FbStart – A new program designed to help early stage mobile startups | Hacker News Reader

FbStart – A new program designed to help early stage mobile startups

fbstart.com

169 pointszeeshanm58 comments

Yeah does anyone remember the facebook App ecosystem?

Remember when facebook was encouraging developers to make apps and then they jammed them all?

Remember how much time/money and effort 100's if not thousands of developers lost? Thanks but no Thanks.

As not a FB app dev, what did FB do to screw over everyone?

Really, they chose users over developers, which IMO was the right choice. In the early days of the Facebook Platform, games spammed up feeds with useless content - games like Farmville would require you to share to get things, for example. Facebook would take steps to restrict this, and they'd find a new way to promote themselves at the expense of user experience.

I never understood why Facebook let that happen, just give users a spam score that's displayed on their account page. People would soon stop sending requests for completely unsolicited things.

Facebook rightly puts the burden of compliance on the developers, not the users. Spam scores would just lead to user experience and customer service nightmares. "Why does it say I'm spamming?! I'm just playing a game! Fix it!"

I think messaging on Facebook could be an excellent ecosystem for a lot of things. A spam score would work or allowing people who make shitty requests to be blocked from doing so on the request.

Users know exactly how annoying it is to receive such invitations having received them themselves.

One example I can think of is how the new FB 2.0+ API does not allow access to a user's friend list unless the FB app is listed as a game. The friends API will only show the user's FB friends who also use the app. Not being able to access a user's friend list takes away much of the value of the FB API (IMHO). Also the double standard that FB apps listed as games get to continue accessing user's full friend lists is not only weird, but a bit unfair (also IMHO).

What do you need the full friend list for?

I thought about using it to write a Secret.ly post deanonimizer.

I was making a chat application that would show all the user's friends so they could create groups of their friends. When a friend not currently using the app was sent a message, I was going to prompt to send an invite. The full friend list is important to my particular application. I'm unsure why FB game apps only get access to the full friend list.

Great way to get hooked on a bunch of monthly service fees when the introductory free period runs out. Reminds me of the Columbia Record and Tape Club.

I hate it when that happens too, but I don't think this is will happen in FbStart's case. We're a program partner and companies who get accepted get a code they can redeem on our site for 6 or 12 months free, depending on the track. No credit card is required (at least for our service, not sure about other partners), so if they decide not to subscribe at the end of the program, they can just go.

I think what Patja is saying is that after 6 to 12 months the users will have developed a dependency on your platform and will have to either cough up cash or replatform.

Makes sense, but that scenario is true for any freemium model though, not just free packages like FbStart.

We got approved for the accelerate track, and frankly it's awesome. And they keep upping the benefits. Parse credits just got bumped to $20K which we use, so it's like free money. I don't quite get what FB is getting out of this, but they are certainly earning a lot of developer goodwill.

Kind of ironic that the iPhone in the background header has Google+ visibly installed, but it doesn't show a Facebook icon

Reverse image searching that stock photo reveals the rest of the screen, still no Facebook icon: http://i.imgur.com/fnFGbtX.png

[1] http://measurecp.com/category/mystery-shopping/

They could fix their terrible app approval process if they really want more people on their platform. I tried to fix up a hackathon entry and submit it as a production app recently, I annotated what every permission was used for, submitted the review request, and got declined with them stating, "please annotate what every permission is used for". I suspect they are just paying people minimum wage in a foreign country to do the reviews nonsensically. Android is destroying iOS in market share in part due to having an easy to submit to app store, they really need to take notes.

"Android is destroying iOS in market share in part due to having an easy to submit to app store"

For instance, they are absolutely CRUSHING the "flashlight apps that utterly pwn your privacy" space.

They're rather vague about the details, but it looks like it's all about advertising credits on Facebook.

Seems like the FB version of Microsoft's long running Bizspark program. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

I was recently approved for FBStart's bootstrap program.

So far, I've only used the UserTesting.com credits (which are awesome) but I plan to use the adobe trial

I ran a FB ad campaign once in the past so I'm not sure that I'm eligible for their ad credits which is the biggest perk in my eyes.

I'd argue it's a good program that gets fledgling apps/companies to build an early connection with Facebook. That's their ROI; introduce you to FB ads early and you'll want to use them later

For some of these services, I would likely choose to not lock myself into something that is quite expensive per month after the 3 or 6 months provided by the program. Obviously, if you were gonna use them anyway, it makes sense to get them free. But, with subscription services, I tend to think long and hard before going down that road, if there are one-time cost alternatives.

And, it's easy and cheap for subscription services to give away a few months for free; it's a proven marketing model, in fact.

That's not to say there's no value here. For people that will use these services and get real value out of them, it's a win-win; the companies providing the services get a new qualified lead who will likely turn to a paying customer in 3 to 12 months, and the developer gets to launch with less capital invested.

Wouldn't the best thing Facebook could do for apps be to get their API breakage and docs under control?

This seems interesting. My initial reaction was "what's does facebook get" from this. I had originally thought that this was only going to be open to apps that somehow incorporate Facebook's api (or their wholly owned company's APIs). So I was surprised to read that it essentially said "no facebook required". Which seems nice.

