Ooma oomph
September 5th, 2007
The oomph is the sound of Ooma when it crashes…$400 for pseudo unlimited residential phone service for life? How do I hate this idea? Unattractive in the short term and unsustainable in the longterm.
Now, it does give me inspiration for a new startup idea that needs to happen: imagine a site where you wager how long it takes various web 2.0 startups to crash and burn. It’s kinda like being able to sell short on bad IPOs (Vonage, anyone?)
This is an abysmal idea. Of all the possible business models that might lend themselves to something like this, this is absolutely not one of them.
It reminds me of what some people tried to do with dialup back in the day, which had the same basic cost structure impediments. When I first got to Athens in August 1999, we bought dialup from a company called webCOMBO, which advertised unlimited dialup forever for a one-time $150 charge. And just resold Level3 managed modem from there.
It was nice for the six months before bankruptcy.
“Now, it does give me inspiration for a new startup idea that needs to happen: imagine a site where you wager how long it takes various web 2.0 startups to crash and burn. It’s kinda like being able to sell short on bad IPOs (Vonage, anyone?)”
Could we pair that with our business model to cancel lunches? I think there’s a large cross-section of people who want to bootstrap ridiculous startups *and* cancel lunches on a regular basis.
We could even thank them for their business.
Clarification: This is an inside joke. We had some smug company startup execs cancel lunch on us a half hour before it was supposed to start, so ever since then we’ve been mulling over the idea of building a business model entirely based around canceling lunches and other species of appointment.