I think modern software companies moves to remove roles like scrum masters, testers and analysts. My theory here is that e.g scrum masters wants to scrum, it’s their job. Much better to have the team take turn being the scrum master. They own the process and the pain.
I've never seen this, I've seen them be some kind of project manager role or just bubbly people who say some BS and convince company to pay them to waste employees time.
In my company, the project manager is essentially just there to report progress to management.
Why is it necessary to report progress to management? I'm not sure; as far as I've seen, nothing is ever done with the information, except to propagate it further up the chain. I can only speculate that, without progress reporting, management would seem to have too little work to do to justify its headcount.
Usually what is done with that information is scheduling or sales. Typically overly optimistic scheduling or selling a thing one does not possess (a future).
I struggle a lot with this, I’m trying todo some side projects to keep up but man it’s hard. I think the only way is to on a high level keep up with new technologies and best practices.
It's also one of the first things to turn off a new consumer thinking about taking a chance on an unknown brand.
You're fighting the reputation of generations of scammers who promised "cancel any time" and either weasel-worded the small print or just outright ignored cancellation requests to charge as much as possible to recurring bills.
Automatic recurring billing is a "dark pattern" from back before anyone made up that term. The only reason it makes more money than one-time purchase or an honest subscription (where customers have to explicitly pay to resubscribe every month or year) is that people will forget or get frustrated when it's time to cancel. Do you want to run that sort of business?
"Fun" fact: I bought a used car, only to discover that it apparently has free XM radio. I would not be surprised if someone unsuspecting person's card is being charged for it every month.
Co-founder here - I actually want to challenge that...for science. I've gone pretty deep on this.
There are definitely sets of products for which people want to 'set it and forget it'. At a basic level - electricity. I'd love to never think about my electricity bill ever. I do not want to explicitly pay for my electricity bill. Automated payment on electricity is amazing!
There are also many products in my life that I truly love and would use a lot more, but I am too lazy to buy or order them. I love LaCroix sparkling water. I would have no problem if it showed up at my house for $20 a month. However, because I'm lazy I never actually buy any - instead I get Coke at the corner store - worse for me.
Our goal with Sudden Coffee is to make it really really easy to get something you like. We are definitely not trying to pull wool over anyones eyes - we try to be as transparent as possible with this. We will never give you the run around if you need to cancel - that's just not who we are.
Closer to our hearts - a subscription allows us to actually make it an 'experience' instead of just cups of coffee. We can educate you about coffee, send you new recipes, guide you through coffee tastings - over a longer period of time. When we talk to customers at cafes - those extra moments of delight make the experience memorable - not just a cup of coffee.
That said, Kalle is also right. A subscription ultimately means we can spend less money & time on marketing, more money where it counts - on coffee, and give it to you at a lower price. I mentioned this in an earlier thread - for us to deliver the same coffee without subscriptions, we'd have to charge $4-5 per cup. However, I can also tell you that we have many happy subscribers who love that it's a subscription - it's not something that feels forced, but rather something that makes life easier.
Would really love for you to give us a try! Promise you will not be met with resistance if you need to cancel!
I have a very different perspective. I religiously avoid auto-billing. For basic necessities like electricity and gas, I like to know how much I'm paying, and to be able to dispute the charges before I pay in case there's a mistake (this occasionally happens).
For luxuries, the periodic reminder that I'm paying $x for something prompts me to reassess whether they are worth it to me, with a default answer of "no." That may be bad for your business, but it's good for my cost of living. Since I'm not in a position to hire a servant to look after my day-to-day financial interests, good defaults matter.
Yup, I hear you. I've definitely talked to people on both sides of it - there are preferences either way. I think both can work. FYI, before our subscriptions renew - we notify customers a few days before, so they can increase, decrease, or cancel the order. We do want to proactively alert you before it renews rather than hide it from the user. It should be very clear to you what's happening (thats our goal at least). Our platform for subscriptions doesn't let us force you to hit accept before billing - that would be hard to implement.
