Bump (YC S09) Raises $16 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz | Hacker News Reader

Bump (YC S09) Raises $16 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

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58 pointsatularora26 comments

In my opinion, as a Bump developer, a lot of the negative comments reflect our biggest problem: branding. In many people's minds, Bump is a nothing but a contact-sharing app. Long ago contacts were eclipsed by the many other types of things that Bump lets you share. The people who are downloading the app are using it in ways that we couldn't imagine when building initial version. The app's "gimmick" of bumping is still an incredibly useful, and admittedly fun, way of establishing a connection between two strangers, or even two of your own devices.

Obviously, my views are biased, but it is quite clear to me (and our users) that Bump is more than just a contact-sharing app.

The bumping gimmick and the rest of the app has a learning curve. It's not particularly steep, but it is steep enough to prevent me from ever trying it with anyone new.

I've tried to use Bump on a few occasions and every time I encountered two problems:

1) App says: "Please bump again". People tend to not want to physically smack two expensive objects together, so they shake em at one another. Timing issues, connectivity issues, and just general coordination issues make this particularly awkward.

2) Other bumper says: "Wait? I didn't actually share anything?" The sharing selection UI was needlessly confusing. Granted, it only shared contacts when I tried it.

Seeing as I had no idea I could share anything other than contacts, I just downloaded the latest version and looked through it. The whole concept of checking off a bunch of boxes before bumping seems strange. I don't have anyone to bump with right this moment, but it would seem preferable to bump first, send/receive data one bit at a time, then disconnect. Rather than make a big bundle of selections and issue a transaction.

EDIT: And regarding contact sharing in particular, I actually really like business cards. I almost always carry a pen and having a physical token in my wallet is a great follow up reminder for later. However, I get annoyed when people don't have any whitespace on their cards for notes!

I'd love to "bump" cash registers for my receipts (straight to an accounting app).

We're working on this with FaceCash.

We are hiring.

I've worked at Bump for about a year and a half - the classic 'work from the founder's kitchen' story...

I really enjoy coming to work here. Why?

Because the work is engrossing - there are more interesting things to work on here than I have time for.

Because our team works well together - it is a low-ego environment, and we are all focused on building cool stuff.

Because our hardware procurement process consists of mentioning what we need to Andy (our procurement officer/CTO) and shiny things magically appear on our desk within days.

Because our offices are custom-made: http://imgur.com/qZAc6 (ha!)

Please check out our jobs page: http://bu.mp/jobs

Or email me; see my profile.

I am visiting India surrounded by over a dozen cousins in 5-15 age range. All but a few are hooked to Bump independently(not through me). One evening the kids literally went door to door in our large extended family searching for iPhones to put the app on.

Seeing such crazy adoption, I wanted to see what they really dig about it. So I tried to played a sucker and kept asking them "Bump sucks, why would you even use it?". Their response: "picture sharing is sooo fast; its quicker than even sms; its just awesome" followed by "want me to put it on your iphone?" :)

Pretty cool!

The article says they are going to put physical stations in venues that people can "bump." I love that idea. Making it a physical act that other people can see is really smart. The activity isn't just happening on the phone, it's happening in the real world, people are literally bumping into things.

Bump is YC09, for those who don't know.

They license their technology to PayPal, and perhaps others. What the rev deal is, I have no idea.

Linkedin should buy Bumb

$16 million? I'd be happy with a $50k investment...

congrats, guys!

What do they need that much money for? It's a simple contact sharing app. And how will they make money?

Foodspotting also got 3M today, for a simple photo sharing app that has no revenue model.

This bubble is very close to bursting. Too bad for those pension funds and university endowments.

I doubt it's just a contact-sharing app, I think they've branched out (or always intended?) to creating a generic platform for exchanging information with people standing next to you.

Indeed, you can now share with any other user you are friends with, whether or not you are physically near each other.

This bubble is very close to bursting.

I'm sorry but the bubble banter seems to have gotten a little out of hand. Yes, there seems to be a rise in startups receiving high profile investments. Yes, the flow of acquisitions has increased lately. But this talk of a bubble seems little more than fear mongering to me. Concentrate on the things that truly matter and if there's a bubble, you'll likely weather it in one piece.

There are way too many content sharing apps out there attracting attention right now, even though Stumbleupon or Facebook or even Twitter can just overtake the entire market overnight. That to me, along with the overvaluation and lack of revenue models, tells me this is a bubble, and it will not end well.

To raise that big of a round from Sequoia AND Horowitz, Bump must have clearly shown them their numbers. Sharing alone is not the single most valuable part of Bump. Bump could very easily replace the paper anything for a lot of stuff - event tickets, p2p payments, etc.

The use cases can go on and on. From what I'm guessing based on their trajectory, I wouldn't be surprised if Bump used iOS's safari browser's accelerometer to implement in-browser Bumping. Go figure!

you could say something similar about twitter not so long ago. It's a lot about expectations of what can possibly be.

That sentence sounds precisely like "bubble-talk" to me.

When expectations matter a lot more than actual revenue is when we start to be in trouble.

I don't know if twitter is making money or not yet. Youtube is barely providing profits for Google. Digg didn't make money for yahoo. Facebook we don't have real numbers yet. (rumor says they are profitable).

FB finances leaked in the Goldman deal. They did something like $2BN in revenue and $400MM in ebitda in 2010.

Check out the post for some of their plans. They're looking to become a platform for helping businesses/bands/venues connect with patrons.

" This bubble is very close to bursting. Too bad for those pension funds and university endowments. "

Not even close.

As someone who lived through the very end (and hence the worst of it) I think this does mark the return of the bubble. Bump is a nice idea but they've now raised $3 per active user and still have no real path to revenue. That's bubble mentality.

BUT at least Bump is a good idea. Good ideas that VCs over estimate is the beginning of a bubble not the end of it. Its when ideas like ecommerce stores that just sell pet food or devices that allow web sites to smell start popping up. That's when its about to burst

Yes, during normal times. However, we're in a global economic recession, where most countries are bankrupt and overnight any country/US state can default on their debt, causing massive failures in many markets. Any other bubble bursting (education, real estate, stock market, government debt) can cause the other bubbles to burst right away.

Most countries are very far from being bankrupt. We haven't been in a recession in a quite some time (more than a year ago). While there are lingering concerns over a couple of specific countries, economic news has been mostly pretty bright for quite some time.

Jobs, particularly labor jobs, continue to be a really big issue. Lets not be hyperbolic, however.

Also, lets keep this in perspective. The amount of money totally invested in startups is (in the scheme of things) pretty small. So yes those endowments and pension funds stand to lose, but not a lot (they tend to be well diversified).

Not all bubbles are the catastrophic crash of the housing market or the general tech bubble that began last decade. Those both saw huge amounts of money invested by millions of individuals dry up overnight. This is very different.

The first bubble came at the end of a recession too. Beyond that VCs are in the business because they have money where others don't and they want to get in on the ground floor of investment opportunities.

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