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I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster
- dangus 5y agoI don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this. I thought the article was an indictment of our culture’s relationship with death more than anything being wrong with Grace itself. So many families simply don’t have a plan for what happens after they die. They leave it until the death actually happens, a time when nobody really wants to be talking money. Of course, Grace never actually turned a profit. While the author felt like he was being dirty, simultaneously the payments he was taking weren’t even covering the cost of doing business. I’d say the only clearly shady behavior was the hospital data integration, something that I’m sure is a fixture of funeral services companies. For sure, the business of death isn’t for everyone. I could make an analogy to how I’d never be a power line technician or wind turbine maintenance person. Nothing you can say and no safety mechanism will ever convince me to willingly climb a ladder higher than 3 feet tall. Perhaps the lesson here is to think about why you’re starting a business before you do it. Who are you doing it for? Is it your idea or someone else’s idea? Is it a product or service you’re already passionate about? If it is, you’re probably going to have a much easier time with it.
- foxyv 5y agoJust a funny thought, but ladders about 3 feet tall are significantly more dangerous than the ladders in wind turbines. Not that they are more pants poopingly scary though. https://cultureofsafety.thesilverlining.com/safety-blog/2013/05/ask-the-experts-at-what-height-do-most-ladder-injuries-occur https://cultureofsafety.thesilverlining.com/safety-blog/2013...
- rightbyte 5y agoIf elderly would climb wind turbines I guess those numbers would change.
- foxyv 5y agoOr if people climbing 3 foot ladders did so in full harness using an ascending device.
- AndrewOMartin 5y agoSimilar thoughts on the same idea here. Taking The Emergency Exit From A Wind Turbine - Tom Scott https://youtu.be/UWSckm8zTc8?t=80 https://youtu.be/UWSckm8zTc8?t=80
- dangus 5y agoI thought of my original comparison because I had watched that video!!
- dangus 5y agoI guess I'll have to bump my ladder limit down to 2 feet! ;-)
- wutbrodo 5y ago> I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this I dunno, the whole "business turned me into a monster" bit is a little thin given that he opens his story with a VC pitch that he secures by melodramatically faking grief over his uncle's death. The guy seems like a little bit of a psycho, who became a little more of a psycho through desensitization.
- fuzxi 5y agoThe business idea is solid at its core but he describes getting turned down because he didn't superficially "fit" as a funeral director. People tell sob stories for little gain all the time, so I don't think telling a small one to get his company off the ground makes him a psycho.
- wutbrodo 5y agoDe gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose. Faking crocodile tears over a family member's recent death is well over the psycho line for me, and "but he had to if he wanted to get money!" is not an especially convincing rebuttal.
- chirau 5y agoIsn't this also what Empathy ( https://www.empathy.com https://www.empathy.com ) does? Grief and death are a business as well, and being good at it does not make you a monster. You just have to have the stomach for it. It's kind of like those guys whose sole job is to come in and fire people, like George Clooney in Up In The Air. Someone has got to do it.
- 55555 5y agoA common source of loss for investors. Funding someone in a moment of strength who ends up not having the nerve to follow through on what they said they could do. Or weakness, depending on whether you look at it from a business perspective or a moral perspective.
- sytelus 5y agoIsn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run those but does funeral services be government run? If no, then making profits is necessary and someone needs to do it.
- lupire 5y agoSomeone does, but not a a growth at all costs VC-backed startup. While fictional, HBO's Six Feet Under touches on this.
- cafard 5y agoThomas Lynch wrote a book that I remember as interesting as far as I read it, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334876 https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334876 .
- beaconstudios 5y agoNot everything has to happen via the medium of commerce or government. Funerals are something that is ideally suited to being a communal effort, or it would be if communal living weren't dying off.
- rualca 5y agoWishing that a service should be provided by a community instead of a business does not address the fact that it is a service, and one which has a constant demand and an inherent need to be offloaded to a third party. Once specialization is demanded from the service, the "communal" label becomes meaningless.
- beaconstudios 5y agoIt /did/ used to be provided by communities. Funerals are traditionally handled by the church, an arrangement which seemed to work for a long time and doesn't contain the dilemma of impersonal and potentially exploitative interactions that entail commercial transactions. Communities have specialisations too. Unfortunately the community seems to be dying with the secularisation of society which only leaves government and business to tackle things.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago/shrug, I would have taken over given the chance.
- lupire 5y agoThe headline is a lie, right? There no "Uber" part. I guess that's the point of the quote marks, to contrast all the bullshit lies and phony origin stories and pitch decks of the VC world , against the reality of the work your business does. There's plenty of room for ethical mortuary companies to make money providing value and distrupting a deeply exploitative industry. But maybe it can't be done with (ironically named in this case) culture capital.
- jiofih 5y agoThe “Uber for …” came to mean any kind of service that you get by pressing a button on your phone. Hence the overuse. It’s just a startup trope now.
- crusty 5y agoOr maybe ^that^ with a business model requiring it to be operated as a heartless, profiteering vulture for success. That's usually where my mind goes when I read "Uber" - not as succinct as Evilcorp but whatever.
- twobitshifter 5y agoUber = you own nothing and use your digital platform to connect the people doing the actual work (cremation) with those that need it (grieving families) Owning their own crematory as proposed in the end would have been much less of an “Uber for” business.
- coward76 5y agoFuneral industry needs an intervention, the way some states fight against pay day loan predators. These are people at their most vulnerable and are being taken for a ride.
- mistrial9 5y agoin some US States, the elected representatives have close and vocal ties to the Pay-Day loan industry
- prirun 5y agoMaybe a new COO would have been a better move. Her figure of $5-10M for a crematory seemed way off to me - it's basically a glorified oven in a building - so I did a little research and found this: https://howtostartanllc.com/business-ideas/crematorium https://howtostartanllc.com/business-ideas/crematorium It says to budget $100-250K to get started, which seems a lot more reasonable than $10M.
- twobitshifter 5y agoDid you adjust for LA real estate prices?
- boublepop 5y agoThe nummer wasn’t for the crematorium, it was for the entire runway of the business which included a crematorium in order to become profitable and get to the point where they would be an attractive acquisition target.
- horstmeyer 5y agoYou weren't a monster, just an effective capitalist.
- krapp 5y agoTomato, tomato.
- crusty 5y agoQuestion... How is this a $2M startup? They raised $2M but wouldn't that have been on a higher valuation. I feel like the norm is to report the "$N startup" with the valuation, not the finding round haul. And that's still the BS machine's version. A company that never turned a profit isn't really a such-and-such dollar startup so much as loss, bad gamble, write off, or the like - in non-BS parlance