I'm just a lowly project manager, but my understanding from the tech wizards around here and those I work with is this:
It is possible, using the advanced technology available today, to make on your website a button which allows a subscribed user to independently cancel a subscription that was made online.
Through this technology, one no longer has to compose a pleading e-mail to customer service. No need to take on faith the co-founder's confusing promise that they want to make it easy for you to cancel while they simultaneously withhold a "cancel" button, with no stated plans to add one.
I mean, look, if you really don't intend to make a serious amount of dough off of people being too forgetful or busy to unsubscribe from a subscription they no longer want... what's the harm?
There definitely is a cancel button too! I just tell people they can email us as well because some people find that easier.
We're just now building an in-house engineering team to make the process easier. If I had my way, you could cancel, pause, adjust timing, etc with a couple clicks. I am stating our plans to do these things :-)
If I wanted to start a scammy business running on recurring subscription I wouldn't have gone into all the trouble of developing new instant coffee ;)
Obviously, we want to build a product that we and our subscribers love and choose to keep subscribing. Right now we have a lot of them.
The biggest thing with the subscription is clear CAC vs. LTV. With our current model this equation works and we can profitably acquire new customers. This allows us to grow, make the product better and bring the cost down.
Isn't this just restating what I wrote in VC-speak?
> The biggest thing with the subscription is clear [Customer Acquisition Cost] vs. [Long Term Value].
i.e. "recurring billing results in more people failing to cancel, because they either forget or are deterred by our 'customer retention program.'"
> With our current model this equation works and we can profitably acquire new customers.
i.e. "we wouldn't be able to profit and grow without doing this."
It seems like you genuinely care about good coffee, but what's the desired end-state? If it's "great instant coffee at $1/cup with no auto-billing," that makes sense. If it involves negative option billing, it's shameful.
No, it's not what you said. Your explanation misses the segment of customers that want the product every month but wouldn't exert a manual effort over and over again when it could be automated. Hence an increased LTV per customer with no change to the CAC. This doesn't really have anything to do with Sudden but rather subscription business economics. Automatic billing is not inherently bad; it's largely positive and convenient.
Also remember this company is not random — there's a ton of diligence involved with getting into YC as well as with VCs which they are backed.
Well hopefully through this thread at least we've convinced you we aren't scammers :-)
Seriously though, definitely something we are not about - would love to grab beers with anyone (in SF) who wants to learn more about our company/values text us/me (650) 823-4287.
I disagree. If the price point is right, I am a big fan of subscriptions.
A great example of this is: meundies (oohhhhhhhh ba doop boop boop). Fresh undies come every month for like $15/mo. I've had it going for a couple of years (I think), and it's slowly replaced all of my other (terrible) boxer briefs.
What I don't get is why policy makers doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth. Just start taxing emission and invest heavily in green technology and we could be on our way to start a new industrial revolution!
The US government's investments in both solar power and clean coal have been either failures or ended up costs wayyy more and taking twice as long. Typical of modern government projects but still bad enough where just saying "throw tax dollars at green tech" isn't as straight-forward solution as it seems.
Why not reduce taxes for corporations building green tech? And provide R&D credit to pay the salaries of engineers working on the problem? Reduce capital gains taxes on investments in green tech? Make it easier for really smart immigrants to come to the US to work on the problem? Create a commission who's job is to review and simplify/eliminate/modernize regulations to reduce barriers to entry in the marketplace? etc.
There are lots of ways to incentivize industry to solve this problem instead of adding more taxes and hoping the government works as a good VC.
The Canadian government tried (and is trying) the angel investor/VC thing here and it hasn't worked at all well. They do stuff like matching investments of other angels or giving loans to entrepreneurs. I'd much rather they made it easier for me to start and run a company by reducing the stuff they are already doing instead of doing more things... like pretending they are private investors. For example, they recently announced a Startup Founder Visa which I think is a great idea and a step in the right direction: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/start-up/
Not really sure about that. The cost of solar has come down dramatically and the technology has made huge strides in efficiency, largely because of the government subsidies. Sure, it's a financial failure for the government, but usually government subsidies are not intended to run a profit (lest the government be accused of profiteering or crowding out private investment).
