YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Mayer

lines on the record: 86
first: 2019-03-12
most recent: 2019-03-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so I spoke earlier about the importance of having people who genuinely want you to thrive. And I didn't have a lot of people like that in my life up until I met my wife. I didn't actually know that was a thing. When she came into my life, I suddenly had this incentive because somebody else wanted me to do well. And so I think the kindest, I think wanting somebody else to do well regardless of how that reflects on you is fundamentally kind. There's a lot of people in my life that have helped me and obviously I'm very appreciative of that, but there's very few truly selfless acts. A lot of people help you because it helps them. But truly wanting somebody to thrive and do better is very selfless and has been is something that I'm truly thankful to have in my life.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The wages at the bottom part of the distribution, and I think that's a good thing. That's a very noble cause. But you can never get the bottom above the median. And I actually was talking to somebody and be like, well, you can't have people making the average salaries. And they said, why not? They should be making the average salaries. And that's a road to destruction. Economically, it's just trying to do things that are literally impossible and mandating them from the top. So I think that's a very controversial opinion. I think it's something to explore, and that's widely applicable to anything that in general is a good sentiment will be overrated.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Society like this, but we have this aversion to lower quality healthcare for people that we give them for free. I don't understand why we couldn't have healthcare for everyone, but more basic. But that doesn't exist because we have this aversion to anything that feels unequal. So we need to pull everybody at the bottom up to slightly above the median. And if you keep pulling people at the bottom up to slightly above the median forever, that just creates constant cost inflation. It's literally impossible when you think about it. Yeah, when you think about it from the fundamentals, you can't constantly pull the bottom above the median in anything. Same for income inequality, for instance, like there's some degree of optimal income inequality. Who knows if we're there? I don't really want to weigh in on that. But I've definitely seen people advocating for increasing”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea of equality is something that people can't criticize. People are way too scared to criticize that. And so anything that's advanced that might make the world seem like a more equal place is generally with plenty of people who are willing to advocate for it. And very few that are willing to go on the record to resist that. And so in general, any very popular idea that's probably good will be applied in a lot of ways that are really bad. And I can come up with a couple examples of equality that are bad. We talked about education, giving everybody an equal education means you're going to drop people at the bottom and people at the top. So there are ways to make education less equal that might actually improve outcomes for everybody on average. And in the healthcare space, we have this idea that everybody needs to have healthcare, which I agree. You shouldn't have people who have no access to basic healthcare in a rich”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fine. The concept of equality is very important. It's generated a lot of progress in the world. We used to be a very unequal world. Obviously, you want to give everybody equal access to opportunity, but it gets confused with equal access to outcome. And so I think...”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do anything other than to be interesting, I don't actually try to tweet things that are true because that's almost besides the point. Like I'm not going to be convincing anyone of my version of the truth. I'm mostly going to be feeding people food for thought that might change them on the margins. So I think people don't optimize enough for saying interesting things and they're too scared to be wrong. You know, there's a lot of interesting things that are wrong but make people think. And I think those are very undermined opportunities. You want to have followers that are interested in your content. So you should be very unscared of losing followers if you think what you're saying is interesting. It's actually good to sort of shed followers. It keeps your account interesting to the people that eventually will follow you. Sure.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They still feel contrarian, so like, don't compete, never compete with anyone, you know, and I see those tweets really blowing up all the time. So, yeah, if you really, if you want to consciously try to build a big following, I would definitely suggest finding these ideas that feel contrarian but aren't. And so I guess the converse would be the tweets that don't get a lot of play are the ones that are contrarian but don't feel like it. But I guess that would be the advice for how to try to consciously make good tweets. For me, I don't really try.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, the best tweets are the ones that seem contrarian but are actually consensus. Everyone's like, oh, look at this great contrarian idea, and they boost it. Yeah. There's a couple ideas right now that are becoming very popular like, you shouldn't compete because that was in zero to one and everybody in their grandma read zero to one in the startup community. And so all of the ideas in there are just actually very popular now. They're popular, but they still feel”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can be surfed to like improve the world and improve people's lives. And I think this concept that we're anywhere close to optimal or that somehow like these big tech companies are going to be the ones to surf those waves. I think that's just yeah, that would be historically anomalous.