Project Precipice Week 3: strategery and defiance

@snapster what divorce?

Also. I am 99% sure I’m not crazy.

@unksol

Rather than full isolation, we proposed and agreed on some shared resources. Kind of like roommates. We label our snacks in the refrigerator but sometimes share a meal together. We each have jobs and friends but we still hang out at home. The air conditioner setting is up for debate. Sure we’ll pay our share of the rent. Separate but symbiotic.

so far we have like a box of wheat thins and some peanut butter — this will take time

@snapster I was mostly curious about what the “divorce” actually will mean.

And then a recent example that,as of now it seems like many things shows up on all three if you bother look. Not always in a bad way. But. Sometimes in a very repetitive way with little differentiation other than $1-2. Poor presentation on my part it looks like 100% snark.

I like narfcake’s take below about the original woot stuff but… we’ve rolled up a lot of other people into our weird little mix too.

I remember when sidedeals started it was leaning more that way. Or at least it felt like it.

@unksol two main business things: an ability to acquire/hold inventory for InLo sites plus a separate P&L such that we can see investment return (or lack thereof) more clearly while we iterate.

@snapster @unksol It also serves as a vehicle for:

• An incubator for evaluating succession/executive potential (ok, hot shot new person, show me what you can do with this subsidiary)
• Carving out some of the overall assets into separate entities for bringing in new partners (e.g. Casemates with WineDavid, maybe?)
• Establishing different corporate structures (C-corp, holdings, LLC, etc) to prioritize/direct revenues and debt flows
• Establishing different corporate structures to limit asset risks and liabilities (e.g. some states have bonkers employer or operational burdens/restrictions that conflict with other states’ regulations, to skirt federal rules (ACA, womens’ health) or score political points with the governing party’s base with anti-whatever laws).
• Establishing different corporations to have specific tax/regulatory nexus (e.g. qualify for in-state/county/city development tax breaks or business development programs)

There are lots of reasons to create new separate businesses that are closely related (operating in parallel or as subsidiaries).

@narfcake Ha - I’ll have to learn more about dbrand - those two are great. Maybe we would go full dbrand!

re: broken. I meant to suggest that maybe the web was not broken (from an earlier explanation that I’d expected Meh to be as it is but larger). (which is pretty much what you’re showing with dbrand)

Point taken on product mix and hopefully soon addressed via creation of our own Meh/SideDeal inventory (previously 1 larger pooled inventory)

@narfcake My son bought me a dbrand skin for my birthday but he got my phone model wrong. They sent a free replacement. Gotta love them.

@snapster Well if that happens, @carl669’s count is bound to increase dramatically.

@carl669 @narfcake would be great to find out someday they were inspired by others (not that we were first to try)

@snapster Twenty-ish years ago, back before they transitioned away from using Yahoo Groups as their comm facilitator, I used to post stuff to my local Freecycle group with brutally honest and humorous descriptions that tended to be rather disparaging of the item. This approach never failed to cause someone to step up and take the unwanted item off my hands. Then Freecycle transitioned to a website of its own with a forum that limited the number of characters that could be in a post without requiring that a moderator approve it, and the mods never approved them, so I stopped. For years afterwards, I would occasionally get what amounted to surprised fan mail wondering why I didn’t post things anymore. And I’d tell them.

I think you’re making a wise move here, from the look of it. We’ll be watching with fingers poised over keyboard for the opportunities to be the Mehtizens that I think you understand we are.

@snapster No need to change the CS here, however.

So I open it, and then immediately recall an email exchange I had with customer service a while back. It went something like this:

I ordered black speakers, you sent me white.
Sorry, we are out of black, color them with a Sharpie.
Fine, send me a Sharpie.

https://meh.com/forum/topics/you-win-this-round-meh--well-played

@narfcake ha yes I remember that one. This reminds me of a feature I want to start. Something like “link-historian” Meh culture gathering topics. I just need to nail down the method and rewards here.