University grants are a different beast. I was addressing the direct investments made in two organizations.
The problem isn't the perception of government backed businesses being 'wrong' for profiteering (or competing with industry?). Most people would be happy if the government made successful organizations that had a real impact (NASA in the 1960s). But successful large-scale government projects are rare today. Any gov tech gains in the past couple of decades were usually a minor side-effect of other massive investments (see: wars, intelligence gathering).
Modern nation states are simply not known for being good speculative investors nor good at running projects efficiently or cost effectively. Even when it's via private industry collaboration. But they are good at being politicians (ie, creating tax policy, managing regulations, etc). So my view is that they should focus on that and let industry be good at building technology.
I was at a conference a couple of years ago and there speaker was proposing that government taxation of tech companies should be higher (or words to that effect) as the underlying tech foundation they were building on was all government funded in the past. I really wish I had a photo of the slide but an amazing amount of the fundamental technology we take for granted today started life as very expensive, commercially unviable readership funded by governments. Their summary was that government is the only place that can fund and progress the technology foundation that companies later build on top of and that the idea that government is bad at tech is wrong - they are just bad at tech when funding is slashed to a minimum. Their main example was Bell labs and semiconductors and then the internet from what I remember.
I don't think the problem is government, the problem is funding - companies with limited funding would do an equally bad job of tech as a government department
Manufacture of PV panels is being further subsidized in China, something that generally isn't acknowledged in the West. If the CPC wasn't as paranoid of political change borne of discontent over smoggy cities, it's hard to say where PV prices would be.
Also bear in mind that assessing the 'cost of solar' is a toy problem as long as solar can't supply baseload power requirements.
Very little until the SolarCity facility comes online, and the battery storage at the Port Allen solar array has been disappointing and expensive, with batteries that died unexpectedly early.
Also, Hawaii gets its electricity from oil and gas shipped in by tanker and residents pay $.30/kWh; the utility there managed to negotiate $.15/kWh from SolarCity, which is almost certainly below their cost of production right now; they couldn't meet the utility's original tender and reapplied several times. I'm guessing that SolarCity is betting that over the life of their 20 year (!!!) contract they can bring their costs down and eventually turn a profit. I wonder about that bet, though, given that SolarCity isn't in great financial shape.
Anyways, I'm very much in favor of subsidized and incentivized solar power; what grates on me are people who assume that there's a great deal of unrealized value in clean technologies ("new industrial revolution!"). Converting to clean technologies will destroy value because oil and gas, especially when untaxed, are cheaper and easier to exploit. But of course we must convert because, well, 400ppm.
I'm confident that battery cost reductions will be substantial when Tesla's Gigafactory is at full production (they've already signed yet another utility scale battery storage deal in the last 10 days), cost reductions that will further increase uptake in energy storage contracts.
Cumulative global installed solar photovoltaic capacity will surpass 310 GW this year, compared with just 40 GW at the end of 2010. Polysilicon module prices continue to plummet; even if storage costs have not caught up, we can continue to drive out fossil fuel generation with more solar and wind, not to mention shifting loads to renewable generation hours whenever possible.
100% nuclear would work too but is politically unviable. Waste and the risk of accidents are a big problem, but at this point I believe they would be preferable to breathing in fossil fuel emissions all day.
Every existing light water reactor in the world could melt down like Fukushima and it won't come close the human disaster that will happen if much of the world's climate exceeds a wet bulb temperature of 35C for any part of the year.
"Baseload" isn't a real thing, it's just a framing. You need electricity generated when it's required by users, and in the exact quantities they demand.
Having nuclear power plants running all night when no-one needs the power is sub-optimal. That's why many nations built hydro storage and offered financial inducements for people to use power at night. Because the numbers wouldn't work for nuclear if it wasn't used at max capacity the whole time, producing a static amount, yet demand rises and falls both daily and with the seasons.
