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The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

 Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.
A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.
Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible
The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.
Payment apps have finally made loyalty points and bulk ticket (回数券) purchases fast enough the convenience stores, which have strict throughout budgets measured in seconds per customer, can offer them across a chain.

And since booze and tobacco can’t meaningfully be used...
Duh duh duh The Coffee Payment War.

Family Mart has a closed loop store value app called Family Pay. It is a barcode based payment and does basically what you expect it to.

It is also a coupon platform, and will sell you an anywhere-in-chain “11 drinks for price of 10.”
The UX of actually redeeming them is a little weird; you have to select the ticket out of your book prior to checking out. But it gives you a great reason to use Family Mart for all your coffee, even if you have to walk 2 minutes longer than a 7/11 closer to your home/office/etc.
7/11 comes at it from a different angle; they gamify coupons. If you buy 10 coffee, you get a coupon for one coffee for free (or equivalent discount).

App tracks progress. 6 more to go!

(I cropped the screen to avoid giving you a barcode that would let anyone snatch my coffee.)
A fun payments wrinkle: one reason chains don’t love coupon books/“buy 10 get 11” historically is that it throws off their internal funds flows if they are franchised. You’d think purchases and redemptions are approximately symmetrical but they are often not.
This tends to “drain cash” from the redemption heavy franchisees, who (because they are in a business of picking up pennies) hate this and complain to corporate over trivial money.

Automating all of this and having funds flow go Corp -> franchisee not F>C>F ameliorated problem.
Think of it as a happy bit of efficiency introduced into the world by computers being utterly not bored by the prospect of tracking 40 million coffees a day in Japan individually, which is A Task even by Japanese logistics standards.
There have, of course, been a lot of presentations in Tokyo with the punchline:

“You know what would make this process even better? ... A blockchain.”

(*sigh* Seriously.)
Fun question left as an exercise to the reader: why does Starbucks have an entirely different offering in the US (and Japan, where it is broadly similar) for their closed-loop stored value?

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.
TECH
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.
WRITING
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):


Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.


"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."


Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.
CRYPTO

More from Finance

Roger C. Schonfeld
Roger C. Schonfeld
@rschon
Wiley buys Hindawi -- a $298 million acquisition for GBP 25 million in annual APC revenues -- in bid to expand open-access platforms @pbasken

I'm really fascinated by several things about this acquisition. 1. One could posit that APC business models in structural decline as they are replaced by transformative agreements. Will Hindawi titles be folded into Wiley TA's or offered as a separate "pure publish" model?

2. Seems that there is little concern about geopolitical risk: "Wiley…saw value in Hindawi’s strong position in Asia, the world’s largest and fastest growing academic publishing market…“Hindawi’s significant footprint in in China is a major benefit from that perspective”"

3. It seems some in the academic community continue to be "alarmed" when, after taking advantage of private capital to fund commercial start-ups for open access services (bepress; SSRN; now Hindawi), that capital looks to sell in search of returns. As if this is a surprise!

4. Most interesting will be to see how this expansion of Wiley's OA portfolio and platforms/workflows/services can connect with its important businesses in support of society publishing.
FINANCE
Saturnalia "Ultimate Survivor" Sundown
Saturnalia "Ultimate S...
@SaturnaliaSund1
Hello friends, I am back! I have been doing a ton of financial research and am very disturbed by what I have learned.

Please enjoy a long (irresponsibly LONG) story about central banking, manufactured crises, George Soros, and the Great Reset.


This thred will be much longer and more dry than my usual, pls bear with me. This one's legit important. The first portion will reference works by Dr. Richard Werner, and the latter George Soros.


Note my views are not indicative of those of people quoted. This post does not constitute investment counsel.

To understand current financial conditions you bare minimum have to go back to WWII. Bretton Woods has just been signed, establishing the IMF and World Bank, and the USD as standard for international settlement.


But we're not talking about US history (yet), we have to look at Japan. Unlike Germany, which had it's economy stripped down and sold off by the victorious Allies, Japan's system remained remarkably intact.
FINANCE
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Eric Feigl-Ding
Eric Feigl-Ding
@DrEricDing
ATROCIOUS big pharma price gouging of insulin:

This crying mother can’t afford the $1000 for her son’s insulin.

📌yet, it only costs pharma $5 to produce.

📌Insulin was invented 100 years ago by Fred Banting—who donated patent for $1 to make it free for all.

Let that sink in.


2) Insulin is one of the most disgusting cases of price gouging ever.

America has long taken a free market approach to pharmaceuticals.
Drug companies haggle separately over drug prices with a variety of private insurers across the

3) “Meanwhile, Medicare, the government health program for those over age 65 — it’s also the nation’s largest buyer of drugs—is barred from negotiating drug prices. That gives pharma more leverage, and it leads to the kind of price surges of EpiPens, opioid antidotes, & insulin.”

