I don't like doing this because I'm a founder too and, well, "you don't shit where you eat" - you don't go and pass judgement about the ventures of others because you don't want to be in their spot yourself.
Nevertheless, I couldn't help but notice their landing page reeks of buzzword laden hustle and nothing more. This, to me, is not a legitimate venture, or at least not presented as such.
1. The service doesn't seem to exist;
2. The landing page textual content is badly made and badly spelled, which makes you question the capabilities and efforts of the team behind it;
3. They have this slider that name drops companies they have nothing to do with (AirBnB, CoffeeTable etc) with some headline stats and icons, and slides out of your way just before you begin to read the smaller print, which is about how these companies improved business metrics using push notifications. It has nothing to do with their product whatsoever. But you wouldn't think that on first glance, as they deliberately made it look like customer testimonials.
This to me is a huge red flag;
4. They have a $599 recommended plan which is way above what SaaS MVPs usually aim for;
5. Microsoft employs ~100k people worldwide. Being a Microsoft employee is completely meaningless in this context, and I feel is only used to lend them credibility in light of points #1-#4.
There's a very fine line between MVP, hustling and outright scamming. I feel they went too far. I'm sorry if I hurt someone's feelings but I doubt this is YC material.
After reading your comment, I was curious and looked up the site, and was expecting amature hour, but I think you're being too critical. The website looks well put together and communicated the product idea just fine. It's actually a very interesting idea that I think has real market demand if it actually works and produces better results than manually segmenting users (what all the other products do right now). That being said, I think it is very non-trivial to make a general recommendation engine that will work well for a variety of different apps and goals that isn't overly complicated. These things tend to sound good in theory, but fall apart in the details of practice.
#1. How do you know? Did you contact them? Obviously it's not open to the public as self-serve right now.
#2. I only glanced at the site, and didn't spot any. I'm sure they're there tho.
#3. They're demonstrating why you should care about push notifications. I'm sure they'll replace with specific case studies when they get some.
#4. I'm sure they've only begun to explore pricing at this early stage, but it seems reasonable to me. It's actually almost identical pricing per user compared to mixpanel, a YC company with a product in a similar space, at $0.002.
Thanks anatari for providing this feedback. You are spot on - our biggest technical challenge is to make a generic recommender that will work with a variety of different verticals. Our current approach is to limit ourselves to 3 specific verticals. For example consider the "news" vertical - a recommendation engine that works for NYTimes will likely work fine for WSJ.
Yeah, no problem. If you guys are planning on targeting games feel free to ping me privately to bounce ideas off of. I'm also a 30 something founder with kids in Seattle :). Our company currently uses a variety of services related to what you are doing. My email is my username at gmail.
Everyone uses buzzwords and I don't have a problem with them charging $599. If it is too high, I'm sure the market will tell them. I agree that they're using their Microsoft experience for added credibility but that isn't unusual either (though given pg's bias against Microsoft, I'm not sure if it will help them much :)
What I find more interesting is something that you haven't mentioned. Yesterday, the same blog post was submitted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484234 ) followed by an email request to thousands of people asking for an upvote. That post seems to only have 9 upvotes (and pg's anti-gaming algorithm may have played a role in it)
However, today, the post was re-submitted and it already has 23 points in just around an hour. So they've beaten pg's anti-duplicate-submission code (and perhaps his anti-gaming code as well)
I had written the post yesterday and submitted it - now the email list is STS [Seattle tech startups] and on that we are fairly active and know personally almost all the active members [seattle has a relatively small startup community]
All I said was up-vote if you like – isn’t that what we do anyways. This is an alias for fellow founders/entrepreneurs it would have been stupid to expect I would game the system there using these people -- we genuinely felt we had put in some thought behind the post ...
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 8:19 PM, Ritwik Tewari <ritwikt@gmail.com> wrote:
Given we are in the season of accelerator applications & that there is a perceived disadvantage to Seattle entrepreneurs like us coming from big cos. I thought some of you might find our story helpful.
The post is @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484234 – In case you happen to like it please up-vote or re-tweet.
[If HN has issues try https://medium.com/p/d639607056f6]
Techstars shares similar attributes hence much of the reasoning applies there too & yes it is amongst the other two I mention in my post.
…
I think the service looks very, very interesting. A potential conversion game changer.
There's actually not a single link to the website in the post, I'm pretty certain they've not even got an MVP yet, or if they do it'll just be string and duct tape. He talks about phone interviews, they're still in customer exploration.
I think it entirely depends on the light you look at it in. Turn to the left slightly, and it suddenly looks like the beginnings of something that just needs a bit of tiller correcting, a bit more businessman, a bit less engineer.
That style of writing on the blog and on the website, to me, is very Indian. I think it's just a cultural difference, try re-reading it.
And in the end if all they get out of the application is a clearer vision, they still got something out of it.
OTOH I'm not sure why he thinks YC doesn't accept 30 year olds with solid engineering backgrounds...
http://informion.com is what I assumed their service is. I apologize if this is not the service they discuss (this is what appears on the author's bio line at the bottom).
When I wrote my comment it was really coming from a place of honest criticism. It wasn't cautionary, as I don't expect most HN-ers to go dropping $599 on their recommended plan.
As a founder myself, I felt I had to give them my opinion of how this looks from the outside. Yes they had spelling errors as other posters politely noted but this is just going around the edges of the core issue here.
mattmanser - thanks for the encouragement. Our website is indeed www.informion.com (flyinglizard got that right). Our service is actually just string and duct tape (a hodge-podge of Java and Python programs running on data sets contained in zip files). We are working hard at getting an alpha version out by end of April that can be used by customers.
