7 ms·

Whenever I hear about these I always wonder what the people that found them are thinking. I mean, what type of person would you have to be to decide to try and

• wpietri 12y ago
  I mentor at startup events, so I know exactly what kind of people they are. The good ones are people who just haven't thought it through. They've found some sort of demand, and they're doing the standard hack-the-system thing that the startup culture trains them to do. Once it's rolling, it's like Mencken said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The bad ones are the sort of entitled douchebags that would have previously gone into investment banking or some other industry where the money's great and ethics aren't emphasized. But now startups are the high-status, high-money thing, so that's what they're after.
  • eevilspock 12y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising, a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. The downvotes[1] come fast when I point out this moral and cognitive dissonance, usually without any counter argument since they just want me to go away. When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest. Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs[2]. The idea that advertising gives us free web content and services is utter bullshit. - [1] The cowardly downvotes with no counter argument have already started. Upton Sinclair is the actual source of the quote at the top. A wise man who got a bunch of downvotes in his time. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811
    • profquail 12y ago
      > "Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising" Citation please? There are many "internet businesses" that don't derive their revenue from advertising, e.g., AWS, Dropbox, Netflix. Spotify derives some revenue from advertising, but their core business is subscriptions. ad nauseum
      • eevilspock 12y ago
        Count all of the web content you've consumed and all the web services you've used in the past year. Now count all the ones you've paid for. Also, those paid-for services you mention are of such high quality (to you, not advertisers) because you pay for them. You are the customer not the product, as they say.
        • gizmo686 12y ago
          That isn't entirely fair. There are some websites that offer a free tier in the hopes that enough users will buy the paid tier. I suppose one could call this a form of advertising, but Dropbox giving me 2gb free does not seem to the type of manipulative advertising you are referring to (and is not a revenue source for them).
          • eevilspock 12y ago
            Granted. But it does't change the numbers very much. Keep counting.
        • enraged_camel 12y ago
          You're right, and it's depressing that you're being downvoted. Then again, HN can be a very hostile place if you bring an unpopular perspective to a discussion, even if that perspective is presented with clarity of thought and reason.
          • vdaniuk 12y ago
            Unpopular? Really? "Advertising is bad" is one of the most supported memes on HN.
  • bhauer 12y ago
    > it's like Mencken said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." H.L. Mencken? The Internet appears to ascribe that quote to Upton Sinclair.
    • wpietri 12y ago
      Sorry! When I searched for the quote, I even typed in "sinclair salary". No idea how Mencken crept in there.
  • codezero 12y ago
    This is exactly right, from the creator of ReservationHop: "To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions." http://brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-became-the-most-hated-person-in-san-francisco-for-a-day/ http://brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-became-the-most-hated-pe...
    • mjmahone17 12y ago
      It's great how he compares himself to two NYC startups: https://www.zurvu.com/info/guests https://www.zurvu.com/info/guests and http://www.killerrezzy.com/pages/about-us http://www.killerrezzy.com/pages/about-us The difference is Zurvu actually partners with the restaurants, helping them move empty tables. They may request a certain number of tables be free per night, but because they partner with the restaurants (that they prominently display), that presumably comes with kickbacks to the restaurant in question. And Killer Rezzy's goal is to allow restaurants to monetize reservations. While this may suck for those of us who don't want to pay an entrance fee to eat, it's certainly not harming the businesses they depend on.
    • jw_ 12y ago
      This guy seems intensely clueless. "If somebody is willing to pay for it, is it really unethical?" There we go - if there's a paying market for something, it's totally ethical. Off I go to found assasins.io - murder for hire disrupted.
      • gfodor 12y ago
        This seems taken out of context. I don't think he was making a blanket statement, he was asking if people are willing to pay for this particular service, is it unethical? Ie, is it reasonable to say that if people are willing to pay for restaurant reservations, specifically, does that say anything about the ethics of it. Not to say that it is a good point, but I don't think it's some moral statement that paying for something makes it de facto ethical in general.
• crapshoot101 12y ago
  I'm going to disagree some here. When people claim starups aren't creating value, I always push back - just because they aren't creating value to you does not mean that they are't creating value to someone else. In this case, people value reservations; its the same thing with concerts or sporting events with scalpers - the price does not reflect market value - that value is being allocated already to people who may not perceive it as such. Now, artists can choose to counter this in obvious ways (Louis CK had a great approach by requiring ID's to limit scalping potential), but if they choose to ignore it, I think there's a reasonable business opportunity. Now if a restaurant chose to counter this TOS by say , requiring a credit card for each reservation, they are well within their rights.
  • wpietri 12y ago
    Scalpers do not create value. At a concert the value is being created by the performers, and it's not like scalpers create seats or make the show longer. They just shift value around to people with more money.
    • rahimnathwani 12y ago
      Scalpers do create value. After a complete scalping transaction: - the original ticket purchaser is happier with the cash received than with the ticket they had before - the final ticket purchaser is happier with the ticket than with the cash they paid - the scalper is happy with his/her profit - the promoter's/venue's revenue is unaffected So, three people are better off. Value has been created.