4) In 2018:
Johnson & Johnson CEO made $30M
Pfizer CEO made $28M
Merck CEO made $18M
Eli Lilly CEO made $16M
Gilead CEO made $16M

Meanwhile:

📌Americans spent $535B on Rx drugs

📌1/4 of diabetics rationed insulin to survive

📌500K Americans went bankrupt from medical bills.

5) What’s the right price patients should pay for medications? ZERO dollars, because no copay ==> more patients get their medicine ==> saves lives and saves money. Copays decrease adherence, and copays hurt patients who actually need them.
FINANCE
Eric Basmajian
Eric Basmajian
@EPBResearch
Inflation is coming, inflation is coming!

Last month I wrote about the distinction between long-term secular inflation and shorter-term cyclical inflation

It has been clear for several months that we are in the middle of a cyclical rise in


The full thread can be reviewed here:


Today's PPI report should have been expected to surprise to the upside as the leading indicators of inflation have been screaming to the upside for months!

Here is the ISM prices paid index, cumulated into a growth rate

3/


Industrial commodity prices have also seen a major acceleration for months.

4/


So today's PPI report was in line with the leads, suggesting that we have a cyclical upturn in inflation that is * primarily concentrated in the manufacturing sector *

This is a key point.

5/
FINANCE
Joe Du Bey
Joe Du Bey
@joedubeytldr
🧵: The 10 Metrics for SaaS Startups (an Operator's Guide)

Focusing on the wrong things can kill your startup.

Based on founding and scaling @edenworkplace, here are the metrics that matter most:

Metric 1: ARR (Annualized Recurring Revenue)

You will need to know this number each day, so you'll focus on Contracted ARR in your CRM tool (as opposed to accounting ARR).

Big ARR milestones are $100K (Signal), $1 million (PMF), $10 million (Growth), $100 million (IPO Scale)

Metric 2: ARR Growth

Once you get past the Signal stage, your ARR growth is the primary determinant of future success (and valuation).

Strong annual growth rate from Signal to PMF is 4x+ and from PMF to Growth is 2.5x+.

@edenofficemagic grew 11x between Signal and PMF stages.


Metric 3: ACV (Average Customer Value)

ACV often starts low for a SaaS company (as your product is not featureful enough for large enterprises) and grows as the company moves upmarket.

ACV is calculated by taking total revenue and dividing it by your number of customer logos.

Metric 4: ACV Growth

Most SaaS companies will make ACV growth a focus.

It is fair to increase revenue per customer as you add more value to users in new features, integrations, and products.

@edenofficemagic grew ACV 2.3x last year, mostly through cross-selling new products.
FINANCE

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Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
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SRI LALITHAMBIGAI, THIRUMEYACHUR (TN)
#bharatmandir #navratri2021

Kshetram where Shiva is worshipped as Meghanatha and his consort is Lalithambigai seen in Abhay mudra.
Once, a demon Pandasura was harassing the Devas who went to Devi Parashakti for protection. 
@GunduHuDuGa


Devi rose from a Yaga Gunda, mounted on the Sri Chakra Rath with the name Lalithambika, waged a war against Pandasura and destroyed him.  When her fury did not subside, Shiva asked her to go to Earth, assume the name Manonmani, perform penance and shed her fury.


Shiva blessed Devi to be Shanta nayagi. There is a sculpture here depicting Shiva pacifying Devi. If you observe closely, you can see that from your left hand side there will be a smile on Her face and if you see from your right hand side you can see anger in Her face.


Hayagriva taught the greatness of Lalitha Sahasranama to Rishi Agasthya. Pleased with his devotion, Ma Lalithambikai appeared before Agastya. He is believed to have then sung Lalita Navaratnamala in praise of Devi. He has also composed a hymn named Rahasyanamasahasram.
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\u0938\u093e \u0935\u093f\u0926\u094d\u092f\u093e \u092f\u093e \u0935\u093f\u092e\u0941\u0915\u094d\u0924\u092f\u0947
सा विद्या या विमुक्तये...
@raghav_aanya
#ज्योतिष_विज्ञान #मंत्र_विज्ञान

ज्योतिषाचार्य अक्सर ग्रहों के दुष्प्रभाव के समाधान के लिए मंत्र जप, अनुष्ठान इत्यादि बताते हैं।

व्यक्ति के जन्म के समय ग्रहों की स्थिति ही उसकी कुंडली बन जाती है जैसे कि फ़ोटो खींच लिया हो और एडिट करना सम्भव नही है। इसे ही "लग्न" कुंडली कहते हैं।


लग्न के समय ग्रहों की इस स्थिति से ही जीवन भर आपको किस ग्रह की ऊर्जा कैसे प्रभावित करेगी का निर्धारिण होता है। साथ साथ दशाएँ, गोचर इत्यादि चलते हैं पर लग्न कुंडली का रोल सबसे महत्वपूर्ण है।


पृथ्वी से अरबों खरबों दूर ये ग्रह अपनी ऊर्जा से पृथ्वी/व्यक्ति को प्रभावित करते हैं जैसे हमारे सबसे निकट ग्रह चंद्रमा जोकि जल का कारक है पृथ्वी और शरीर के जलतत्व पर पूर्ण प्रभाव रखता है।
पूर्णिमा में उछाल मारता समुद्र का जल इसकी ऊर्जा के प्रभाव को दिखाता है।


