Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
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Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to.
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
I can only see that these guys are at risk of being sherlocked by Calendar.app, Google Calendar and Calendar.exe.
Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk.
to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
I'll bet the Pro HDR folks groaned and got drunk after the Apple event yesterday where they showed the HDR functionality built in to the OS. They got Sherlocked!
by franketh September 02, 2010
"Apple buy hundreds of companies every year. Being bought by Apple is a potentially a valid exit strategy."
if (yolo(money)) { pivot_me(money) } else { shutdown() }
(if (yolo money) (pivot-me money) (shutdown))>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.
>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment.
Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Edit: 2 years after I left, Blackberry devices became Android devices... so I guess I was ahead of the curve or something?
Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(
I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.
I still have a Q10 somewhere, it's such a nice phone too.
Internally, 33% of every dollar went to the Blackberry Wireless division because Blackberry was created before commoditized mobile chips existed. In effect, this means we paid for the chips, paid an extra fee to unlock it just so we could flash our software.
It was an ongoing battle between the spec for Bluetooth being released and having our own version, validating it against every single thing out there that could connect to it and then shipping it out. This made it extremely pricy to deliver a feature on the wireless stack and often things just weren't supported which came with the original chipset.
It's difficult to turn the ship around without just firing everyone involved and going "just grab what's there just like Android is doing"
BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.
I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.
I want it to be really easy for people to get a hold of me if the information is important or if they are important to me, e.g. via SMS or voice.
I want it to be very difficult to be overwhelmed by low signal content unless that is my focus at the time, e.g. mailing lists, work email, etc.
And I want to be able to select my focus. When I am reading about mountain bikes, I want to read about mountain bikes. I don't want to sort through work messages, family memes, or tech news at the same time.
The last thing I want is for all of those to be jammed into one app.
Whilst I agree, that's an organizational problem as much as a technology one. Why is the business built upon so many apps?
So many different functions. My company is purely cloud and we use Google as much as possible, but we still have tons as we need a help desk, a task board, HR software, credential management, Office for some people, Udemy, etc.
Two, and this is where I think Superpowered, the company in question, will stumble, is that every attempt to unify these disparate needs has ended up into a unholy giant mess of "Enterprisey" software that tries to be all things to all people. Inevitably there's at least one key area where it sucks to bad for the table stakes requirement of that user base that they never adopt it, strike out on their own, and now you're back to "why do we have so many apps?".
1. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/05/202768...
Edit: this should have been a reply to the parent of your comment.
Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later.
I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.
Try O365. It just works. Seems like every app works well with the other ones.
>>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
That's risky. Major OS already have notification centers/aggregators.
The trouble is that this kind of SNAFU is common when you are dealing with multi-application use cases, so this criticism is going to apply doubly to any new player in the space, including the topic of this discussion.
Edit: or perhaps anti-unified...
Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unreasonable way to go about it. It’s important to have a larger vision, but execution is perhaps the most important in this space (as with most consumer tech).
I saw this and it resonated deeply with me. It's an exceedingly small paper cut, but a paper cut nonetheless.
I would rather club multiple slow steps requiring user action into one long wait time that I can completely ignore.
Also, if you want to make money selling software to consumers, Apple's platform is the one to target. Mac and iOS users are the most likely by far to actually pay for software. It's far more difficult to sell an app for actual money to Android or Windows users.
Again talking specifically about the consumer market here, not enterprise.
Trying the demo on three middle-aged individuals, two did not have the habit of hitting page down or scrolling. So, two out of three did not find the "obvious" content of the website below the video.
Who are the audience and what are their true needs?
This is why having a digital product out in the market with paying customers is valuable in itself. You get to observe and measure, and pivot if you're lucky. The userbase is the resource, and the paying userbase is gold.
At this point, the answer is just network effect, but that certainly wasn't the case when it was new.
vertical scaling only works to a degree, and horizontal scaling while keeping the data as close to real-time as possible is nontrivial.
Sometimes it's also just a startup pivoting due to a misfire or system, e.g, regulatory, problems
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
Serious question - hasn't it? I know there are other players in the space, but it's absolutely the #1 solution I think of.
Easy peasy.
This. Whenever someone quips "that's a feature not a product" the reply should be "so why were they able to ship this feature and you weren't". Technical debt, opportunity cost(s), mission focus are all opportunities for arbitrage.