And yes, both of us are 1st gen immigrants to the US from India :-)
Please view the site as a precursor to our customer development conversation or an add-on to the cold call. It's not for inbound marketing, in-fact we have spent Zero dollars on advertising.
1. The service exists as a bunch of Java and Python scripts running on data sets in zip files. We needed just enough to get the core algorithms. We totally stopped development there and then forced ourselves to do customer conversations – we knew we could build this but not sure if people cared.
2. We were experimenting here and used to change the tag line every 20 or so cold emails to see which one worked better. It ranged from “Increase CTR…”, “Customer Success Platform”, “Interrupt to Please” – We monitored our conversions and asked our prospects what worked for them. We do not have a ton of data[12 customer conversations] to prove one way or other but found a provocative line to work better to pull them in the conversation than the most matter of fact explanation – discussions always were about specifics.
Would more than appreciate getting specific feedback ritwik@informion.com or @ritwiktewari.
3. This is an interesting one – we had two choices 1. Create make belief scenarios and try explaining that 2. Showcase examples where companies had done this well.
We started with 1 but almost never heard positive things in our conversations – we switched to 2 knowing that we could really NOT dupe someone since at this stage no one could sign up on the site besides a conversation -> demo followed by a pilot.
We have only one target in next 8 weeks replace this with a real customer testimonial ..
Please do understand that we just started and yes we might have crossed the line here.
If many share the feeling we would be more than happy to revert.
4. This one we have really put a lot of pain into so let me defend this ..
We asked our prospects
1. How much they would value the service @ - the answer was around 1K/mo
2. How much do they pay for compete/researched all the alternatives and the fact is that 1-3K is an average [Not really accounting for the difference between us and compete.]
From there we put in $599 – so that we are competitive yet account for the risk a company would take on an early stage startup
PS: Closes compete charges 3c/user – and we are targeting >100Kma
5. Well it might surely be – but being in Microsoft till date meant people outside rarely knew about the cool tech that was built – it is not the case with Google/FB/Twitter et al.
I had 6 points and Microsoft was just one which was specifically related to
• Have Non-existent open source profiles [Didn't we say Microsoft ☺]
I think that’s a fact – I am more than glad that things are changing rapidly for good at MSFT.
Good luck. As constructive criticism of the headline, my mind fleetingly tried to parse what a 'yo' engineer was (and a Microsoft one at that), and why 30 of them had applied for YC. :)
"Do not have network intros to YC-Partners" that got me thinking what are my odds of getting in. pg once said "your chances are either very high or very low". No intros. Haven't co-founder a successful startup in the past. Haven't worked for FB. I'm from "middle of nowhere".
We really have none of these - yet wanted to apply and encourage others like us to apply. We laid out our reasons with the hope to encourage a few more to polish their customer pitches using the framework we used ...
For us it came to two things:
a. Did we FEEL that the guys running the accelerator cared
b. Had we developed respect for their OPINIONS
As I said we found 3 fitting our criteria and YC was only one
I wonder how big of an effect getting on the front page of HN has on your YC application. I can't imagine it being that much, but this won't be the first time someone has tried (and succeeded).
I must say that we really didn't plan it this way we wrote this yesterday given we felt strongly about it.
The intent was not necessarily to talk about YC but to:
1. Spell out the framework we used to evaluate accelerators so others could use it as appropriate
For us it came to two things:
a. Did we FEEL that the guys running the accelerator cared
b. Had we developed respect for their OPINIONS
As I said we found 3 fitting our criteria and YC was one among those – it depends on what pre-access founders get to these guys/their thoughts – being in Seattle guys @ 9 mile have helped us out from even before we left our day jobs, similarly Andy and Techstars alum has been nothing but vested.
Thought this will be helpful for others deciding on accelerators.
2. Using YCs app as a tool for improving sales/pitches
We found YCs application & what they expect to have most resonance with what customers asked and expected – I would concur that almost all applications have these questions in one form of the other but PG has done well to express what they expect in his essay – we found him echoing what our customers expected but never demanded – so the app could be a tool one could use to refine the sales call/pitch.
Yes, I agree that this will not have much of an effect on our chances at YC. Our objective was not to get on the front page of HN. It was to have a conversation around the pros/cons of applying for "ivy league" accelerators. (All the added feedback on the website is a plus :-) )
Nevertheless, I couldn't help but notice their landing page reeks of buzzword laden hustle and nothing more. This, to me, is not a legitimate venture, or at least not presented as such.
1. The service doesn't seem to exist;
2. The landing page textual content is badly made and badly spelled, which makes you question the capabilities and efforts of the team behind it;
3. They have this slider that name drops companies they have nothing to do with (AirBnB, CoffeeTable etc) with some headline stats and icons, and slides out of your way just before you begin to read the smaller print, which is about how these companies improved business metrics using push notifications. It has nothing to do with their product whatsoever. But you wouldn't think that on first glance, as they deliberately made it look like customer testimonials. This to me is a huge red flag;
4. They have a $599 recommended plan which is way above what SaaS MVPs usually aim for;
5. Microsoft employs ~100k people worldwide. Being a Microsoft employee is completely meaningless in this context, and I feel is only used to lend them credibility in light of points #1-#4.
There's a very fine line between MVP, hustling and outright scamming. I feel they went too far. I'm sorry if I hurt someone's feelings but I doubt this is YC material.