Leaving a Million Bucks on the Table: Why Flotype Pivoted in Y Combinator
thestartupfoundry.com
thestartupfoundry.com
NowJS, and the free open source product "Now," is just one small piece of Flotype the company.
We haven't launched and haven't disclosed the business-side of NowJS (tl;dr we have an enterprise product that's extremely complex). So trust me, it's not just a "dump open source js" project.
Looking forward to seeing what you guys have in store.
Bi-directional message passing in real-time is a solved problem and I am not sure how many companies are willing to pay a license for this type of software if they can get away with using a hosted service like Pusher.
I wrote my own equivalent of nowjs in a few weeks about a month ago... maybe I should apply to yc?
NowJS had been doing some iPad app that improved the online shopping experience. That was going well, getting traction and good feedback, got them an offer for $1M of investment, etc.
But they realized (thanks to PG questioning them) that they didn't actually care about shopping that much, and they were a great team whose strength was really solving really hard technical problems, which also interests them more. So they were trying to decide whether to pivot away from a successful idea. After some indecision they gave the idea that turned into NowJS 1 week of their attention and built something very promising, so they gave it a bit more time, and then they decided to go with it.