NireBryce

Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

layoffs into competitors

thinking maybe there should be Startup Construction Kit and How to Get Funding materials for the case of "your whole team thinks it's going to be laid off, or it's morale has been decimated and everyone's thinking of leaving"

because it seems to me that one of the best ways to punish layoffs in the short term is turning layoffs into something that generates competitors.  It's an industry where that's actually possible still. And there's a long history of it.

Laying off entire small companies worth of institutional knowledge?

Wild. Good luck with that, mate.

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sudocurse
@sudocurse

i was just thinking yesterday about this, we know a ton of layoffs can be directly traced back to a completely okay and safe business model being upended by unnecessary IPO and subsequent growth and spending demands. if you remove that element there's no reason people shouldn't be able to make like, fucking stitchfix work

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

I'm glad more people are independently thinking this

one snag is that the real economy you're competing in is the attention economy, so past businesses are a risk and directly creating only part of a platform is a big risk

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

that is, customers have a limited pool of money, but the real limiting resource is "are they going to use your thing enough that it becomes part of their rotation, or is their time/attention already too saturated to be able to 'commit' to using you instead of bigcorp", and at say 20$/mo you need like 7500 customers per employee and that's if you keep salaries low and ignore operating costs.

business-to-business is hard too because they work on reputation, further delaying uptake

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sudocurse
@sudocurse

you would have to raise prices and expect to operate on slimmer budgets, early stage economy-of-scale pricing is a big illusion that zirp VC-mania set up for both businesses and consumers as an expectation. peoples' time simply isnt meant to be as cheap as 2 roast turkey ranch and bacon sandwiches from arbys (disclaimer i dont know if this is a good comparison i have never eaten at an arbys)

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yaodema
@yaodema

honestly considered trying to build my own little co-op again, but it turns out being a rather underpaid engineer doesn't give you much of any savings to work with, and I burned through it all just living. the biggest worry I'd have with trying to do any "startup-y" things is that I don't know where funding would come from, and I refuse to do VC.

but maybe that's more aimed at the folks with means and connections to others who got laid off from some mega-corp, rather than single layoff cases from a tiny group like what happened to me.

it'd be a fitting fate for those megacorps to get eaten by those they threw away, tho

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

especially in places forced to pay severance, entire teams being laid off have some options there.

otherwise, yeah, funding is an issue but depending on how certain you are, loans are cheap if your plan is very strong, and there's some other routes otherwise (Grant type things, lower cash investors, crowdfund if you're willing to commit to the long term, etc).

but in the same breath, I'm not going to be the one to push people into creating their own, it's very much not without risk

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lapisnev
@lapisnev

The second case is literally what happened to my recently former job, morale hit proverbial rock bottom and went to go find a drill.

The problem is that, if you consider the company's purpose to be what it actually accomplishes rather than what it was intended to do, the product was "enable old people to watch Fox News," so I absolutely do not want to spin up a competitor...

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