Seeing Interactive (YC W10) Raises Seed From Baseline & Lerer Ventures | Hacker News Reader

Seeing Interactive (YC W10) Raises Seed From Baseline & Lerer Ventures

techcrunch.com

58 pointslloydarmbrust16 comments

Congratulations guys. I am very impressed with what you've done so far.

By the way, I didn't know joshu was part of this round?

$1m is a "seed round" these days? The mind boggles. In any case, congratulations!

I find it fascinating how crowded the local advertising space seems to be, but different approaches seem to work in different places.

Local is a _really_ hard market, and having cash in the bank removes atleast one big obstacle which threatens your survival.

That being said it seems like since there's so many angels around these days, raising money for a startup perceived to be hot is not that hard. The problem with raising a large round is obviously that you're either diluting yourself too much early on or raising the valuation too high for the next round. But hey, if you need the cash, why not?

My, these headlines can get difficult to parse. "What is an 'interactive raise'? And what does it mean for one to seed?"

Yeah. Poor company name. Maybe we should have gone with "Newpaperly".

Don't you mean that we should have gone with "Newspaperly"? The .net is available!

Hehehe. No, I think your name is great. I say more unintentional headline poetry!

Newspapers aren't exactly in a "growth industry" ... I'm trying to see how this threatens the Yellow Pages to any degree.

Really? The YP industry lost 25% market share last year. Print YellowPages is gone in 5 years. Local businesses literally hate YP reps because they only enter their market once a year looking to collect their "protection money". Contrast that to their Newspaper reps who they actually like and have an industry average of 10 years experience.

I agree the YP industry is dying, but that is happening regardless. I doubt YP print is losing market share to print papers, and I'd like to see sources showing that newspaper websites are taking share from yp.com ... my guess is that they're both losing market share to Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and (soon) mobile ad networks.

Pretend you're a local locksmith in a town of 10k, or an auto mechanic, or hair dresser. You're been paying the Yellow Pages $199/mo for 20 years but less and less people are coming in from that ad. Now, you have two options: one, do you go with Google or Facebook, or YP.com, or some other company probably from "California" that you just don't trust; or two, go with your local newspaper who has a very similar product and who you've done business with your entire life?

These people are our customers. I've actually heard folks say "I don't trust those California people"--wrap your mind around that and get back to me.

The truth is that by partnering with newspapers Seeing Interactive has a potential sales force of 30,000 trusted-local reps. Even if the newspaper industry is dying--which is a ridiculous claim--we still have the feet on the street and technology today to sell markets that Yelp or Google will never reach.

I like that angle. I too figured that there's one thing that web SaaS can't really effectively replace well: feet on the street, and people interacting with other people they trust in 'meatspace'.

Yellow Pages (the print publication) is dying. The market is undoubtedly going to shrink as it goes online. The question (this is why this disruption is so interesting right now) is who will capture the bulk of this opportunity?

Seeing Interactive would argue that newspapers are actually in the best position to capture this new revenue. They just need to take advantage of the opportunity.

congrats guys! good to finally see a public launch!

Congrats -- Go get'm texas!

Congrats!

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