I know a lot of VC funds really don't favor Services and Solutions companies really well - and of course prefer SaaS due to obvious reasons. What does YC think about Services related companies? Would it be a waste of time to apply?
I'm an expat that lives here, the social healthcare system is a complete mess and garbage. As an employer, not only do I have to pay a ~30% tax over the salary of each employee (to pay this healthcare system) - in the end you must resort to private healthcare as the system is terrible. If your not half dead, you will wait hours and hours (not even kidding) trying to be attended. Aside from waiting hours and hours on end just to be attended, the doctors treat you like crap, the nurses treat you like crap - no one cares if you live or die.
Story:
My wife's brother was crossing the street and was hit by a car, pretty badly at around 8pm. He was able to get able, and they took him to this public hospital. He has bleeding, vomiting (from concussion) and he waiting over 12 hours to be attended. The only they did was give him an IV for his dehydration (due to excessive vomiting for 12 hours from concussion), told him he was fine and to go home. He asked for a pill for vomiting, and doctor told him to go across the street to the pharmacy to buy it. Yes, really.
The private healthcare sector here is pretty good. A bit expensive, but good. I could have had my kids here in the "Caja" (public hospital) for free, but after hearing tons of complaints and horror stories it was better to just pay a $5000-$6000 fee to the doctors and hospital in the private sector to have each of my kids born.
Costa Rica is absolutely not a model for it's healthcare system. It's expensive, in huge debt, it's terrible, and no one cares about you. Would not recommend.
I highly doubt these terms were lifted from another app/service.
I believe the goal of this app is Sportbook related - but with a twist: it's a game right now. But I see people being upgraded to a "game for fun" to as a "Look how much money you can make if this was real money." Like Zynga Poker - but the end goal isn't you buying more Zynga poker chips to play for fun, but rather bet real money on sports.
No idea who is behind this, but I wouldn't be surprised if a Sportsbook in Costa Rica, UK or Europe is bankrolling/investing in this. The Sportbook industry is declining each year as less and less people are gambling on sports as it seems the 20-30 year olds aren't as interested as the generations before them. This is a great way to create a new generation of sport gamblers.
The problem I see is, Facebook ad's are never really going to be extremely lucrative. People don't search on Facebook. They want to play games and post stuff on their walls, looks at other peoples photos, etc. etc.
I think Facebook needs to seriously think how they can monetize aside from ads. Obviously with all those users and data, the possibilities are endless.
• Job boards and paid job postings
• Get people to shop for stuff.
• Subscriptions services: Dropbox style storage, who knows what else, etc. etc.
• Get more local and offers deals. You know where a billion people live.
• Offer business services for businesses pages. Upgrades, focus on ecommerce on business pages and charge for it.
• + Who knows what else? They can be a million other things.
I just thought about this for 5 minutes, and I am sure people that actually work at Facebook have weeks, months and years to think about this. I have no idea why they aren't moving faster with this.
From what I see, they are all in on FB Ads, but that wasn't the way to go. Maybe it was the surest thing in the beginning, but now - they really need to step it up.
Getting into the online dating scene would be a great money move for FaceBook. It's such a simple and obvious move that there must be something/someone internal that is preventing it. FaceBook has access to millions of people listed as "single", a large % of which are already using a pay-service like Match or eHarmony (which collectively boast around 35 million members).
My guess is it makes more sense to take products that can be monetized over as much as the user base as possible, and increase their efficacy than try to enter different verticals.
UX (User Experience) is about designing exactly that - an experience. It's about being extremely detail oriented, mathematical inclination (sifting through metrics, a/b testing data, CTR, bounce rates, etc.), willingness to sit down and focus on one concrete task at a time, sifting through hours of user video seeing how people interact with an application and then finding solutions to make the UX more smooth. Sound familiar to what you wrote about your "programmer"?
Not so different after all it seems.
EDIT: Everyone seems to confuse UI design with UX design. They are very different, and in some cases are different job descriptions.
UX is about empathy. Understanding how other people think and the emotions they feel. All those tools you mention are metrics to keep score, but without an understanding of how your users think you are playing a fun game of guess and check. Sure with enough iterations and metrics you can figure out anything, but your users won't give you that many chances. Someone who can get the initial design in the right ballpark and use metrics to fine tune it is your UX guy. As I programmer I really struggle putting together a viable initial UX, and I don't think I'm unique in that struggle.
