When same-day flower delivery company BloomThat launched in San Francisco in 2013, it seemed on a fast track for success: The Y Combinator alum had $7.6 million in funding and a quickly growing customer base. But just two years later, the startup was racing toward bankruptcy. Cofounder and CEO David Bladow explains what went wrong, and the remedies that saved his now-thriving business.
The error: Overexpansion
“We were intoxicated by what was going on with Uber -- on-demand everything, expand really fast and off to the races. Once we had the mechanics of same-day delivery figured out in San Francisco, we expanded too quickly without realizing that we couldn’t copy and paste the mechanics of what worked in San Francisco to Los Angeles and New York.”
The fix
With the company burning nearly $500,000 per month, it decided to shutter same-day delivery in L.A. in August 2015. “We had stretched our footprint so wide, it spun our whole economic model sideways.” The switch took their burn rate to just $15,000 a month, giving BloomThat time to retool for L.A. (It’s now back, and profitable.)
The error: Moving too fast, literally
“We promised delivery within a one-hour window, and in San Francisco alone we had seven distribution points to make that happen. That’s a lot of touchpoints -- and every time someone touches the product, it’s a cost.”
The fix
Do we really need to do this in an hour? Bladow recalls thinking. Or would two be efficient for our customers? His company got rid of four distribution points and tested a two-hour delivery window instead. No customers complained; delivery costs dropped 25 percent.
The error: Competing with giants
“We’re here in the Bay Area with Google, Facebook and all these companies that provide, like, three meals a day to employees, and, oh, here’s a masseuse! You’re under all this pressure to take care of your team, which we want to do, but we set up a structure that didn’t work for us economically.”
The fix
BloomThat reeled in its perks -- providing snacks all the time, but only lunch a few times a week. “We’re taking care of our team, but we’re not sending them to a spa. Though on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, we bring in two people and have them do chair massages.”
A reader wrote in yesterday asking why she no longer had the “pretty” glass windows, and how to get them back. It occurred to me that there might be other people with the same issue, so I’m writing up the (fairly simple) instructions for others that might have the same question.
Last week i wrote about switching my main OS to Kubuntu and so far everything has been going fairly well except for a few configurations here and there. I hope to have some cool posts regarding Linux topics in the near future. One of the things I really have enjoyed so far is Open Office. We can
One of the things that has really annoyed me about running Firefox on Vista is that Internet Explorer looks really slick with the Aero Glass extending down onto the entire navigation bar… and Firefox just looks pathetic sitting next to it. Thanks to the Glasser extension from my new favorite person
Have you ever noticed that many files don’t seem to work in the Preview Pane in Windows Vista’s Explorer? Until recently the only way to work around this was a painful registry hack… but now there’s a utility that will let you easily add file types to the preview list.
One thing I like to do is point out the extra software applications try to sneak in during installation. Especially it that software can definitely be considered “Crap-Ware”. I have found a couple of instances of this while reinstalling Trillian on my Vista machine.
If you’ve been a reader of this site for any amount of time, you are probably familiar with the Keyboard Ninja concept… we like to feature all sorts of ways to quickly access applications or functions with complicated shortcut keys. But what about regular people? Isn’t there a simpler solution?
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
I have played with various distributions of Linux for the past 5 years. I would dabble in Red Hat running a web server, install Mandriva (Mandrake at the time) in a dual boot with XP, and actually build a kiosk for a tech school in my area using Suse Linux. I have also ran various versions on
We’ve covered how to access the Windows Vista Calendar using the keyboard, but what if you wanted to assign a single keystroke to pop up the calendar? Yeah, sure, you can just click it with the mouse, but where’s the geek fun in that?