The startup raised $2.5M and immediately spent $1.8M of it on the domain name <i>friend.com</i>.<p>That neatly sums up the priorities of many recent "AI" startups.
> a screenshot of the transaction (…) shows he paid $1,887,843 for the domain<p>So it’s closer to $1.9M.<p>> "People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing," Schiffmann said.<p>What’s the logic here? It doesn’t matter if your domain is imbecile.tld or something slightly less “premium”, you still have to tell people about it. No one is typing random domains in the address bar. Does anyone think Dropbox’s adoption was hampered by their initial domain being getdropbox.com?<p>Also, this does say a lot about the founder’s priorities: that spending on marketing is at least three times more important than spending on improving the core offer.<p>> The device also looks like a more specialized version of other AI companion devices like the Humane Pin and the Rabbit R1, both of which have had disastrous launches.<p>If and when this fails, I wonder if they’s still claim they “get consumer”.