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Comment by zapnap | Hacker News Reader

Stripe is an awesome example of a company that addressed a tangible frustration / real need instead of a desire or a higher-level "want". I've noticed that companies that provide "Internet plumbing" often fall into this category:

* SendGrid (bulk email sending)

* Twilio (easy to use telephony / sms)

* Zencoder (video encoding)

* MailChimp (mailing list management)

What others can you think of? Would love to see a list here :).

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Heroku, Mailgun, MongoHQ, Cloudkick, Parse, AeroFS, DotCloud, Vidyard, AppHarbor, Mixpanel, Cloudant, PagerDuty (we like this type of company).

Urban Airship

One of the things that I have noticed about all of your examples is that they are all tools for developers. Do you have any examples of companies that solve real problems for the general consumer?

Sure. But he asked for examples of companies working on plumbing.

Leanpub (self-publishing in-progress ebooks)

[disclaimer: my startup]

That is pretty nice Peter. I have a few short book ideas and I'll try your service out on one of them.

Dropbox, Airbnb

Simple/BankSimple, maybe :p.

I think a lot of us are clamoring for an alternative to Gmail that also happens to be placed outside the (immediate) jurisdiction of the United States.

It's obvious people want it, but mere mortals shirk from the prospect of securing it.

I think Dropbox is part of that list. Hey - there were file sharing solutions from big companies (AOL, Microsoft, etc.) but they were all crappy.

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