Being able to breakout of that feature product into an expanded ecosystem before your product becomes a feature of a bigger platform is the real end game.
Dropbox addresses a real problem, it's just that the triviality of a business copying it means it became table stakes on a lot of platforms.
To be clear, my expected rate of problems for this functionality is “never.” The only service I have that experience with is Dropbox. With GDrive and One Drive I have seen folders lose sync, files get stuck syncing, and inexplicable conflicts.
In addition, sharing outside my org is way easier and more reliable with Dropbox.
I agree that copying files around seems like it should be trivial. Somehow it’s not, though. I don’t have an explanation, just observations from trying to get real work done on a Mac.
The magic of DropBox was that non-technical users could just share that word document, have it everywhere and not have to deal with a weird terminal.
I wished Drobox built a (physicals, why not) wall at their HQ with the names of everyone who was able to miraculously recover their masters/phd thesis after hardware failure because they saved it in their Dropbox folder.
Is it the UI? Is it keeping your data safe? Is it the sync?
I never used their native applications because I hate constant syncing for no reason and running proprietary apps (especially if they're always on), but I use some of their free tiers to store stuff.
If I had to pay I'd just buy some space on some server at the cheapest price per gb there is.
Doing one thing well is so much better to me than 100 things poorly. And there's still a ton of complexity and work to do the one thing well, usually. Be it integrations, sub features, whatever - i vastly prefer a full experience with a narrow scope than a "out the door" experience with a huge scope.
Absolutely. It's a common startup tactic to release a product that costs more and does less than existing alternatives to get market share and brand awareness. This is just basic stuff. Marketing 101.
Proving that the total addressable wallet is sufficient to sustain a YC company is a) non-trivial, and b) their problem. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there can be remarkably large markets in remarkably unexpected places, so while yes, this one looks like a totally conventional small-software-shop play, and the 75th percentile outcome across all YC companies is crater-shaped, I'm not going to second-guess whether they might have something.
On the other hand, researching and trying out alternative free/cheaper tools might take hours. For a busy person making good money, $10/mo to make them more productive isn't a crazy ask IMO.
And maybe that's the intent.
If you're not Apple, where price insensitive customers beat down your door, then finding them is a non-trivial problem. And not just any customers, but ones who would be interested in your (I assume) follow-on product in a similar space.
I was just offering the way I would approach considering to buy something like this
Personally, I don’t think this tool would make me significantly more productive, but if it could truly save me a few hours a year maybe 120/yr isn’t that bad.
I would also contest your claim that a lot of the HN audience makes $200K a year. I’d wager that it’s a lot lesser.
Paying similar price for simple software? Well, I would expect something like one-time purchase for $10, that's how much I'm paying usually for those kinds of programs.
It might sound a little bit communistic, I know. Sorry.
If I'm making $20k/year, I could pay $10k for Intellij Idea. Because it's essential for my work. But I'm paying $90, because Idea creators put a reasonable price. May be that's because they're in a hard competition with free tools, I don't know.
Text editor for 30€ is a good business, everyone needs a text editor.
Database client for 30€ is probably a little less profitable, not as many people need that.
Client for a specific database like the protein data bank for 30€ -- well, you might sell two or three copies.
All of these are probably a similar amount of work, but you can't sell them for the same price.
That being said, a menu bar widget has such a huge market that I don't see why they are pricing it so high.
Finally, maybe the biggest variable is non-billable hours. Maybe there isn’t 2000 hours of work available at that rate. And a lot of people who charge that much spend a substantial time finding new clients, writing new project proposals (many of which don’t get executed), and doing things to promote themselves like conference talks or speaking to press.
It would typically net out to anywhere from $500k-$900k depending on how much of those overheads you have. Nothing to sneeze at but similar ballpark as senior FAANG comp
How long of chain of dependencies on other technologies does a conventional Meat Thermometer have?
At some point in the future I plan on offering additional locations (at a compellingly low per location monthly service fee TBD).
And all of that is ignoring the possibility that the idea is to build into some other thing, but there's minimal advantage to waiting.
If you want those features, you'll have to look at my competitors' more economy priced offerings, I'm afraid.
