Apply HN: Qbix, Inc Aims to Do for Social What Bitcoin Did for Money
A few "impressive" stats first: our apps are already in stores & have been downloaded over 4MM times. They're used 3MM times a month! We've got users all around the world and most reviews are 5 stars. See http://qbix.com/blog
We already make steady revenue. But we've poured it all into building an open source platform that will:
1) give every community a way to host "its own facebook"
2) give people a consistent experience across domains & devices enabling unprecedented privacy, ease and control over their own data
3) give developers a stable, thoroughly tested platform on which they can build apps for communities, without reinventing the wheel on a thousand things (literally) that we take care of
You can see more here: http://qbix.com/platform
When Fred Wilson recently said this at Le Web, he was speaking about the platform we built: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s
Email, the Web, Wordpress, Bitcoin, Git are all decentralized. Yet social networks are still centralized; it is a hard problem to solve.
What if there was a web-based platform that ran on every device, letting any community choose their own host and install apps which would all work harmoniously? What if it would reconstruct people's social graphs across communities seamlessly and the apps would "just work"?
That's what we built. We're now working with several local communities that paid us to release apps for their members. After the beta, we will roll it out as a self-serve platform to all our 3MM users of Groups. We made several apps on top of this platform that we estimate will generate about $15/user/yr
The YC community can make a huge difference for us going forward would be happy to apply for YC!