$12/meal + shipping. Price is obfuscated on the website. I'd imagine that Gobble will struggle with the same things that every food delivery business in the world struggles with - low margins.
People just aren't willing to pay high margins for food that gets delivered. There is constant pressure to offer more food at lower prices.
Their most likely exit strategy is to build a brand strong enough that they can get a line of frozen prepared meals picked up by major grocery retailers or sign a licensing agreement to do something similar.
My biggest issue with these services is that for a regular home-cooked meal, that is quite a premium for something where the portion size is quite often way too small or the ingredient quality isn't justified by the price.
I know I'm looking for something that may not be able to exist because of the razor-thin margins, but if someone came out with a service at the <$10 price point with decent ingredients and portions, and healthy (read: low sodium, low sugar, low processed-crap) options, I'd likely switch a significant percentage of my weekly meals to them.
As it stands now, it is just hard to justify at that price. But perhaps I'm not the target market.
As a Reddit user and advertiser, I was disappointed when they doubled their ad CPM's in June without notice to advertisers (as mentioned in the article).
I can understand incrementally increasing the price with demand, but doubling the cost of CPM's without notice is a big fuck you to advertisers.
Now they're more expensive than Facebook and with less targeting capability and you can't change or edit your ads once their live.
I'm not not parent, but - I've purchased a few time-blocks for a different campaigns over last few years and it brought in significant traffic, a bit more conversions, but despite being able to target a subreddit, it is still hard to get your money's worth if you are promoting a brick and mortar store. Unless that store offers tangible goods sold online as well. Location constrained and in-person transaction type of services saw less of a bump in revenue. That is probably true for online advertising overall. My 2 cents
So Google, Facebook, and Apple are bad because they come to secret agreements to not poach each other's employees and now Uber and Lyft are bad because they'll do everything in their power to poach each other's employees?
Make up your minds.
This sort of poaching is good for the drivers, and this sort of ruthless competition is a good indication of a market that is good for riders.
Imagine if google and facebook were calling up random numbers at each others' headquarters in order to recruit. If the recruiter ended up guessing a number of an engineer that they've already reached, they would hang up. If they hadn't spoken to them they would give them a pitch on switching companies.
This would be an accurate analogy, and I think if either google or facebook were doing this we (the tech community) would complain about it.
Except there are other, easier ways to contact google or facebook employees. Why would anyone do what you suggest instead of using linkedin or github? There's no such alternative for contacting lyft drivers in this case, so you're analogy is not very accurate. Also, lyft drivers aren't employees of lyft, which strains to your analogy more.
It's by no means a perfect analogy, but it's the closest thing I could come up with to compare to the anti-competitive practices of google/facebook/microsoft, which is what the OP was trying to do.
The true genius of Facebook is it's practically impossible to not use it, even if you're not signed up. If anyone mentions you, or happens to post a picture with you in you're in it.
The same applies for Google, where if you happen to be in the background of a photo which isn't shared but gets uploaded to G+ quietly as a backup of an Android phone (which they do by default) then Google (and by extension the US gov) know where you were, as per their demo at I/O about 3 years ago.
As MitchellRobert already pointed out, I'm refering to traffic in the sense of data traffic (commonly called bandwidth). A very common remark I've gotten is "but what about the bandwidth usage?!", but nowadays it's not hard to get a few terabytes of monthly traffic allowance for under $10.
For this particular VPS, I'm paying $9.30 a month, and it includes 2TB of montly traffic. Cheaper offers exist, and there are always providers like OVH that genuinely offer unmetered traffic on the cheap (as long as it's used for a legitimate purpose, eg. serving hosted files).
I don't think we should pile on these tech execs. It happens elsewhere. I'd speculate it's rather widespread.
I worked for a Fortune 500 market research / consumer data company and I know for a fact that the Senior VP of our office would call Fortune 500 clients and kindly request they not "poach" our employees.
Most of it is done casually and "innocently". I doubt most execs even thought they were breaking the law before this came to light.
Most exchanges will ask you to buy at least $1 worth of bitcoins so that pushes your figure to about 0.001 BTC as a minimum purchase. However, you can certainly use them with up to 8 decimal places.
The only startups that are "lucky" are those that never validate before development and still find traction.
I define validating as getting 3 paying customers before building a viable app.
You could have built an abridged or simpler version of your game and asked people to pay you to play it. If that posed problems, you could have pivoted to a different premise for the game.
$2B income from $5B in ad revenue.
Hopeful businesses just keep running ads and lining Facebook's wallet. If Mark really wanted to give back, he'd give us more clicks per $.