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unicorn business. Fundamentally, if you can formulate a problem as an information problem, you can tackle it with information technology if you get the right data. That's what we're doing at Bottomless. We're reformulating this problem of repeatedly purchase items as an information problem, and we're getting the relevant data. You have lots of technologies that are maturing right now. So it's not like we've seen that process stop. We've talked about computer vision is coming to maturity. The cost of anything in the smartphone supply chain is continuing to”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's some potential future for bottomless where we create an API that uses our prediction technology that other people can build on top of. And I totally think that would be a very valid route for us to scale. We have people all the time selling random stuff through subscriptions saying if I had this, how much better would my business be? I can sort of hack on to emergent properties. In general, I think business strategy depending on emergent behavior is overrated right now. I know that that is something that Twitter did, but there's this saying in Silicon Valley that Twitter is like a clown car that fell into a gold mine. And so maybe emulating them isn't the smartest thing. Amazon and Bezos basically had this business plan, for example, what they were going to do. And I think that that is a smarter thing to try to emulate. It's really popular to try and iterate your way to the epiphany, but you're just as likely to iterate your way off a cliff. But in general, I think it's way overrated to think that you're just going to iterate your way into a billion dollar.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like I don't use it as much as I would like because I have to remember to open this app and put these concepts down. It kind of sucks. So I've always imagined this social network where you see a feed just like it's Twitter, but if you like it or the equivalent of retweet would be putting it to your own space repetition. So it shows up in your feed into the future. And so it creates a whole nother incentive structure for people to try and put things out that are actually durably relevant for people. I imagine for my own various Twitter feeds if I was trying to put something out that people would use in this app, the content would be different. It would totally be different and it would probably be better because people, I'm trying to create something that people actually want to remember.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it exists. I think it's called just spaced or something. You can search spaced repetition, and there's like a lot of apps. Space repetition itself is not really a new concept. I think it's just underused because you have to actually create these cards for yourself. You know, who wants to do that?”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll see it again tomorrow, and then I'll see it again two days later, and then a week, and then eventually I'll only see it once a year. I kind of moderately remember these things.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Word you want to learn, and then it'll repeat to you again the next day because you're most likely to forget in one day or be just forgetting it. So it's an optimal time to be reminded. And then you probably don't need it again the next day. You maybe need it two days later and then four days later, two weeks or whatever it may be, there's different algorithms. But basically you start spacing out the repetition. And that's a way for basically putting things into your mind forever, which I think is a very powerful idea and makes things legible to yourself forever when you decide you want it to be in your memory forever. So it's like people spend a lot of time talking about putting computer chips in people's brains so they'll remember stuff. But that's kind of silly. Sci-fi crap. But if you use space repetition, you can kind of do that already. So I do this all the time. I have my own space repetition app where I make notes to myself.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's get back to that. So, I think the big problem with social networking right now is we only have this model of things show up in your feed once and then they disappear. And that has a huge incentive for ephemerality. I almost don't want to see something in my feed that I'm going to want to see again. You know, there's this optimization for like one-off pieces of content. You definitely see that on Twitter. People definitely post ephemeral stuff. I think you could make a much more meaningful social network if you had some sort of repeatability in the content and that's where space repetition comes in. So space repetition is this way of basically creating flashcards is how people use the concept now to be reminded of something when they're most likely to have just forgotten it. So you'll make a flashcard. People use it for learning languages, for instance.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that I would love to see built, so I'll put this out into the world is spaced repetition social network. I think social networks are underrated. I think right now there's this massive backlash against social networks. And I think it's because people haven't actually developed the ability to properly curate their social networks. The Facebook thing of just get all your friends was like a great way to bootstrap the first social network, but it's definitely not optimal way to consume information. And then you have Twitter, which is better. But then it's still like, you know, follow all these celebrities that you have name recognition from the offline world. Still not ideal, but it's getting directionally better than your friends and family. So that's besides the point. I think people are getting better and better at curating information and the problems with social networking is not the form factor of social networking itself, but with people's inability to actually properly handle it.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The original inside is just seeing it happen in beer. You had beer originally made in little breweries across the United States, right? It was basically artisanal. And then you have these big companies come in and produce it at scale for much.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Good lark, math anyway. Yeah, we'll see. That's basically the strategy, which might make other people uncomfortable. Okay, when are you going to start pushing other products down the channel? I never give an actual answer. I'm like, oh, when customer acquisition cost blows up, you mean like 100,000 customers, at a million customers, 10 million? I don't know when customer acquisition blows up. Like when we can't profitably acquire coffee customers anymore, then you start pushing other things out.