Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc.
Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to.
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
This. From my YC experience, I know that starting with a niche is good advice and advice they likely would have gotten.
Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.
Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"
Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!
$10/month is not a cheap tool. I'm paying $90/year for Intellij Idea which is my main development tool. IMO that cost is extremely prohibitive for most users and it's definitely not a way to get plenty of people on board to monetize it later.
It is, however, a way to get a validated group of people who are price insensitive (compared to you, anyway)
and willing to pay money for that specific sort of tool. Whether that's enough for a YC hail-mary to work is a them-problem.
Why though? People who are price insensitive enough to pay 120 bucks a year for a menu bar widget are not your target audience, they are a tiny tiny minority.
They might be a minority. They might be a minority you're not in. So (I'm guessing) is the minority that buy genuine Louis Vuitton handbags. The question isn't the size of the market in total audience numbers, or the proportion of some arbitrary population they represent, it's the readiness with which they can be parted with a sizeable chunk of cash in aggregate.
Proving that the total addressable wallet is sufficient to sustain a YC company is a) non-trivial, and b) their problem. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there can be remarkably large markets in remarkably unexpected places, so while yes, this one looks like a totally conventional small-software-shop play, and the 75th percentile outcome across all YC companies is crater-shaped, I'm not going to second-guess whether they might have something.
I don't get when people say $X/month is too much. Too much for you maybe. But for me, if I can save 1 hour per month, that's worth $500. That's the top of what I've charged per hour for some consulting gigs. So $10/m is literally nothing for me if I can save time. Time is your most valuable asset. Money is nothing. Focus on time.
If every comment has to be suffixed with “for me” or “IMO”, it would be quite tedious to read. In most cases it’s clear. In cases like this, it could also be that the writer isn’t earning a six figure USD income or is in a country where even a $10 here and a $10 there add up relative to one’s income.
It’s also very easy to say that X is most valuable and Y is nothing when you have very limited X and have a lot of Y.
on the contrary, it's very important for people to distinguish clearly between statements of objective fact and personal opinions. they ought to do it more often. imo.
more on topic, time is inherently more valuable than money due to its fundamental scarcity. there are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in a person's life. if you have time, you can always trade it for money. but if you have money, you can't always exchange it for time.
I think it’s very clear that different people have different amounts of money and thus different ability and willingness to pay certain amounts for certain things.
Great, I'm hoping you'll sign up for my upcoming weather widget which tells you the weather in a single location. It's only $30 a month, and it will save you time as you will no longer have to use any other weather widget.
At some point in the future I plan on offering additional locations (at a compellingly low per location monthly service fee TBD).
As great as the endless possibilities software offers are, it really obscures the amount of effort necessary to bring real world products to life. The jump in hubris from “Great, I can code!” to “Well, I could build a tool to do that, so no one deserves to make a living/profit/native app/business doing it” is waaaay too prevalent around here.
Of course none of the people who say such things could actually do so. Instead, they continue to post the aforementioned type of comment along with the following:
- Ask HN: Where are all the profitable ideas?
- Show HN: I built some half-assed idea that no one will ever use to learn the latest technology fad.
- Who’s Hiring: I hate my job at some random SaaS firm because I hypocritically don’t assign worth to building software.
Anyhow, where is this mythical weather widget getting its data? How reliable are its forecasts? What makes it better than the tools Apple/Google build into their OSes after spending millions acquiring formerly indie weather tools?
I pay for this its called Forecast bar (https://forecastbar.com) and I love it. Basically Dark Sky for your Mac. Not $30 a month, but there's different tiers of service depending on your needs.
Would I pay for this startups calendar? Probably not, but it seems nice, and I can definitely see people paying 2 cups of coffee a month for it.
I have been looking for a dark sky replacement for a while! Thank you, I just installed forecastbar. If it is even marginally approximate to the original dark sky, I am subscribing!
If I lived in that location, and that widget had a great UI, maybe combined some reminders (good morning, 70% chance of rain today, don't forget your umbrella!), maybe it integrated with my calendar and let me know I need to leave early if I'm in a location far away from where I need to be and it's snowing really bad.
And all of that is ignoring the possibility that the idea is to build into some other thing, but there's minimal advantage to waiting.
