WTF: Daybreak
15As we round the corner to year five here on Meh, we’re looking for new areas to grow that help us to get bigger and better deals. A few of you may remember @snapster’s post Why Sellouts are our Goal. The second to last paragraph of that post is still quite relevant to our strategy today. Don’t worry, we’re not bracing you for an impactful change – just calling this back to mind for gentle relevance.
We’ve created “circuit breakers” and started email notifications for our deals over the past few years, looking for ways to honor the classic model we invented while adapting to today’s internet environment. A few months ago, we tweaked that again, shifting the second release to 11am eastern. While subtle, this change allowed a larger portion of inventory to be served in the classic way (at midnight, without emails) while allowing the later-morning event to be something more like a “mainstream public release”.
We’re now opening that 11am eastern time public release to our other sites on the checkout.org platform. On MorningSave, this implementation takes the form of Daybreak. The goal here is to expand the visibility and sales of our deal to the customers we’ve gained from our TV and other media partnerships. That will then let us go buy more stuff, which will let us get bigger deals on that stuff. You know, economies of scale.
So from midnight to 11am, the deal is Meh-only. At 11am, it’ll launch on MorningSave (and eventually, other sites) at the same price (and obviously continue on Meh).
If you’re a Meh-only type, the only thing you might notice is a bigger sales spike on our stats graph around 11. And possibly some higher volume / higher discount things we’d previously had to pass on as too large to handle. If you shop around all the Mediocre family of sites, you’ll see a new daily deal module. Feel free to check it out. Heck, feel free to buy from there if you want to see what that’s like. It’s all the same price, anyway. (Coupon codes are both site and offer-specific, though, so Daybreak may not accept ones you can use on Meh or elsewhere.)
We’re continuing to work on Meh, and other retail sites (maybe one day we’ll actually get a shirt site up and running), and we’ll keep you up-to-date on anything new that launches.
Meh
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Clever way to claim meh only sells 1 deal per day, but really morningsave is the main site that sells tons of items per day including the one concurrently featured on meh.
Yeah, meh gets first dibs before 11am, but I don’t see why you couldn’t just stick the leftovers on morningsave the next day as a meh encore type of thing. Seems like you’re trying to make meh.com irrelevant and just an afterthought.
Edit: a comparison would be if woot created new site called classicwoot.com that only had the main woot deal. Kinda pointless because woot.com would still feature that very same offer. What’s the point?
@medz This way they can sell “I miss the old meh” shirts in the future.
@medz I’d honestly like if Woot did that. They’ve got something close to it: http://woot.com/today
My thought is ‘selling exclusively on meh for the entire 24 hours’ was never a key tenant of the daily deal site, like ‘selling one thing a day’ is (and for those who really want that, you’ve still got 11 hours of the day).
@narfcake I wonder if they’ll sell the domain name or if they’ll keep meh.com to redirect it to https://morningsave.com/#daybreak
@dave Except they’re not pretending there is any kind of distinction between the main deal and all the other crap they sell other than it is a “featured” item.
@dave @medz
From “Why Sellouts are our Goal:”
What if the last unit sold had to be sold on meh.com? Would that offset morningsave’s subsidizing of meh.com, keeping meh a deal a day site?
@medz sorry for our lack of conspiracy material here. We’ll keep this need in mind for later ideas.
@medz @snapster Conspiracy?
@narfcake
You are welcome.
How does one unsubscribe from the daybreak emails after enabling them to view the process? Or does that just enable notifications from Meh? Just making sure I don’t get double emails from different places for the same product.
@lichme It should be already set up that no one will get both emails.
I like the new FAQ page.
@medz I like (and yet am a little terrified of) how deeply you’ve thought this through!
Today’s item has a limit of 3. Can I exploit this to buy 3 on meh and 3 on morningsave? When the next TIRK goes up, can I buy 2 The Instant Regret Kits? (midnight on meh and 11am on morningsave) Will the checkout page be active before 11am for further exploitation? (ex: example)
@medz you should try it and report back. spoiler: the checkout page deep link is active because who cares. you can’t exceed purchase limits across sites.
@shawn Excellent. Thanks.
What about the previously sacrosanct VMP hour?
@f00l we didn’t make any changes to meh.
we still reserve a small batch for VMPs released at 4pm ET here on meh. if we sell all but the VMP batch before 4pm ET the deal on morningsave is sold out to ensure VMPs get their share.
