Top Startups From Y Combinator W14 Demo Day | Hacker News Reader

Top Startups From Y Combinator W14 Demo Day

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44 pointsninox11 comments

I like wit.ai but I don't think their pricing model is sustainable for many developers.

At bulk pricing you get 25000 queries/day for $1500/month. At 30 days/month it comes down to $.002/query.

Assuming you generate revenue from advertising and you are able to display one ad per every query. You have to do $2 CPM or better to break even. Which is about the current market price [1].

There are other revenue models than mobile ad, but taking that example the developers would have to give all their revenue to wit.ai which would not make any business sense.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Mobile-Advertising/What-are-current-mob...

Hi, Wit.AI team here. Thanks for your feedback.

We also have a free community plan: if you agree to give back to the community by sharing your training data, then Wit.AI is free for you.

That being said, we are just getting started and we'll adjust our pricing after we get more developers' feedback.

I noticed that but I was wonder how sustainable that model was. 1 - you need to make money so, someone has to pay.

2 - at some point you'll reach saturation with training data and that won't be a viable option.

Anyways, love what you're providing and we'll look into where we can use it. But just wanted to do a quick back of the envelop math.

I love PushBullet, didn't know they were doing YC. I don't know if they can ever grow into making enough money to show up on the YC ROI charts but they have a great solution to a common problem and have been developer-friendly since day 1.

Having built voice interface systems in the past, I'm definitely intrigued by what Wit.AI will deliver. Any plans to support multiple languages?

I was interested to see the differences between this and Mattermark's top 8. The only two in common are Kimono and The Dating Ring.

Mattermark Top 8:

Kimono Labs, Taplytics, CodeCombat, Airpair, Beacon, Ambition, The Dating Ring, Style Lend

TechCrunch Top 8:

wit.ai, The Dating Ring, PushBullet, AirHelp, Weave, Boostable, Kimono Labs, BatteryOS

Mattermark and their rankings are going to be looked back on as just as useless as a professional blogger. There are hints of positives for you to take away (and make wide sweeping bets across companies with - if you're an investor), but the outliers end up being outliers in a number of ways. Pretty much all the ways that make prognostication like this precisely pointless.

Mattermark founder here, and to be clear we are not "prognosticating" - the Mattermark Score has not been proven to be predictive in any way. It is descriptive, describing which companies are getting more and more people to care about their existence on an ongoing basis. If anything, this might be similar to "traction" and might help companies raise... but as we all know many startups who appear to have traction still fail. What we hope to do is make investors aware of companies who are gaining traction that they might overlook, and in the long run we hope we can encourage them to look beyond the echo chamber of tech and focus on the echo chamber of a startup's actual customers. We'll see how it goes...

OK, I'm often a bit skeptical about some of the startups from Y Combinator, but Airhelp is definitely something interesting for me. Anything that simplifies going after relatively small sums of money is good in my book.

I agree, definitely a big potential here. They say that there is a $16 billion potential in claim each year, which is a pretty huge pie. Does anyone know how much of this is currently claimed each year?

I'm surprised to not see AirPair in this roundup, they're very well situated in what could become a huge industry.

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