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1. It's not fraud. They were proving the market at an early stage while living on a pizza diet. 2. Their startup now does what it says on the tin. And it's now
by echelon 1y ago
1. It's not fraud. They were proving the market at an early stage while living on a pizza diet.
2. Their startup now does what it says on the tin. And it's now a unicorn.
3. To those claiming this was "unethical" - a large company providing this service would still record calls and have QA / engineers listening to calls to improve the service.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago+1, this strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is actually incredible manual. Once you proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this.
- collingreen 1y agoAnd as long as you much a buck or two then who cares if you lie a little to the customers about what is actually happening!
- pinkmuffinere 1y agocustomers pay for the service, not the method-by-which-the-service-is-provided. If they explicitly sold it as a service without a human in the loop, then I think that's bad. If they just sold transcription..... then this is transcription.
- collingreen 1y agoI agree!
- throwaway5465 1y ago[dead]
- dragonwriter 1y agoWhat the news article and the original post from the CTO clearly and describes is fraud: the service being sold on explicit, false pretenses. What the later post from the CEO describes (and presents as a calrification, but it conflicts with rather than clarifies the initial description) is not fraud, but the question is was the CTO being loose with the truth to paint a rebel image or is the CEO. being loose with the truth to try to protect the company image after the CTO’s post got picked up by multiple news outlets and people were correctly pointing out that it described fraud?