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's absolutely true. And I think that's a number one cause of startup death after the early years. It's just your acquisition cost blowing up. And actually, you asked earlier what the biggest pushback people have. And that's probably actually. The best pushback. It's like, how are you going to acquire customers at scale when this is almost impossible? For us, we have this magical quality where we can acquire coffee customers that break even and then start pushing other products down the channel. So we don't have to figure out how to constantly acquire. There's tons of potential for revenue expansion. So once our customer acquisition cost blows up on coffee, we can really just start pushing out other products at basically zero acquisition costs just by adding more products to the store. And that's free.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just capturing that progress inside of bottomless is very good for the company. But there is some friction to being a married couple. There's this tendency for people to think that if you're doing something with your spouse that is less serious, that's real. And obviously for us, that's not the case. We're dead serious about this.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, just making sure that any vision that I have is actually being carried out by me. It's kind of funny, but that's actually the case. So her background, she's originally from Lima, Peru. She was born and raised there. She actually moved to the US when she was 18 alone, barely spoke any English at the time. And she's done a remarkable job of like building her life and her career. Her most recent job she was working at work day and was like a senior consultant. But her speed of progress in her career has been remarkable. That's why I really wanted her to come on board bottomless full time. People's careers follow an S-curve. And if you can catch people before that first inflection point where they're still accelerating upwards, and you can kind of see it, you know, she's been started at her first job out of college, like doing temp work and AP work and stuff like that.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're married to a woman of action? You're lucky. So we're the lucky ones. Honestly, I think that's the case. And that's never been my strong suit. So she's always been in the background steering the ship in the right direction.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think she's the real founder of Bottomless, to be honest. I'm like the type of guy who's just always coming up with lots of ideas that I think are all really awesome. And she would always say, oh, no, that's horrible. No, no. When I just was obsessed with this for a long period of time, she said, you know what? I actually think that could be it. You should quit your job and do this. And I'm going to continue doing my job. And you can try to make this business. And if it was just me by myself, I don't know if I would have made the leap. So she's person I would call like a woman of action. And those people are rare in the world. They're very rare. Maybe more rare than people who have unique insights.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have that availability, so it's very high bandwidth because we know each other very well, obviously, and constant uptime on those exchanges. So I think it's a big advantage.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah Unique co founder story. Yeah, so my co founder is my wife, which is not that common, but becoming more common. I think it's a huge advantage. If you look at a lot of the companies that have been very successful, they've been started by two friends or Stripe started by brothers. And a lot of these people live together and work together in the early days of the startup. And the reason is in the early days, there's so many decisions that you're making that will determine the path of a company in the future and are very important. And they need way more attention than you would be able to put to them during like Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. You have to schedule a meeting to talk tomorrow at 4 to 5. We're going to talk about this strategic decision. Good luck making a good decision at that time. A lot of times the muse will attack at random moments. So my wife and I will be walking around on a Saturday and suddenly we'll talk about something of immense strategic importance for bottomless.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interview is kind of oppositional. My understanding is that YC was started by some grad school people. And you have to defend your thesis or whatever in grad school. So it's almost like a thesis defense for your business and what you want to be doing. So I remember leaving and thinking we totally had screwed it up because it was not a positive friendly. I mean, it wasn't unfriendly, but it also wasn't, they didn't give you the impression that they were super impressed.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, like, my order got screwed up, so I got 10 calls from different local numbers. And every time I would answer, and I'd be like, hello? Oh, yeah, did you want the guacamole? Oh, God. And then finally, when I did get the acceptance call, I answered, but I was super nonchalant. I answered almost like in a rude way. I was like, you know, and they're like, oh, you know, and then I heard who it was.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if it's good, but if it's bad too, you know, it's good to know. The funny thing is they call you if you get in and they email you if you don't. And we are waiting that afternoon. I happen to have done some food orders. And so I kept getting calls from local numbers.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the interesting thing is, so they fly people from around the world to do interviews, but the interview is only 10 minutes. Right, like We were only flying down from Seattle. That's not that big of a deal, but there's people flying from all over the world. At one of the YC dinners, we saw these people from Columbia and they flew from Colombia to San Francisco to meet for 10 minutes. You know, that's a little insane. I understand why they do it. If it weren't 10 minutes, they actually couldn't interview people face to face. That's sort of a crazy part of the process. And then another part of it, they give you the feedback same day, which is really awesome, right?”