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Let's reminisce about the time when tech subsidized the cost of living
It's pretty clear that those times are over, but I'm sure many of us remember the heydays of VC funded tech extravagance. These are the ones that come to my mind, hoping to hear others experience.
- At one point, uberpool was cheaper than the cost of public transport in the city.
- No sales tax on Amazon!
- So many promotions and code to get you to join in on their platform. This was also before they try to get you to subscribe to their monthly plans.
It wasn’t really tech subsidizing the cost of living, it was just unsustainable business models.
All of the companies people have mentioned knew they had unsustainable business models. They just wanted to corner the market and then raise their raise prices to gouge people because of their market dominance.
Except MoviePass. Those people were just idiots who had no fucking clue what they were doing. I sure did cost them a whole lot of money though. I calculated it after they shut it down and they lost an average of something like $50 per month on me.
I got a free Google Fiber t-shirt in 2015 that they sent out to our region when they first announced expansion here. Now in 2023, I actually still have the t-shirt but still no Google Fiber :(
Interestingly enough, Doordash still sends very good promos that can make your meal pretty close to free in certain circumstances.
I still have my Google Fiber T-Shirt -- and my Google Fiber! I'm in Kansas City, which was the first "Fiber City." The shirt has held up surprisingly well, given that I wear and wash it pretty frequently. Might be moving soon; going to be real sad when I have to give it up.
Who could forget Netflix streaming? $8 for almost anything you could want; way cheaper than cable. Now, we might as well be back to the days of cable packages... Hope the same thing doesn't happen to music streaming, or I may have to dust off the ol' Jolly Roger flag.
MoviePass at $10/mo for unlimited movies. The best way I ever found to take giant piles of VC cash and shovel it straight into a furnace.
Since they gave you a debit card and authorized it for the average ticket price, people figured out that it they went to a cheap theater, they could get some concessions on it too. I never tried that trick, but I definitely saw a bunch of movies I would never have been interested in paying for myself.
When Uber Eats was new in London, the app would automatically give you a voucher to get the next order free (or maybe like 75% discount? I forget, this was years ago, but it was significant) if the current one took >30 minutes to arrive. There was no limit per customer and it still applied even if the current order had also been made with a voucher.
I think I paid full price maybe twice in a three month period, and I ate well from them a couple of times per week pretty much every week the whole time! It sure as hell got their order numbers up, I’ll give them that.
[Edit] Curiosity got the better of me and I had to look it up, it was even better than I remembered: a flat £20 off even if the existing order was less than that. You could literally get a more than 100% discount and they weren’t screwing over the drivers and restaurants yet!
For a while, a grocery delivery service here in Australia was offering the first order free for new accounts. Each order contained the ingredients for 4 or 5 meals, selected from a menu of meal choices. New accounts were verified in the usual ways, and also by checking if the associated credit card had been used previously to make an order. So, your free food deliveries were limited mainly by your ability access new credit card numbers :)
Simple. The goal of most startups is not profitability, it’s marketshare. You can reach profitability later in the life cycle of your company.
To gain marketshare, you offer insane deals to your customers to get them in the door. Your investors will be supplying the rest of the funding.
The startup I work for is just now, after 6 years of being in business, shifting our focus from hyper growth to a “path to profitability”. That’s going to take several years.
Now that Uber, Amazon, DoorDash, etc. have marketshare, they can start boosting profits.
Amazon used to be free if you had a .edu email. Now it's half off. Still a good deal, but not in most students' budgets.
Google Play Music was $5 when it came out and included YouTube Red.
The early days of Twitter before all the influencers showed up. I got SO much free stuff to hand out to friends. And tickets to events. It was awesome!