Luckily, I live in a place where the weather is the same for 6 months, before it changes and is the same again for 6 months. The ultimate time saver ;)
Not exactly. To make it equivalent first you need to consider employer side of FICA, which take about $100k. Then health insurance and other benefits. And vacation, sick pay, and any equipment you need to do the work.
Finally, maybe the biggest variable is non-billable hours. Maybe there isn’t 2000 hours of work available at that rate. And a lot of people who charge that much spend a substantial time finding new clients, writing new project proposals (many of which don’t get executed), and doing things to promote themselves like conference talks or speaking to press.
It would typically net out to anywhere from $500k-$900k depending on how much of those overheads you have. Nothing to sneeze at but similar ballpark as senior FAANG comp
Well, GP did say that was the top end of their hourly rate, so maybe not that much, but I think it's safe to say they're very solidly into six figures. Under those circumstances the calculus does no doubt change/ I don't think it reflects the reality experienced by the majority of people with less otherworldly remuneration, families, etc.
I don't do consulting anymore, but I know plenty of consultants that gross over a million per year. Of course, business expenses, taxes, etc. bring their net income down considerably.
I don't get it either when you consider most people drop $10/month on plenty of other things. I'm pretty sure I spend a decent multiple of that on coffee.
If you're someone whose main work tool is your calendar (C-level execs, PAs, salespeople, project managers, etc) then that puts it in exactly the same ballpark as you and Intellij Idea.
Even in the poorest of countries, $90/year is not too much for any serious (heck, even amateur) software developer. A coffee costs around $1 (in poor countries), that's $365/year and most people drink more than a cup per day.
Now that's a tool to actually work, not increase your productivity (or mess with it). So $90 is pretty affordable.
There are plenty of completely free editors that are within striking distance of IDEA editors, and some of us even prefer them. $90 is fine since it's not a requirement for 99.9% of the coding jobs out there. I wouldn't be too worried that it is $90
I'm really talking about home-made coffee (with some milk). Even in the cheapest countries, a cup of coffee (in a cafe) costs more than $1: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310492
People who are surviving on a $500-$2000/year budget, are not on the market for a full-fledged IDE.
first off, you're calling bulgaria, india etc. poor countries. relatively, okay, but op was about even poorer countries. But more to the point the prices you quoted were about buying coffee in restaurants. Most people drink their coffee at home (or at work) not in shops. And it's much cheaper then. E.g. I usually drink senseo and it costs me about 25 eurocents per cup.
You might be surprised but if coffee is imported, it might actually be cheaper in Europe than in these poor countries. Import duties, corruption, bad port infrastructure... all of these issues inflate costs.
To put it into perspective, for someone making $200k+/yr (a lot of the HN audience), $10 is about 6min of their time/month (assuming a 40hr work week). Over a year it adds up to 72min of time.
On the other hand, researching and trying out alternative free/cheaper tools might take hours. For a busy person making good money, $10/mo to make them more productive isn't a crazy ask IMO.
Your comment comes with a very big assumption that the trivial amount of money you spend really serves your needs and that all marketing material is true and comprehensive. When you buy something and then realize it’s not really solving your problems, then you might apply the same calculation, buy another tool based on some marketing copy, be disappointed and then finally come to a “let me research this space better before throwing money at undeserving people and services” mode. I’m not saying this is how it will always play out. But those who do spend some time researching and trying things out aren’t quite stupid either.
I would also contest your claim that a lot of the HN audience makes $200K a year. I’d wager that it’s a lot lesser.
As was pointed out here, though... by pricing at such a point (initially), they find people who do.
And maybe that's the intent.
If you're not Apple, where price insensitive customers beat down your door, then finding them is a non-trivial problem. And not just any customers, but ones who would be interested in your (I assume) follow-on product in a similar space.
If you're living in a Western country as a coder you can afford $90 a year for something that can save you more hours than that unless something is taking most of your money (say alimony or garnished wages from bankruptcy caused by our poor medical system). I prefer emacs and vs code to IDEA editors but that's just me. Even when I was at $50K a year I wouldn't have though twice about $90 for an editor (or other tool) if I thought it would save me time and cussing.
Plenty of successful products appeal to very few people.
I was just offering the way I would approach considering to buy something like this
Personally, I don’t think this tool would make me significantly more productive, but if it could truly save me a few hours a year maybe 120/yr isn’t that bad.