@f00l ‘tis the hour when I (and all the holy ones) lift the chalice and say the oath. Shall always be thus. When the yankee candle incense curls around the goat-headed staff, then shall the daylight touch the centuries-old amethyst crystal embedded at its heart, and only then shall—
—oh wait, this is just raiders of the lost ark now. Never mind.
@dave
so since we longterm V folk get a discount on morningsave, we can buy everything there for less?
@Cerridwyn The VMP coupon code doesn’t work on Daybreak sales. Looks like that’s why they switched us over from an automatic discount to needing to put in a code.
@sammydog01
well screw them then
/
@Cerridwyn @sammydog01 I thought it was so folks with VMP could actually use coupon codes over there if they took off more than the VMP discount since the VMP discount occupied the coupon slot.
@Cerridwyn @ThomasF That’s the reason you guys said you did it. But maybe it was a big conspiracy.
/giphy big conspiracy
I tried for an hour yesterday to evolve @dave’s statement into a longer strategy post but decided it was too in the weeds. It would have helped some who are concerned perhaps. Elements included the open web failing and walled garden social media networks lowering credibility of “I found a good deal” cries such that Meh is not distinct. Sort of like so many bad retailers crying wolf on Facebook that no one cares about wolves anymore. I have extremely high confidence from 15 years of data (and observations of external data points) in my understanding of this. It’s an understanding that spans the entire life cycle of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, iOS and others. I’m sure everyone has noticed that very few open-web independents are surviving this maturation.
Ultimately, I didn’t write this because we’re actually still growing. It amounts to a bunch of unnecessary excuse looking things and we are very happy with the ideals we have preserved. We don’t feel any need to excuse ourselves.
What you’re seeing from us is a peculiar indefatigable passion to support a business model we invented and a community that we love. We love it enough to invent entirely separate business models to feed and support it.
If we wanted to move on, we would have done so long ago. We don’t.
We love this experience precisely for members like @medz, who are relentlessly passionate themselves.
@snapster
/define indefatigable
ADJECTIVE
I would be so sad if Meh went under.
/giphy Thank You!
@snapster
With all the crap sites and crap etailers and fakes and scams out there, all the tracking, the personal data hijacking, so much “news” recursively-faked thru so many generations that “real news” is out of fashion, and not much current trust in anything …
…
People I know are tending to stay within communities they “trust as much as they trust anything”.
Or stay within communities that they trust at least in some defined way that suits the purpose of the visit …
Or stay within communities in which they have invested so much energy, that they stay by default and habit …
Or stay within communities they don’t trust, but the community has a nice interface and a lot going on …
and hardly anyone seems to want to go back to the days of actually knowing and spending time with the folks next door…
Thanks for Meh.com.
/youtube what a wonderful world
peculiar-indefatigable-passion is my favorite order number
@snapster I understand the move. I’m a kickstarter who has been a VMP since day 1. I even bought something on day 0. I was trying to figure out how the site was profitable. Especially with you taking a large personal hit when you started this because you didn’t wait out your non-compete.
I kept going back on the old, and never updated, mediocre labs site and trying to see if there was going to be something new launched. There were some pretty crazy ideas on there but if this is can’t be sustainable than that’s the way it is.
What I’m trying to work out is why I should keep my VMP status that I’ve had for five years. I’ve been grandfathered into the older VMP program at this point. I’d have to check my order status but I’m not really buying enough to justify it. I’ve bought from Morningsave and wine sites but, like the others, its not why I’m here.
I guess I held onto that Kickstarter attitude of helping to build a company for all this time and its finally evolved. It just seems like we lost our status of being a single deal site if we don’t have a single deal anymore. I mean this is just an online store. Why do I care? What do I have invested in it? I was with woot in the beginning and now I’m here. It is the social aspect. Having been part of two sites as they grew. It shouldn’t matter but I think we have too many years invested with you and that’s why we are complaining.
@Fodder650 So did Amazon when they bought Woot from @snapster.
@narfcake @snapster I meant Meh not Woot. Matt’s retelling of his meal with Jeff Bezo’s about how Woot worked is still pretty fresh in my head. It explains a lot as to why Amazon bought the site and why it has become what it’s become.
@Fodder650 Oh, I know, but seeing how meh is the “old woot”, it was pretty much figured that it going to operate like Woot was (pre-Amazon).
Source: https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/matt-rutledge-woot-has-a-new-deal-mediocre-corporation/
The bigger question:
Ask again later
/8ball Has @snapster learned that if an item sells at a loss, making it up in volume doesn’t quite work?
@narfcake @snapster I would doubt he’s every sold anything on here at a loss and I’d love to hear him verify that.
