Project Precipice Week 2: say hello to inlo

@troy oh I JUST watched that movie!!

Well, rats. I took too long editing that, trying to find a more appropriate giphy.

@werehatrack We know you meant to wave and it seems very wavy to me, so it’s a win.

What I was going to say when I couldn’t find a good giphy was that it’s good to hear that you’re going to do some brainstoning, err, barnstaining, no, that’s not it, breadstorming… Whatevs. Trying to find stuff that isn’t everybody else’s Same Old. In this age of the Internet, that’s rough. But because old ideas sometimes still work, I’ll just quote Doc Rumack and say “Good luck. We’re all counting on you.” (Except that weird person over in the bushes who just yelled “I’m not!”)

@werehatrack I like this one anyway! I wish I knew what the context was.

@PooltoyWolf
“Say hello to Inlo.”

So I wanted a giphy that waved at Inlo.

@werehatrack I meant the context of the GIF you actually found, the one above. LOL

@PooltoyWoff
Waveform generation. As for how that fits the keywords supplied, “the ways of Giphy are mysterious.”

@werehatrack here take this: ( ´ω｀)ノﾞ

@Kyeh That’s the one I wanted!

@werehatrack
Sorry for co-opting it.
A copy cat!

@Kyeh
/giphy cat

@phendrick
I’m surprised someone here in CO hasn’t grabbed that one.

@kdemo thanks for the project name

/giphy hat tip

@snapster - Thanks for picking it up and running with it. I trust you to run in the right direction.

Way to dodge answering

@Kidsandliz yep, we’re on the same page. There are some excellent opportunities that come from the Morningsave’s higher volume but we need more exclusives.

The InLo model will require going back to our wholesaler distribution roots to take down larger opportunities than Meh can swallow. Key to aggressive buying is ability to solve for mistakes quickly.

Great point on the plushy timing!

Great point on the plushy timing.

@Kidsandliz @snapster I’m kind of thinking back to the shirt.woot mini plushies AND having folks pay a reasonable price for them – I honestly can’t see it happening, what with labor and logistic prices from overseas have gone up substantially over the past few years, not to mention the necessary legal aspects these days – CPSIA compliance/certifications and PA toy standards come to mind. TeeTurtle went through those steps; the alphabet-soup knockoffs (like the ones that were on MS) most likely did not.

@snapster Start up growing pains, Fun. Hopefully your brick and mortar will help with that kind of mistake solving. As you implied by opening the brick and mortar, meh couldn’t solve that alone for you alone.

So as you refocus your business model what role do you see in there for meh? It sounds like nostalgia is part of it.

By the way when you started the meharons I thought back to your solution in search of a problem you mentioned years ago - an email that would vanish from your inbox on a deal if you didn’t read it and then buy within a couple of hours. Morphed a bit but I see you hung on to that idea. We still going to be a playground for experimentation?

And while meh member defections from here due to the use of meh as your less than quick /ideal “problem solving” outlet, doesn’t really matter much to your bottom line, I am guessing that you are now in a financial position to include “going back to your roots” in one corner of your business model. Which is good for meh/us.

Please don’t forget your VMP’s and kickstarters when you resurrect/modify your meh model. While financially our role is just a drop in the bucket (you posted about that years ago), if that, hopefully nostalgia will bring back those “good old days” too in differentiating us from your “members”.

And keep @koolhandjoe’s occasional role here. While I would not be a customer of his as his work is not my style (although I am an occasional donator of “raw materials” that I hope to someday see monsterfied), he is a good artist and those threads are interesting.

The contests, where at least some of them don’t require any semblance of talent, have been fun. The drop in numbers in an individual irk is very frustrating when your ping is generally 170+. Please try not to design things that require good internet and coding nerds can “cheat” at (eg write code to prevent the page from loading and thus “get in” sooner to buy an irk. Equal opportunity and access is appreciated. Liked the occasional easter egg hunts for irks on side deal as well (yes I knew that those were partly to force us to go look at inventory there with the irk carrot dangled in front of our easily manipulated eyeballs - LOL).

And I really miss @jonT’s unique contributions to the forum (and I think we all have him to thank for his original shaping of the forum, building and management of it). Watching his legacy fade has been sad. That was a very wise personnel choice back then. Please think about the direction of that too in your future plans. Occasionally you had other staff being active, each adding their own thing which adding interesting twists, but they were never there for long.

While members came together to do important/interesting things (for example the meh group who funds Kiva loans, the group who’d coordinate funding teacher projects with that one organization, the unofficial mehrican exchanges…), this depends on meh members remaining active and initiating these actions. An employee could keep those traditions up if the member or members who initiated those things didn’t do it that year - or ask who wants to volunteer to run it, or whatever.