I'm comparing software to software. I want to buy honest software. If I'm paying $100/year for some program, then I'm expecting that another program with similar cost would require similar amount of engineering effort. I'm ready to pay $100/year for operating system. I'm ready to pay $100/year for sophisticated graphical editor like Photoshop.
Paying similar price for simple software? Well, I would expect something like one-time purchase for $10, that's how much I'm paying usually for those kinds of programs.
It might sound a little bit communistic, I know. Sorry.
If I'm making $20k/year, I could pay $10k for Intellij Idea. Because it's essential for my work. But I'm paying $90, because Idea creators put a reasonable price. May be that's because they're in a hard competition with free tools, I don't know.
>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
I’ve spent almost a decade in the productivity space (founded Shortcuts at Apple, fka Workflow) and everything is always confusing.
Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unreasonable way to go about it. It’s important to have a larger vision, but execution is perhaps the most important in this space (as with most consumer tech).
Sure, but saving a click or two when joining zoom meetings for mac users that don't use the native calendar app doesn't really scream "hair on fire"...
I ended up building my own solution to this because I regularly miss meetings by minutes and want a one-click solution to jump into meetings (I can have up to 10 a day) even though I use the native Calendar app.
I saw this and it resonated deeply with me. It's an exceedingly small paper cut, but a paper cut nonetheless.
The Zoom client has already a built in calendar integration. Once connected, it will show you all upcoming meetings for the day including a button to join the call. It's quite convenient.
As someone who has to have zoom, teams, and webex meetings with clients I would enjoy a tray item that would just organize all those into a lista and have one click access the task tray, integration with various calendars (mainly icloud and google) would be even nicer. Even if it just summed up my week. Extra points for cross platform. seems as if someone probably hasn't already built in emacs probably :)
It's not just a click or two when we are joining several meetings in a day. Personally I'm annoyed by repetitive tasks that are slow due to external factors. Joining a meeting through Meet on Chrome involves -
1. Open a new tab on the right user profile
2. Navigate to meet.google.com (second slowest task)
3. Click on a meeting. Wait for it to be setup (slowest task)
4. Join. Wait for a couple of seconds for the stream to setup.
I would rather club multiple slow steps requiring user action into one long wait time that I can completely ignore.
Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later.
I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.
If they build a unified notification inbox, I will pay for that. I had one of those when I used a Blackberry and I miss it as I now have to check 10 sites periodically to stay on top of things.
Honestly, the last thing I want is a unified inbox. I get inputs from a dozen different streams and have segregated them by platform to better manage my time.
I want it to be really easy for people to get a hold of me if the information is important or if they are important to me, e.g. via SMS or voice.
I want it to be very difficult to be overwhelmed by low signal content unless that is my focus at the time, e.g. mailing lists, work email, etc.
And I want to be able to select my focus. When I am reading about mountain bikes, I want to read about mountain bikes. I don't want to sort through work messages, family memes, or tech news at the same time.
Man I really wish BB10 had come to the market earlier. I honestly don't doubt it'd still be around today if it wasn't for the fact it entered the market so late. BB were too busy dragging their feet for years after iOS and Android hit the scene. If they started work on BB10 as soon as the iPhone was released, I think we'd still have BlackBerries and more importantly a third platform. The Apple/Google duopoly benefits no one except Apple and Google.
I still have a Q10 somewhere, it's such a nice phone too.
There's still a lot of things I can't talk about because some of the people who I worked with, who are great people still work there.
Internally, 33% of every dollar went to the Blackberry Wireless division because Blackberry was created before commoditized mobile chips existed. In effect, this means we paid for the chips, paid an extra fee to unlock it just so we could flash our software.
It was an ongoing battle between the spec for Bluetooth being released and having our own version, validating it against every single thing out there that could connect to it and then shipping it out. This made it extremely pricy to deliver a feature on the wireless stack and often things just weren't supported which came with the original chipset.
It's difficult to turn the ship around without just firing everyone involved and going "just grab what's there just like Android is doing"
I still have a special Z10 that I was allowed to keep after working there.
It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment.
Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Edit: 2 years after I left, Blackberry devices became Android devices... so I guess I was ahead of the curve or something?
It is probably not possible, you have to unlock on premises using a signed version of the tooling on a beta version of the OS on the device.
Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(
I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? I'm not sure why you need to check sites for notifications, that seems like the opposite of a notification.
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means?
BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.
Isn't this just notification center? I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it, but most services have some form of notification support that will redirect you to the proper app context
I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it
I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.
Yeah, this is the other thing I'm baffled about here. My iPhone is my unified notification inbox and I can do all of those things right from the lock screen. I definitely never have to visit sites to check notifications.
And you can add calendar, todo, notes, etc etc widgets to it. It is slow and you can’t use the keyboard to navigate it. I think developers are very limited in what they can do with it. That said, it covers 80% of what users are looking for here ...
> The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together.
Try O365. It just works. Seems like every app works well with the other ones.
>>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
That's risky. Major OS already have notification centers/aggregators.
O365? Outlook.com is terrible. Crazy a** js that doesn't mark messages as read with no discernible way to reliably trigger that, shows me the email message version from before spell check as I am waiting for it to send, super laggy, arcane hover triggered menus that want to do a million undocumented things, just to get an email address from an email chain, etc. The only two worse online experiences for me are logging in to att.com and trying to shop on homedepot.com. Microsoft should not be in a discussion with those two head-lice.
Your critique is coming from a sincere place, and acts as a harbinger of the troubles that users of Superpowered are also likely to face.
The trouble is that this kind of SNAFU is common when you are dealing with multi-application use cases, so this criticism is going to apply doubly to any new player in the space, including the topic of this discussion.
Correct, but my point was that there is room for said new player if that is the best we have right now. It is truly basically unusable for me on my device. I don't plan on getting a new device, but rather quitting the part time work that requires me to use that mess (along with so many other bad decisions they make, that make my work about 80% more time consuming than it should be).
So many different functions. My company is purely cloud and we use Google as much as possible, but we still have tons as we need a help desk, a task board, HR software, credential management, Office for some people, Udemy, etc.
One, every subdivision of a company might have similar needs, but each one has niche table stakes that only one app provides. Case in point: Lawyers still use WordPerfect [1].
Two, and this is where I think Superpowered, the company in question, will stumble, is that every attempt to unify these disparate needs has ended up into a unholy giant mess of "Enterprisey" software that tries to be all things to all people. Inevitably there's at least one key area where it sucks to bad for the table stakes requirement of that user base that they never adopt it, strike out on their own, and now you're back to "why do we have so many apps?".
What's the alternative? You could try to centralize all of your apps onto Google or Microsoft or Zoho, but frankly if you want the best user experience, you have to work with several different companies.
For me that's still what it's best at and what it should focus on. "Paper", Signatures, Password, to me that feels like they're desperately trying to find something to not just be a reliable external hard drive for people. Oh and of course their number one ambition, trying to convince me to upgrade to whatever more expensive plan they have.
Dropbox could have carved out a niche for itself as a platform for backup and sharing of files. However, the amount of investment capital doesn't allow them to be just a successful medium sized enterprise.
Being the best in a completely commodified area is tough, especially when that solution set is thrown in for free in the world's most popular productivity platforms-- Office 365.
Dropbox has the best sync clients, but that's not enough to save them from being a commodity. Dead-simple and reliable sync seems like a nice-to-have that isn't going to save them from the incredibly large footprint the likes of Microsoft already have in enterprise markets. An IT purchaser might not care much about the usability difference between OneDrive and DropBox (which I'm not even sure exists since the last time I used both.)
Dropbox needs to think of what apps you can build on top of it and let people build those apps. They are a data lake. Enable advanced analytics and ML etc...
Well, is there some _specific_ reason to scoff now?
I'm not saying that's the
case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
Dropbox is in a weird place right now because its free tier is too small, the pair tier is too big and expensive, a $5 tier doesn't work financially, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple offer 80% as good solutions with 2.5x as much space for free. For corporate customers, again, they're probably Exchange or GSuite shops, so they can use one of those storage providers.
Dropbox addresses a real problem, it's just that the triviality of a business copying it means it became table stakes on a lot of platforms.
Dropbox’s killer app is: simply working. I have access to and use both Google Drive and O365 One Drive at work and it is shocking how often I have problems with them.
To be clear, my expected rate of problems for this functionality is “never.” The only service I have that experience with is Dropbox. With GDrive and One Drive I have seen folders lose sync, files get stuck syncing, and inexplicable conflicts.
