Mattermark Index: Y Combinator Summer 2013 Companies
mattermark.com
mattermark.com
Also, a note for those signing up for the trial, there is neither an option to cancel your subscription directly nor information about billing inside the application. You have to email them to cancel the account and i got a response after 5 days(3 working days) when i sent an email asking them to cancel my trial account. While it is totally acceptable for an early stage startup to not have those features and i am sure they have it in their backlog, just make sure you don't send that cancelation email the day before your trial ends.
It's hard for me to understand how this formula could be a valuable measure of growth of a startup, since most of these things can be easily purchased. I'd guess that growth of Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, LinkedIn followers and website traffic are more accurately a measure of a company's ad spend than their actual growth in revenue and users.
That's literally 12 data points per startup, way too little for any type of smoothing to have an accurate effect.
It's interesting that the company at the bottom of your list (Reebee) has 3x the Twitter followers and 6x the FB followers that the company at the top of the list (OneMonthRails) has. If Reebee started out (i.e., when you started tracking them) with a couple hundred followers on each of these services and OneMonthRails started out with none, then Reebee had the deck stacked against them, needing to add 100x+ the number of followers added by companies that began with no traction, during a limited time frame.
You're welcome to sign up for free trial to poke around and see why each company's score it what it is. We provide graphs and details on all the data points for each company. http://www.mattermark.com/app/signup
At the end of the day investors do have to choose one company over another, as very few can justify investing in all of them. We're trying to give them more info to go off beyond hype. All of these companies tackle large markets with varied margins, and I believe investors are smart enough to sort that out for themselves and make decisions based on their domain knowledge, relationships, and expertise.
All you're measuring is hype though. Startups that rely on likes, follows, etc. as a gauge of success/traction are by nature, hype driven.
There are many industries - B2B, EdTech, etc. - where lack of social media traction is not at all an indicator of the health of a startup. I know because I run one. We have 0 likes, 0 mentions, 0 follows, but a hundred paying customers and on track to hit 1MM in revenue in less than 20 months since launch (with only 4 employees).
I hate to be critical of other founders, but all you're doing is contributing to and validating all the silliness that is the SV startup scene.
One problem is stats like you mentioned are hard to count, as for one you may have a competitive incentive to hide them. For another, there are no easy APIs or ways of scraping that data.
What mattermark could do (and are probably doing) is learning what stats are signals of success for what types of startups. For a consumer web or mobile startup, mattermark's data is likely a very good health indicator, for a b2b thing likely not.
A couple examples to play devil's advocate even when discussing consumer startups against other consumer startups: 1) The social media startup that relies on spammy incentives to retweet or like something. 2) The ecommerce startup that relies on free giveaways or hefty price cuts to get people to tweet or post deals that are not sustainable from a business perspective.
Unless there are other signals that you can combine with this data, in many instances it can be deceiving. Like I said, the data can still be a great starting point because you at least see the data ranked with the names of the startups and then can investigate those startups closer from other perspectives.
Within Mattermark Pro investors can filter by stage, vertical, business model, geography and many other factors to create useful comparisons between companies... Mattermark scores for B2B companies are quite meaningful when comparing apples to apples. I know it is painful to judge and be judged in this ecosystem, but I hope people will see that we are blogging about interesting stuff that others aren't covering and bringing more transparency and information symmetry than before.
There's a reason that so many tech-focused venture firms are located in Silicon Valley. It makes it easier for partners, associates and analysts to hit the pavement and keep their ears to the ground. Why do they want to do this? One of the big reasons: to obtain meaningful information about potential investment opportunities before (hopefully) it becomes widely known. This is particularly valuable in the context of early-stage investments.
If, for the sake of argument, we assume that Mattermark has actually developed a model that can identify promising startups that aren't getting the attention they deserve, you're destroying the value of that model by selling its output to anybody willing to shell out a paltry $6,000/year for your pro service.
A smart VC could just send of them as a spec to dev team in Russia/India, and hire mechanical turkers to blitz forums. Even hire a few good writers to create blogs and post to HN.