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Show HN: Ponzi.es – Startup sticker ponzi scheme
- personjerry 11y ago32 points, 35 minutes ago? Is this a voting ring? Edit: As mentioned below, also with 0 comments at the time (this was the first comment)
- mariocesar 11y agoI already print the address and get a mail envelope
- hellbanner 11y agoYou print the address and then an envelope arrives? Sorry, I'm not following how this relates to the voting ring
- mariocesar 11y ago"I get a mail envelope": I mean I search and found an envelope, and I'm ready to put the address on it, to later send it to the postal office. I was stating my enthusiasm with the idea.
- paublyrne 11y agoNot common to see the top story on HN have 0 comments, as it did when I loaded the page ...
- zachlatta 11y agoHonestly not sure. I've never had a post rise this quickly, though it's definitely fun to watch! Here's a screenshot of where people are visiting from: https://i.imgur.com/Of5xKOk.png https://i.imgur.com/Of5xKOk.png
- personjerry 11y agoPerhaps it's just that great an idea :) Quick, grow and monetize it!
- paublyrne 11y agoWhat did you use to generate this?
- maxw 11y agoWe're using piwik(https://piwik.org https://piwik.org) for analytics, which has a nice map view.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- archmikhail 11y agoI'm really surprised how few visitors were from the bay area, is that normal? Does anyone know the location breakdown of hacker news visitors? Edit: oh that was at 6am PT
- personjerry 11y agoI agree, especially with the tremendous amount of votes... Usually for the first 30 minutes or so you'll be lucky to get a handful of votes, which rapidly accelerates your post.
- hellbanner 11y agoThe submitting account has other stories which didn't earn many points, FWIW. But I agree that this is.. silly and IMHO not deserving of #1 spot on HN, there are some serious topics being discussed!
- personjerry 11y agoHm, not sure I agree with that second part. HN can find a number of non-serious things interesting, and I think this is at least a little interesting. The issue is, was it really THAT interesting?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 11y agoNo ponzi scheme is complete without a set of fake satisfied customers and bogus tesimonials! /joke
- mariocesar 11y agoYou got something here
- fortytw2 11y agoThis is awesome in every way. Talk about a fantastic project
- cwilkes 11y agoThis is an Internet age Ponzi scheme.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoNot really; while it does use some of its mechanisms, it lacks the crucial one: recursion.
- mikeash 11y agoHow so? Each new "investor's" sticker goes to "pay off" a previous one, and then they are in turn "paid off" with the stickers from two new "investors."
- pforpineapple 11y agoSeems pretty recursive to me.
- leereeves 11y agoIt's not a Ponzi scheme if startups donate stickers for them to give away.
- highace 11y agoIf I want to just buy a load of different startup/saas/tech stickers, is there a place I can do that?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- LukeB_UK 11y agoStickermule[0] and RedBubble[1] come into mind. [0] https://www.stickermule.com/ https://www.stickermule.com/ [1] http://www.redbubble.com/ http://www.redbubble.com/
- benwaffle 11y agoAnd http://www.unixstickers.com/ http://www.unixstickers.com/
- cflee 11y agoI don't recommend Redbubble, I just ordered some and they're cheap but the printing quality is just not very good. I have a few from Unixstickers though, they're printed properly. (no affiliation, just a customer)
- nissehulth 11y agoSome sell their own, like Github. http://github.myshopify.com/products/octodex-sticker-packs http://github.myshopify.com/products/octodex-sticker-packs
- djsumdog 11y agoI wonder if they'd honor the deal if I sent them a letter internationally...with an Australian 50¢ piece
- zachlatta 11y agoIf you send us an international stamp instead of a 50¢ piece, we'll honor it ;-).
- lorenzhs 11y agonot sure how to get a stamp for sending mail from the US to where I live honestly. But the idea is cool and thanks for considering internationals as well ;)
- thesimon 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon Might work if they are still sold in your country. A bit expensive though and not sure if they are willing to accept these, because they have to be exchanged for a stamp, they don't count as a stamp themselves.
- zachlatta 11y agoIf we can exchange it at a standard postal office, we'll do it.
- lorenzhs 11y agoThe article linked by thesimon states "UPU member postal services are obliged to exchange an IRC for postage, but are not obliged to sell them" so it looks like this would work. They cost 2€ here in Germany ($2.20) compared to $1.20 for a USPS First-Class Mail International Letter, so it's not that bad. Really cool!
- 11y ago
- ohitsdom 11y agoWhy not ask for 50 cents or a new stamp in the envelope? Including a stamp is easier in an envelope, and it should make prepping a return envelope simpler. Require "forever" stamps to protect yourself from a postal price hike.