In addition, sharing outside my org is way easier and more reliable with Dropbox.
I agree that copying files around seems like it should be trivial. Somehow it’s not, though. I don’t have an explanation, just observations from trying to get real work done on a Mac.
Nerds used to large corporate networks/university ones pretty much all had access to shared drives that "just worked" in the OS file browser.
The magic of DropBox was that non-technical users could just share that word document, have it everywhere and not have to deal with a weird terminal.
I wished Drobox built a (physicals, why not) wall at their HQ with the names of everyone who was able to miraculously recover their masters/phd thesis after hardware failure because they saved it in their Dropbox folder.
TBH I never understood the appeal of dropbox, drive, mega, etc
Is it the UI? Is it keeping your data safe? Is it the sync?
I never used their native applications because I hate constant syncing for no reason and running proprietary apps (especially if they're always on), but I use some of their free tiers to store stuff.
If I had to pay I'd just buy some space on some server at the cheapest price per gb there is.
This. Whenever someone quips "that's a feature not a product" the reply should be "so why were they able to ship this feature and you weren't". Technical debt, opportunity cost(s), mission focus are all opportunities for arbitrage.
I think the discussion was always sure you can release a feature product and find success. One you reach a certain level bigger players will incorporate your features and you will cease to exist.
Being able to breakout of that feature product into an expanded ecosystem before your product becomes a feature of a bigger platform is the real end game.
sherlocked:
to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
I'll bet the Pro HDR folks groaned and got drunk after the Apple event yesterday where they showed the HDR functionality built in to the OS. They got Sherlocked!
I commented on this risk. The founder smartly replied that they have much broader plans than just calendars. Still, anything that lives in the menu bar and serves such a core purpose as notifications is at risk of being “Sherlocked”.
Most companies (the majority, I'd wager) who were Sherlocked were _not_ bought by Apple. Most companies basically got a "sucks to be you", that they found out along with everyone else at an Apple launch event where Apple had, sometimes shamelessly and brazenly, cloned their product. Sometimes, to add insult to injury, Apple would then remove that company's product from App Stores as "duplicating OS functionality".
Allegedly Apple's strategy is often to make an offer to buy the company and acquihire some devs who understand the problem and have experience solving it, and if the answer is a no they implement the feature themselves. I have no idea if that's actually true, or if it happens a lot, but it could be the case that being "sherlocked" is what happens if you turn down an offer. If true, that would make being "sherlocked" irrelevant if the plan is to exit by being bought by Apple.
On top of that: doing something that you could hack together 80% of the way over a weekend, but then providing careful attention to detail in terms of user experience and integrations, quality and responsive customer support, and a general intimate awareness of your customers' needs can make it into a valuable product. Many products could be dramatically amplified in their usefulness by way of a couple tiny UX tweaks, driven by understanding of users' problems. In fact this is a main factor in Apple's success, IMO.
Yes, thank you. A handful of years back i realized every huge startup's new product was 90% empty air. Ie, startups would bite off more than they could chew - even huge startups.
Doing one thing well is so much better to me than 100 things poorly. And there's still a ton of complexity and work to do the one thing well, usually. Be it integrations, sub features, whatever - i vastly prefer a full experience with a narrow scope than a "out the door" experience with a huge scope.
And especially today, when tech megacorps attempt to copy every successful product on any of their platforms, doubling-down on doing one thing extremely well is your best defense because that's what they struggle with
> Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to.
A cheap tool to build an audience makes sense, absolutely, but this is very nearly the exact opposite of that. How many users is a $10/mo calendar widget only on MacOS and only with Google Calendar really going to attract? It's expensive, and the audience is a subset of a subset of a subset. Got to start somewhere, of course, but this is like the result of a weekend hackathon, not something that a significant audience is going to drop $120/year on.
Absolutely. It's a common startup tactic to release a product that costs more and does less than existing alternatives to get market share and brand awareness. This is just basic stuff. Marketing 101.
>most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside
It’s enough that they made it into YC to conclude that there is a lot more going inside.
They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...
Regarding focusing on a niche it was a lesson I learned when I was filtering startups for investments I wrote about about my lesson before and how dumb I felt for passing on startups because they were too niche
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507122
> They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...
Plenty of people get into YC with nothing more than an idea.
