Splitterbug (YC S11) shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Splitterbug (YC S11) shutting down

splitterbug.com

53 pointsfearless51 comments

If you believe the Lean Startup thesis*:

  Success = F(#Iterations)
  #Iterations = Runway / Speed of each iteration
  Runway = Cash on hand / Burn rate

Then things are looking quite good for this team if they can continue to build, validate, and iterate this quickly with the new project they are pursuing (Assuming they didn't spend their Start Fund money on hookers and blow in the past 9 days).

[1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/cash-is-not-kin...

I know people who, if they were for example taking a long cross-country trip, would split up gas, hotels, meals, etc., down to the penny. I even heard of somebody who hounded one of his friends for $1.72 after the trip was over. This app sounds perfect for them. Still, I can't believe there's much of a market for them, since anybody who's cheap enough to care about $1.72 from a friend would never pay for this sort of app in the first place.

Exactly my thoughts: nobody that cares enough about exactly splitting bills is going to pay for an app like this. There is the alternative, that has always served me well, called 'pen and paper' that is faster and easier to access. And as long as you don't care about a few $ up or down, sharing expenses is incredibly easy.

I had a "friend" who hounded me about 35 cents once. And I'm not exaggerating, unfortunately.

Whatever happened to Y-Combinator funding startups tackling "hard problems", and searching for "the next Microsoft" ?

Even Microsoft started small. What PG likes to say is: YC is looking for startups building the next BASIC interpreter for the Altair (which was almost as obscure then as it is now.) Something minimally useful in or adjacent to a market that's going to explode, and started by determined/smart founders.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934374

Exactly my point. YC says that's what they're looking for, but YC startups tend to look more like this little "social calculator" web app then a company that will invent a new operating system, programming language, and personal computing paradigm.

Pretty sure pg said somewhere that it's a fool's game searching for the next Microsoft, because to get that you need another company to bend over at the right time to be the next IBM. I doubt YC has ever been expecting that.

9 days from private beta to shut down?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2724933

So a great offer for the other project or a well thought out early fold?

Not sure if private beta ever launched. I signed up for TestFlight and to try the app out, and still haven't, to this day, received an opportunity to try it.

I was looking forward to this though. Sad to see it go.

And I just recommended this to a family member about a week ago :(

This scenario happens on family vacations all the time. If you've ever gone on vacation and rented a big house for 3-4 families, you end up having to split the grocery bill, dinner bills, group activities; it's a huge pain, everyone has to always keep cash on them to divide the cost right away or people forget.

Protip: keep an envelope of pre-split money. Anytime money is added to it, every contributor adds an equal amount (or whatever agreed-upon proportion). Money can then be spent from the envelope without splitting.

Also useful on long road trips where gas money is being split.

While the app's a work in progress (and if you forgive the shameless shill), Splitsies (http://splitsies.net) does more or less the same thing and is freely available in the App Store.

Doesn't do groups yet (because I haven't worked out how to make them awesome yet) but its coming...

If you've ever gone on vacation and rented a big house for 3-4 families

A mistake you will make only once, believe me. Everyone paying his own way UP FRONT is the only way to make these sorts of things work.

The way to do this is to start a kitty upfront into which everyone places $X and all group spending comes from there, no-one pays for anything in common individually. Every time it runs low, everyone puts in the same again. Anything left over at the end you blow on booze and/or give to charity.

that was fast. Would be nice to share more of a postmortem

I've got all the parts of a good postmortem post floating around in my head. Unfortunately, it's probably going to have to wait a few weeks while we tackle our new product.

There was no link to any blog (or any kind of site to see a postmortem for that matter). Any chance you could send a followup to the goodbye email when you finally get around to writing something?

I'm very interested in reading it and I have this fear that it'll slip between my frequent HN checking.

We're not staying in the same space so I don't think we'll want to spam our current set of beta testers with our new product. If you track me down on Twitter though (sean_lynch), I'll send you a heads up when we launch.

Was afraid that might be the case. That's an ok compromise though. Following.

Is your new product still part of your YC experience?

It is indeed. One of the amazing things about the YC program is the amount of support we received from the partners and other companies when we were facing the decision.

I, to this day, believe the whole thing was a test to garner interest. The screenshots on the website look like photoshop mockups of what the app could look like.

I've yet to see an actual video demo of the app working, and i've yet to hear of anyone actually using it.

I have it installed on my phone and can assure you it's very real and works well.