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, no, like, really, how much? And they said $1,000. You're like, you don't get it before bottomless, I was getting my car and driving to a coffee roaster and I was running out all the time too. And you're saving me a half an hour of time regularly. And if I play that out for the next couple of years, it's easily worth $1,000. And that's validation. And also people say that you shouldn't care about investor validation, but I think that's bullshit. Investor validation is important. If you can convince smart people to part with their money or their LP's money and believe in your vision, that really means a lot, especially the angel investors that have invested in us and are putting their personal money in too. Those are great moments. That's great validation. And it's great to bring people on and see that they believe in what you're doing.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the first time I got my retention graph up and running and actually looked and said, holy crap, we have that long run cohort is now buying more coffee than they did in month six. They're on month 18 or something and they buy more coffee now than they did at month six. And in general, the cohorts will go down, but then they'll flatten out. And just recently, I did it again for like our more recent cohorts. And we actually see them starting to go up very early. And that's probably because our scales are working better now. And so it's getting even better. So that's important validation. Customers will send us messages saying somebody told me it's like having somebody do my laundry. I love bottomless. It's like having somebody do my laundry. That's a good count. That's a good compliment. Or like I called a lot of customers and asked them questions about bottomless. I asked them like, how much would I have to pay you to cancel the service? So I think that's a pretty interesting way to figure out the consumer surplus. And, you know, when people told me at that time,”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More than two years. I'm bootstrapping a hardware company is hard. It's very hard. You know, I've spent a lot of time just putting together We're literally soldering scales and listening to podcasts and shipping them, taking them to the store and dealing with the ones that don't work. I don't know if that's actually been that hard other than just the exhaustion of it, but it's kind of fulfilling to work hard towards a goal. A lot of entrepreneurs talk about the emotional roller coaster, and I think it's absolutely true. When you're putting your whole life into something that's so high variance, it's pretty natural to have high variance feelings about it. You have one customer cancel and you think you don't have that much data. Early on our first pilot was only 15 customers and the results from it were great, but like we would lose one of them. And I'd be like, oh God, we're screwed. This is definitely not going to work. Small sample sizes can create a lot of anxiety.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing something unique like bottomless. But I sit here and I pitch the people and I say, I think 15% of all of the repeatedly purchased items in the US, which might be like $500 billion is going to go onto systems like Bottomless. And I think being skeptical about that is rational because that's an audacious view of the future.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a limitation of how bottomless works now, not a limitation of how we'll work in the future. So in terms of long term, I mean, there is this big question, do people really want to have all of their stuff monitored by sensors and sent to them? I think skepticism around that is probably the most authentic pushback because nobody knows, you know, for any company, it's really hard to say. We've been talking a lot about Amazon. So like Amazon originally, their vision was, hey, I went back and I read a lot of their shareholder letters and they said 15% of all retail is going to be online eventually. Like they said this back in 98. I think it would have been pretty rational for people to push back and say, hey, I don't know if I believe this. And they haven't gotten there yet. It's crazy. People still, it's crazy how much they have to run, but it's also crazy how bullish people are on them thinking they can go from whatever their revenue now is to like three times four times because they've sort of mined all of the most profitable e-commerce opportunities outside of”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, that's the worst. I almost want to just be like, okay, well, it was nice meeting with you. Good luck putting all of your LP's money in Amazon stock since you're so bullish on Amazon, but I haven't actually said that to anybody. I don't have the nerve. Anyway, the best one was probably, so shout out to John at Founders Fund. He said, okay, well, you know, you have a one-to-one hardware-to-product relationship. And that's going to be tough.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The really important nut for us to crack is bundling of shipments. If you imagine you have five, six, seven items, we can figure out the perfect time to ship two or three or four at a time. And once you bundle shipments, the marginal cost of an additional item is virtually zero. Once you have a shipment going to people's houses, there's almost no marginal cost to adding things to that box. So that's, I think, a massive accumulating advantage that could be really, really huge in the future if you already have a couple boxes a week going to people's houses. You can actually replace most e-commerce because you can provide things cheaper. Even Amazon with their prime, they still have to break even with the shipping cost. And so all of their products actually account for that cost. But if we don't have to account for the shipping cost because we're already sending a box, like we can actually be cheaper. So that's potential advantage in the future. And, you know, Amazon would have to rewire the way they work to make that.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you have to send our scale back because we're not selling the scales. We're giving it to you for free. So there's this massive stickiness that you typically would see in like SaaS companies that we have just by default, just by the way that our system works. In terms of accumulating advantages, we can expand from coffee to other products.