train's already left the stop.
[+] [-] nommm-nommm|9 years ago|reply
Dollar Shave Club, apparently, delivers Dorco razor blades once a month. The exact same ones you can buy straight from Dorco for a fraction of the price, or if you prefer, Amazon. Razor blades are so small that several months worth can easily fit in even a dorm room. The CEO apparently believes that he's adding value from the subscription model.
>[Dollar Shave CEO Michael] Dubin said his service offers greater "convenience." "Are there similar razors out there? Sure. But our goal is to create value." I pointed out that I can get the Dorco razors delivered conveniently to my front door, too. "Not once a month," he said... Bottom line, if people want to buy in bulk, there's a bazillion other places on the web to do that. Dollar Shave Club offers value beyond just the price of blades & convenience.(1)
What does HN think about this? Would you pay a markup for the "convenience" of a subscription? Is this a real thing people find value in?
(Personally I find 'create value' to be a suspect phrase in this context. I also, personally, find subscriptions to be inconvenient 99% of the time)
(1) http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-th...
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|9 years ago|reply
When I put my account on hold, they don't spam me, begging me to come back. When I switched to every other month on razors, there was no dramatic emails or price changes. When I switched versions of the razor, they just shipped me a new handle. They've been doing this razor thing for ~7 years, and in that they haven't given me a single reason to complain. Its nice to have a transaction with a "startup" that does exactly what it says it's going to do.
[+] [-] dsacco|9 years ago|reply
The article is mainly talking about companies that augment existing products with shallow improvements for the sake of large margin increases. Dollar Shave Club is novel in that it adds a service to abstract away the thinking portion of buying a razor. It makes no attempt to increase profits with shitty tech.
[+] [-] justanotherbot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Domenic_S|9 years ago|reply
No affiliation, not even a subscriber -- just had a "duh" moment when I saw their ad.
[+] [-] zippergz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_cat_kittles|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
Nitpick: DSC is headquartered in Los Angeles, not Silicon Valley.
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
Granted, I like my beard and don't shave daily, but even when I was keeping up the same routine and using Gilette-style cartridge razor blades, I was burning through them much faster.
[+] [-] dorian-graph|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullnilvoid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|9 years ago|reply
The only value I see him creating is value for his company haha.
[+] [-] drewrv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bonestamp2|9 years ago|reply
It seems like he forgot one line item in his list:
2012, Medium: At last, a way to post text on the internet!
[+] [-] niftich|9 years ago|reply
In other words, it's milking the freebies.
[+] [-] tdb7893|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealdrag0|9 years ago|reply
So take that salt into consideration. Besides he never said every bit of tech is bad.
[+] [-] 8oblp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstanley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxsilver|9 years ago|reply
Except that's literally not all there is to it, that's just one component of the problem. It turns out housing is just a tiny bit more complicated than your first day of Econ 101. The half dozen empty skyscrapers lots of us pass by each day seem to indicate that.
"High Rent is just supply and demand" is the new "I could rebuild that whole app in one weekend".
[+] [-] losteric|9 years ago|reply
Policy-market mismatch is partially due to low participation in local politics, and partially due to high-income neighborhoods influencing local politics to keep their area low-density (raising their property value and the surrounding area's rent).
[+] [-] tunap|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1_2__3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs95|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
Instead, over the past 20 years, Silicon Valley went from being a land of dreams to an accelerator of the conditions that make middle class life so precarious in the developed world.
Nobody in the valley seems to care. Many, including those on this thread, seem to be ignorant of the fact that over the last 10 years, Silicon Valley has transformed, in people's minds, from a place that makes the future better to a place that makes the future worse, yet slightly more entertaining.
[+] [-] jaboutboul|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoolGuySteve|9 years ago|reply
As someone who spends hours pondering the same NYC subway ads, this captures what I'm seeing better than I could ever put it.
[+] [-] fullshark|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400562
[+] [-] andybak|9 years ago|reply
Whilst that was amusing in a bitchy kind of way, it rather meant I stopped listening to anything said after that point.
We're not dealing with a someone capable of great insight - or at least we're not dealing with someone who values insight over snark.
EDIT - I read it to the end and I'm slightly more forgiving. I came to understand the intent a bit more. I initially came to it expecting something less literary/stand up comedy and took it in the wrong context.
[+] [-] draw_down|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxfordAndSons|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altcognito|9 years ago|reply
SV doesn't have that world cornered by any means.
counterpoint: Capitalism sucks, but it seems to work better than most things we've tried thus far.
[+] [-] ashark|9 years ago|reply
OK. OK. Not defending other practices in the article, but as someone who long thought electric toothbrushes were a silly gimmick but finally got (a fairly cheap) one a couple months back: they are. not. a. gimmick. Oh man. Life changing. First time I used it it felt like I'd had a professional cleaning. No amount of brushing with an ordinary one had ever done that. I could never go back. Even when I'm lazy and only do half the cycle it gets my teeth much cleaner than a manual brush could. The difference is dramatic and they're not really that expensive as long as you don't go for a bunch of stupid features.
[+] [-] drvdevd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Adam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustingetz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johan_larson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devrandomguy|9 years ago|reply
The most desirable, and most physically constrained cities, are mostly coastal. Could something like this work in a place like Vancouver, Seattle, or SF? There is always the threat of bureaucracy or regulations getting in the way, but the incredible pressure of the housing crisis might be enough to encourage open-mindedness on the part of the relevant local leaders.
For the endangered artist community, I could see this working better than it does for someone who works in a specific building. Certainly not a small undertaking, though.
For those who don't like YT links, this is a short professional documentary/interview about a couple who built their home from scratch, on the ocean. Most materials are salvaged, and everything was built by hand. It is beautiful. For a Canadian bureaucrat, the whole thing probably doesn't even compute.
[+] [-] bjornlouser|9 years ago|reply
Pretty funny coming from an academic who would gladly make a living pushing standardized testing at the undergraduate level.
[+] [-] theprop|9 years ago|reply
Yes, there will be spectacular failures, but right now 3 of the 5 most valuable companies in the U.S. did not exist ~21 years ago (Google, Facebook, Amazon), and 1 of the 5 was a tech company which many had written off (Apple).
It's easy to laugh at the failures, but the real entrepreneurs just don't care. I don't think Larry Page or Jeff Bezos minds if you want to laugh at them over Google Knol or the Amazon Fire phone. For their 100 failures, their one big win was with no doubt worth it e.g. AWS or Android.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnfy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thetruthseeker1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FridgeSeal|9 years ago|reply
It's harder to make pointless, bullshit companies that add literally nothing and instead contribute to degrading conditions and pay.
I have zero sympathy for someone not being able to spin up a useless, zero-effort company. Put some effort in and come up with something worthwhile that contributes instead.
[+] [-] thesmallestcat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamatworknow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JDiculous|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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