Perhaps social responsibility it could be in the mission of the “new” meh in a way that has commitment from meh (including financial/personnel) and doesn’t just rely on the members. For example meh budgets money for kiva investments, teacher investments from that site and members deciding how the budget is spent on that? Or members (and staff) bring to the table something going on locally or nationally that meh could become involved in both involving members and me?

Heck we could even do silly things. The two times people could get their names on a disk being sent into space (my kid and I are on one of them) maybe meh could have spearheaded a list of mehricans together as part of meh on one of those. Or contacted the space program to see if we could send in our own disk. You gave money for Crimes against humanity to dig a hole and fill it back up. Find ways the meh community can be immortalized. Win a brick sized portion of the warehouse and your artwork, name, photo, whatever can be glued to the wall after being coated in resin or laminated or something (shades of your initial office decoration “project”).

And bring back the videos. Some of those were really entertaining, even if it was just meh blowing things up and then we guess how many pieces someone had to pick up to win a non-blown up version of that (in that case speaker doc).

In my opinion there needs to be a position created again to focus on that aspect of what made meh “special” for the community.

@narfcake @snapster Hey don’t destroy the hopes of those who want one with actual reality. I’d say off hand this would be an order worth subcontracting to whomever has that wired. Mind you I don’t want one myself, but others have gone on and on and at least one person has created their own to give away in an unofficial mehrican exchange. Heck do a poll to see if the interest to actually buying one is high enough to bring the price down low enough people would actually be able to afford to buy one. I am thinking some may want one and hope one would be sent to VMP’s or in irks but wouldn’t actually buy one. And I am guessing the company knows if polls actually track with sales later. snapster didn’t say our ideas had to be, um, practical or anything.

@snapster meant to say to prevent page images from loading. and both involving members and meh?

@OnionSoup

Just please don’t follow the woot model of a dozen different category.woot pages.

Seconded. Besides, the current Woot is little more than Amazon’s Other Clearance Outlet (for the stuff that the main site’s clearance sales can’t dump). I haven’t seen a single Traditionally Wootworthy item over there for a couple of years; And their prices suck. Meh is at least trying to have things that have some appeal, particularly when it’s more than a bit off-center.

@sammydog01
But no rubber chickens.

Launchable rubber squirrel, maybe.

@werehatrack My sloth scarf is the best.

@werehatrack
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

@Ignorant
If logistics is “making things work and moving things where they are needed”, then I guess the idea here is that inverse logistics is “subverting the dominant paradigm”.

“some” not “come” of my click faces. Proof reading. Not my best skill. I don’t practice it enough.

@Kidsandliz is this a request to turn them into not quite fungible symbolic cryptic trading things?

@snapster Sure. Why not? It would be entertaining. And comparatively I’d start out reasonably rich LOL.

We could trade them for preferential treatment on irks paying in click faces for early access for some of them by, say, 30 seconds (takes me 8 or so seconds to load). That would also mean you’d have to hold back some for the mere morals…, cost to have first chance to buy for really low inventory good products will cost you click faces and the you are charging for the first 12 hours…, use them to enter contests for “clickface $20” coupons… it would increase page views (only partly overlapping with customers I am sure) as they’d want to bank click faces. I am sure there’s be other uses we could dream up (I have some other ideas but not worth going into if I am being looked at in askance over all of this. .

Might fit your off the wall approach to retail with meh… AND VMP would be granted X number of click faces a month “extra” as a VMP (and not membership) benefit…

@Kidsandliz I am pleased it was recommended and I like the brainstorming. For the most part I enjoy making fun of crypto bros so we’d have to hammer home the meh-ness. Maybe a project for later.

@snapster Well cool. I am sure bunches of us have off the wall ideas we’d be glad to let you know about. Maybe a thread done in true brainstorming fashion where all meh ideas (that would be meh as in idea quality, not meh as in the company) can be posted? You know… a thread titled something like: “If someone died and made me king of meh I’d…”

@Kidsandliz @snapster of course they would have to be called MFTs and would be meta disruptive disruption. Besides it would really annoy the NFT kids every time they saw someone mention MFT thinking it was a typo. MFT FOMO just around the corner! Lol

@Kidsandliz @snapster Aren’t the Woot! forum avatars kind of similar to some of those NFT collections? (Was it Mr. Toon who created those?)

@tmwest87 not yet - when we do we’ll be routing through the larger Mercatalyst org/hr dept.