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so right off the bat, when you have a certain stickiness, once you have our scale, you're pretty much unlikely to set up a scale from our future competitors. Why would you do that? Then you have to set coffee.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Like Amazon can introduce, you see that they're rolling out all these white label brands and they can just do that and people will buy them if they put them at the top of their page.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, and you see this playing out a lot. There's brands that won't sell on Amazon. So, for instance, one thing we're really proud of is that we just got Phil's coffee, if anybody's familiar with the area. They just signed up with us”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazon owns a customer relationship, not the actual sellers. And they've sort of accrued all the value to themselves. And a lot of people say that that's because they own the network. And that's a big part of it. But I think that there's something powerful about actually just owning the direct customer relationship and being upstream from the rest of the suppliers because every company is sitting on top of a web of suppliers.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And so we can ship whatever we want, and that's a massive amount of leverage for us. So there's some supplier power. You see a lot of very valuable businesses just own the customer relationship. And I think that's something that is sort of underexplored from a business strategy perspective. I have been thinking about why that is, and I don't think I really know exactly. I maybe have a couple of theories.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would love to say that suppliers don't have a lot of power in this model, but in reality they kind of do, because people are very brand sensitive. So you could put a cherry on top of that, but we do own the customer relationship, and half of our customers pick just like a rotating product.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the right time, and people can select whether they care more about freshness or not running out. And a lot of our customers do care about freshness. So the roasters love that. They want people to enjoy their coffee at like the optimal time.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good pitch. Yeah. Well, they do give us wholesale price for the most part. So you do have to sort of convince them a little bit. But it's been surprisingly easy for a couple reasons. First of all, all of these roasters are e-commerce enabled already. If you look up a random coffee roaster that you like, odds are they're going to be selling online already. And that's thanks to Shopify. So we're kind of riding on top of some waves of e-commerce fully penetrating into the economy. They're already shipping individual bags. So it's not that hard to convince them to ship our individual bags. And also they're very familiar with this problem. They see their customers turn out of subscriptions all the time. They see people complain saying, hey, I have five bags and I want a refund for four of them because they're all going stale. And so when we go and we tell them about this, they're very excited and a lot of them really want to get on board. Because they want their coffee to be super fresh. They don't want people having multiple bags piling up because it doesn't present their coffee well. And part of our value proposition is that we actually”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of our fundamental insights is that nobody wants to pay for reordering hardware. We're not the first to come up with the idea of reordering hardware. There's like Amazon initiative for replenishment services. And you have to buy a printer. I don't know if they have coffee, but you would have to buy a coffee maker. Nobody wants to do that. You already have what you already have your setup. You don't want to pay for reordering hardware. You just want to get your stuff when you need it. So one of our most important design considerations was just that we can give this away to people for free and make money off of the actual coffee in the subscription. So we've kept it purposefully simple. And I don't think in the future we're going to add any bells and whistles. It's just one button to do the Wi-Fi sync and that's it. And I think that's how it should be.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's important. It's much easier to assemble. We got to the point where eventually the model that I put together was good enough that we could hand it off to an engineer and they could just draw it onto a PCB and get it manufactured. So the iterative process got us to where we needed to be rather than just trying to dream up something and doing a Kickstarter. A lot of companies die doing Kickstarter too. I think it's really overrated.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facility every week or so and just build as many scales as we're going to need that week. And a lot of hardware companies will try and perfect a product, do a Kickstarter. And we've learned so much making different versions of this thing. The version we have now is way better than what we had before.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I just picked something that I thought could be great and figured it out. So I used the technology where there's lots of libraries available for doing like the basic stuff that you need to do. So I didn't have to actually know anything. And where there are plenty of tutorials for how to put it together. And then, you know, the main design consideration for us was battery power. If you get a shipment every month, you don't want to be recharging your scale every month. What's the point of that? So we had a design goal of having that things last for at least a year. Basically, the story is we just started building these things. And the first units we put together, you said, took three hours to put together painstaking labor. And also we were painting them to try and make them pretty. And we found out nobody cared because we shipped one out that was unpainted and they didn't complain. So we were like, okay, well, let's see how this goes. And so we've been not painting them. Yeah, it's just been a process of we've turned our apartment into a little mini manufacturer.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source