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dagerlöff's avatar

"but that’s a tough sell to individuals and corporations during a downturn"

I once started a business where I built software designed to address an allegedly vexing problem in corporations, and it was education-related. It also was during a strong economic period. The minute the idea of paying for something to minimize the costs this supposed problem I was trying to solve had, the minute people didn't want to hear about it.

I also had approached individuals on this, and naturally it was fine until they have to pay for it. There was a competing startup I remember reading about at the time that had for years earned no revenue and had no business plan but raised tons of money. (It's still around today, albeit with a subscription model now!) But when I presented it to my local startup/dev community, the same people who complained about lack of competition and the fact that locally most startups are at most two degrees of separation from the same four people dismissed it because they said we already have (only) one business that does that. Selling education in general is a valuable idea, but I only see it "successful" in limited cases, and the path of many education providers is to converge to the very antithesis of whatever their mission was.

On the "yoga babble" stuff, funny thing is when inexperienced, entry-level web devs said nearly 15 years ago that all of this was nonsense and any woke/ESG/whatever stuff they push REALLY is just a mask for colossal business failures to secure those top valuations, they weren't blown off as being too immature to understand the way the business world works.

Last week, I saw a handful of people who 6 years ago scoffed at the notion that companies should be profitable now act like the smartest person in the room saying Uber and other companies are failing or losing tremendous value, because they were built on gimmicks and unsustainable business models that yielded market share but not stability. They were totally in on whatever this gimmicks that brought high valuations and little-to-no product, but now they act like they knew all along that that model isn't effective!

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