Of course none of the people who say such things could actually do so. Instead, they continue to post the aforementioned type of comment along with the following:
- Ask HN: Where are all the profitable ideas? - Show HN: I built some half-assed idea that no one will ever use to learn the latest technology fad. - Who’s Hiring: I hate my job at some random SaaS firm because I hypocritically don’t assign worth to building software.
Anyhow, where is this mythical weather widget getting its data? How reliable are its forecasts? What makes it better than the tools Apple/Google build into their OSes after spending millions acquiring formerly indie weather tools?
Would I pay for this startups calendar? Probably not, but it seems nice, and I can definitely see people paying 2 cups of coffee a month for it.
To make it crystal clear – it seems odd to launch a product that's much more expensive than your competition and delivers much less.
It’s also very easy to say that X is most valuable and Y is nothing when you have very limited X and have a lot of Y.
more on topic, time is inherently more valuable than money due to its fundamental scarcity. there are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in a person's life. if you have time, you can always trade it for money. but if you have money, you can't always exchange it for time.
However, if you work on your own product, you might save more than $10 per month indeed.
Now that's a tool to actually work, not increase your productivity (or mess with it). So $90 is pretty affordable.
People who are surviving on a $500-$2000/year budget, are not on the market for a full-fledged IDE.
A cheap tool to build an audience makes sense, absolutely, but this is very nearly the exact opposite of that. How many users is a $10/mo calendar widget only on MacOS and only with Google Calendar really going to attract? It's expensive, and the audience is a subset of a subset of a subset. Got to start somewhere, of course, but this is like the result of a weekend hackathon, not something that a significant audience is going to drop $120/year on.
Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.
Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"
Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!
It's interesting to see they are branching out to smaller, lesser known more regional schools. Pretty far from their debut in Harvard/Kendall Square.
Never heard Stanford referred to as the "Waterloo of the United-States" either.
But hey, if you say so, I believe you internet stranger!
Either way, I don't see the harm in putting it in front of people now, and I see a big downside to either polishing it more, or pivoting without having tested it on people.
It’s enough that they made it into YC to conclude that there is a lot more going inside.
They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...
Regarding focusing on a niche it was a lesson I learned when I was filtering startups for investments I wrote about about my lesson before and how dumb I felt for passing on startups because they were too niche https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507122
Plenty of people get into YC with nothing more than an idea.
Getting into YC is sort of like getting into Harvard. Yeah, lots of people there are impressive, but not all of them. YC doesn't have a perfect filter.
FWIW I got into YC without anything remotely resembling a business, and I don't think I'm that impressive. My company failed almost immediately.
I get why they do it. It's an easy way to make more money. But the average YC founder today is nothing like the average YC founder a decade ago. They will argue otherwise, but I disagree based on personal experience. And everybody knows YC was really started by pg (I am fully aware of the entire history), and he hasn't been actively involved for years.
It may be "Mac first" rather than "Mac only".
I'm assuming the reddit post is by someone who is just really unfamiliar with YC and modern tech entrepreneurship. Hopefully, their question was sincere and they'll receive sensible answers.
As for the question of whether YC has lost its way - most institutions lose their way at some point, so it's a fair question, but I don't think it's fair to single out this particular company.
This is less an attack on Superpowered as it is a critique of YC. I think the idea of a unified Notification Center is interesting but the space is quite simply too crowded. You have slack, plus all of the companies like station trying to solve the same problem with much more features and a much bigger moat. YC used to pick companies that were more or less going to be at least decently successful even if they had never encountered YC, while this one seems like it wouldn’t have been successful without YC.
It seems like YC has fully switched to the shotgun model of fund everything and see what sticks instead of the boutique smaller cohorts of the past. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but that also comes with a reputation change as well.
Remember that Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter. Apple themselves started with a niche computer back then that sold to less 500 hobbyists at a hobbyist computer shop. The next Apple would also have to build something extremely niche that no one is paying attention to. Something like this.
The other side of the coin could be they’re getting funded because yc likes the founders :)
I think you're entirely correct. It's akin to hiring, sometimes the best prospect isn't the one with the most relevant experience.
YC is doing what they were created to do. To invest in extremely early stage startups no one is willing to bet on. But maybe their product is questioning a fundamental assumption that is outdated that has not been thrown out yet, given current technological advances. Who knows.
