jeff18

a) Come up with a great, simple idea

b) Make the site very clean and simple

c) Launch publicly

d) MASSIVE VIRAL GROWTH! (Of course, more modestly ;))

That seems to go against conventional startup wisdom, where you have to fight tooth and nail for a long time before you start getting traction. These interviews of late are really motivating and awesome, but at the same time, they are sort of demoralizing because the subtext seems to indicate that if you aren't growing super fast from day one, you are almost better off just starting over.

TechCrunch parties <- how do I get in on that?

YC/Startup parties <- ditto

Entrepreneurs Helping Entrepreneurs event <- this sounds great, but how did you hear about this?

Lean Startup meetup <- this looks great! I will definitely be at the next one. Thanks. :)

However, even though I am not part of YC, I'd love to meet up with fellow SF startups -- I have never found an online community I identify more with than HN. Also, surely many people who give advice to YC startups are not on the payroll and would be happy to talk to me, if I had their contact info.

Maybe I'm wrong since I'm not part of the group, but I feel like the identity of "young, full-time startup" is much more important than "young, full-time startup [yc funded]".

- I would like to hang out with like-minded, serious startup folk in San Francisco.

- I would like to meet a seasoned entrepreneur and have a chat about my plans.

- I would like an introduction to a few investors to bounce some ideas off of.

For those three things, I am not willing to give up 5-10% of my startup, which is profitable, and relatively mature compared to YC investees. Additionally, I am sure a full-fledged YC investment offers far more than those three points. ;)

I don't want to give up 5-10% of my company and the ~$10k would not make a difference, however I would love to be more involved in the community, and am particularly jealous of this paragraph:

"When you’re accepted into Y Combinator you are part of a community of 172 startups, that take every opportunity to help one another. Being part of this community is invaluable. Six months after our session of Y Combinator ended, the founders of S09 regularly meet, and I would consider us a close group of friends."

Is there any way for a non-YC startup to become an honorary member of this group?

I hate to be that guy, but seriously? I have never witnessed this kind of behavior before. In fact, from my experience at Cal, all of the student groups are absolutely desperate for anyone to join, let alone a girl! If you just walk across campus you will be aggressively flagged down and invited to all sorts of things. If you are on Facebook, you will be shamelessly spammed with invites to all sorts of events. I just can't picture someone getting shunned from even an IEEE meeting or hardcore hackathon because they are "not a true geek".

I'd like to think adults are more mature than kindergarten-level exclusion, fellow hackers most of all.

She then goes on to say that she bought vintage gaming t-shirts and worked on some video games and afterwards, all the geeks were "cool" with her again. I don't really know what I'm trying to say here other than this seems totally unbelievable.

All I wanted to say was that those three sites could be technically created using HTML5.

You then seemed to say that HTML5 doesn't actually let you create the effects exhibited in those websites. I corrected you and referred you to the modules.

Sorry for any misunderstandings. If we are clear on the above, and you would like to bring up a new point, I'd be happy to engage in a separate debate.

I wasn't trying to argue that HTML5 has the same adoption as Flash, simply that HTML5 is technically capable of creating those "state-of-the-art" websites cited in the first post.

FYI, HTML5 also addresses hardware accelerated 3D in the WebGL module. ;)

This is the first time I have actually performed a real facepalm.

What does it mean to reduce friction? They minified their Flash app from 1 MB to 0.45 MB and don't require user accounts.

It certainly wouldn't work for the vast majority of visitors, as most people are still using Internet Explorer (hence why I can't produce any examples of AAA HTML5 sites), but there is nothing shown there that is inherently Flash only, technologically speaking.

a) You don't need to maintain a public facing save game server -- you simply need to have a local server running at localhost:31337. A successful crack will have this running transparently as you run the game.

b) Many companies entire purpose is to provide "uncrackable" DRM. AFAIK, all of these companies' solutions have failed. Often before the games even publicly ship.

I mean, at the very least, a script kiddie will naively crack the protocol and manually generate save files from each of the levels, so that you can play the game one area at a time. I am confident that it will be properly cracked though. Or as someone else on HN mentioned: you could ship the crack with a light virtual machine and just save states of the entire VM.

There is a huge incentive to crack the game, both monetarily for pirates who will be reselling the game, as well as for the huge prestige for cracking groups. I am not aware of any high-profile game that has not been cracked within a week of release, if not days.

If you do the math, that is approaching $0/hour. It is simply not a good way to acquire customers, nor should it be expected to be.

I can cite many examples of people who have abandoned PC gaming for XBLA, PSN, Wiiware, Flash gaming, Unity web gaming, or the iPhone, I don't know of a single guy who has jumped onto Facebook. So the fundamental thesis of hardcore indie developers being tempted by the lucrative cash piles to be had in Facebook apps seems pretty dubious.

The other contrarian point I'd like to make is that Facebook has actually been really kind to indie developers. Facebook Pages are huge for self promotion: Facebook is consistently a top referrer for our game, even though it is a traditional, PC/Mac/Linux downloadable game (that's not even released yet).

That surely cannot hurt, but the return on investment of posting comments on a site is minute. I mean, I am addicted to commenting on HN and other sites daily and it is a lot of fun, but the notion that this is actually a good use of time for my startup is wishful thinking.

I would never expect to get a single customer from this. I think getting an article on TechCrunch is of debatable value... but the traffic you'd get from a comment underneath an article from people checking out your profile link is miniscule.

Regarding telling your friends -- again, it doesn't hurt, but it is thinking really small and is not sustainable. That might be a good strategy for winning a minor student council election, but the ROI is going to be utterly negligible. Basically, you could spend a week phoning everyone you know and convince them to check out your site. If you're lucky, this would roughly equal the amount of traffic you would get by having a moderately influential person spend 30 seconds writing a tweet about you.

To many people that is a ton of money. A better solution would be to

a) switch to something like Google App Engine which will not charge you a dime until you are serving millions of pages a month.

b) ask a buddy to let you put the site on one of their under utilized servers (this is what I do for my startup, even though we run through terabytes of bandwidth per month)

c) ask a company to sponsor you. Many companies have a plethora of unused servers and would be happy to donate some of that to someone in need.

d) ask the community for donations. I bet you could scrounge up enough to cover hosting, especially if the community realizes that the alternative is ads.

If all of that fails, then go ahead and fallback on adsense - at least you tried.

Yelp has many easy opportunities to be a shady company and raise its profit margins in ways that are 100% invisible. For example, they could claim that an ad impression got twice as many views as it actually did and there would be no way to call them on it other than a few internal potential whistleblowers.

However, running a blatant extortion scheme where there is inherently a huge paper trail is not one of those things. Any one of the millions of businesses could become a whistleblower simply by posting an email to Hacker News, and Yelp would go from a near billion dollar company to a fraction of that.

It saddens me that if someone accused my startup of doing something absolutely atrocious, illegal, and irrational, instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt, it looks like Hacker News would actually say "where there's smoke there's fire" and start to rationalize how I am likely guilty given zero evidence.

That's the mantra of conspiracy theorists, UFO forums, and Bigfoot communities. Let's give Yelp the benefit of the doubt before we assume that they are illegally extorting small businesses based on no public evidence.