(no title)
Xt-6
|
3 years ago
They start elitist, people love them for it but that's a niche market as the top "1%" is, well, only 1%. So to justify valuation/please VC/increase revenue, they have to increase the pool of candidates which basically destroy the value-prop of their service.
rachofsunshine|3 years ago
This is essentially correct.
Our original model worked, more or less, for a small pool of candidates. But acquiring those candidates was extremely expensive in ways that scaled poorly as Triplebyte grew. Basically, we were dependent on ads for growth (anyone who used Reddit at the time probably saw a lot of our ads, shout out to /r/againsttriplebytemike), and the marginal cost of ad conversions grows as you try to scale how many people you're bringing in.
Slightly less cynically: if your business can't exist without VC funding, but can't justify the expectations of that funding, you never really had a business to begin with. You borrowed one temporarily. This is normal for startups, and VCs know that they won't always (or even usually) succeed, but you can't sit on your break-even-ish business when that's not what VCs were funding you to do.
For what it's worth, early TB's efforts (and for that matter, late TB's efforts, both before my tenure and during it) were sincere, it's just that that sincerity is predicated on actually being able to make a working business out of it.
compumike|3 years ago
Harj recently described Triplebyte's user acquisition trajectory publicly in a video from Y Combinator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw&t=473s from timestamps 7:53 to 9:33. But yes, ads worked for a while, until they didn't.
camdenreslink|3 years ago