      • neumann 12y ago
        I do not understand this logic. What original ticket purchaser? Scalpers aren't like eBay. They have bought up the tickets from the venue at certain amount, depriving others of a limited resource at that same value, and now offering it a higher value to people who didn't have the means to buy it as fast as the scalper. The disruption the scalper is introducing into an existing system benefits nobody but themselves.
• Andys 12y ago
  Maybe the restaurants could enjoy higher margins if they made great websites which let you bid for last-minute reservations?
  • usefulcat 12y ago
    Because talking to a human for 30 seconds is that much of a chore when making a reservation? And how, exactly, would that do anything to prevent reservation scalping without adversely affecting the user experience of making a reservation or making life even easier for reservation scalpers? Probably it will be easy to use and easy for scalpers to screen scrape, or the UX will be a some kind of CAPTCHA-filled monstrosity. Now that I think about it, forget about restaurants and reservation scalpers; if you could develop a truly superior CAPTCHA replacement, that would be orders of magnitude more valuable.
    • Andys 12y ago
      OK, how about prepaid meals?
    • icebraining 12y ago
      Because talking to a human for 30 seconds is that much of a chore when making a reservation? In my experience, the problem is not the 30 seconds call, it's the minutes of waiting to get someone free to answer. Most restaurants can't exactly afford a call center. There was a story recently on HN of a restaurant who did just that successfully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786
• onewaystreet 12y ago
  Right now they are taking all of the money for themselves, but in the future, if the service becomes popular, you will likely see them work directly with restaurants and share the revenue. The whole point of this service is to make reservations into something that can be bought. This obviously works best with the cooperation of the restaurants.
  • lotharbot 12y ago
    > "you will likely see them work directly with restaurants and share the revenue" Why wait for the future? If some startup thinks that selling reservations at restaurant X is profitable, they should be partnering with restaurant X right now to sell their reservations. They should be sharing in the potential downside with the restaurant -- if they book reservations they don't sell, and the restaurant has to turn down paying customers, the startup should pay some cost for that.
    • onewaystreet 12y ago
      Because it's very hard to get small businesses, especially restaurants, to signup for unproven new services. This is why you had companies like Groupon spending millions on hiring local sales people.
      • potatolicious 12y ago
        That's an excuse, not a reason. "Because doing the right thing is too hard" is not a valid reason for doing the wrong thing. "Let me do the wrong thing, I promise (disclaimer: not a real promise) to do the right thing once I've gained sufficient profit" is even less of a reason.
        • gfodor 12y ago
          Bullshit. Many, many startups have a chicken and egg problem like this and artificially create demand or supply through 'questionable' tactics in order to prove the business model simultaneously to themselves and to their potential customers. This guy can now go into restaurants and tell them how much people are willing to pay for their reservations. Nobody else can do that, and that just might make the difference to getting those restaurants on board with his product. Once the engine is humming then of course not only will it be unnecessary to keep doing what he's doing but it won't scale anyway. There's often no other option and the ends in fact do justify the means if the net result is a more efficient market for both parties once it has been bootstrapped up "in the small." Of course, this requires you to not be an evil scumbag and be honest with yourself, but I see no reason to assume a path of execution is inherently evil, the intent and overall strategy greatly matters.
• benatkin 12y ago
  The restaurant probably gets about the same amount of money on average, if not slightly more. It's easy to say that the jerk that uses this kind of app leaves less of a tip or takes up table space longer without spending more but on closer examination I don't see why this would be the case. They likely just pay more overall, and the app gets the extra.
  • saurik 12y ago
    You missed the part where these reservations are being held with risk of not succeeding in selling the spots: it isn't that the person who is sitting at the table is less profitable for the restaurant, but that a bunch of reservations are made that might in the end not ever succeed in being sold by the website. Assume for a second that the restaurant also charged for reservations and had cancellation fees for no-shows (which arguably they should, but the economics and expectations works out that most normal customers would be turned off by this): then the risk of the no-show transfers from the restaurant to this website, and it is more clear why this business is just a parasite.
    • benatkin 12y ago
      Ah yes. I thought about that but forgot to mention it. I think this could be mostly solved by some combination of a) canceling reservations (if the place is busy these would often be replaced by a waiting list or walk-ins), b) avoiding excess inventory, c) using unused reservations themselves or having friends use them
• EdwardDiego 12y ago
  And what kind of customer wants to give a fake name to dine? The feeling of dishonesty aside, I can imagine it going hilariously wrong if automatically generated. "Yes, my name is Eduardo ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, it is a proud family name, we are far better than the scum of House Segmentation Fault".
• walshemj 12y ago
  Restaurants are not exactly Lilly white they have huge mark-ups of drink and food, deserts especially. They also take advantage by paying staff less the minimum wage and relying on tips to make a living - a campaign for a living wage for restaurant workers would be a better use of "josh" and those like him time. If foxcon treated their staff in the way the average restaurants did there would be an outcry