Quite frankly, it's because I think very differently from most people and have trouble understanding their thought process. I'm not introverted or especially socially awkward or any of those engineering stereotypes. Everything from my ability to creatively approach problem solving to my subtle dry sense of humor is because of my different way to think about things. But when I need to think like everybody else, I just can't do it. That's why I need a UX guy.
When I first saw Pinterest's exponential traffic growth sequence, it altered the way I believed women think.
But at the end of the day, its just a very well executed image board, marketed to women. The concept in itself is not a fad, but they may need to add features that make a user feel penalized for moving elsewhere. (e.g. the network effect from Facebook, or a users library with Kindle)
Normally I am not one to comment on fundraising, and I have stayed out of the whole "bubble" debate. But, honestly, this is really getting a little out of hand now. The whole funding situation is getting really frothy.
$1.5b pretty much prices them out of any real acquisition now for the most part. So is Pinterest going to go IPO?
Where do they go from here? That's the question of the day.
I won't tell you where they going. But I know the more people will pin unique, cool photos they stumbled upon, the more artists, photographers and content owners will demand either their share, or take down.
In this another debate of "is this a bubble", something interesting came to my mind. I thing the issue here is that any online real estate that made it big, made it huge because they used the latest technology available. Think YouTube. When it started, barely anyone knew how to program flash and have a container to upload 5MB file and it could be coded in different movie codecs and youtube would read it anyways. This was definitely pushing the envelope! The technology was new, but it let you display videos and thats what counted. I think with the new technology coming in, like HTML5, etc, there will be new websites coming out and grabbing huge audience based on this new technology. So in other words, whomever is betting $1,500 millions on Pinterest, is like betting that nothing new will be invented over the web. This is like buying GeoCites, because nobody is sitting in garage developing WordPress 1.0. On buying MySpace because there is no Facebook. I hope you get my drift...
I think the natural path for Pinterest will be to merge with Groupon, another shopping-related site and one that has survived an IPO--at least for now. This new site will combine the deals of Groupon with the design of Pinterest. Users will coupons, which are automatically pinned to the appropriate boards with automatically chosen photos.
Of course, Pinterest is all about design, which is why Groupon will also have to acquire Instragram. This will allow the merged company to select the right photo for any coupon and, if necessary, saturate the yellows, unfocus the background, and add a creatively misaligned border. That night your friends enjoyed the half-price alcohol they bought at Jerry's Drive-In Liquor will look extra cool when the photo has been processed through the "1977" filter. And on the plus side, Groupon/Pinterest/Instagram gets to keep it for their next liquor-oriented deal, giving them free advertising material. It's too early to tell what this new supergroup of startups will be called, but I want some credit if it becomes Groupstagram.
I don't know about the half kidding...it seems like you might legitimately be on to something there in the area of private deal "experiences" for you and close friends.
But I'm thinking, more so than Pinterest it's closer to "Path" where you and your small network of close friends collectively get a deal (at Jerry's liquor, lovely example) then post cute photos of your night/experience (sans the trip on the porcelain bus) which become public on "Jerry's Drive-In Liquor" or whatever, and exposes the deal to other people in the private networks of those who were in your private network... a sort of "local viral" marketing effect which works as advertising and as the regular "look how awesome my saturday night was" that we (what? just me?) use Facebook/Instagram for anyway.
I think it perfectly combines the innate desire to show off and receive value while maintaining an air of exclusivity plus the whole validation thing, from strangers and friends alike.
Get bought by Amazon or Google in my mind - they have stock to do it, and it would benefit either of them (although less for Google). I could see Amazon buying them as, essentially, infrastructure for driving ecommerce sales.
they just raised a round on 1.5B valuation. Just exactly how much money you think Amazon or Google would be willing to spend on this deal? I would assume that if they just raised that round, the would not talk about anything less than 10X.
I don't think neither Amazon nor Google would pay 15B for a company, regardless how much traffic they are getting. For that amount, and knowing Google, they would rather build their own product.
Why would you assume it would have to be 10x? But I agree with your broader point that it would have to have amazing metrics to support that valuation on purchase. Instagram, from my point of view, was as much as defensive move as anything else - not sure there would be the same driver here.
