YC W17 Launch: Claire, Peer5, WaystoCap, Symple, RankScience, and Kudi | Hacker News Reader

YC W17 Launch: Claire, Peer5, WaystoCap, Symple, RankScience, and Kudi

blog.ycombinator.com

51 pointscraigcannon34 comments

I'm pretty excited about RankScience. SEO can have a huge effect but also be one of the hardest things to accurately measure; and it's an industry where there's a fair amount of dogma and waving dead chickens around.

It sounds good, but I don't get it from the brief description. I'm interested in hearing more.

Especially this line makes me wonder:

> No one has solved automated SEO because SEO is a software problem

I thought SEO is a content and linking problem, not a software problem. I'm somewhat disillusioned after having lost keyword rankings to competitors with far inferior content software (hundreds of HTTP requests, 20s load time, MBs worth of junk) vs. my highly optimized website that loads in milliseconds even without AMP.

Pagespeed is a ranking factor, but it's far from the most important one. I would think deeply about what might make humans engage with your competitor's site for longer than yours.

Thanks for the advice. Will do. But I still fail to understand how this makes SEO a software problem.

SEO also includes: "what meta description can I surface on a SERP that has the highest clickthrough?" so in that sense, it's an A/B testing/software problem.

Also excited about this product but from their pitch:

"No one has solved automated SEO because SEO is a software problem that non-technical marketers are trying to solve."

Great pitch, but untrue. Most SEOs I've met at serious companies are almost always very technical people.

And this isn't a recent development, back in 2007 there was an SEO contest held to grab the keyword for "Greatest living american".

An SEO named Brandon Wirtz took the win(1) and the guy would fit any description as a very technical person previously having been the compressionist and technical lead for Microsoft's Merlin Lab.

SEO is, at its core, a technical puzzle with constantly changing parameters, and as a result attracts a lot of very talented technical people from diverse backgrounds to solve.

(1) http://www.adweek.com/lostremote/the-second-greatest-living-...

>> Most SEOs I've met at serious companies are almost always very technical people.

Companies of a certain scale can afford to have engineering teams focused on SEO, and they should! Most companies can't afford this, though, and the vast majority of people in the SEO industry are not technical.

Also, who's better at solving ever-changing puzzles with many variables: humans or software? : )

It's interesting that HN shits on advertising as a zero-sum game, but has no issue with SEO.

I don't understand "X for Y" businesses such as:

- Kudi: "PayPal for Africa"

- WaystoCap: "Alibaba for Africa"

- Symple: "Venmo for business payments"

Can't PayPal, Alibaba or Venmo just target these customers themselves? Duplicating these efforts seems like a huge waste of resources...

And until they do? If a company isn't able to capitalize on the whole global market why shouldn't someone else fulfill that need?

People usually take the stance of "it's just ripping of that other original company's idea" but it's very hard to make a business succeed and grow it, wherever it is, much more in the harsher overall conditions Africa generally presents.

I hate the competitive feel surrounding these kinds of startups. It doesn't seem like any of them is trying to bring anything new. Mostly, they're building mediocre versions of what already exists, then fold after 6 months when faced with reality.

If they succeed, it's all of us that lose. We'll add yet another "me too" tool to the collective toolbox, further dissipating the little focus that we had.

> Mostly, they're building mediocre versions of what already exists

Yes and as such they can easily be summarized into X for Y. It shows no originality and it requires no thought.

I thought this is how Silicon Valley works. The churn|acquisition|procurement is how everyone makes money, at least that is how it looks to an outsider.

The cost, difficulty, and research required to penetrate the market makes it not worth the potential return for Paypal/Alibaba/Venmo. Instead - another company can take the risks, build the market, then be acquired by one of those larger companies. The larger companies now has a proven business model for the market.

Like a typical Korean "grind MMO" businesses have two options:

    (a) Buy high-level gear for an extremely inflated price from other players
    (b) Grind to make it yourself (potentially losing more money than if you had bought it in the first place)

(a) is lower risk and makes more sense for businesses. They "could" spend $300,000,000 - $800,000,000 to maybe extend into a potential market. Or maybe they fail and threw away $600,000,000. Maybe they try again and lose another $800,000,000 with nothing to show for it. So why not acquire a company for $3,000,000,000 and forego the risks altogether? (All figures made up for example purposes.)