The 30 day live requirement is also telling. I'm guessing that facebook can judge if any initial uptick is occurring and then use this in their acceptance criteria.

Th fbstart program seems to be some sort of way for facebook to get a grip into the very early stage mobile ecosystem. Primarily for their acquisition strategy (think early instagram, whatsapp, etc.). It also seems like a direct competitor to the accelerator programs?

> Th fbstart program seems to be some sort of way for facebook to get a grip into the very early stage mobile ecosystem.

I think so, too. I just submitted one of our apps and it literally took less than 10 secs. And they were like submit any other app too you may have.

The inherent problem of using an incubator program to breed acquisitions is that 99% of social/advertising companies that are worth acquiring will not set up shop under your roof.

People who are baffled by:

* "what Facebook could gain from this?" (must be an evil ploy, yada yada)

* what seems to be a wordpress blog

* the free photo (in spite of Facebook's stock photo deal)

* the G+ icon on the iPhone

* etc

are missing the simple fact that Facebook is not a single giant apparatus of propagating the One Way from top to bottom, but it's instead a conglomerate of regular Joes (and Joannes) like you and me, except smarter on average (probably). It's a good sign I'd say that some of these people care about startups, and get OK'd to start scruffy 20%-style projects such as this.

As I always say about Facebook: I deeply dislike their product‡, but the company is friggin' awesome.

‡ too much noise and unethical shit to put up with for questionable value

The 'baffled' responses in this thread actually present valid arguments, unlike your response.

I'm sorry for being a bit OOT, but does anyone have a list of these kinds of things, sort of like "goodies to grab when I start my startup somewhere in the near future"? E.g free AWS/Google Cloud credits and stuff.

Not the one like $10 voucher, at least few hundreds or thousands. Cash is king esp in early stage, but you don't want to cut coupons as it'll distract you from building your product.

Check out the deals page on F6S: http://www.f6s.com/deals

Is there a company that is pre-packing these benefits packages for startup accelerators? Most of them look suspiciously similar to one another.

Not that I'm aware of. We're a FbStart partner and have been on the partner side of these kinds of benefits packages a few times, and each time, we worked directly with the organization that was giving away the packages (Facebook in this case).

I was hoping they provided more information regarding the IPR if you were to be accepted to the program.

My first impression was that the site itself did not seem official (by that I mean in direct affiliation with Facebook). AFAIK Facebook often reuse the same design/colors on the their projects (documentation, available positions, FAQ and so on), however not on fbstart.

Official (and several months old): https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2014/05/14/fbstart...

I do not claim it is not official. Just making an observation from my first impression of the site. Considering they are asking me for personal information I would at least like to unconsciously be aware that they are affiliated with Facebook.

Yes, I see the irony in that last sentence.

I got the same impression, especially the "Powered by WordPress.com VIP" at the bottom

I work at a company that's a FbStart partner. I've never heard anything about FB asking program participants for any IP rights (or equity). Just double checked the ToS and there's no mention of IP either.

For a company with a market cap of almost $211 billion dollars, and a deal to use Shutterstock photography in their advertising, it's odd to see that they chose a free (and overused by startups who can't afford stock photography) image from unsplash.com as their header picture.

I don't think that'd odd at all. There's nothing wrong with that image. It does it's job perfectly fine, despite high market cap or fancy partnerships.

I couldn't help but be distracted by the dark line behind "early stage" -- it looks like a strikethrough.

It would be very interesting for our company to get involved with this at a partner level as we often work closely with startups during the earliest stages. Is there anyone from Facebook here who can get me in touch with the right people to discuss this? Thanks!

Even $60K is such a ridiculously small amount, what do you do with it? It not even enough to hire a junior developer for a year.

EDIT: it looks like they don't want anything in return, so it looks good to me.

it's $60k in benefits, not actual cash. This is a freebies pack for startups not an accelerator or seed funding.

Looks great but where is the catch? Are all those perks free or do startups need to give away equity or something like that? (I'm not a native speaker so I maybe miss something here.)

Doesn't look like there's any equity involved. I suspect this is a way for Facebook to spot "the next big thing" as early as possible..?

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, which roughly means "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

One doesn't build a multi-billion company by giving things away.

Exactly, FBStart is no charity, so why do they do it? You don't even need to integrate your product with FB. I would love to apply but the offer is too good to be true.

Maybe a modern version: beware of geeks bearing gifts?

The saying is almost 2000 years old [1], so I think if somebody wanted to modernize it they've had the chance :P

[1] First writing appears in a text from AD 49

I work for Transifex, one of the FbStart partners. Startups accepted into the program don't have to give away any equity (neither did we, for that matter). For us, companies simply redeem a code on our site to get 6 or 12 months of the service free, depending on the track. I'd guess other partners have a similar setup.

Curious thing the site lacks of og meta tags

Yes - it's built on top of Wordpress VIP. Seems to me they are simply interested in curating a list of the next next big apps.

A Wordpress blog, what is up with that?

A way to show that it's not just about sucking us further info the Facebook vortex?

What's in it for Facebook ?

The ability to buy these companies _before_ they cost a billion dollars.

what's the catch? they only talk about benefits, what do they want in return? fb isn't a charity.

What does Fb get in return for this?

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