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Comment by petargyurov | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry for being negative, but paying $10 per month for what is essentially a calendar widget is blowing my mind. The fact that this is even in YC and not just a side project is taking what's left of my brain and blowing it into the stratosphere.

> We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.

Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.

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It’s the YC model. Throw money at smart upper-class kids in good schools with some ambition. Once in a while, those kids make Dropbox or Airbnb, most of the time they make calendar widgets and leverage the experience to jump the line at some FAANG and start out their careers a decade ahead of their peers. It doesn’t make sense to you and I because it doesn’t make sense. It’s a lottery ticket for the investors. YC just games the system by buying most of the lottery tickets.

I understand Dropbox and Airbnb, but the long-term growth potential was clear to begin with - here, I just don't see it. It's a stupid calendar widget on a subscription.

I understand the potential for future expansion, but wouldn't it make sense for YC to wait until an MVP for said expansion is released before investing in it?

Even more absurd is that there are free and more functional alternatives: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar

Thanks for point this out - it is amazing. Superpowered has a lot of catching up to do.

It's just a MVP... version 0.01 of their vision. The fact that they have paying users who use them daily is a very, very good signal - that's a hard thing to do! It's so much easier to add additional features to that group of users later.

I see so many negative comments and can't help but think of this (first comment on DropBox's HN launch): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The difference is that DropBox didn't have lots of free and better competitors.

The V in MVP stands for viable. Things that aren’t viable aren’t MVPs they are steps getting to an MVP. Part of the value of testing stuff is to check and see if what I think is an MVP is, actually is. When it clearly isn’t, if I call it an MVP then I’m either insane or a marketing person.

Prototypes are perfectly cool as long as expectations are met. Of course, charging $10 for a prototype doesn’t frequently work

The pro-sumer market is massive. It's really not that hard to deliver $10 worth of value to people whose time is very, very expensive.

As far as YC goes, pivoting and working on new ideas really rapidly is downright normal. Sometimes that looks like taking weekend hacks and seeing how far you can get with them (this one being a canonical example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819)

ive had friends get into YC without an idea, just two guys looking to start a company

I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time.

It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.

Genuinely curious why not pay for fantastical? It has basically the same widget, plus an iPhone and Mac app for a 1/3 of the price? Not to be mean, but this seems like it only got traction because they got accepted to YC on another idea, otherwise would have been lost in the sea of dozens of other much more full featured or free calendar solutions?

It's been a while since I used fantastical but I didn't like it. I don't remember why to be honest.

Fantastical has this feature though. It would be overkill, but you could only use it for this feature and it would be half the cost!

I bought fantastical quite a few years ago for something like $10... single payment. Still works. They have offerings for 6.99 cad a month.

How many QoL are you willing to buy? You’re essentially paying $10 for a netflix subscription only it’s a calendar widget in the top menu bar.

For context, Austen Allred is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda School, so efficiency wins are going to be pretty valuable for him.

Also, as a CEO you are constantly thinking in terms of ROI. It doesn't matter how much software costs if it pays for itself several times over. This spills over into personal purchases too.

(BTW, big fan of what Lambda School is doing Austen.)

You forgot to mention they're also a YC company...

are you an investor as well?

No, he's _just_ a fellow YC alum.

I'm not

No problem at all. Definitely does, it's a broad problem and we're still figuring it out too.

As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser. We want to bring all the platforms we use for work into one native place. Does that make more sense now?

Doesn’t MacOS already have an elaborate notification implementation? Would not integrating with that work?

Many people have the notification center on Do Not Disturb indefinitely. It's noisy and unactionable for a a lot of people, including myself.

We want to integrate deeply into SaaS platforms to provide one-click access to features within those platforms. For example, viewing and resolving comments on a Google Doc. This just isn't possible through Mac's notification center.

How do you prevent your platform from becoming equally noisy and unactionable?

> As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications

Maybe I'm being dense here, but can't you use email?

> As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser.

But why would anyone be constantly checking GitHub notifications? Isn't that a distraction?

I am currently working on a service for GitHub project reports and analytics. Would you be interested in that? If so, leave your mail here and I'll put you in beta! https://sneak-peek.io/product/ohmycode

http://ptsochantaris.github.io/trailer/ is wonderful to manage GitHub work and notification.

YC funds widgets ? What are the economics of this thing. A thousand developers can copy or open source similar alternatives.

You will laugh, but a year ago I made same service in open source: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar/

I love Meeting Bar. Use it every day. I really like the applescript feature. A hotkey combo pauses my music, launches zoom or meet, and I'm good to go

Amazing, thank you. I will be using this. They were probably "inspired" :wink by your service

I think what you're paying for is someone to sync your calenders for you.

Similar to ring camera. You're just paying someone to make your cctv camera available to you over thr internet instead of you setting it up yourself.

I personally hate these services but some people would pay $/month for this convince.

> Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.

The business value of missing a notification or meeting can be really high. I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting. Or even just closer. I imagine similar logic can be applied to other notifications.

> I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting

Maybe I'm being extremely naive, but isn't it already a solved problem with synchronized & shared calendars and notifications?

I don’t think so because the notifications in chrome get buried for me. Email alerts for lost in the deluge of work emails. The Apple Watch helps a lot actually

Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried?

>Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried?

I think the idea is that the upcoming calendar/appointment notification is live and always on the menubar. See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png

I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for personal use on Windows so I understand the value of this. Calendar notifications via email and "reminders" on the iPhone are not effective for my workflow and I need something that's always active on my menu bar.

Exactly - calendar notifications are "more important" than my frequent Clubhouse pings and having them in a more visible place is very helpful.

> is live and always on the menubar

I spend my time in fullscreen apps. The menubar is never visible.

> See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png

If this is all you need, why not just use an open source alternative? I'm using MeetingBar (https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar) and it covers all of these "issues". It even sends notifications, it's lightweight, scriptable and doesn't cost me as much as a Photoshop subscription.

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