• Sent out all murder mystery invitations, as well as the printouts and office supplies and decorations. This is a lot of work!
• India's Tandoori up near Allie in miracle mile has a lunch buffet that goes until 3. I went today, so good.
• GRRM blogpost after the series finale: http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2019/05/20/an-ending/.
• The expedia/priceline business model:
• The customers are not the individual users. The customers are the companies selling through your marketplace.
• The cofounder of Kayak was the cofounder of Orbitz before. The key change which made Kayak successful was that it no longer sold tickets, it just became a search engine to aggregate prices and compare. This was easier to maintain, fewer employees, no customer service needed, etc.
• Kayak gets about half its revenue from referrals (flight/hotel/car companies paying them) and half from advertising.
• Kayak earns anywhere from 0.1 - 0.3 cents per query for flights, cars, and hotels (hotels being higher).
• Amazon takes anywhere from 6-20% cut per item sale (average 15%), as well as monthly dues to even list items ($0-$40). There's also a minimum (a dollar or two) in case 15% of an item sale is less than that.
• Progress:
• Free for pharmacies. Money comes from vendors. Could take a percentage of sales or charge a fee per query. We'll have to iterate on the sweet spot for this number until it makes sense for both parties.
• Roadmap:
• Add a few more vendors.
• Enable user accounts, necessary to store partnership information and vendor credentials and such.
• MVP is done. Show it to pharmacies. Get them to use it.
• Once there are enough users, start pitching to vendors (our actual customers).
• In production, we should not aggregate prices by webscraping. Supported vendors should expose a contracted API for our data.
• Possibly: buy bulk and resell for discounted rates, just like kayak does with hotel blocks. To do this, we'd need to add functionality/complexity to the app. It would allow buy/sell instead of just redirect.
• Start trending history and offering price prediction.