Ask HN: What are some successful startups built on top of other services? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some successful startups built on top of other services?

14 pointstzz19 comments

Are there any successful startups built solely on top of other services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google App or others?

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Baremetrics (https://www.baremetrics.io) by Josh Pigford is built off of Stripe. There are also a handful of dunning-related services that sit on top of Stripe, also.

Gnip (http://gnip.com/) was just bought by Twitter. I would argue that they built their whole business on top of twitter & other social media companies.

Zynga was basically built on top of Facebook. Upworthy was built on link traffic from FB. Then FB changed the way they allowed / promoted sharing and both companies took a hit.

Lots in the social media space (ad tools, social analytics, crm, big data tools) also in the enterprise space (i.e add-ons for Salesforce, SAP, etc.)

Youtube was originally a Myspace widget.

Really? Do you have a source?

Search for jawed karims talk at CMU I guess. One of the key reasons of YouTube fast growth was the HTML snippet that you could embed in you MySpace page.

I remember MySpace ended up blocking YouTube from their site. And YouTube, a small startup at the time, turned to their users to plead to MySpace to activate them again. A few weeks later, they were back in business. But it's interesting to know how close YouTube was to hitting the deadpool.

Edit: Dug up an older article about it: http://www.blogherald.com/2005/12/22/myspace-users-angry-ove...

Never heard this before. Got a source?

Siri was built--and still relies--on Dragon Mobile Speech Recognition from Nuance

Shit, I didn't know that. Whoa.

Dropbox and Heroku are built on top of AWS (amongst thousands of other companies)

And also many companies are built on top of Heroku...

TwitPic on top of Twitter.

They use aws as infrastructure but aren't inseparably welded to it. They could presumably switch to hosting elsewhere without changing their product itself.

You can see them as abstractions of AWS in some ways. An average consumer wouldn't go through the trouble of dealing with AWS to backup their files and even for developers heroku provides a nice level of abstraction

Agreed, that's the way I've seen these companies. AWS has truly become a layer that powers a huge part of the applications on the web.

AppointmentReminder by patio11 relies pretty heavily on Twilio AFAIK.

NextBigSound is built on top of plenty of social media companies.

Heroku on Amazon

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