अमावस्या में ऊर्जा का स्तर कम होने पर वही समुद्र शांत होकर पीछे चला जाता है। जिसे ज्वार-भाटा कहते हैं। इसी तरह अन्य ग्रहों की ऊर्जा के प्रभाव होते हैं जिन्हें यहां समझाना संभव नहीं।
चंद्रमा की ये ऊर्जा शरीर को (अगर खराब है) water retention, बैचेनी, नींद न आना आदि लक्षण दिखाती है


मंत्र क्या हैं-
मंत्र इन ऊर्जाओं के सटीक प्रयोग करने के पासवर्ड हैं। जिनके जप से संबंधित ग्रह की ऊर्जा को जातक की ऊर्जा से कनेक्ट करके उन ग्रहों के दुष्प्रभाव को कम किया और शुभ प्रभाव को बढ़ाया जाता है।
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Reshu Nath
Reshu Nath
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'Tera mera rishta kya, hindu, hindu,hindutva' is a clear take on 'tera mera rishta kya,la ilaha illallah'. As much as Hindutva hates the monotheistic religions especially Islam, there's a strange wistfulness and subliminal need at display now, to BE that they hate. 1


Charlie Hebdo doesn’t come up as a cautionary tale now but rather 'why cant we be like that'?
Growing up, Hanuman was an adorable deity for us, who swallowed the sun, or who couldn’t figure out what was Sanjeevani booti so he picked up a whole mountain and came back with it. 2

Or he was loyal, admirable and when he cleaved his chest, you saw both Ram and Sita. Now we have a lot of “Angry Hanuman” stickers. Why is a cute childlike God angry? We don’t know. It's a convenient blank space where to paint all the angst of Hindu Khatre mein hain narrative. 3


The other strange thing that has started happening is pictures of Ram appearing sans Sita. “Jai Siya Ram” has become “Jai Shri Ram”. Some people disingenuously explain it as being the same thing - because Shri is a name of Lakshmi. Not really. Siya is an apbhransh of Sita. 4


Shri is a prefix of respect in this case. Hinduism is being militarised. A woman/Sita has no place in it. Even the militaristic Goddess that is Durga has no place in this conception of neo-Hindu divinity, as evidenced by Dilip Mandal wondering where Durga came from. 5
RELIGION
Corey Haines \U0001f4a1
Corey Haines 💡...
@coreyhainesco
I think I'm giving up on mainstream marketing content.

I'm giving up on social media consumption too.

So little substance.

Need to devote more time doing. More time creating.

Who needs another "5 ways to boost growth" post? I click and am disappointed every time. Not again.

I don't want to poop on content marketing, but marketers need to step it up.

Or at least, founders need to know that doing something is not always better than doing nothing.

Why is content marketing not as effective as it used to be? An innumerable amount of factors...

But one things for damn sure.

Things have to change.

Two of the chief sins:
1. Unoriginal research/story/study/etc
2. Not having anything more to add that's meaningful

Why blog/podcast/vlog/etc about something that's already been said? Already been done?

Do we really need another interview with founder of x hot startup? Do we really need another ultimate guide about facebook ads?

Not all content is like this...

Sometimes, you get an occasional piece that truly leaves you better off than you were before. That doesn't make you want to skim.

An original case study. A first time interview with a founder. An honest account of an experiment. An explanation of a change, shift, or realization.
LIFE
Bharadwaj
Bharadwaj
@BharadwajSpeaks
Today is Jayanti of Ahilyabai Holkar

She was a widow who became Malwa's greatest queen. Defended our country & personally led armies into battle.Never plundered anyone. Developed Malwa into a prosperous kingdom. Rebuilt temples destroyed by Mughals. Built Dharmashalas at Tirthas


Unfortunately, her memory has been blemished by inaccurate representations in modern popular media.

The serial "Punyashlok Ahilyabai" depicts her as ultra secularist feminazi icon who questions Hindu rituals & Pandits while patronising Sufis.

This is far from historical truth!


Ahilyabai was born on May 31 1725 to Patil Mankoji Shinde.

She was from Dhangar clan(classified as OBC today). While Dhangars were traditionally into herding, they took up arms & held several military /civil roles in various eras of history(especially during Maratha resurgence)


In 1737, when she was 12, Ahilyabai Holkar was married to Khanderao , son of Subedar Malhar Rao Holkar.

By the time she was married, fortunes of Holkar family had already waxed.

Malhar Rao was a Subedar of territory comprising 30 Parganas yielding a revenue of at least 7 Lakh


In 1741, when Ahilyabai was newly married, her father -in-law Malhar Rao Built Indore palace & ordered the kanungo to populate the settlement with a promise of protection to traders.

This began rise of Indore from its background as modest trading town Indrapuri to a great city
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