- zachlatta 11y agoAh, we should update the website! If you send us a forever stamp instead of 50 cents, we'll honor it.
- ohitsdom 11y agoFun project, cheers!
- blakeyrat 11y agoYou should let people know not to send coins, too. Coins can get violently ejected from postal sorting machines and cause injuries. (And as general advice, if you're going to do a mail campaign like this in the future, it might be a good idea to actually chat to a postal carrier about it first.)
- jzwinck 11y agoYou're right that people should not send coins in regular envelopes. But of course people mail coins, keys, and binder clips pretty frequently. Do you think USPS employees stand around an open sorting machine just waiting to get hit in the face with a paperclip? I actually know someone who has worked on those machines for decades. He never told me anything other than that the machines might reject your letter, or your thumb drive might fall out and they'd not be able to find where to send it.
- rplnt 11y agoThat way you are losing 1 cent in profits.
- nicolethenerd 11y agoOr just have people mail you a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE)? Then you can just put the stickers in it and drop them in the mail (plus, you don't have to buy or address envelopes)
- rogeryu 11y agoI want PONIES!
- codeshaman 11y agoFrom Wikipedia: Ponzi's original scheme was based on the arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps; however, he soon diverted investors' money to make payments to earlier investors and himself. ... The profit that could be made by taking advantage of the differing postal rates in different countries to buy IRCs cheaply in one country and exchange them for stamps of a higher value in another country was the intended profit generator for a scheme operated by Charles Ponzi, which became the fraudulent Ponzi scheme.
- icehawk219 11y agoFor anyone interested in more information on this, or on Ponzi himself, I'd highly recommend giving Ponzi's Scheme[0] a read. It's a great book on the subject. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812968360 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812968360
- driverdan 11y ago"Ponzi: The Incredible True Story of the King of Financial Cons" is good too: http://smile.amazon.com/Ponzi-Incredible-Financial-Library-Larceny-ebook/dp/B000FC1BGU/ http://smile.amazon.com/Ponzi-Incredible-Financial-Library-L...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cpdean 11y agoGiven how many useless stickers I've been given at conferences this might go on for quite a while.
- devNoise 11y agoThat moment you see this and then wonder where your pile of stickers went.
- natch 11y agoWhy not ask for "one or more" stickers? (Still promising only two total in return). If you're not being purist about the ponzie part, that is. Then you might be able to carry it on a little longer.
- szhu 11y agoBecause they're being purist about the ponzie part
- benwaffle 11y agoIf I send 2 stickers will I get back 4?
- zachlatta 11y agoTo (somewhat) rate limit it, we'll only send 2 stickers back per envelope (regardless of whether the envelope has 1 sticker or 10 stickers in it).
- srameshc 11y agoAlways wanted that github sticker, never knew where to get from :)
- untothebreach 11y agogo to a conference that they sponsor (or at least have a booth at), they will be everywhere. I went to a small regional Python conference a couple years back and they were there.
- 91bananas 11y agohttp://github.myshopify.com/products/die-cut-github-stickers http://github.myshopify.com/products/die-cut-github-stickers
- daveguy 11y agoSelf sustaining version: Send us 3 stickers and postage. Get 2 unique stickers back. You get all the profits of the excess postage (assuming bulk rate) plus the extra sticker can go to a bin / advertising page of ALL THE STICKERS.
- pierrebazoge 11y agoLooks like they ride on the Notifuse successful initiative: "Free dev stickers, worldwide shipping" https://notifuse.com/stickers https://notifuse.com/stickers
- plesner 11y agoNit, but: it's not actually a Ponzi scheme. What made Ponzi's scheme a Ponzi scheme was not the postal coupons. It was pretending that investors were making huge profits to make them keep their money invested, and paying them with each other's money. At that point the coupons was just an alibi. Of course I don't know ponzi.es' long-term plan, maybe they'll start taking investment and promising huge returns. That'd be pretty funny. Though I don't know if you can legally run a Ponzi scheme, even an ironic one.
- mikeash 11y agoIsn't that exactly what this is? You "invest" a sticker, and you get a 100% return on your investment by receiving two stickers. It's not explicitly stated, but given the name and the context, I assume that the stickers you receive come from new "investors."
- decwakeboarder 11y agoA ponzi scheme would require a larger upfront sticker investment from new investors with large but unsustainable sticker returns over time. This is just a straight up 'sticker + $.50' for 2 stickers exchange.
- mikeash 11y agoI thought that a Ponzi scheme was simply one where returns to existing investors are paid from the capital contributed by new investors.
