Wow what a great tool! Intuitive and clean interface with realistic default equity investments/option pools. Also I love to see more and more svelte projects popping up. Really exciting seeing its growing adoption :)
I believe there is a fallacy in the analysis of SF vs neighboring counties. The author is comparing YoY change; however, if the adjacent counties have less baseline nominal crime the YoY change could be less while hiding the magnitude of crime in SF. The author also doesn’t differentiate the types of crime in the analysis which makes a substantial difference. This section is in reference to the lenient theft laws, whereas these numbers commingle that data with violent crime and all other crime. And lastly, COVID is an outlier year where the population of the city dwindled, there were massive store closures, & there was less opportunity for non violent crimes.
That's one way of turning a vice into a virtue... "Right, I've been found out to have fabricated years of research, entire PhDs are now junk. How can I make some more money out of this?"
I would advise you to think about how to make that value proposition proprietary and defensible. I’m not wholly convinced that offering interior design or offering whole-apartment bundles alone is something you could defend an incumbent from also providing. Although it does sound like your space-visualization technology might be a leg-up here.
Also note that there are several competitors from the other-side that provide whole furnished apartments for rent such as Blueground. You seem to be in between the “rent single pieces of furniture” and “rent a whole apartment” spaces and need to ensure that the space is carved out enough and the market is there.
Congrats for being accepted into YC! You now have a large journey ahead of you!
You're right, there are several verticals of competition for us. Here are some quick notes:
1. Traditional retailers like IKEA and Wayfair: We don't think they'll be fully pivoting to a rentals because it's a very different business model and requires lots of financing/credit setup. These retailers are motivated to get rid of their inventory as soon as possible (warehouse space!) whereas we look at furniture as assets, so we're happy to take yours back, refurbish it, and put in in a new place.
2. Furniture rental startups like Feather and Fernish already have a rental system in place, but but personalized interior design is a different game altogether, especially when you consider our proprietary rending technology which generates photorealistic renders with relatively little human effort. We think our technology will set us apart.
3. Online interior design services like Modsy and Havenly only focus on human-driven interior design. They might want to upsell you a furniture package, but they don't have the necessary rental and logistics setup to have a full offering as we do. This is only competition for us if people want interior designers but want to buy all furniture outright (say for $20k) and our goal is a more affordable offering.
4. Depending on where you live, fully-furnished or serviced apartments are (much) more expensive than renting an apartment, so we think our value proposition is also the "rent to own" part where each of your monthly payments go towards ownership. We also have optional addon services like electricians and biweekly cleaning, so I think we'll more directly compete with the serviced apartments space, except that it's still your apartment and you can own the furniture if you like.
Thanks for your feedback and making me think about this!
I thought he brought up really good points about the politicization of current social networks. I miss the days of chronological feeds and only seeing posts of users in your circle. I think splitting up actual users and pages/groups you follow into two separate feeds will also help reduce the feedback loop Cuban talks about.
Everyone is bashing this as if it's a peer-reviewed paper...Note guys: This is just two students' final project for a class, not some security experts' publication
