119 karma · joined March 22, 2016
How might they turn their service into a viable business?
[0]: https://www.alphavantage.co [1]: https://iextrading.com
Downloads of new mobile applications have been decreasing in growth steadily for years now[0]. Instead, user's spend more time inside their existing applications, particularly messenger applications. Take a look at just a few of their user bases:
- Facebook Messenger - 1.2B+ [1]
- Whatsapp - 1B+ [2]
- Kik - 300m [3]
Add to this the fact that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Slack and others, with a combined market cap in the trillions, were simultaneously contributing to the support of chatbots in one way or another.
It's a classic rendition of the Hype Cycle[4]. We're probably somewhere in the "Trough of Disillusionment", but give it a few years and we'll get to the "Plateau of Productivity", and chatbots will probably make their way to a more useful purpose.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-t... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/ [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billi... [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has-over-6000-... [4]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner...
Oh the ideas...
No they weren't
> What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in the long term.
What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?
My original comment was in regards to the well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar companies. In fact, it's a known question during interviews[1].
So, my question is what do these founders say when asked this question? What possible paths are there to a billion dollars for this type of company?
I really like developer focused companies like Buglife. However, what path could Buglife take to reach a $1B dollar company?
The post notes that they are currently in 300 apps. I'd assume the majority of these 300 are on a free plan. Let's assume that they hit a growth spurt and end up in 10,000 apps. Let's also assume that every one of those customers is paying for their Premium plan. That works out to a little over $2 million a month in revenue.
Not only that, but there are already very established companies in this space (Fabric/Crashlytics, Firebase, Sentry, etc.). It's also fairly trivial to switch to another provider.
How do companies like this propose they hit that $1B mark?
The only way to open up ADB over a wireless connection is to set the device in tcpip mode on port 5555 and then connect via adb using the device's IP and the mentioned port.
However, adb is not shipped on Android devices (though adbd is). How is it that a malicious device can install an application on another device as claimed by the article?
This isn't true. Android 6.0 introduced runtime permissions, where permissions could be granted in the context of the application. Previously, the permissions still had to be granted, but they were granted before the application was installed.
It's funny, I assumed the same. I then asked a few who used the product, and was surprised to hear praise for Epic. I wonder if the product has actually improved, or if users have simply conceded.
Probably Meteor, though not as mature as Rails.
> While it is “teaching,” it’s also squarely in its own domain
Could this idea simply be because, for the most part, language learning applications have been the most successful? Other than Khan Academy, which is mostly videos, i've never heard of another company building similar products for other subjects.
I'm not sure whether it's because the market doesn't exist or that it hasn't been tried.
One would think there would be a market for Duolingo style apps for other subjects, such as mathematics, where the user is simply charged on a subscription bases. Could such a business not survive?
It looks like it requires a local copy of the original Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 to work. Why is that?
Removing the need to wrap sibling elements in a single parent element is a welcome change.
I'd be interested in hearing some use cases for using the Portal API.
Lastly, the new licensing announced last week was fantastic news. I commented on last weeks thread, but I want to extend another round of compliments to Facebook and the React community as a whole for prompting this change. Props to them.
An interesting side note: if you repeatedly click the first link at the beginning of any wikipedia article (except links in parenthesis) you will always end up at Philosophy.