It seems odd that PayPal/Alibaba/Venmo don't take these "risks" themselves. Considering their extensive domain experience, if anyone is to successfully acquire a market, it's them.

Which is why large businesses sometimes expand into markets they feel comfortable enough to expand into using their domain experience. Markets they aren't confident they can thrive in - they don't join. There is simply too much risk attached.

They have the option of expanding their existing markets instead of taking risks trying to enter new markets. Let other people take those risks then simply buy out whoever ends up being successful. Sometimes this backfires when the new kid on the block is better at your business than you are. That's a potential risk and is also why some acquisitions appear to be too soon and have an extremely inflated price tag. Give them an offer they can't refuse before they run you out of business entirely. :)

Luckily businesses transform from innovators to job-generators when they grow, so the small companies can get a piece of the pie.

Not necessarily. Local knowledge can play a huge part in building companies in emerging markets. Look at any number of companies entering Asia.

Finding product-market fit can be focusing on an underserved segment despite there being big players in the market already.

If you don't understand why "PayPal for Africa" makes sense, then you likely are not from Africa, you've never visited, or you know very little about the place.

Consider that Paypal is not accepted in a few countries from that continent, then you'll realize that there's a market for it.

The other side is Paypal is an American outfit. With options like Kudi that are not controlled from the USA, there's less chance of a group not popular with the US govt. being denied access to funds.

There are many angles to consider. You just have to know the landscape. And an aside: From my knowledge of that part of the world, kudi is Hausa for money.

The same argument can be made for "Alibaba for Africa".

Imagine if Alibaba was not founded, and the Chinese had to rely on Amazon. That's a lot of moving flowing from online Chinese shoppers to the confers of Amazon. At some point it becomes a national security issue.

So, yes, "Alibaba for Africa" makes a lot of sense.

You did a nice job explaining why consumers should choose the local service option, but you didn't address why the service options shouldn't/can't launch in those regions.

But that's not what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do, which was a reply to another comment, is explain why the local service option matters.

Reading the comment that I replied to will help you understand my line.

I did. Specifically this line

>>> Can't PayPal, Alibaba or Venmo just target these customers themselves? Duplicating these efforts seems like a huge waste of resources...

Which is enquiring about the service options ability to enter those markets.

IIRC, one of the central points of Innovator's Dilemma is precisely about why this is rarely as straightforward as it seems.

All those existing companies are probably up to their collective ears in work satisfying and growing the lucrative markets they already operate in -- it's hard to justify focus on much smaller markets with much smaller margins.

Then, sometimes, those smaller markets end up being really big, and oops you've been disrupted.

> Symple is Venmo for business payments.

This seems a close enough industry as Simple to be confusing: https://www.simple.com/

This may be true now, but Simple (the consumer online bank) is currently in the process of shutting down.

Source? I have been a Simple customer for years, and haven't heard anything about them shutting down?

The aren't they are transfer accounts to BBVA

Just wanted to hop in here as a Simple employee—we are not shutting down! We're very much alive and well: as another commenter said, we're currently in the process of migrating our customers to our new partner bank, BBVA. (Definitely speaking in an unofficial capacity, but thought I'd clear the air as best I could.)

good group of companies. See the need for a CDN that can handle television volume audiences. Symple makes a lot of sense. Basically, bill.com that doesn't suck/feel dated.

Hi Peer5 co-founder here, thanks for resonating with our vision!

WebRTC seems like a really cool opportunity to rethink certain kinds of services. Video is an obvious candidate, I've also seen a bittorrent client that uses WebRTC. What are other interesting peer to peer applications that WebRTC could enable?

> I've also seen a bittorrent client that uses WebRTC

Yea, webtorrent[1] is a great project.

We've also created Sharefest[2] a while ago which is basically WeTransfer with no servers.

I think multiplayer web gaming has a nice potential and need for a high performance network stack using WebRTC.

IoT might also be a candidate for direct p2p communication, without the need for all the devices in your home/office to connect directly to the cloud.

[1] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent [2] https://sharefest.me/

Peer5 is a brilliant idea! Glad to see they're doing well.

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