Another Dot-com blowup

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From: Antoun Nabhan (anabhan@law.harvard.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2000 - 11:02:42 PDT


Today's <www.suck.com> about the demise of APBNet.com. I think they were
the site that hosted the crime statistics by neighborhood, which was a
nifty tool for all of us mobile types who have to rent apartments sight
unseen in cities we've never lived in.

The story of their demise is in the Boo.com mold: Spend way too much on
advertising and use that as your primary mechanism of customer acquisition,
then fail to get that much revenue back from your eyeballs. When big
ad-firm invoices start to look like recurring costs of goods sold instead
of one-time sales, general, and administrative costs, you've got a problem.

I'm not saying it's easy to succeed with a startup, but there are some
failure modes that are easily foreseeable!

--Antoun
Antoun Nabhan - Arrayex, Inc. * 617.901.8871 voice/page
"We will invent ways to enable freedom faster than tyrants can develop the
means to suppress them." - Eric Raymond


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