The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Liu: A winning grocery delivery app cannot exceed brick-and-mortar prices
“We believe that to become the go-to grocery shopping app, we cannot be more expensive than brick-and-mortar stores.”
Liu: US group-buying was a workaround for poor grocery access, not entertainment
“The fundamental reason people were doing this was because they couldn't have easy, affordable access to the food they love. I remember that's what I felt like the fundamental problem People were trying to solve using these group bias, but it was not the right …”
Liu: Startup success only buys entry to harder competition against stronger players
“All the success we had basically only earned our ticket to play the next game, and the next game is going to be harder. That's how I felt. I felt it's definitely harder than the early days, simply because we have bigger vision, we have bigger dreams, and we ar…”
Liu: Founders should pivot execution on right goals, but quit fundamentally wrong ideas
“So if it's the right thing and you are just not doing it right, you should not give up. You should try to find a way to do it right. However, if it's not the right thing, You should not try to make it better, because it's not the right thing. You should stop r…”
Liu: Goodwater Capital owned over 50% of Weee! by late 2018
“So, so by the end of 2018, they ended up owning more than 50% of the business.”
Liu: Scheduled Batch Delivery Enables Viable Unit Economics Over Expensive On-Demand
“From day one, we knew that we couldn't do the on-demand delivery, because on-demand delivery is so expensive. So we did what we call scheduled delivery. That way we can aggregate a lot of orders, and we can do the route planning.”
Raz: Weee!'s aggressive referral discounts drove profitability in six months
“It cost we a lot of money. It put them in the red for three months, but it, but their customer acquisition as a result of that was so enormous that they became profitable in six months, and they, I think they've been profitable ever since.”
Liu: Over 99.5% of early Weee! users used Chinese language app
“More than like, 99.5% of the users actually use Chinese language on our application, so almost all Chinese immigrants.”
Liu: Hotmail co-founder Jack Smith wrote Weee!'s first $250,000 check
“He committed to write the first check we ever received, a 250,000 dollars, because he really liked the scrappiness and the creative ways that we approach this.”
Liu: Weee! relocated warehouses overnight without halting daily operations
“And by moving the warehouse, we actually did not shut shutting down the business, not even for a day. We ship today's order. Then we put away the inventory. We disassemble the shelves. Then overnight we move the shelves and inventory to the new warehouse. We r…”
Liu: Weee! had under $1 million left by mid-2017
“By mid of 2017, we were running out of money. We had less than one million dollars left.”
Liu: Personally Delivered Over 1,000 Orders to Build Weee!'s Logistics Software
“I delivered more than a thousand orders myself. Because I had to figure out how to do delivery, how to write the software that, how to design the driver experience, and how to figure out the delivery part.”
Liu: Weee! Reached $500,000 Per Week in Sales by Late 2018
“A year and a half later, we were doing half a million dollars a week in sales.”
Liu: Expanding geographically when a model fails locally is a mistake
“Now looking back, we were doing the exactly wrong thing, which is when something is not quite working in a smaller geographic area, we try to make it work in more areas, right?”
Liu: Weee! reached tens of thousands of users by mid-2015
“So we released the software. I remember it's January of 2015. By mid-two 1015, we had tens of thousands of users already using our software to organize group buys.”
Liu: Weee! Was Initially Self-Funded Using eBay Savings
“So we decided to run the business using our savings from the eBay days and to self-fund the business until we see significant traction, then we can try to raise money.”