Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
B2B businesses rely heavily on sales - a great sales team can make or break the company. But for folks with a predominantly technical background, sales as a function, remains at best a mystery, and at worst something they make fun of (because sales people are often different from technical people - there is a lack of understanding between the two).
It is great to see more technical people entering "sales" and are trying to understand it.
Sales is often (mis)understood as a slick-smooth-talking meeting/phone call that magically convinces an unwitting customer into paying for a product. Companies like the 4 mentioned above, and several others that are playing in this space, are attempting to bring data and rigor to this space.
It would be a net better outcome for everyone -- less annoying calls for a prospect and more focused approach for the seller.
I am fascinated by the intersection of analysis, software, and sales. I wish the best to these companies!
edit: formatting
Personally, I found that ML consulting gave me a valuable perspective on this process. So many hats to wear: research & development, lead gen & marketing, sales, support, product management, legal & IP, administrative & taxes.
Consulting definitely teaches you humility. You will no longer be "that researcher" who thinks whatever happens after their precious math formula or the 5-line Matlab prototype is "unworthy stuff for code monkeys".
Or that engineer who thinks "the suits" are out to ruin your perfect towers of code and logic, with their silly deadlines and requirements...
For context I'm marketing guy in electronics manufacturing, where the sales cycle is extremely long (~6 months), and involves a huge number of decision makers. One new customer a year is par for the space, one a quarter is performing very well. Our sales team is small, and our marketing team is smaller, but that's fine because the set of companies we're a good fit for is a small target to shoot at in the scheme of things.
Given all that, the two huge priorities are lead qualification, and time management. The former is pretty straightforward, I'll throw money at anyone who can give me good info on decision makers at the companies active on my site at any given time. As you mention, B2B relies on sales, and at least for EMS where I work, anyone who's based in America and survived '08 is probably good at it. In that regard, things like AI generated scripts/nurturing lose appeal because proven strategies exist, knowing who to call (and more importantly, when) is the name of the game. My favorite in that regard is Mattermark. Their sales team is really good, by the way, interested people should sign up for their trial to at a minimum pay attention to what they do.
There's two parts to the time management aspect as I see it. The first is that upkeep of a CMS/CRM becomes a big task in itself, and nobody wants to do it. I want to be working on scripts/nurturing flows for the sales team or making X piece of marketing content, not staring at dashboards all day. Sales wants to be reaching out to their leads. Some new tool that adds a slight twist to functionality that exists in a more all in one system becomes hard to adopt. If something isn't very obviously better at a given function than part of a big CMS/CRM, or provide some new functionality I'd like to have and can't use with my primary tool, it becomes hard to adopt. For me right now that's Mailmunch for newsletter subscription pop forms (sorry world, I'll stop using them when people stop filling them out insanely frequently).
The second aspect to the time problem is the increased adoption time that will happen across generations in the office. For instance, a senior saleswoman where I work (who's awesome/great at her job) gets thrown through a loop by HubSpot UI changes, and basically doesn't touch Slack. From that perspective, new tools that a salesperson interacts with need to be super smooth to adopt, nor not be very 'user facing'. And please, dear god, don't make me schedule a 30 minute demo of the product for trial access.
> But for folks with a predominantly technical background, sales as a function, remains at best a mystery, and at worst something they make fun of
I think spending more time on something like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, etc. would help here. Which may, and probably does happen, I just don't know how common it is. Either way, having a good understanding of what the big tools can do in terms of automation, prospecting, analytics, and all that is valuable.
Of the 4 in this batch I like Riley the most because of their mention of nurturing/drip campaigns, which are critical in industries with big contracts and long sales cycles. Scribe is a close second, but I'm skeptical it's that much better than functionality of bigger CMS/CRMs to justify onboarding/upkeep time. Upcall makes me uncomfortable, but my industry is extremely niche so I'm biased. Clover might be cool, but that landing page to watch the demo vid isn't very nice. Best of luck to all of them though, it's a great space to be in.
I'm quite willing to pay for podcast content, and I do. I've been a paid subscriber to The NoSleep Podcast ever since they started offering the option, at $20 a season. They use a service called Nanacast, which collects my payment and gives me a unique RSS feed URL that I can add to any podcast app. No arbitrary centralization or gatekeepers required.
I pay for Spotify, Netflix etc. to avoid ads. Some podcasts manage to incorporate ads tastefully with respect for the listener. Others are not done that well, and produces the same horror as when you're used to Netflix and suddenly see how a show looks with frequent commercial breaks on a hotel TV.