You could be right on founders. Founders are hungry people. If there is one thing I've learned in my short time on Earth is do not underestimate hungry people.
This is something that’s easily bootstrapped and which can be run as a lifestyle business at best.
My definition of an ideal calendar app is it would set the meetings I need for the right amount of time with the right people. It will obtain theoretical correct schedule S that maximizes my happiness and satisfaction on earth.
The design space is huge. Maybe cutting edge tech can help us get closer to the scheduler that we all need.
It’s comical that it even exists, and absurd that it’s received funding.
If they can actually sell a decent amount of these widgets, I can see them growing into something bigger in an adjacent space.
Edit: From the HN guidelines [0]
> In Comments: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
How do you feel about Framework?
- I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.)
- Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.
Same. I often see good software then see they run on a subscription model and nope right out of there.
If it was a one-off reasonable price I'd pay.
Sometimes I am happy to pay a small yearly fee if it's real nice software and I wanna support the dev.
But monthly subscriptions is stupid to me.
As a software dev myself I'm fully aware that at least internet facing software must be maintained and that maintenance is actual work and should be paid.
On the other hand there are so many apps where a subscription feels flat out dumb, so here are some alternatives:
- tokens instead of subscriptions. Just don't make it another dumb whaling business or a toddler trap. E.g: local play free, networked game takes one token from one player. I'd be happy to not have to type payment details into my kids phones. You could even make a social thing out of it. Maybe I'll pay as much but 1. if I stop using it won't drain my bank account until I realize (making me feel stupid) 2. I don't lose access to my data.
- meaningful upgrades/add ons
- yearly releases
- monthly but with perpetual license for the last paid release (Jetbrains model)
Continual improvement also counts as ongoing - but for many small utilities there’s only so much you can improve.
A good thing I’ve seen is a subscription where you can buy a “lifetime” for what is probably 2x expected subscription value or something.
I don't see why I'd pay more for less here.
If its a local app, cloud/sync/whatever "anything" should be optional/opt-in. Developers should charge an upfront fee for a point-in-time of that release, bug fixes are included for N years, but feature releases are available as an annual/whatever upgrade.
If cloud/sync/whatever makes sense for an app, then that should be available as a separate, monthly service fee. If it makes sense, then the developer can "bundle" both that monthly fee and the annual/whatever feature upgrade fee into a single subscription.
That unified subscription is what most apps do, but its important that it be separate and opt-in, while giving customers a way to pay you otherwise. That way, your revenue is aligned with customer happiness. I think back to the 1Password transition to the subscription model, where they left tons of customers behind on the non-sync product without giving them a way to pay; now, their revenue is not aligned with the success & happiness of those customers. They're still customers! Yeah, they're not paying you every month. They'll probably pay you again in the future. But, oh no, they can't fit into your MRR metrics that you need to communicate to investors; that's your problem, but you're making it the customer's problem, which means you're actually anti-customer.
If we're speaking of a website, then fundamentally, you've willfully unaligned your business model with any ability to price it transactionally. Maybe that's fine; if I think about something like Slack, that app makes zero sense to price transactionally, it's gonna be monthly, so I can't complain about that business model. But, Notion [1] is an example of an app which should have a transactional model; not everyone wants sync.
Everything is connected to Money. And, in software, I think the biggest reason why customers have began noticing how much slower and less reliable software has become is literally because of Money; its because every app now needs to be a web service. Because your app is a web service, it has to live on the web. It gets served to customers by underpowered AWS m5.large instances; did you know that your customer's iPhone is more performant than an m5-tier AWS instance? It has to travel a thousand miles over the internet. The data model lives in a database; your customer has a 5Gbps SSD hardwired to the PCI-E bus of their CPU, but instead, by putting the data In The Cloud, you're making sixteen network hops just to query for something.
None of this is better. Some of it is necessary, for some product domains, but don't fool yourself into thinking its better.
How many months/years of maintenance (“warranty”) do you typically expect to be priced into a one-time purchase price for software?
I mean, no disrespect on yc, but it performs what it says on the tin. It's a business for businesses.
Idk. I have tempered expectations moreso than some I guess.
You've got a point, I just wonder how egregious is TOO much.