@Fodder650 @narfcake yes we sell many items at a loss. Some planned that way, others we simply paid too much. There’s a halo effect to a business model that favors momentum.
We aren’t yet to a size where we can really generously reward those who have been the most loyal. I’m still confident we’re getting there and I have to say I’m enjoying the ride a lot more this time around.
@Fodder650 Day zero was a huge money loser already. American Apparel shirts cost $$ (made in Los Angeles where workers were paid $13+/hour minimum). Meh defaces them with the logo and the K, and sold them for $1.
In fact, any shirt sold here for $5 or less was below cost.
ETA: Even at $10, the margins were extremely thin with the AA blanks. Even now with the Next Level ring spun blanks, the margins are thin; they’re not the cheap scratchy cotton blanks that wholesale for $2.
@snapster So what you are really saying is we aren’t selling enough meh crap on our niche site meh, only a few customers on our other niche sites are coming to meh to buy it so we are going to sell what we sell on meh on our other sites starting 11am. The way we were selling left over meh stuff on morning save wasn’t working the way we’d like it to (due to niche differences that affect marketing, sales, to some degree products, traffic routes to the sites) so we are trying something else. Oh, and if this works then we can buy up crap to sell on meh in quantities that are larger than what we are currently limited to due to current meh sales volume. And if we closed down meh and rolled it into morning save, et. al, we’d likely lose some customers as the cross over from meh to the other sites isn’t as big as we’d like it to be either. And our attempts to get that to happen aren’t working as well as we’d like. And you have a sentimental attachment to meh and its loyal
subjectsfollowers, are making enough money so that you can afford to humor yourself and the meh community, because, after all, you are king of mediocre.@Kidsandliz we can restate it multiple ways. I’d put it more simply as a TL;DR: this plan is to grow the Meh community.
Pools are formed by rain. Ponds are fed by streams. Lakes are fed by rivers.
@snapster so what you are saying is right now it is only raining…
@Kidsandliz @snapster Several drops of rain.
@Kidsandliz @narfcake I like new people!
Meh Temperature Taking…
After buying a fair amount of stuff (sometimes crap but also some stuff we love even more due to the price we paid) on Meh, going back about 1,600 days (Fall 2014) the following captures about 75% of my Mehood…
Thanks for those wild, first 18-24 or so months. What felt like the startup phase promotional budget subsidy (amazing deals and @JonT) made it crazy fun with too good to turn down, deals.
The constant contests, the spontaneous @JonT deal give aways to the first 5 people who…, the VMP specific freebies, etc…
We get it that couldn’t last. You might enjoy having fun selling shit but it has to be sustainable or the entire thing collapses.
Back when we could, I shamelessly & opportunistically turned VMP on when a deal made sense… and turned it off 30 days later. Ironically there were very few breaks from VMP due to the constant stream of too good deals. I caused extra work for myself for little benefit. We used to rationalize, VMP made sense if you bought at least one item per month.
Meh was and still is entertainment as much as deals.
So I find the draw-mix for me has shifted from deals to entertainment. I’m no longer buying an item per month. I could rationalize continued VMP this past year due to what was effectively half-price VMP from Kickstarting Casemates.
So, sadly, I’ll likely cancel the VMP once the K-subsidy is off this month. (@unixrab, perhaps you were right after all.)
And while it might appear to be sour grapes on my part, the prospect of Meh replacing the “V” icon with a shit-pile icon next to my legacy-VMP handle, seems every bit as much sour grapes. (Why not an upside down “V” honoring early day VMPrs as for legacy goats?) The shit-pile icon goes beyond Meh rambunctiousness. … bring it on, shit-lovers.
So I’ll likely back away, perhaps lurking a bit to test the post Meh era waters. Sour grapes? Perhaps.
BTW, the posted topic changes above seem to make perfect sense while themselves not really impacting Meh in a further negative way.
@RedOak
@RedOak we support changing the smiling poop icon — just haven’t added it to the priority list. I plan to lobby that it become my new CEO badge.
@RedOak @snapster I like to think of the ex-vmp icon as a pile of non-dairy topping, not excrement. It might even be chocolate if you look at it right.
And RedOak’s thoughts parallel mine, and are better said than I could have said.
@RedOak @snapster I would take that poop icon in a second if I didn’t have to give up my “V” benefits to get it. I love that thing!
@RedOak @sligett I did forget to remind that we support manually changing the icon for ex-VMP who ask via a meh.com/support form request.