Here's an idea: Crowdsourced ad-filtered podcast RSS streams you have to pay to access, where the profits go back to the podcasts themselves. Users mark the start and end of the ads in the podcast audio, and a podcast player skips those parts. That's something I would pay for, and hopefully would generate more money to the producers of podcasts than ads.
Consumers get mostly free podcasts. Producers are either fine with not monetizing; the podcast is a hobby or it's in support of other activities that do bring in money. Or a pretty reasonable ad density (apparently) brings in enough money that people find it worthwhile to produce podcasts.
>Tetra – Automatic notes for business meetings
>A lot of meeting notes are taken in Evernote but Tetra takes call notes for you by automatically dialing you to merge into the call and then sending you a fully searchable record of the entire conversation. It comes in auto speech only or human edited using a fast transcription feature for 50 cents a minute from humans. There may be some ethical challenges around recording others and each person using the service will need to inform those on the call they are being recorded but with two billion hours of conference calls a year, Tetra plans to take on that market using it’s AI and data. The startup launched on Product Hunt a week ago and now has two paid monthly users.
>The startup launched on Product Hunt a week ago and now has two paid monthly users.
>two paid monthly users.
Yes, two. But still, any traction is better than no traction! I love a lot of the ideas but am sceptical about most of them. Good luck to each company!
Speech -> annotated searchable text is a humongous market. I really hope you guys and gals kill it.
There are some hilarious errors but it's surprisingly readable. So it's necessary for some people.
I definitely wouldn't mind such a service in our meetings provider, but the company currently uses either Skype or Go2Meeting (EDIT: I see it can dial in. I might try it :) ). I worry about confidentiality as well (the CSO would have my hide if some of the future projects are leaked due to such a service).
It's an extra I could provide in my very own startup though :) (we're still struggling with core features so not for version 1).
I wonder, does YC still fund founders with no ideas? Or take them up on the secondary idea, which may imply abandoning any progress on the primary idea?
I think I read in a comment that they're no longer accepting teams without ideas and that the experimental batch ended up pretty badly.
Until they provide a clear opt-in usage behavior, this opinion will not change. Clearly if their proposition is about better streaming service/quality, this is trivially testable by how many users opt-in to their network when viewing videos.
Their endpoints should be added to easylist. This is very big concern for metered users, who'll see their usage spike. Is there a list of peer5 endpoints?
The only way to tackle this is public denunciation of their model, hand in hand with browser based blocks -- either easylist/uBlock, or Chrome/Firefox/et-al modifying the browser protocols/UX to disallow this leeching without the user's knowledge.
You're giving your customers tools to abuse the internet commons. You should be called out for it. Afterall your revenue is an exact function of user's bandwidth. Quoting from your pricing page:
> "Only data delivered via P2P counts against your plan."
1. A user visits a website, sees a video player, and watches a video.
2. A user visits a website, sees an article, and reads it.
There may be some confusion about whether your technology will still force Scenario #2's user into your P2P network, and use their bandwidth. I'd argue that Scenario #1 is legit for your purposes, but not #2.
Are there any steps that can be taken to prevent sneaky behavior?
I think people are overreacting here.
But as long as we want to get free quality content, publishers have to see some profit (And I'm ok with that). You opt-in to many things when you visit a website on a regular basis, and tools like peer5 are just one of these things.
(Fixed typo)
I was in line for the Nintendo Switch and I got to talking with a contractor who deals with and hires carpenters, tile guys, plumbers, etc - and you wouldn't believe the shit this guy had to put up with to finish a project.
His workflow was all over the place out of necessity and he paid around $500/month on software alone, not to mention the wasted time. I was thinking of building something like Fibo for these guys, this is gold! Best of luck to them for real. They can change the quality of lives for contractors and for their clients.
Kudos for you to find a under-represented industry and make a dent.
I have to wonder, what's the catchet of YCombinator when you have so many new startups being churned out every quarter? YC is always going to be fine - they get their 7%. They're simply increasing the bandwidth and they'll get a few hits, but we should be prepared for the average quality of YC start-ups to fall with volume.
random commentary below:
* FloydHub – Heroku for deep learning *
It's unlikely in my eyes that a company with enough data worth doing deep learning for is going to outsource the actual model building. I'd be interested to hear counter examples.
* Tetra – Automatic notes for business meetings *
I think this is worthless. Meetings important enough to warrant for "paid notes" will have people taking notes, on their own (company) dime anyway. Not to mention taking notes will improve your engagement in the meeting. Not to mention the privacy implications.
* Collectly – Stripe for medical debt collection *
Pretty interesting. Hard to comment without knowing what the success rate is for an average debt collector. I fear there's some selection bias in the stats techcrunch shared.
