Bastian P

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On April 30, 2020, Bastian P commented on Teladoc Health: A Clear Winner During (and After) COVID-19 :

I think the main reason telemedicine didn’t go mainstream before COVID were bureaucratic obstacles (e.g. insurance, liability etc). Across the world, governments have now fast-tracked progress in these areas. That will to the most part not be reverted after COVID is less of a problem, so I do think the rise of telemedicine is here to stay.
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/03/17/secretary-azar-announces-historic-expansion-of-telehealth-access-to-combat-covid-19.html
https://medicalfuturist.com/covid-19-was-needed-for-telemedicine-to-finally-go-mainstream/

On April 30, 2020, Bastian P commented on Thirty Madison – Urgent Care before Urgent Profits :

The explicit goal of the subsidized service is to help the healthcare system not to get overwhelmed. That will (one way or the other) not be necessary for the long term, so I don’t see a scenario where they would need to run this unprofitably in the long term

On April 30, 2020, Bastian P commented on MasterClass: The future of “edutainment” :

Interesting article. I visited Masterclass this January as part of Westrek, and have since been a customer. They actually started by charging per course and only switched rather recently after extensive LTV-focused A/B testing.
I think the biggest part of the value proposition is not celebrities, but that both a celebrity brand and the Masterclass brand are vouching for the quality and curation of the content. I’m sure for all topics, similarly high quality content could be found on YouTube, but because it’s mixed in with all the clickbait chunk, without a way to filter for quality, it’s too much of a pain to find.

I always thought Nextdoor is a lost opportunity to revive local journalism. I don’t believe that the reason local journalism suffered in times of Facebook is because people aren’t interested in local news – but rather because Facebook never prioritized letting newspaper microtarget their audience, and audiences find local source of information.
I heard a lot about fake news on Nextdoor and wish they would use their particular local access to help local journalists as a platform to reach a smaller audience

On April 20, 2020, Bastian P commented on Overjet – Transforming Dentistry Powered by AI :

Nice post highlighting an iLab startup 🙂
Having moved a lot, I think portability of medical data is a major problem. Every single time in the last 10 years that I went to a dentist, I had no way to give the dentist meaningful information on my previous dentist appointments, or what has been done to my teeth. That seems to have big impact on quality of care, esp. given the shocking diagnosis variation numbers you’re quoting.
Obviously, such a solution should be held to very high privacy standards – e.g. by ensuring that data is owned (potentially anonymously) by the consumer, who needs to approve any temporary access.
I wonder how Overjet approaches this challenge.

On April 20, 2020, Bastian P commented on Criteo: how much personalized retargeting is too much? :

Interesting post. I have worked in the digital marketing industry for a long time, and am writing about LiveRamp/Acxiom for this assignment. They managed to benefit from the whole GDPR/data privacy discussion by selling of the data itself and instead becoming a hands-off data matching algorithm. In this new situation, privacy laws actually come to protect them, as new startups will have a hard time managing the complexity and risks.
I’m where Criteo lands on this one – on one hand they’re relatively small, and seem overly reliant on cookie technology, without having a lot of sources to enrich the data. On the other hand, i have seen them pretty strong outside the US, where data quality on users is generally lower (lucky non-US residents…).
I agree that the industry should wake up and hold itself to higher standards before a stronger privacy backlash makes their business impossible

On March 24, 2020, Bastian P commented on Gojek – A Motortaxi for Every Need :

I think it requires a culture of going around on motorbikes. In indonesia, every other person already had one before Gojek, and taking a motortaxi, as mentioned, was normal. Will be hard to get enough penetration if that’s not a given.

On March 22, 2020, Bastian P commented on How Groupon failed Ali Wong, but Netflix saved her :

As a former Groupon employee, I got to defend Groupon to a certain extent 🙂
I think there is something to say to go from 0 to 1 in terms of audience, as an artist starts of their career (or a restaurant opens it’s door etc). It’s hard to get the ball rolling and overcome the chicken-and-egg problem of “nobody wants to go to an empty restaurant/standup comedy/…”.
I also personally don’t believe that there is a long-term brand damage. It’s not like people are actively scouting Groupons just to see who is listing on the website, and customers who care about “exclusivity” and not to be spotted at a comedian’s show that is not considered “hip” are probably not on Groupon’s email list anyway.

What’s true though is the low quality (in terms of retention) of Groupon customers to their business. Indeed, Groupon’s investor told their e-commerce businesses not to list on Groupon for that reason.

So I consider Groupon as a great way to get started, learn and find first fans.

Making it a long-term strategy only works if the client breaks even on the Groupon itself, which isn’t unheard of. E.g. while the nominal discount is 50%, in reality many tricks are used, e.g. the show would create a special category of tickets which are only sold through Groupon, with an unreasonable high nominal price. 50% of that price might still be driving profits.