Unveiling Stealth Y Combinator Startup URX
uncrunched.com
uncrunched.com
Our target customers are mobile commerce companies like LivingSocial whose inventory 1) has a higher cost of sale, and 2) isn't subject to the 30% App Store rake. This means that they are willing to be more aggressive with their paid marketing, similar to how things work on the web.
We just posted a case study with LivingSocial on our website if you'd like to learn more.
s/Tenants/Tenets :)
The ability to link into the middle of mobile apps is massive. Imagine where the web (or AdWords) would be if the deep content within websites was not able to be indexed or referenced. Right now, most mobile developers don't implement deeplinks, and even fewer marketers use them to drive traffic.
In concept, "URX" represents this next version of the URL that is built for the cross-screen, native/web world. URX's mission is to help app developers and marketers enable and monetize deeplinking in their mobile apps, and the name "URX" keeps us honest to that.
That said, I have to admit I read your explanation of the name of your company three times before I understood that you are changing the L in URL into an X. In my head, I guess I had latched onto the URX as something like "You Are X", and then that opens up all the possibilities to what I can be, where I am, etc. That may happen to a lot of people.
Is it possible that, by skipping demo day, you also skipped the communications training that allows you to transmit your idea in two minutes? Since you are going to be asked to explain your name dozens if not hundreds of times in the future, maybe you could iterate on the three paragraphs above until you can get the URL->URX connection into an ordinary persons head.
Besides "you are X", the other feedback we've gotten is that some people read it as "irks".
However, in a space full of not-subtly-named companies such as Tap{Stream, Joy, Jump} and App{Salar, sFlyer, etc}, we'd prefer to stand out with something that sounds like it might be more than your average DSP.
We also think it could be a cool acronym, but we're keeping that to ourselves for now :)
Perhaps there's a market for such a plug-and-play product?
Did you hand-roll the ad proxy or find something open-sourced? I'm definitely a believer that if you don't want ads, the resources should be widely available to avoid them.
On rooted Android, AdAway.
Also, I would think in-app purchase pricing would be relatively inexpensive. I guess I don't see who they're targeting... the target company would need substantially-priced in-app purchases to justify the cost of even traditional advertising.
Wish them well though!
Not sure what you mean. Why does in-app purchase pricing have to be inexpensive? Why does it matter if it does? Traditional advertising is substantially more expensive than mobile advertising.
The reason a company would be interested in this is because someone who has your app installed (say Uber, to take one of the apps that enables transactions on my phone as an example) is one of the highest value customers you can reach in terms of likelihood to make a purchase (they installed your app, so it's akin to someone entering your store).
It seems like Facebook sees the same thing happening.
Of course, I am curious to see how this affects game developers - I've encountered a few who have rolled their own retargeting solutions on top of house ads. It seems like game developers are especially reluctant to pay for anything except to pump up their install count in order to reach the top of app store rankings (seems like using SEM to boost your SEO).
Any predictions?
As far as game developers, the SEM for SEO strategy is the TapJoy model and it sucks for people who play. One thing I think deep linking could start to do for developers is allow them to cannibalize each other (say Angry Birds started advertising in Candy Crush Saga to people who spent over $X/week and had Angry Birds installed, I know this probably isn't the best example, but it is descriptive at least). Does that push game devs away from allowing in app ads from other game companies?
From what I observed in YC, launching a TechCrunch article typically doesn't lead to a ton of inbound interest (at least for B2B companies this is true - if you're Uber/Vine/Tinder/Grouper, it's a different story).
For B2B companies, press helps get investor attention, can help with inbound hiring, and can potentially help get clients, if your press releases are well targeted enough (which most aren't).
From our perspective, staying quiet was the default. Now we're at the point where we're interested in reaching a slightly broader audience.
It's unfortunate, although sort of understandable, that Facebook is so strict on how its adds can call-to-action.
Especially since the nascent mobile advertising market focused so heavily on the gaming industry, it makes sense that people weren't terribly motivated to start indexing deep app content early on.
We (at URX) feel especially passionate about non-game apps that we use on a daily basis, and get excited about the ability to help them grow faster and reach their users in more relevant ways. Personally I'd prefer to see ads from apps that I already trust, rather than ads trying to get me to install more games that don't add a lot of value for me as a non-gamer.
I'm interested to hear what about Facebook's approach [1] is so strict. It's a little funky that they make you register an ugly custom protocol scheme... in their words, "the deep link scheme would be your app id prefixed by "fb". e.g 'fb1234567://'". I'm also somewhat surprised that they limit you to a very specific set of call-to-action phrases: - Open Link - Shop Now - Use App - Book Now - Play Game - Listen Now - Watch Video ... "Use App" is a little boring, isn't it?
Would you have done anything differently than facebook?
I really think twitter is on the right track with Twitter Cards [2]; it seems that once we're able to better understand the content within apps (or pair it up with the web equivalents), we can construct a much richer data set and make awesome new experiences possible in the ways people use their apps.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ads-for-apps/mobile-app...
[2] https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/app-installs-and-deep-lin...
Twitter cards are incredible, and really promising. Now Twitter just has to figure out a way to get people that advertisers reach with them to actually spend money (not to mention the miles they have to catch up with Facebook on attribution and conversion tracking).
1. why they explicitly says that they don't send users to your app, but either to your mobile website or to the app store
2. why users, that do not come back to my app, will go back to URX
Is your friend anyone we would have heard of? If he's working on deeplinks, we'd love to get his feedback on our open-source project, Turnpike [1], which helps developers enable deeplinks in their apps.
I'm actually doing ad tech consulting with a focus on helping folks integrate standard machine learning tools into low latency bidding infrastructure. (and was helping the friend with such)
I'm a bit curious about the "deep learning" remark in your hiring post, i'd be curious to learn more!