Nothing against you personally, but I'm the only one who thinks it's weird that a Shopify A/B testing app got into YC?
For starters, a really simple question you could have asked that may update your belief of how weird it is they got into YC: "How much money are they making and how much are they growing per week?"
This question sitting at the top further validates that other people are wondering it, so disappointing as it may be - people are curious!
I just had the impression that YC tries to back more "ambitious" or "important" businesses, but may be I'm wrong about that.
The founder does say that they want to change all of pricing. Even then I'd argue that launching making recurring revenue would have got them more favourable terms with a VC in the future.
1. Liability. A result of "raising prices by $10 is 5% more revenue" is not confirmation that raising prices by $10 is a good idea. I expect a non-trivial error rate, especially since most merchants aren't statistics savvy (forming experiments, doing risk analysis and interpreting data is hard). If Shopify causes this, it's a story. Startups will have room to develop features / legal to adjust to the liability concerns
2. Channels. Shopify is a very multi-channel platform and many stores actually rely on Facebook or Instagram integrations and physical stores rather than their online store. To be able to control prices on all these channels is an engineering challenge, and will also further dilute the value of the data. It'll also amplify concerns about pricing-inconsistencies.
3. Just a high-risk idea. Customers don't like seeing different prices. Merchants don't like running experiments that could cause them to lose money. Merchants also like being "good" to their customers by some measure, and some merchants would consider this unfair.
Best of luck though. I can see many stores thinking this is the way to unlock profitability.
Another thing I'd like to add: most of the comments in this thread are assuming price is going to be increased when in reality a good number of merchants are going to actually end up lowering their prices (and serving more customers). In the end, it's all about delivering + capturing as much value as possible.
First of all, it's a great business. Shopify is exploding like crypto kittens, and with millions of sellers, even if you secure just the top sellers, let's say 1% of the Shopify market, and charge $10,000 per year, that's a 100-million-dollar-business. That's incredible.
From there, you have a choice to either expand further in the market, or start offering more advanced tools to your best customers. Given that Shopify is currently at 100B market cap, yours could be 1B in just a few years, if not sooner.
It's brilliant!
There wasn’t a single successful entrepreneur amongst the “partners” who interviewed us.
Here we are a year or so later flying at 7 figure revenues thankful we didn’t give up nearly 10% of our business to an incubator that’s a shell of its former self.
Therefore I'm afraid that we will see less and less interesting and "out there" YC companies but more confirming ones.
I'm aware that growing has other benefits for YC and its companies, but I'm personally just a bit sad about this...
Edit: I feel like Seibel is the last interesting full-time partner and I wouldn't be surprised if he leaves within 2 years.