I absolutely love these "$EXISTING_BUSINESS for $TOTALLY_RANDOM_THING" startups, and this might just be my favourite. What does "Pandora for Lunch" even mean? Is it Pandora the streaming radio service or Pandora the jewellery company? Neither seems at all applicable to lunch!
The streaming radio service. You sign up, tell us about your diet, and every week we email you a calendar of lunches from awesome local restaurants. Easily modify the suggestions with our online interface, or just sit back and let the good food come.
That article does little to justify the "X for Y" meme. The reason for it is that "X" is famous and successful already and people are trying to capitalise on that, and because a three word summary is pithy and easy to remember.
As to your startup - Pandora is a streaming radio service which actually, you know, streams radio, as a service. Emailing lunch menus (or calendars, or whatever) is not as to lunch as streaming radio is to traditional radio, so your "X for Y" makes very little sense!
If you agree with the underlying premise that a good high concept pitch is essential to a startup, then those seem like pretty good reasons to adopt this sort of meme, at least if the comparison holds.
Anyway, I'm surprised you don't see how this particular comparison holds. Pandora auto-suggests and delivers musical content over the course of a few hours or so. Forkable auto-suggests and delivers "nutritional content" over the course of a week or so. Does that make sense to you?
Pandora delivers music that you can listen to; unless your startup delivers food that I can eat, I don't really see how the two are all that similar - unless you're suggesting people print out the emails and then eat them.
But hey, perhaps I'm too stupid for your startup (usually I just make a sandwich for lunch, so I'll probably cope either way!).
I see the where confusion is coming from. We do in fact deliver the food. I stated that in the above comment. It's also in our AngelList profile and I alluded to it in my first response ("let the good food come"). You don't seem stupid to me. But perhaps you are reading too quickly?
The image of people printing out emails and eating them is pretty amusing, though. :)
I've been known to print out the more objectionable emails from my clients and eat them...
OK, great, you deliver food. If your AngelList profile is your main publicly visible page at this point, you should - in my humble opinion - make it really clear what it is your service actually does: however slowly I read "we send you a calendar of lunches from awesome local restaurants", it doesn't suggest to me that you actually deliver food. The second paragraph does mention delivery. Make your copy accessible even to people who read quickly and don't care very much and you won't go far wrong (with your copy, anyway!).
Ha, I read that to mean streaming business meetings with strangers, to help you discover people outside your network and habits... it might be a cool solution to a problem I have, which is how to meet people who have a different worldview and background (one solution was just moving countries). A kind of anonymous Weave with recommendations...
The brain is an organ, and medical terminolgy is very clear that something like major depressive disorder is a disease that adversely affects that organ.
This is medical science. Its really not up for debate. If you are really questioning the entire field of medical science and the vast corpus of research on mental illness, the only people who will take you seriously are lay-persons.
And thats precisely the problem. While I trust you mean well, attitudes like yours are extremely dangerous because they increase stigma and disuade people from seeking medical help for treatable illnesses.
The question of mental illness is much more complicated than that. This is an issue with a rich and long history and shoe-horning mental illnesses into biological diseases (I suspect) will prove to be a foolish error historically. It's wishful thinking.
It's true that yes, biochemically, the brain's abnormal activity often correlates with subjective experience. But a) the subjective nature of the condition is what makes it so damn tricky and b) we don't know what's causing what. It could easily be the case that an individual (organism) in a bad (social) environment leads to a biochemically abnormal brain state. Treating the brain state is like playing whack-a-mole. There could also be complex feedback loops. We don't know. We're throwing shit at the wall right now.
Though there is good evidence for the basic nervous system strengthening properties of SSRI's, there's also very compelling evidence that SSRI's have absolutely zero impact in credible, controlled studies. From my personal experience and observations, I believe SSRI's can be good at 'stopping the bleeding', which sits well with why they are often known for having a dampening effect. But that will only get you so far, because there's no set way of determining what 'cured' is. There's no such thing as normal in the same way that it's normal to be free of strep throat. Functioning and succeeding in society has positive qualities, but can sometimes be at the expense of individualized growth and healthiness.
The point is, mental life is really complicated, and possibly wrapped up in broader, deeper things like spirituality, love, and economic and social conditions. Your bio-reductionist view (which isn't an insult, it's simply the view of much of the middle to upper middle class) doesn't match reality in my experience. I've found that most people suffer deeply with modern conditions (the less neurotic they are, the less they're aware of the causes of their malcontent) because there are fewer sources of authority, purpose, or truth. A la carte medicine and treatments won't solve that.
Besides all that, the drug industry just stinks of hypocrisy and deserves its popular skepticism. If a sufferer is to experiment with drug treatments, ayahuasca (and similar) should be legal and just as available as XYZ SSRI's.
Pardon the off-topic reply, but I'd like to connect with you. In the breadbox article the other day, you mentioned there's an opportunity to compete with GrubHub on price. Check out forkable.com. You can reach me at joe at forkable dot com.
This gave me a chance to collect my thoughts. I sent the following email to my representatives. Thanks, Sina, for your role in organizing this.