* Indigo Fair – Amazon for local retailers*
Unfortunately I think local retailers are slowly dying. I do think this is an interesting niche that could be successful.
* Lively – Modern healthcare savings account (HSA)*
This too could be successful. Most people who'd do this probably have an HSA that's offered by their employer, unless they're trying to replace that.
* KidPass – One pass for “amazing activities for kids”*
I'm surprised at the success this is seeing. I do think parents are a good group to exploit though. Overworked parents want the logistics of spending time with their kids to be outsourced these days. Plenty of rich parents in NYC too.
* Upcall – Outbound calls as a service*
Not a huge fan of spamming services.
* Niles – Conversational wiki for business *
It's cheap enough, I guess.
* Sycamore – Onboarding drivers for on-demand jobs *
Looks interesting, but don't see how it'll address the drivers making so little part techcrunch mentioned.
Flynn will be great for education and proof of concepts.
Nobody said it was a robot-calling or auto-dialing service.
"Qualifying leads" is the thing where people with whom I have no prior business arrangement call me at work, asking if I'm the right person to talk to about (service that they sell), right? "Spamming service" sounds about right.
It's quite unsettling that this is an industry where people see a lot of growth potential.
Not worth a startup, but a fantasy-sport-like site that allowed some "gambling" -- perhaps "paid" for with karma points -- on YC startups would be fun.
This is stupid, everybody just has there own car and drivers where they need to be.
* Airbnb *
This is stupid, who wants to rent out part of their home to strangers, who knows what they will do. And have you ever heard of hotels? Sheesh.
What does that mean?
Im interested in hearing some insight on this.
- 3 months of intense focus on product and growth with feedback
- access to and advice from YC partners
- community of other founders in the batch who are going through similar issues
- access to other YC founders (partnerships, advice, etc.)
- social proof to investors, press, customers of having done YC
In that case, YC is tremendously helpful in giving the platform to raise enough money to do all of the hard things involved in building a plane that's never been built.
Time is the most precious resource in startups. One way to get more time is to have a phenomenal team, so you do things faster (either by building the right things faster, having the expertise to not build the wrong things, etc.)
Another way is by having more money, so you have a longer time to figure things out. When I say that the $120k isn't what is valuable about YC, I don't mean money in general. The fiscal benefit just tends to come indirectly, from access to platforms (Demo Day, press), investors, and pitch advice.
I have been using a French company that seems to do the exact same thing, for low volume and prototyping: sculpteo.com
However, for mass production (still low volumes, <10,000) I manufacture in China, and the reason is not only the cost, it's that "manufacturing" is not enough.
We need finishing (polishing, printing) and packaging, and those on-demand manufacturing services usually don't provide this, which is a shame.
Airbus already have an electric prop engine fully tested as well as experience building prop planes with traditional fuel engines. So to say Wright is years ahead is misleading.
There's something very satisfying about seeing such a company in a batch with enterprise sales focused companies and an e-plane company.
Then I realized this is a pretty massive niche market and these guys are smart for focusing on it
Y Combinator will also provide some funding, though it won’t take an equity stake in ACLU because it’s a nonprofit. ACLU will not pay to participate."
The ACLU has at least publicly stood for decades for a lot of positions that seem to fundamentally go against what some YC companies do.
For example, the ACLU is a clear proponent of the Civil Rights Act, which among other things guarantees that hotels must not discriminate when providing lodging to guests. Meanwhile, in recent years there have been several documented cases where AirBNB renters have suddenly run out of vacancies for one rentee, only to be suddenly free again a day later.
Given situations like this, I'm not sure what ACLU seems to think they can get out of a YC "mentorship." If this creates a chance for a larger public discussion on issues like this, it could be a good thing, but at the moment I am extremely skeptical.
ACLU need to choose their wars and if YC can help them hone their skills so they win more meaningful wars for the masses then that's a good thing.
If it's about access to legal skills, the ACLU has been around for nearly 100 years and has been involved in pivotal court cases.
If it's about money, I've seen articles saying that the ACLU's donation base has gone up quite a lot since Trump.
If it's about reputation, I don't think there's any contest. I suspect that more Americans know about the ACLU than YC, by an order of magnitude. It's also worth noting that the only place I've seen this advertised is in tech blogs, and a few news outlets. I haven't seen anything in legal journals, and the ACLU's website doesn't even seem to mention it.
The one thing I could see as being logical is YC helping the ACLU to work on more technical projects, and using technology to get more people involved in civic duty. But if that's the case, then it's extremely misleading to say the ACLU is a YC "startup", and far more accurate to say they are collaborating on projects of some sort.