Getting into YC is sort of like getting into Harvard. Yeah, lots of people there are impressive, but not all of them. YC doesn't have a perfect filter.
FWIW I got into YC without anything remotely resembling a business, and I don't think I'm that impressive. My company failed almost immediately.
I would claim it also doesn't want a perfect filter. Maybe the team is great and they expect the (future) pivot leading to success. Also failures are cheap for YC, they live on their successes.
Sure, but YC has definitely diluted its brand over the years. I don't think most people hold it in the same regard as they did a decade ago. I certainly don't.
I get why they do it. It's an easy way to make more money. But the average YC founder today is nothing like the average YC founder a decade ago. They will argue otherwise, but I disagree based on personal experience. And everybody knows YC was really started by pg (I am fully aware of the entire history), and he hasn't been actively involved for years.
Also, if you want to make money selling software to consumers, Apple's platform is the one to target. Mac and iOS users are the most likely by far to actually pay for software. It's far more difficult to sell an app for actual money to Android or Windows users.
Again talking specifically about the consumer market here, not enterprise.
while its true that the base functionality itself is extremely easy to implement with any CRUD framework (spring/django/RoR/phoenix/whatever), the created app would not be able to scale to the degree twitter has been scaled at this point.
vertical scaling only works to a degree, and horizontal scaling while keeping the data as close to real-time as possible is nontrivial.
I'm not talking about engineering complexity, I'm just talking about user value and user experience. I'm sure that scaling a calendar tool to a billion people is non-trivial too.
I have to put this on my wall. I made this point to a "designer" in love with the trend of the full-splash intro video. They wanted to use it on a website targeting managers.
Trying the demo on three middle-aged individuals, two did not have the habit of hitting page down or scrolling. So, two out of three did not find the "obvious" content of the website below the video.
Who are the audience and what are their true needs?
is what we have to concentrate on when we sell products. I am sitting in zoom sessions with individuals that complain about their "wireless" headphones failing / discharging. Yet they happily paid for them, hundreds of dollars.
Consumers are magic. I suggested they use a wired headset. They will not spend 10 dollars to buy one. One should contemplate deeply why, if one wants to sell to people like this. Observe them in their natural habitat. They can't explain why.
This is why having a digital product out in the market with paying customers is valuable in itself. You get to observe and measure, and pivot if you're lucky. The userbase is the resource, and the paying userbase is gold.
I'm purely talking about it from the perspective of user value. Whether users are customers or products, what are they getting out of the platform that drives them to use it regularly? Or more generally, what are they getting out of it that they couldn't get on 100 other platforms? Or an RSS feed?
At this point, the answer is just network effect, but that certainly wasn't the case when it was new.
I can see this going one of two ways: either nobody signs up, they get made fun of a bit, get the message and pivot, or the publicity they're generating gets the app in front of the niche they are targeting, they get users, feedback, and the ear of people who put this kind of value on the productivity boost they get.
Either way, I don't see the harm in putting it in front of people now, and I see a big downside to either polishing it more, or pivoting without having tested it on people.
Yes, you're right. In fact the founders practically say as much in their Launch HN post.
I'm assuming the reddit post is by someone who is just really unfamiliar with YC and modern tech entrepreneurship. Hopefully, their question was sincere and they'll receive sensible answers.
As for the question of whether YC has lost its way - most institutions lose their way at some point, so it's a fair question, but I don't think it's fair to single out this particular company.
I actually posted this on reddit (mainly to get other viewpoints besides the HN echo chamber), and I’m not new to the tech entrepreneurship scene. I’ve launched 3 startups, two bootstrapped that are chugging along quite well and a third one VC funded that is doing just ok.
This is less an attack on Superpowered as it is a critique of YC. I think the idea of a unified Notification Center is interesting but the space is quite simply too crowded. You have slack, plus all of the companies like station trying to solve the same problem with much more features and a much bigger moat. YC used to pick companies that were more or less going to be at least decently successful even if they had never encountered YC, while this one seems like it wouldn’t have been successful without YC.
It seems like YC has fully switched to the shotgun model of fund everything and see what sticks instead of the boutique smaller cohorts of the past. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but that also comes with a reputation change as well.
Skeptical me says it's for collecting data about the users. The data and the analytics would be the actual value. Not the users, though, only to the investors.
Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to.
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.