Also, you can always contribute to charitable organizations. It's not an investment in the traditional sense, but changing the world to be 0.01% nicer is still a good investment.
And subscription costs are less.
That's not to say that a new competitor will put Flexibits out of business, but if the market for calendar management expands, I wouldn't expect Fantastical's share to grow proportionally. So there's an opportunity.
This also exists on macOS and WatchOS, but I think it existed in iOS first.
It's free. No paid upgrade or subscription. Just installed it.
> We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem.
Based on the how it started / how’s it going, it looks like they started in YC with one idea and realized they needed to pivot. The fact that this is what they came up with isn’t great, but at least it’s something. It wasn’t their first idea and it probably won’t stick, but that’s not terrible. I don’t think this one single company is a valid criticism of the entire system. Failure is the default end state for startups, so you take the not as good with the unicorns. And at least this one is still going!
https://www.reforge.com/brief/why-hard-pivots-in-startups-ar...
In this case though, the company is brand new. There aren’t a lot of employees involved. The valuations are low and most of the costs are sunk. There isn’t much to lose by trying something different. And they went from a video conferencing platform to managing scheduling for video conferences. It’s at least in the same ballpark.
I guess what I’d say is that it is completely fair to criticize the team for the product they made. It isn’t something I’d spend money on and is in a crowded market with existing players (both free and paid). Not the best plan.
But don’t criticize them for switching tracks. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But at this stage, I don’t see much downside in them trying.
The word 'pivot' in the startup context is used to mean precisely that.
Semantic drift happens though, and pivot certainly sounds nicer than "we gave up to do something else", so it's liable to become a broader term out of sheer convenience.
It makes sense for high ticket pieces of software (Office, Photoshop), where it makes it more accessible for regular users. However, for a calendar widget or many similar examples that come up nowadays, it just turns me off immediately.
That’s the reason? Just shows how jokes become reality - everything is a subscription because you can squeeze more money that way, not because of actual value.
Showing a countdown to my next meeting in my menubar, with one click video join, is super useful. The app itself shows how much room for improvement in calendar apps there is - their availability sharing and time travel features are consistently deeply helpful
This is all to say, I think this product approach has a lot of merit. I primarily use Vimcal in its "App Mode", not its "Menubar Mode", but its menubar mode is super valuable.
I happily pay Vimcal $15/mo, and love seeing in the space. Google Calendar and iCal are fucking terrible. I hope the SuperPowered guys crush it.
2 thoughts on YC, 1 on the company.
ON YC:
YC's model is: place lots of small bets. They have presumably grown considerably in the last 10+ years, and are likely now managing a lot more capital than they were initially, which means they need to place many more tiny bets than they initially were. YC accepts many teams who just apply as a team.
In other words, YC is not really in the business of evaluating ideas; they evaluate founders and give them money depending probably 80% on the founding team and 20% on the idea.
ON THE COMPANY:
On the company/product, calendar-ing is a relatively high leverage problem. Everyone on the (digital) planet uses a calendar every single day. Scheduling stuff is a nightmare. Being on time for stuff is a nightmare. Apple Calendar sucks. Google Calendar sucks. I assume Microsoft Office calendar also sucks. If you solve this problem in a better way to the extent people are willing to pay for it (not to be underestimated, see Superhuman), there is a large direct and indirect market for such software. Now, if you have a successful calendar app, you could do something like calendly, which is already a billion dollar company.
Try to remember, a lot of companies that come out of YC are in MONTH 3 of their lifecycle. The initial footprint can look small, but dig a little deeper and a lot there. Small footprint, big ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots
>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups.
YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup.
1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&i...
1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to something else, which might be.
2. The team was actually perceiving an opportunity you didn’t understand, and the idea ends up being a big success.
This doesn’t have to work out all the time, or even most of the time - if you fund even one team that ends up pivoting into a runaway success, it pays for all the “bad” (in hindsight) bets that didn’t pay off.
Don't invest in ideas invest in people.
No shot they are selling millions of these. But tens of thousands seems within the realm of possibility, and it would be a very profitable small enterprise if they managed it without a huge marketing budget.
The success rate for hope-to-be-unicorn startups is very low.