I stand corrected, then.

When I've needed to do this, I've used a spreadsheet (with some sophisticated conditionals to get a net "you owe" matrix for each person in the group based on a list of shared expenses paid for by different people.

In other words, it isn't a startup IMHO - certainly not something I would pay money for.

I should put the spreadsheet on Google Docs Templates I guess.

I've done that too, but the average person would struggle to do it. That is (was?) the market.

And I use a napkin.

Interesting: if I may ask, what lead to the decision?

PG: “Who needs this?”

But then why did he fund them?

This wasn't even the idea they applied with.

YC fund founders not ideas. He probably gave them a "warning" or a chance to give it a try expecting them to be ready for a pivot anytime soon. jm2c

My guess? The team was solid. Since they found something else (i.e., something better), they probably are.

Sometimes I put my team into a situation where they have to complete a really small product or tool "on their own". Usually when someone new is joining the team, so they learn the way of working together and how get over issues in that area.

Maybe this was the case here...

I was wondering the same thing, but PG must have thought someone needed this.

"Sadly, the team has moved onto another project."

Seems they recognized a better opportunity.

Yeah, me and my friends are using BillMonk and are quite content.

On a side note, the problem of shuffling debts among a group of people, so that the total amount of checks written is minimized, is NP-complete.

Some shameless self promotion: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tabs/id383784290?mt=8 Not quite the same, but close enough :)

I just re-read this essay yesterday, and it really rings true.

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

Thanks for the link.

I especially liked these two sections:

"One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating."

"I like Paul Buchheit's suggestion of trying to make something that at least someone really loves. As long as you've made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track. It will be good for your morale to have even a handful of users who really love you, and startups run on morale. But also it will tell you what to focus on. What is it about you that they love? Can you do more of that? Where can you find more people who love that sort of thing? As long as you have some core of users who love you, all you have to do is expand it. It may take a while, but as long as you keep plugging away, you'll win in the end. Both Blogger and Delicious did that. Both took years to succeed. But both began with a core of fanatically devoted users, and all Evan and Joshua had to do was grow that core incrementally. Wufoo is on the same trajectory now."

For anyone looking for an alternative, I've been using https://venmo.com/ with good success. They have been around for a while.

Wow, that's remarkably similar to website I thinking of making... It was going to just keep track of who owed you what, and what you owed to who. The splitting app on top of it would make it even better.

I'm surprised this didn't take off at all.

(If anyone wants to steal my idea, don't feel bad. I rarely get around to them. And I want the app. lol)

My take on the problem has been live since end November (yeah, working on the marketing & design side now). http://splitsies.net/

You might consider at some point in the future (when the backlog of essential work dies down) doing some testing on the impact of displaying the dollar symbol versus the pound symbol in the screenshot of the app. Or better yet based on ip show a screen shot with the currency symbol that is most likely to be applicable.

Looks nice!

Android please. :)

Edit: I signed up. Looks like it -just- does splits, and not separate IOUs. Unless I say that I paid, but the cost goes to someone else?

Might be worth having a separate IOU interface to save confusion.

Just a thought. :)

We're looking at it. I'll probably go for mobile web first - 1 developer and a backlog of essential work that needs to be done. But I hear the call for Android, its definitely on the urgent list.

(edit to respond to edit)

What do you mean "just does splits"? It doesn't (at the moment) do a good job of explaining that the IOUs balance each other out: if I buy you lunch, then you buy me lunch, we're probably pretty close to balanced out.

I'm working with a great designer at the moment to try and fix some of the programmer-isms in the UI.

Actually, that's a UI issue ;) In the web or mobile app, just click the "delete" icon next to "you" when adding a bill.

And yes, we've got a way clearer and sexier UI in the pipeline.

Like, if I just wanted to say "Joe" owes me $20 for a lawnmower. There isn't a split, it's just an IOU. I think I could put at the top that I 'paid' $20 for the lawnmower (it's my mower! lol) and at the bottom that Joe owes that same $20. And that's basically an IOU.

But it hurts my head to work that logic out, for some reason.

The first public web app I built does this : http://flataccounting.net/

I built it in mid 2008 to help the flat I was living in split bills. It worked well for us, as we were all geeks and were used to using web apps for everyday tasks.

I don't think anyone uses it, but it's been running for 3 years now.

Thanks for sharing! It looks like it would have done what I wanted.

The other one mentioned is still in development, though, and I think I'll see where it goes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com