- jpablo 11y agoIt is, but for it to work you have to give the appearance that it is actually working for a long enough period of time. That requires exponential grow or most people reinvesting returns (so they don't realize there's no actual money to pay them back). If you give the returns immediately (the two stickers) with no option to reinvest, the ponzi scheme is going to run out of steam very quickly and there's no way this is going to attract a lot of people. In summary, this is a Ponzi Scheme, but not one that has a lot of chance of being sustained for very long.
- gtpasqual 11y agoWould you send it to the EU and take euros :)?
- timdorr 11y agoCan I just mail you postage instead of heavy quarters? I think that would be nicer to the USPS.
- zachlatta 11y agoYup! As long as it's a Forever stamp, we'll honor it :-).
- polynomial 11y agoWhat about a BTC address worth 50¢? 8D
- mathgeek 11y agoExchange rates can and will change while in transit.
- mmcclure 11y agoThe nit picking in these comments seems, for once, to actually be in good spirit, but this is a really fun idea! I would love to do this with startup / event t-shirts so I could (eventually) clean out my drawers...too bad sizing clothes is a little more complicated than stickers.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoWhich of the examples is considered to be a "startup"? The featured one is a 15-year-old spinoff of a public company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The second one is an actual public company with 4000 employees. The third one might be sort of a startup, but they have over 100 million dollars in VC backing.
- zachlatta 11y agoFor the sake of simplicity, we're using it as a blanket term for "tech company" and are happy with stickers for anything from a tiny 1 person company to a behemoth like Google (or an event like a hackathon).
- saganus 11y agoWouldn't it be better if you use "tech company" term instead? If the blanket term is already widely accepted, I see no point in using "startup" instead, as that will probably cause much more confusion.
- zachlatta 11y agoWe originally had "tech company" on the site, but after showing it to a few friends and people that were crashing at our house, it was clear that people had a better understanding of the site when we used "startup", so we decided to go with it.
- fluxsauce 11y agoIn case anyone was curious, mailing cash is legal according to this Snopes Article - www.snopes.com/legal/postal/sendcash.asp Can't find a current USPS FAQ, though.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoWho would think this was not legal, and why?
- fluxsauce 11y agoMailing physical cash? Because it's a security concern? (theft)
- thrownaway2424 11y agoYou never got a birthday card in the mail with a $10 bill inside?
- fluxsauce 11y agoJust socks, maybe the $10 bills were stolen ;-) A transient mailing of discrete paper cash is different than a call-to-action requesting coins that will be delivered to the same address on a regular basis.
- callumlocke 11y agoWhy would a security concern (which would apply to mailing anything of value, not just cash) imply any legal issue?
- fluxsauce 11y agoIf a particular address was known to consistently receive cash in the mail, wouldn't that make it a target of theft? As someone who lives in the Bay Area and has seen car windows smashed for the change in the cupholder and a friend's motorcycle knocked over to get the flattened soda can that was being used as a stabilizer, yes, that's a security concern.
- melvinmt 11y agoCurious to know what the privacy policy is with this thing.
- jkrejci 11y agoWhy.
- drmattyg 11y agoNo, seriously, why is this even worth spending time on? WTF? This isn't even amusing. It's just random.
- rdancer 11y agoYou've just defined modern art.
- sohcahtoa 11y agoBecause they've got 5000 GitHub stickers left over from a conference and don't know what to do with them? Personally I love it.
- austinstorm 11y agoLOVE IT
- mydpy 11y agoI bet a lot of companies would just give you their stickers, simply to take advantage of your distribution network. It would be funny if this became a legitimate business idea (while the trend is alive).
- zachlatta 11y agoWe've actually already had a couple reach out, but we've turned them down because we want to see how long we can sustain this by "crowdsourcing" stickers (i.e. being a ponzi scheme).
- pearjuice 11y agoCan I also send you a dollar and get back four stamps for return postage?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wfbarks 11y agothe amount of time and effort I'm willing to spend to get start up stickers is probably about equal to the effort it takes to type in the address to mail them to. probably less.
- collinmanderson 11y agoAre you going to do all this work by hand?
- zachlatta 11y agoTo be honest, we weren't expecting this large of a response. But yes!
- thecuriousone 11y agoInspired by what you guys done. I created one based on favours :). http://ponzifavour.com/ http://ponzifavour.com/
- zachlatta 11y agoAh! This is awesome. Just subscribed :-).
- Cerium 11y agoUpdate: Received two stickers in response! Very cool. Thanks Max for running the scheme. http://imgur.com/uwnXc86 http://imgur.com/uwnXc86