Doing the same thing, decades later, for solar is hardly rocket science, the only difference is the power correlates very well with air-con loads on both a short and long term scale which makes it a no-brainer for many locations around the world.
A call for a carbon tax is the free market solution.
Resistance to it just redirects efforts into exactly the kind of thing you are railing against.
Most carbon tax proposals a) have stopped using the word tax as people have a visceral, but non-logical reaction to it, b) are designed to be revenue neutral, since raising money is not the point, but changing behaviour, and so cut other taxes so that it balances out.
More taxes is not free market in any form. Considering the alternatives are not yet inexpensive enough for general consumption combined with the fact any tax on oil/coal/carbon etc would likely get pushed down to the consumer, it's largely just punishing consumers who are acting rationally and within their means.
By reducing taxes for green tech companies the focus is on acellerating the time when it can become widely available for consumers and consumers can purchase it without large economic trade-off. As a result the coal industry, which is already in steady decline, with continue to go in that direction. Oil will get squeezed.
Only at that point would it make sense to punish consumption of the harmful energy. But doing so now is just wishful thinking and harming the already strugglign middle class.
Free market is an inexact term, but I would think that nearly everyone would agree that one goal of having a free market is having it be efficient. Which, of course, is what a tax on negative externalities does:
At least on the hydro front, it's a difficult comparison. Quebec even more so - they have a lot of hydro opportunity.
France generates 85% from Nuclear, so effectively 'emissions free', but of course that comes with other complications.
I believe that Nuclear will be the way forward. Renewables are just not getting 'good enough fast enough' in a pragmatic way ... if we spent as much researching Nuclear I'll bet we'd have much safer choices by now. And most 'new reactors' are very safe. In particular CANDU reactors designed by Canada - and even they are decades old.
The reason Nuclear reactors are 'so expensive' to build has more to do with liability than anything. 'Insurance' is the expense - plus - there are very few entities capable of doing it and they have a 'military industrial complex' type oligarchy on it (i.e. it doesn't matter what the next-gen US fighter jet does, it will cost zillions - because he economic structure is there to make sure it costs that much).
A 'truly progressive' country should be investing in this as an option, the upside is just too good: enough Uranium to last centuries, with effectively no CO2.
What I don't get is why private industry doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth. Just start manufacturing green technology free of government incentives and subsidies and we could be on our way to a new industrial revolution!
"What I don't get is why private industry doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth."
There are thousands of companies trying. The inherent problem is that solar and wind are generally crap ways to make it work.
If you live near the equator, and don't regularly have access to electricity, and need a panel to power your TV for a few hours a day - then that's 'impact' but in the West it's really, really hard to make work.
While this is true, I think that there is much more to it. FinTech is taking business away from one of the strongest lobbies in the world, the financial sector, and the regulators all around the world seem to be embracing it, even bitcoin.
I can just talk from my own experience. I have a mobile app in a very specific niche, that is used when people tune in their tv antennas. Typically gross about 100$/month took 5hours to build and I have not made an update in 3years. Maybe those types of incomes are to small for you but you gotta start somewhere. So my tip is mobile utility apps, they don't go out of style as quick. You wont get rich but its a nice additional income!
It's an app that shows you the direction to the nearest radio tower. You basically turn it on and it points to the nearest one, with a compass so you know the direction to point your antenna in. I have only done it in Sweden so far, so feel free to develop a similar app in your country ;)
Do you know much about how/why people find your app? When playing with a TV antenna, I wouldn't think to search for an app that could help. Seems like you are getting plenty of people finding it, though.
Well I think that people and developers in particular needs to start realising that companies like docker has gotten really good at marketing them selfs towards them. Most of the stuff you hear about a technology is just marketing stuff that makes you sound smart when telling your peer about a new technology.
What: You will be the first hire except for the founders! We believe that there is a huge opportunity left in the collaboration space, that we are addressing! We haven't launched officially but have almost 1k paying users and are well funded. All made in under 1 year!
