How YC S12 Companies Make Money | Hacker News Reader

How YC S12 Companies Make Money

blog.imranghory.org

64 pointsig119 comments

Great info, thanks for compiling this.

It would be fascinating to see a trendline across batches - do you feel you'd have the data to do that?

Basically it would involve going through the previous batches and manually labelling them. I might pick a couple of other classes to do it for, but it's probably too much work to do it for all of them.

Could you crowdsource it? Share a Google Spreadsheet here with a list of all the batches, I'd look up a couple :)

This might help you: http://yclist.com/ (no idea how reliable the data is, though)

It would be awesome if YC recorded this data, and made it available on the site. At least for the start-ups that they fund.

So one out of four have no business model? Interesting.

I think that's the real headline here.

More likely they're just not easily categorizable.

No, every company which had a defined business model fell into one of the five categories.

It would be interesting to correlate your data with whether the company receives funding and,if so, in what amount.

"... which suggests YC is still open to funding consumer startups that have the potential to be massmarket without a clear revenue stream"

Nice way of looking at the data but it's difficult to draw conclusions like the above. There are always posts that describe how people changed course partway through or even changed at the last minute. YC can't know how things are likely to go at the time they make the offers.

It would be interesting to compare YC startups considering also their income so we can see not only chosen business models but also how much they earn.

But I wonder if we can get such information.

It is interesting that only 2 companies in B2C have subscription. In other words, it seems like selling something to consumers is really really hard.

I find it really strange that you build a service without an idea of how to monetize it. Surely "being bought" isn't a valid business model.

Anyone have a similar analysis for previous year intakes?

Would be interesting to see which business models are most likely to survive.

From a casual look at the data it seems like B2B and B2c are almost inversed. None is the most popular with B2C and Subscription with B2B.

What makes subscriptions attractive to businesses, but apparently not to consumers?

It could be that businesses are used to paying for services since it typically increases business. Therefore it's a justified expense.

  None is the most popular with B2C and Subscription with B2B.

That's exactly what you would expect. Maybe I misinterpreted your comment, what do you mean by "inversed".

If you plotted the histograms for both types of businesses, it looks like you'd get roughly a parabolic shape.

B2B falling from Subscription towards None, and B2C rising from Subscription towards None.

It also seems like Pay-as-you-go and Advertising are the least popular options overall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com