It was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847334
Was a fallacy along the lines of 'we only have to sell to one percent of China to make billions, anyone can sell anything to one percent of a country', but in reality it never works out due to factors like shipping and getting a foothold among the many established companies.
If someone could cite the name of the economic theory it would be super appreciated.
Edit: so I was thinking of this one[1], which I believe speaks to where this theory originated, and was known as 'Chinese Math' which is apparently re-invented every year by someone, but glad you found the one you were thinking of GP.
[1] https://www.businesspundit.com/please-stop-with-your-chinese...
Or they may see what we mere mortals can't see.
Modern innovation at its finest
I think a lot of people miss the fact that YC at the end of the day doesn't care about the actual idea / product but if there is a way it could be used by millions and if there is a path from this widget to something bigger. It's just the MVP and seems to be pretty successful considering it has paying users already. At the end of the day, YC funds people, not companies. If they think you have some potential and can prove it with a little bit of traction or some background or having the right team. There were numerous companies in our batch that pivoted once they started the batch.
Calendar is a really bad product that needs disruption as well. I imported my victor ops on call schedule the other day and it imported wrong, so then I had to go through an entire year of two meetings a day fixing it, something that would have taken 10 seconds if they let you search and delete results.
Re Mac only, the first stage of a startup is finding product market fit. It isn't about making your product work on every platform. In fact that's counter productive. The goal is to have the shortest build-release-learn cycle, if you are porting to multiple platforms, you just increased your build time, which increases your cycle time, which means you will take longer to reach product market fit. Once you do, you can go port to every platform, but it's harmful to do it early.
I'm not seeing some tipping point here. YC has always had startups that were a bit funny or outright weak sounding -- their investment strategy pretty much means the idea must initially sound bad in the pitch. They're aiming for things that are counter intutitive to give them an advantage.
And has some pretty successful alumni!
This product has many competitors in a crowded space, and the risk of being sherlock-ed.
https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/
Syncs to Google Calendar and just... works?
You may not think that’s valuable, they may not succeed at realizing that vision, but it is clearly not a case of “Mac only calendar menu bar app gets YC funding.”
The lack of intellectual humility here is alarming. I don’t see the value in this thing selected by a 16-year investor, who actually has skin in the game to pick successful startups? Maybe there is something I’m not seeing. No, that can’t be it, YC must just be stupid.
Something was going to get sherlocked by a big fruit company or reinvented by a Chrome Extension for free or integrated into their own taskbar by a trillion dollar software company.
Am I right f.lux? I don't think we'll get an answer from this company if the 'competition' decides to go the way on what they did to f.lux.
However, it might be just a little tiny thing that they want to do. They launched ASAP. They've got some feedback. Etc.
Next thing might be that they will reinvent the way we use calendars. Who knows? Not YC. But they will give it a shot.
You start small (even if you have a trillion dollar ambitions), you grow.
"SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION: We share your Personal Information with third parties (analytics tools) to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use analytics tools to track our users to improve our product and provide a better experience."
Calendars, like contact lists, like emails, like all of the other personal content people produce everyday is sensitive. In lieu of saying how this is protected, apart from just saying it's simply used to make things better, I'm reluctant to link any accounts containing sensitive personal data to startups in search of a revenue-generating business model.
Said nobody ever!
It is literally three clicks away...
1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button
I use Itsycal which is sensibly the same thing, and it really changed my relationship with my calendar. I would never pay a subscription for such a widget, but for the value is provides I would gladly pay a fixed price.
Open source, free (both as in beer and freedom), small memory footprint.
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23991111
We are thinking of applying for a political accelerator. Probably a long shot but who knows and IDK even know if I want to spent near 100% of my time on something like this.
But this is exactly my concern - that maybe we don't have enough of an 'app'?
Right now the functionality sits inside a plugin on a 3rd party service. It's pretty full featured though replicating features of another standalone organizing app but within a different context.
This is also building tools on top of cross-platform messaging so that's also relying on more 3rd parties - FB particularly i think probably could get rid of Messenger API they keep restricting it gradually. But the others are more stable and email/sms/chat will always be open. Read hear all the time don't base 100% of your business on FB... Which this isn't but still it's a big value of it.
I also built other organizing tools that work together with this that might expand features to be more of a multi-product, but again probably 50% of that is built to work with another 3rd party SaaS!