And we don't have an arrangement with companies we fund. Founders decide if they want to put our logo on their site.
Wow, so the for-pay college application coaching is now becoming for-pay jobs&internships "coaching?" I suspect this will be limited coaching and more so selling access. Wouldn't this essentially incentivize insiders to "sell" internship opportunities at prestigious firms? Certainly families paying $7500 up front are going to want results, even if it is a for-show internship at Google reviewing release notes that gets morphed into entry level resume gold. I'll be surprised if companies dont ban this outright (but then, TeamBlind seems to be successful...)
Did they mean million? No way it's billion?
A U$500 billion market then means the average person spends about U$240 per year on hair care. Which is ridiculously high.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-break-down-the-racial-demog...
Black women's hair appointments are more expensive; many hair salons charge a premium. Plus they use a lot of products and elixirs to change the nature of their hair. Plus, many of them wear a wig-like accessory, often of real human hair, every single day. The process of 'weaving' that into their natural hair can cost hundreds or even thousands, at the high end.
Source: black friend in college wrote an essay about this for a journal I was editing at the time, plus, common knowledge. There are some interesting cultural questions about how in North American society, natural black hair is deemed unacceptable, and this has generally been internalized by black women. If you choose to just be natural (as my friend did) you get a lot of flak from other black women.
I don't know if you can get this to work out to $500B; other industry numbers I could find are like $10B, which would be about $50/month for every black woman in the USA.
You've basically identified the source of a "problem" that shouldn't even exist to begin with: an inferiority complex.
It used to be that women of African descent would sport plaits, Jheri curls (80s), Afro (70s) etc. These were styles that rarely required the use of hair attachments or wigs. Wigs used to be for masking hair loss ...
I have to disagree here. There has been a 'natural hair' movement circulating through the black female community for some time now[1]. I'm not sure if it's because the dangers of chemically manipulating hair have become more prominent or other factors, but black women in my circle (which includes high school, college aged, middle aged, and 'professional age') have all been transitioning to a more natural style and it's a very well embraced trend.
My girlfriend has been natural for a few years now and while it is harder to maintain she's told me that she will never go back.
Source (anecdata of course): A black man.
She's of course at one end of the spectrum, but $240 on average a year doesn't surprise me that much.
You're probably talking about an American (or a Brit or a French person? Someone in the developed world) who's at least lower-middle-class. Consider someone in an emerging country. For the average Brazilian or Colombian, a U$1000 weave would be far too expensive. And the vast majority of the target population is living in Africa and is much poorer than the average Brazilian.
FWIW, I don't see anything wrong with the startup. I just making a back of envelope calculation that shows the market estimate is BS.
But the real source that it cites can't be found on Mintel's website (maybe it's a paid publication?).
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/antonia-opiah/the-changing-bus...
The article says: "It’s a $27 b market and claims 700,000 teams signed up in one week."
I believe this is a typo - they actually have 700 teams that signed up.
Here's a YC blog post on this: https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day-software/
* "massively democratizes" is the new "disrupt"
I wonder what would black women say if there was an app "Social community for white women's hairstyles", would not it be considered racist?
Car insurance vs. Electric car insurance. To me it would make sense to highlight that the new company is targeting a particular market.
To be clear (and I will own up to being not fully knowledge on this topic myself): many black women have very different hair than women of other races. The way they style it is different, the treatments they get are different, the products they use are different, and the issues they face are different.
All of this is underepresented in most media today. Most social sites about hairstyles are white women's hairstyles sites by virtue of what they cover, even if it isn't their stated aim.
This is a totally uncontroversial concept in most situations and markets, but somehow when race is involved people start behaving very oddly. A site specifically targeting white women isn't automatically racist, no. But such a site is not logical by any assessment of the current market. So absent that logic, people look for other reasons, and when you're targeting a specific race, and the economically dominant one at that, you're opening yourself up to such questions.
PS. I also didn't know such market exists
It's important because even with the best of intentions, the exact wording can lead to a catastrophe of a thread (or avert one).
GP is simply ignorant.
(My only question: how is it possibly a $500 bn/year market? The world economy is something like $60 tn; I have a hard time imagining black women's hair care is 1/120th of global GDP. I can't imagine hair care en toto is anything like ~0.8% of global GDP, either. I mean, if you're going to make up numbers... they should be plausible.)
"African hair" is unique relative to the hair from other parts of the globe. "European hair" isn't as meaningfully different from other (non-African) ethnicities.