• Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    If the numbers are content. That’s about 3.2 million in revenue and 64 million loss per year.

    While people want to clap over that. Many companies are not profitable their first few years.

    I work for a tech company. We are well known, bring in billions but one made a profit once or twice in twenty years.

    Prior company the same.

    It’s amazing that you can bring in billions and still not make a dime

    • Carrot
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      3 months ago

      Big companies do this on purpose. They want their earnings and their expenses to match up as close as possible, because companies don’t pay any taxes on money spent on making money, only on profits. So if a giant company is in the red, the vast majority of operating expenses are tax deductible

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’ve worked for two successful startups and they also tried really hard to break even every year, for the reason you’re mentioned. The thing their investors wanted to see was revenue growth, not profits. As revenue grew they would hire more people to use up the money.

      • Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        It’s also hard to turn a profit. People think running a company is easy. It’s not. Employees, health care, etc all add up. Hell when we sell software, it takes a few years to break even on it and our margins are 95%+. Out ceo doesn’t care about paying taxes. Most don’t. They’d rather be profitable but that’s a tough goal to achieve on a consistent basis.

    • Tyfud@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You generally don’t want losses as a business. Even a startup. Ever. You want your revenue and expenses to be as close as possible,ESPECIALLY for the first few years.

      Some insane Silicon Valley companies take VC money and operate at a massive, massive loss, banking on making that up with a spike in growth later. In most cases, it’s built into their business model that they’d be operating at a loss for X quarters.

      That’s not what’s happening here. They’re operating at a huge, huge loss, and they have no realistic business prospects for how to close that gap, ever.

      Additionally, the market leader in their space (Twitter/X), is making a hard right pivot and becoming a right wing platform/safehaven. This is further reducing an already thin market share they might have claimed.

      Purely as a business investment, if I saw these numbers, in this market condition, I would pull my money immediately. Halt all further investment. Call a board meeting. Liquidate the company to try and pay off the debts, and any proceeds are returned to the shareholders.

      I would, under no circumstances, continue to invest in a company like that, expecting any sort of return on my investment. I could only expect to lose whatever else I put in.

    • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
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      3 months ago

      There’s a world of difference between not having any profit because you’re aggressively reinvesting it into your business, and not having any profit because you spent 16 million to keep the lights on for a service that brought in approximately 5% of what you spent.

      • Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        That’s not uncommon through. Meta, twitter, etc didn’t have any real revenue for years. I think truth will last through the year and then die off unless Trump wins. Maybe two years. Hell I’m a conservative and I don’t know anyone who uses it. I would say it means more maga and once Trump is gone, it’ll die off.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Many companies are not profitable their first few years.

      Especially if they’re a Twitter ripoff with one single user being the only one anyone cares about in terms of who posts.

      In fact, I’m going to make a, what I feel is pretty safe, prediction that Truth Social also won’t make a profit over their last few years.

    • Tja@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      If you revenue grows 100% YoY and you are investing in growth, sure. I work for a 15 year old company that is just starting to become profitable, still growing well into double digits.

      None of that is true here.

      • Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Put it in perspective. Twitter, Facebook, both had higher expenses and less revenue at the same mark.

        Truth has 600k active users a month which isn’t bad for a two year old company

        I just see it as a fad that won’t last.

        • Tja@programming.dev
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          3 months ago

          600k active users and shrinking. That’s the problem. No growth perspective, no plans, just grift. Let alone how many of those are bots.

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I always question “active users”, too. A few years ago I worked for a large cable company. We put out an app for them that let users email, text and make VoIP calls. Absolutely nobody in the real world used it but the company was able to make it look like it had well over a million daily users. They offered a discount on people’s cable bills if they installed the app so a lot of people did, and then the app would ping the servers once a day and this would be logged as an “active daily user.” So the million daily users was just customers who hadn’t bothered to uninstall the fucking thing. The company veeps behind the app knew it was total bullshit, but they were just trying to justify the expense of producing the app to the higher-ups.

            It’s depressing to think that I spent eight years of my career writing exactly this type of useless bullshit cable company flagship app, for many different cable companies and ISPs. At least the final year was just doing literally nothing all day while “working” from home until I was finally laid off.

      • Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        As I clearly said I don’t use it. I checked it out a few times and it’s not my jam. It’s very MAGA and I’m not a maga republican.
        I find it’s overly focused on the culture war which doesn’t interest me.