My complaint with YC lately is the exact opposite -- they keep investing in companies that have product market fit and profits. Those are great derisked investments, but not at all what YC used to do, which was investing in people, sometimes without any company at all.
They've done a good job of moving back towards those types of investments, but Demo Day is still filled with, "Hi, we're the top experts in our field and we started a company a few years ago and have $1MM+ ARR and are profitable but we want investment to grow faster". And a lot of those companies look like they'll settle into a nice low 9-figure valuation, which is great for the company and YC, but boring for someone looking for the moonshots YC used to be known for.
Martin Casado, from a16z, has a great post/talk about this trend. https://a16z.com/2019/08/09/video-growth-sales-and-a-new-era...
This app is ridiculous, but maybe they had a good pitch or whatever, who knows.
And if you have such a giant portfolio, they cannot all be diamonds.
Downloaded and got it set up in less than 2 minutes. Already in love. Weighing if $10/mo is worth it and my immediate reaction isn't "No"
If you are lucky enough to solve a complex problem and deliver value expressed in a simple widget, that is a perfect starting point for a much bigger business.
That's what they do. They make stupid looking bets. That's the business. If that hurts their brand with anyone, then that person didn't understand what they're doing anyway.
I guess what I would worry about is can they handle strange link placement, different meeting software, and times when I'm double or triple booked with different meetings?
Also, tough to judge a company by its earliest incarnation. I thought Facebook was pretty dumb when I first heard about it, but they turned out fine.
(Though certainly your assessment could be accurate, regardless)
I think the other thing to remember is that these guys started with a videocall platform for professors, which is what won the pitch with the partners. Then they got cold feet and pivoted to this.
I also don't think a single bad investment ruins the YC brand.
I can't even dare to imagine how demotivating it can be for the founders. I really wish YC can cater to as many startups as it can and hope the reason for this is not the growing batch sizes.
Need to start somewhere before leaping to the next step, and momemtum creates momemtum.
Amazon started with books. Paypal started with Ebay sellers or something. Airbnb started with couch sharing. Etc.
Bezos would not have needed YC's measly $125K when the bank of Mom and Dad were offering double that.
In the thread, it was obvious that for some people it would alleviate a pain : keeping track of synchronous events across multiple platforms.
Why? There's no shortage of more serious and productive problems to solve.
Looking at this product, I'd expect it to grow into a powerful, personal RPA product. They could build a high quality, MacOS-native view into all the APIs in your life, with automation tooling and a great mobile story.
But it has to start somewhere. :)
Step 2, ads!
Though in seriousness, YC has said it is more about funding people than specific projects. And who knows where this lands on the path to the destination.
"Facebook started with a social network and they're still a social network! They haven't changed at all!"
You're completely missing the point. You can do the same or similar things while starting with a small audience and scaling. Target a small pool to get product/market fit and gradually expand your target audience until you're a billion dollar company.
Fast forward 3 years with this company and if they build their unified notification inbox product, with the benefit of hindsight you could say "Superpowered started selling productivity software, and its still selling productivity software"
I have no idea if this company will pan out or not. But I do know it's very easy to craft historical narratives that seem so clear after the fact. I have watched many founders do it.
A widget for all would be a larger addressable market.
If you leave aside the fact that it destroyed housing in many cities, like the one I live in. A handful of landlords got richer, turists could travel cheaper (not necessarily a good thing overall), but an entire class of citizens got kicked out of the city as now no landlord wants to regularly rent their flat.
If you ask for disruption, that's what you get. When you disrupt a market, you also disrupt many lives, even indirectly.
So the question is what does the status bar enable? That's the opportunity. I think of and want zapier in my status bar. I don't work for these guys but rather than dis the company let's figure out how to make them successful.
I'd give a basic product away for free and focus on integrations.
But in a world where, for example, a competing product like Fantastical already exists, costs less and does more, it does seem valid to be wondering what is going on.
I will not comment on whether this calendar app is revolutionary, it might not be, but it's also possible it is something that will make an impact. There's lots of untapped potential in the calendar and event space, in my opinion.
“I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.” - Jeff Barg
Well, I must admit this is not the most compelling sales pitch in the world. It almost seems like satire. I understand the utility, but the calendar tab is ok.