from Hacker News

I made a $2M funeral startup and became a monster

by ActsJuvenile on 5/7/21, 10:24 AM with 49 comments

• by sytelus on 5/7/21, 2:01 PM

  Isn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run those but does funeral services be government run? If no, then making profits is necessary and someone needs to do it.

• by prirun on 5/7/21, 5:00 PM

  Maybe a new COO would have been a better move. Her figure of $5-10M for a crematory seemed way off to me - it's basically a glorified oven in a building - so I did a little research and found this:

  https://howtostartanllc.com/business-ideas/crematorium

  It says to budget $100-250K to get started, which seems a lot more reasonable than $10M.

• by lupire on 5/7/21, 2:42 PM

  The headline is a lie, right? There no "Uber" part. I guess that's the point of the quote marks, to contrast all the bullshit lies and phony origin stories and pitch decks of the VC world , against the reality of the work your business does.

  There's plenty of room for ethical mortuary companies to make money providing value and distrupting a deeply exploitative industry. But maybe it can't be done with (ironically named in this case) culture capital.

• by dangus on 5/7/21, 1:37 PM

  I don’t want to read into this too far but I hope the author doesn’t blame himself for all this.

  I thought the article was an indictment of our culture’s relationship with death more than anything being wrong with Grace itself.

  So many families simply don’t have a plan for what happens after they die. They leave it until the death actually happens, a time when nobody really wants to be talking money.

  Of course, Grace never actually turned a profit. While the author felt like he was being dirty, simultaneously the payments he was taking weren’t even covering the cost of doing business. I’d say the only clearly shady behavior was the hospital data integration, something that I’m sure is a fixture of funeral services companies.

  For sure, the business of death isn’t for everyone. I could make an analogy to how I’d never be a power line technician or wind turbine maintenance person. Nothing you can say and no safety mechanism will ever convince me to willingly climb a ladder higher than 3 feet tall.

  Perhaps the lesson here is to think about why you’re starting a business before you do it. Who are you doing it for? Is it your idea or someone else’s idea? Is it a product or service you’re already passionate about?

  If it is, you’re probably going to have a much easier time with it.

• by 55555 on 5/7/21, 1:57 PM

  A common source of loss for investors. Funding someone in a moment of strength who ends up not having the nerve to follow through on what they said they could do. Or weakness, depending on whether you look at it from a business perspective or a moral perspective.

• by chirau on 5/7/21, 1:54 PM

  Isn't this also what Empathy ( https://www.empathy.com ) does?

  Grief and death are a business as well, and being good at it does not make you a monster. You just have to have the stomach for it.

  It's kind of like those guys whose sole job is to come in and fire people, like George Clooney in Up In The Air. Someone has got to do it.

• by crusty on 5/7/21, 6:03 PM

  Question... How is this a $2M startup? They raised $2M but wouldn't that have been on a higher valuation. I feel like the norm is to report the "$N startup" with the valuation, not the finding round haul. And that's still the BS machine's version. A company that never turned a profit isn't really a such-and-such dollar startup so much as loss, bad gamble, write off, or the like - in non-BS parlance

• by coward76 on 5/7/21, 4:34 PM

  Funeral industry needs an intervention, the way some states fight against pay day loan predators. These are people at their most vulnerable and are being taken for a ride.

• by NikolaeVarius on 5/7/21, 2:10 PM

  /shrug, I would have taken over given the chance.

• by horstmeyer on 5/7/21, 5:50 PM

  You weren't a monster, just an effective capitalist.