@snapster Maybe a /history command in which mediocrebot returns links to the respective events (or mishaps) from a lookup table?

@narfcake that’s a cool idea – or as @shawn would say, way to turn it into a developer problem

The community manually rounding up fun links is still the input we’d need and I bet it’s a real long tail of “mildly interesting drama” that we’d not want to automate.

@narfcake @snapster

And knives

And food from winedavid

@lehigh
Or are the forum participants just the Statler & Waldorf hecklers to Meh’s muppet show?

@lehigh spot-on with these questions.

I have an anecdote from an early meeting with Amazon post-purchase-of-us where an exec asked what the Woot demographic was. Turns out, that simple question (more than even the silly Breakfast Octopus reasoning for buying us) highlighted core philosophical differences.

My answer was “the customers that buy our products are our demographic.”

To ease the VPs glaring silence, I asked what the demographic of Amazon was, to which they had no helpful reply either. They didn’t enjoy the exchange.

I could have been less obtuse but I wanted them to understand that we didn’t put demographic first and then play to a customer. We looked for raw supply chain opportunity in the consumer market and just knew we would attract customers with lower pricing due to our efficiencies.

Years later from the perspective you present (and I hold at 50), it feels absolutely correct to suggest we need to attract and target a younger audience. Still, with two teenage boys giving me input at home, I’m quite optimistic that we can be relevant without being overly defined by age. That’s always been a cool thing about online communities.

@snapster Thanks for the reply, and funny to hear of the Amazonian silence on a similar question.

Unrelated – are you happy with how often Whisper is being used? I thought that was a really cool forum development, and useful on something like Casemates if you want to share contact info to break a case, but didn’t know if its usage matched your hopes/dreams.

@snapster

with two teenage boys giving me input at home, I’m quite optimistic that we can be relevant

Progeny will have an outsized impact from too small a sample size, geo- and socio-economic experiential biases, and systemic privilege skews in feedback/survey results. Their input will inherently be very demographically narrow and lead to inaccuracies if relied upon.

@mike808 @snapster

Progeny will have an outsized impact from too small a sample size…

Any small-group sample is unreliable overall, even though it may provide very valuable input at times. Often, the real trick is in knowing what the question needs to be. In the case of T-shirt designs, “Would enough people want to be seen wearing this?” is the important one.

@lehigh Good question - I haven’t checked in on stats in a long while. I love the Whisper feature but concede it’s a bit complex vs an inbox with DMs.

@mike808 point taken but I am a sample size of one

@snapster I am a sample size of XXL.
You already have my shipping info.

In the case of T-shirt designs, “Would enough people want to be seen wearing this?” is the important one.

@mike808 @snapster @werehatrack Going back to the peak shirt.woot era where 1,000 sales in a day was considered low, there was never any clear cut answer. Votes didn’t correlate to sales figures; neither did style, topic, or amount of effort taken.

@mike808 @narfcake @snapster

…there was never any clear cut answer. Votes didn’t correlate to sales figures; neither did style, topic, or amount of effort taken.

I’ve gotten better at predicting this over the years, but I’m still no better than 50/50. On the other hand, in a market where roughly 90% of what’s available is judged by the customers as unworthy, getting to 50/50 is pretty good. In particular, I’ve gotten better at spotting the ones which are either hilarious or on-target or otherwise excellent, but will fail because people won’t wear them. That may sound peculiar, but it’s A Thing.

@narfcake @snapster @werehatrack
It’s not about if they will wear them, it is about if they will buy them. After they’ve been bought, whether or not they are worn is irrelevant.

American consumerism at its finest. We buy crap because we just can’t help ourselves. We are addicted, and somebody has to feed the beast.
/image shut up and take my money

@snapster Oooooh.

I REALLY would NOT try to restart the silk road. Heard that didn’t end well.

Stick to knives.

Heh heh. “Stick”.