A tool to map your network - for fundraising, sales, partnerships, etc - to get intros to people. Cold email is dying as it gets so much cheaper and easier to send emails with AI and automation, so human connection is going to skyrocket in importance.
A tool to map warm intro paths to people in your extended network (ie 2nd degree). For finding paths to VCs, sales prospects, candidates, etc. Would love any feedback! www.draftboard.com
Loans get issued based on profit generation (or asset value), so no, it is not “to keep them afloat”. You can’t get a loan if your company is not doing well or too risky (that’s why startups raise equity - because they are still too risky for someone to lend them money).
A loan is a form of debt, which is one of the two main forms of capital - the other main one being equity. Debt is less expensive than equity, so companies prefer to issue to raise capital via debt than equity.
It’s funny that Molly (a VC) ascribes so much power to VCs that they can literally create bank runs on their own.
No.
VCs don’t make decisions on where a company keeps its cash; the founder/CEO does. And founders freaked the f-ck out. Let’s make sure to remember that founders had 100% agency in the decisions they made about their cash.
Here’s a selection of comments in the Whatsapp founders group Im in - all founders, no VCs:
Thursday 3/8 (36 hours before FDIC takeover):
“I'd consider moving to one of the too big to fail banks..”
“I agree the risk is higher then we thought before, I'm in SVB, with 4% - and looking to understand where to go now.”
“It's a numbers game - if a lot of people do what I do at the moment - it will fall.....”
“Does someone have a contact at Chase for B2B SaaS customers? I'm thinking it's wise to already have an account open there in case it will seem like we need to move off SVB.”
“Let's say we want to open a Chase account and move company funds?”
“for those that have their money in SVB and do not have another company bank account - what are the immediate options?”
“If there is a risk of a bank run, why not take the money out”
“Basically our whatsapp group creates bank runs now... power to the founders?”
“we just moved 85% of our money out”
“I just pulled ours”
It’s not surprising a VC would think she has more power than she actually has, but she also clearly has no idea about the wildfire that was spreading among founders themselves. Founders don’t give a sh-t about what their investors think (generally) - founders make the decisions they think are best because they have the most to lose (or win) from being wrong (or right). And they are much, much, much more likely to trust their fellow founders than their VCs.
I’ve had this business idea for years but I would be torn apart in todays world if I tried to launch it:
Build an ML model trained on actual images of women’s breasts and bras that are verified to fit them well. Once the core model is built a separate, a smaller size on-device model is built to be the model users actually interact with. A user submits an image of breasts and is told right away which bras in which sizes would be the best for them. Photos containing faces would be blocked from being uploaded. No photos would leave the device unless a user opted in to do so in order to help improve the model.
Monetization is straightforward: affiliate fees for directing users to buy bras at retailers, plus sponsored placements in search results at some point.
Biggest concern is how to come up with the initial data set, but I’m fairly certain there’s a solution there.
Am I crazy or is this as obvious as it seems to me? ThirdLove sucks, as do calculators like this.
I agree - it’s about how the developer communicates (or in this case obfuscates) the price to the user. Check out the substack link and you’ll see screenshots of how Bending Spoons does it (it’s highly misleading).
Generally I’m of the opinion that consumers are responsible for their own choices; but Apple has allowed bad actors to exploit the availability of weekly subscriptions and prey on suspecting users.
Tricking users into these high priced subscriptions is a tried and true strategy in the app store. The press caught on late (2018) but it was happening from the moment apple opened up subscriptions to all developers in June 2016. Started with crappy coloring book apps and then spread like wildfire from there. Bending Spoons is simply the evolution of that.
This is a common response. unfortunately it doesn’t hold water: the average lifetime of a paid user of Splice is somewhere in the 7-10 week range (source is confidential).
What super users of editing products do you know that only stay 10 weeks?
None. What’s actually happening is Bending Spoons is exploiting the App Store’s ease of payment and dark patterns to trick unsuspecting users into enrolling in a super high priced subscription without their knowledge.
This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor:
“let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:
- Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)
- Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)
- Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth
- Convert those new downloads to paying users
- Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization
- Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition
- Lather, rinse, repeat
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.
Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”