While the meh server was getting hammered at midnight, I breezed right through checkout using the morningsave payment server. #prohacks
@medz prohack #2, the link to the checkout page from Friday’s deal seems to still be active, so you can potentially use that technique to defeat whatever the opposite of buyer’s remorse is on a deal that you let get away. Unless my saying it here causes it to go away, or it looks live but will not let you complete a purchase. I’m not trying to buy a speaker dock to find out.
@djslack right. These aren’t “daily” deals anymore. Morningsave will perpetually sell all available inventory.
@djslack @medz
I mean, I’m sure there’s probably something we’ve missed but so far it’s working well.
Glad you got your important scarf order in before they sold out.
@shawn I thought there was a significant possibility this could be the case. Nonexistent loophole closed.
This is a “feature” I might have taken advantage of a couple of times a year so it’s better for my wallet this way
Wonder if the daybreak link actually takes you to meh.com cuz
Hey, Fuckheads!
@RiotDemon Sadly we made a shorter, more easily digestible write-up for the Daybreak page…
@RiotDemon @ThomasF It makes for a interesting first view of the comments in the community forum. I am guessing that not many Morning Save only people head into the forums. This format might not work over there. I peeked over there to see if the forum was different but it was the same from here.
@speediedelivery @ThomasF unless you dive into the other threads over there. I don’t know how @ignorant can moderate that forum. So many confused souls.
@Ignorant @RiotDemon @speediedelivery @ThomasF
@ignorant must combine @patience with his @ignorance.
This reminds me, I need to set a reminder for 7/8 for any potential birthday IRK action
@nolrak I still owe meh their SASE birthday card from their second birthday.
Wasn’t the circuit breaker implemented to give East Coast people a chance at popular goods? Now we have to compete with more people? Also, how will this affect Mehrathons?
@callow or the morning release of irks… it sounds there will be more competition since one goal, apparently, is enlarge the meh community/customer base.
@callow I may be wrong but I think the Daybreak deal won’t happen if there’s a sellout at midnight. Did I read that somewhere or make it up? My memory sucks.
@callow @sammydog01 circuit breaker would apply so the 11 am relaunch would then bring it to daybreak, no?
@callow @djslack I looked around and couldn’t find the thing I thought I saw so
/giphy nevermind
This is just my own commentary, after reading through what’s already been said, the past few days.
I actually bought my second item on Meh the other day (it’s winter, and I’d been looking for long scarves that had no wool content in them, and were not patterned). I may or may not be happy with them, but two scarves for less than I would normally pay for one made me happy.
I’ve had the VMP since the Casemates kickstarter, and it’s been very worthwhile to have. Scanning over my orders, there have been a couple of months that I purchased nothing. I made up for it in other months, and I’ve averaged better than one order a month. I like VMP, and consider it a bargain (even if I have to start paying monthly, it’s still a bargain).
Most of what Meh sells doesn’t interest me, but I like the forum, which is a nice diversion. The forum on Casemates is not all that interesting, for the most part (excepting the discussion on the current offering, which is worth reading even if the wine itself doesn’t interest me).
Morningsave was okay for a while, but I really REALLY wish that you’d quit posting the Meh deal of the day there. It just clutters up the place, honestly. I purchased some things from there, but I have enough purses/hats/random stuff now, and don’t even look at it any more.
This is longer than I’d intended. I guess that I got carried away.
On the whole, I like it here. I like the Casemates offerings, and like the variety of wines offered. Woot is just sad, and since they revamped how comments work, and (as far as I can tell) tossed all the old ones out, or at least made them unavailable, I mostly go out of habit, and to answer (usually) the poll on the main page. With the exception of the last hurrah of Wine.Woot, I haven’t purchased anything in years from there, and I can’t see any reason to change.
Besides, what is this “Daybreak” you speak of? I’ve heard rumors that the world exists even before 7Am, but I’m doubtful.
@Shrdlu I had no idea they posted the deal of the day over there. Weird.
@Shrdlu yeah… Daybreak… Since when does day break at 11am?
sorry for picking literally the only hour the morning sun shines on our nation
Didn’t think y’all shipped to HI. Methinks the 11am misses the East coast commute window when people shouldn’t be trying to snag a deal on their phones. Then again, it hits the West coast right in the commute.
Items for sale on Meh are not always exclusive to Meh. It’s not unusual to see the same things turn up on dailysteals, for example. So why should they be exclusive on the mediocre family of sites? (I’d like it to be that Meh sells every single existing one of an item… wait, would I? I don’t know. Never mind.)
@walarney because then they’d be amazon! meh deals were supposed to be limited quantity sold at a good discount. Not something that could be sold everyday because they have a ton of them at “normal” prices you might find on other sites.