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I think I understand what is going on. The folks at the top look at all the huge centralized information stores like Facebook, Google, Verizon, etc., and I guess they think, "well, it's gonna get collected anyway, so we may as well have access to it." President Obama actually hinted at this line of thinking when initially caught off-guard by the Snowden revelations. Instead of responding directly, he deflected, suggesting that what we really needed was a larger conversation about mass collection of data, i.e. not just the collection by governments.
The trouble with mass data collection, either by governments or private entities, is that it gives the possessors of such information extreme amounts of power. Left unchecked, it will almost certainly lead to severe economic and political corruption. The free market is compromised when a small group of people can spy on the private communications of executives and other business people, for example by stealing trade secrets or conducting insider trading. Meanwhile, democracy is compromised when politically active people, including politicians and activists, are made subject to intense scrutiny. Since virtually no one is totally free from legal or moral wrongdoing, the possibilities for politically motivated blackmail and retaliation are massive. And of course the data collection has serious chilling effects on free speech and freedom of the press.
If no course correction is made, the U.S. will become more and more oligarchic, more and more like China and Russia. This is unfortunate not just for its implications vis-a-vis individual freedom, but also from a larger perspective. This century we are faced with a diverse array of extremely difficult problems: economic, political, social, and environmental. Non-democratic governments have a historical tendency to fight with one another rather than cooperate, so it is hard to imagine how we will effectively confront these problems in the absence of strong democratic institutions.
What worries me is that some of the people in positions of power may actually believe that this massive data collection is somehow necessary to protect Americans from terrorism. But it is patently obvious that terrorism is not, and never has been, a serious threat to the personal safety of most Americans. Over the past two decades, something on the order of 800,000 men, women and children have died in car crashes, while around 3,000 have died as a result of terrorism. If this were a matter of saving lives, we'd be much better off fighting a "War on Car Crashes" than a "War on Terrorism." If this is purportedly an economic issue, i.e. the fear that a dirty bomb will go off in Manhattan and upset commerce, well, the fact is much worse things have happened (i.e. Hiroshima) and economies have recovered. This perspective may sound cynical, but in truth it is idealistic. I am not dismissing the tragedy of the death of perhaps thousands of people, but rather saying that, for the sake of a free and democratic society, such sacrifice is worthwhile.
The idea that "collection is going to happen anyway, so we may as well have access" is not unreasonable, but it is ultimately self-defeating. What we need is real leadership on this problem. Not only is there no strong voice against mass data collection, but the overwhelming thrust of the government is to reach its tentacles as deeply into the data gathering machine as possible. Instead of working to lessen the danger, the government is acting to accentuate it, amassing and centralizing even more data, and meanwhile using its media access to legitimize such activities to the public.
Again, what is needed is strong leadership. We need a group of people at the highest levels of federal power to put up a fight in congress and explain clearly to the American people why, in fact, we are on a very dangerous road. If not corrected for, this road will lead to the end of the democratic experiment, and a very uncertain future for our children. I hope that you, as my elected representative, will seriously consider taking a stand on this issue.
Thanks! In fact there is a filter (the far left tab), but perhaps that needs to be made more obvious, or there should be a better introduction in the app.
That's me. And actually, it's ok. I never expected this revenue stream would last forever, and it's the core business --- the app recommendations --- that's crucial. That's going well. We've got tons of happy users, a few great engineers, some cash in the bank, and several interested investors. In the long, in fact, this move by Apple will only accentuate the need for a good app discovery engine to help find everything outside of the top-50.
I found that user retention only went up marginally when the rewards were added. The main advantages are that is provides a good hook and a near-term business model.
And to answer your question: Yes, very much so. And growing.
Just curious to see, just how profitable are you? Are you saying you launched the app without rewards at first and were making money from day 1? If so that's impressive.
I'm just about to go on a hike, but let me respond quickly. I do appreciate tough criticism, but I think there are some rash judgments and misconceptions here.
1) just because the recommendations aren't suited to you doesn't mean they're bad in general. Hacker news is very special, sophisticated demographic. The recs are currently optimized for a more main stream audience. We get lots of feedback from users attesting to this. Certainly there is lots of room for improvement tho and that's why I want to hire so badly. We care a great deal about the product.
2) There's no bait and switch or anything underhanded going on with the gift cards. We get a certain amount when a user downloads an app, and we credit the user a certain percentage to work their way toward a reward. We need to expire point of inactive users to prevent an accounting nightmare. Many users are getting the cards every day.
Hope that clears things up. I certainly understand the skepticism, and again I welcome tough criticism.
I don't think you understand my criticism. App publishers are paying you to pay people to download their app. How can that be the basis for quality, objective recommendations?
Or let me try with a question: Explain how exactly your app helps people find the good app they need in the haystack of bad apps? If you don't do that, then this is an outright scam. People are paying you money for something. Please tell me what they are getting.
Out of curiousity, what does it mean for the recs to be optimized for a mainstream audience instead of a sophisticated one? Different audiences will like different types of apps, sure, but why wouldn't the same basic recommendation algorithm work for everyone? Unless of course the assumption is simply that "mainstream" users are less discriminating, and the recommendations don't have to be as individually targeted.
If you're interested in becoming co-founder of a growing, cash-flow positive business in a giant market, please reach out.
In short, Forkable is "Pandora for Lunch". AngelList profile: https://angel.co/forkable
My email can be guessed from my first name, "Joe"