A Quick and Dirty Analysis of Apply HN
tillett.info
tillett.info
As one of the Apply HN candidates (Brodlist), the only category I can think you sorted us into is 'existing competition'. While we did have some comments saying that what we have wasn't interesting (some from those competing in the same space), we also had comments hinting that it wasn't even possible. Someone said we're trying to do the Tesla of databases. I'm also subjective, so I see it as the latter. You would need TDD by an objective third-party to know better, or just wait to see what happens after we launch.
Second, unicorn embryos don't show themselves that way or everyone would just do it if it's that obvious.
Now let's take a random situation: You have a business that makes widgets. You have customers, suppliers, parts, etc. Do you store that information in Word as text? Of course not. You either have a spreadsheet or database, right? Text is great for a novel or a poem... but not for data. That would be crazy.
Currently, the web is still a big collection of text documents. How optimal is that? Deeply sub-optimal. The number of people going to the Google homepage is declining because people are now just going directly to the database that represents what they're looking for. Looking to buy a home? You go to Zillow or Trulia and query their database. People want data, not text. 95% of the web wants to be data.
Now imagine if that company mentioned before had significant market share. The authentication is common across all of these databases, they all have the same API (the language), and so instead of appearing as many databases, it appears as one large database of everything. Suddenly a network effect kicks in and if you have something you want to be discovered (which is what the web consists of) it makes sense to join in.
The next Google won't be better text search but instead something completely different -- it will be data. And the web will become essentially a massive database. I don't know who will get there, no one can know, or how it will happen, but it will happen; it's waiting to happen.
Traditional SQL stands up extremely well to modern use cases, and tons of use cases never require the magnitude of data at which other solutions become pragmatic. As a result, it's important to consider traditional RDBMSs with respect, acknowledging that they are extremely resilient to tons of use cases, schema or schema-less situations, distributed access, etc. etc., and active development is making them better and better all the time.
By basically saying, "put away your boring old SQL database grandpa, it's time for something better" you're giving sort of an immature and technologically hasty vibe that's going to alienate people.
Your technology may be amazing, but people often don't respond to things that present in this "your whole way of thinking is totally wrong" sort of way.
In about 2 sentences, the author manages to alienate pretty much anyone who would want to consider that product and the new features.
It's this massive unawareness that even though something like Docker is the cool new way of doing it, probably 90+% of businesses (especially cap-weighted) remain doing things with legacy systems and are necessarily slow to adapt. Not only are they not using 2.0 ... they're not even using 1.0!
This kind of marketing might work when you mostly only want other start-ups for your clients. But if you want bigger players, you have to think about it from their perspective. Do you want to offend the 15-year veteran VP of Operations who got a promotion 7 years ago when everybody thought signing some enterprise contract was the right thing, and now your presentation basically starts from sentence #1 saying "You did it all wrong, old man!" You're just priming that senior VP, who wields the political power to utterly veto you from their new product search, and motivating him to want to make sure you're not around to bring any kind of critical highlight to any of his previous choices.
This is an important point in business. I never even thought about until I read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" but now I start to see it more often (especially when I do it, which is still too often for my goals).
[0] < http://blog.shippable.com/devops-2.0-is-here-announcing-ship... >
Specifically with databases people are very wary of new databases because of the issue of data corruption or loss. It is not only a market where there is so much choice that it is hard to know which database to choose, but it is one where the customer is very conservative. This is a very tough market to crack.
I also addressed the conservative nature of the market but maybe what you don't realize is that this is a tremendous pain point for developers and businesses. We already have customers and we're not out of alpha yet. The reason there are so many high valuation exits of nascent database companies (Compose, Firebase, FoundationDB) is another sign of the value of making progress towards those ends. I think the more you learn about databases and their market, the more nuanced view you will have. It's exciting and I would encourage you to learn more.
The comments on your application really hammered two points - 1. What is about your product that is 10x better than everything else and 2. Can you deliver on your promises. You need to have much better answers of why your product is 10x better than all the alternatives and how you will ensure you deliver. This is really hard I know in this area, but it is critical to your success.
No, actually. No, I don't. Because we're not looking for investors. ('Apply HN' was a spur-of-the-moment exception and for the same reason we're not bothered if the answers fail.) We're not and here's why:
Back in 1998, web search ruled everything. The big players were Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Excite. Larry and Sergey took their Page Rank algorithm to the top minds of those companies and tried to explain why Page Rank was better, offering it for 1 million(!). (When you say 10x, we both know that the end result is the quality of the experience which can't be multiplied and that what you mean is that it is drastically, compellingly better as opposed to marginally better.) Of course, we know what happened: they had something drastically better, couldn't prove it and they were turned away. So they ended up letting the users of the technology decide. I remember thinking it was the quirky search that only I and a few nerdy friends knew about but I used it because I felt it got me better results. Then I noticed others, like my sister, starting to use it.
We're still edging into Beta and we already have customers; whatever is failing in communicating to investors is not failing in communicating to prospects. And we'll let them decide, not in conceptual foresight, but by using our service directly. We'll go one at a time. We want each one to find it drastically better for their specific need, whatever that is.
More money would help, I won't lie, but the last thing I want to do is lose time on tangents by chasing it. For example, the other question was "can we deliver?" when I had already mentioned that the core (the equivalent of implementing the PageRank algorithm) was complete and that we are in the process of packaging it. I get that they want more proof if they want to invest, and I'm not arguing that they don't deserve that. Instead, I'm arguing that they can keep their money. Should Larry and Sergey have spent time proving that their technology was "10x" and that they could execute? Or just execute? ... Exactly. We're just executing.
These were not my critics of your startup, but my paraphrasing of the comments on your Apply HN application. You can choose to take them on board or not.
The reason investors care about 10x is that is what is required to convince customers to switch. Your product may well be 10x better (I am not an expert in this area so I can't answer this), but I do know that databases are an incredible crowded market with some very fierce competitors. To succeed you have to have a product that is at least 10x better and you have to be able to communicate this very clearly to your potential customers. It is great that you have customers already (hopefully paying ones), but if you want to grow rapidly you need to have a really compelling product and pitch. I wish you well.
It's all about customers: do they get the communication and do they respond to it? In our case, so far, they do.
My main point remains: you (and many HN commenters) would have scored an early Google in 'existing competition' and written it off also. And Larry and Sergey certainly wouldn't have "chosen to take that on board" because it's meaningless.
The reason I didn't actually list each of the companies in each category is that the purpose was not to critic individual applications, but to look at them as a whole and try to draw lessons from what I saw. There is a real disconnect between what people are proposing and the questions investors want answered. If you want someone's money you need to have good answers for these questions.
Network Effect yes, Lifestyle Business no.
Further, any given investor would be wise to look at businesses like AirBnB with skepticism from a "can they actually achieve critical mass of users" point of view. Effectively 0% of these types of businesses are unicorns. Unless you personally have special knowledge or are willing to take an extreme risk, it's foolish to invest in these ideas and it amounts to literally buying a lottery ticket.
Actually AirBnB is a good example of how you can solve the chicken and the egg problem with networks. Because real estate rentals are local, it is possible to bootstrap a strong network in a geographically small location and then scale out. All the successful network businesses out there have used a similar approach (Uber, Facebook, etc).