Former Facebooker Scoops Up $1.4 Million for Freshplum (YC S11) | Hacker News Reader

Former Facebooker Scoops Up $1.4 Million for Freshplum (YC S11)

allthingsd.com

69 pointsSam_Odio33 comments

I started this company with two other friends from YC companies: Nick Alexander and Michael Yuan. It was really to scratch a personal itch: online pricing. When you're selling something online (especially a virtual good) choosing a fair price is hard. Most people (including me) seem to guess.

I felt like there must be a better way, where econ & math is used instead of intuition.

Freshplum grew out of that. After building the company to solve that need we realized that analytics can help online businesses in several different ways - not just pricing. We now how a more holistic focus on helping companies understand their online business through analytics.

Congrats Sam. Sam and Nick have generously hosted me during previous Startup Schools, including during crunch-time of their first Y Combinator startups years ago, even though we barely knew each other, so I'm forever grateful.

Are you guys going to post some visual or marketing on the product? When DropBox 'launched' on Hacker News, Drew posted just a video. Even though it didn't have any actual pictures of the product, it got me excited.

Unrelated, I notice we have the same top color of abcdef. I read your user profile because I'm launching a Google Chrome extension for Hacker News (later today) that shows profiles via a popup inside the story. I'm currently working on my own demo video for it before I post the link, but maybe I should just launch now, too!

Congrats Sam!

For any newcomers, Sam is one of the earliest HN members and has been around making great contributions to the community since the very very early days.

All the best in your new venture!

Sam, congrats on the raise. Can you elaborate on the pricing for online sales? Would this include subscription services as well or just (one time) virtual good/digital sales?

Can you please tell us if and how you are using Freshplum to price Freshplum?

So what does it do exactly? Is it something like automated A/B testing on prices/segments of customers? ("let's see if we can charge visitors on Macs a dollar more?" type of stuff?)

Love the design of the site.

Freshplum sounds very interesting and like something I may find useful in the near future, but I fear that this may be because of how vaguely it is described. "Virtual goods" isn't specific enough (in my opinion). I think everyone would be better served with some sort of concrete example of a good that was priced or even a list of the most common goods that Freshplum works with.

Man this guy's writing style is incredibly unclear and annoying.

Glad I wasn't the only one to notice that. How many annoying euphemisms for "receive" can an author use in one article? "Scooping up," "nabs," "snagging"... And then there's the outright spelling error: "Who is wiling to pay for it?"

Not to take away from the funding news, but you have a rather eclectic mix of three different faux-3D visual styles on your web page - the logo, the form/buttons and the map at the bottom. At the very least I would consider fixing the glossy stuff on the logo, it stands out the most and not in a good way. Something like this - http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/3535/freshplum.jpg

(edit) I would also reconsider the use of Futura as your primary branding font. It's way off the mark. You are not a romantic movie subtitles :)

Noted, thanks.

Clickable link to actual freshplum site : http://www.freshplum.com/

Always amazes me when I read an article online that's 100% about a website and there's no link to said website found in the article.

Somewhat ironically, "selflinks-only" seems to be a common policy with news republishers.

"not looking for ninjas, samurais, pirates or rockstars." i like this company already.

So ... by extension, there might just be a spot for a philologist on a distant world.

Mooted if they follow it up with, "we're just looking for the best of the best."

Just being curious. What type of companies use your service. The example the article gives "a pair of jeans" is still a physical good and is priced taking labor cost into account.

Congrats Sam as a fellow UVA alum, always like to see these stories. Wahoo-wa!

You know what's cool? The only news about your company is that someone wrote it a check. Your website has fuck-all about what you're doing. Apparently I can sign myself up for some unspecified email content at some random point in the future, because I don't get enough email.

Now it's on hn with some crap about how you've "since expanded"... great. Get back to me when you're in business.

geez what's with the hate? Read the article, be happy for the guy, and go about your life.

Take a look at his comment history. He's just an angry dude.

Looking at your previous comments on this site, you may want to lurk for awhile to get a better sense of how people generally conduct themselves here.

While I disagree with how the parent worded his statement (there is really no need to be uncivil), I agree with the sentiment. I don't see how an announcement of funding in any way qualifies as worthy news for Hacker News.

Regardless, congrats to the owners of Freshplum. Curious to see more about your product in the future.

To all the people hating on this guy - he has a point. The company in the article is going about it's business quietly and PRODUCING while many companies on here do a lot of talking...

So while his manner of discussing this was definitely not diplomatic, that doesn't deter from the fact he has a point.

I'm sorry you feel this way and I can understand where it's coming from. Raising money isn't an extraordinary event and probably doesn't mean much to you (though it does mean I can pay everyone's salaries for a little longer - and that means something to me).

That said, we'd love more than anyone to make this available to as many people as possible. The team is pulling long hours to make that happen. We're just trying to do it in a responsible, methodical way.

I'd love to see you or any other HNer try us out. If you sell stuff online and are interested in an analytics tool to help you understand your business, feel free to drop me a line. My email is in my HN profile. After I understand your needs I'll tell you honestly whether we can help.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that if someone gives you market research in hopes of exchanging it for access, there's a chance that they'll be giving it away for free?

Who the hell changed the submission title? It was clearly stating that it was submitted by the founder. And now it has some ex-facebooker BS in it. Who cares he was with Facebook. The fact that he's on HN is what matters.

Please stop. You are not helping. Keep it human.

Did the title of this post really just get changed? Was what the head of the company (and much more than just a "Former Facebooker") posted to announce his company coming out of stealth not a good enough title?

Until there's some public announcement about things like this or some accountability, every front page post on this site is going to have a comment chain like this. This is ridiculous.

It was changed, yes -- and there was already a previous comment to this submission discussing it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4163318) ... and it was killed. I'm disappointed in the continued editing of submission titles as well.

[Edit] And now the referenced comment has been un-killed. :-)

If comments like mine are being killed just for pointing out flaws, I guess I should turn on showdead before I start blabbing!

I was thinking that there should be a plugin LevelII stack for each good, say used computer hardware. you can hit someone's bid or put your offer away from last traded price.

http://www.yourtradingjournal.com/images/nt/NinjaTrader_clip...

I'm sure that for virtual goods, delivery is more fluid and there would be less of difference say for an identical configuration of a server, but one server with 8GB vs 16GB ram.

Congrats Sam. I think this is an important and super cool venture.

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