wmab

Why would there be a buy in the Eats tracking but not in Rideshare? I'd imagine it's the same underlying GPS tracking/routing software used in both cases. Is it just that the rides are paid differently than Eats deliveries are so they're noticing it differently?

This is great to show the ability of aggregating videos from Reddit. I'd say a better use case would be to turn it into a news feed of subreddits you follow - Instagram stories, Tik Tok with autoplay right in the feed. It irritates me to have to click into each one to see if I'm interested, but good work.

TLDR: Buy a copy of the Lean Startup, read it, action it.

Yeah that's interesting. I think the friction "Go to the website to signup" is worth them spending the 30% to have it in-app for Spotify, catering for the lowest denominator of user.

There are entire cohorts of interested companies and industries that will be looking to benefit from a reduction in Apple's standard pricing policies.

Do we know how / if Apple charges SaaS companies who enable adding seats through their App Store apps? I'm thinking the likes of Slack, Trello, Zoom, Notion etc, I haven't heard that they get charged by Apple?

Agreed, that's correct for public market prices in general. I'm not commenting on the valuation of the business, merely the business model that "succeeded" (one definition is valuation). I would have said the same 2 years ago when they hit 1T.

That's super interesting, thanks for the video! Perhaps they understood that there might be resistance to native ("small market" at the start) and so looked for something that could help the transition?

Right, Google doesn't play in the "luxury" space, they decided that strategy early on, allowing any smartphone maker to ship the Android OS. This won them the market share for operating system - currently 75% to iOS's ~24% [1], but they are unable to capture a fraction of the value that Apple did with their luxury mass-market strategy.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...

Yes, the app store was genius. We'll see how the 30% shakes out in the long term, with the recent revolt from Epic etc, but creating a platform on top of your software/hardware vertical integration is a decent monopoly play that creates sustainable revenues.

Apple succeeded because they managed to do something that was previously unimaginable in business theory - create a mass-market luxury good. A well taught theory in business school is Porter's general theory, which was to create a sustainable competitive advantage you either competed on differentiation or cost, and if we did something in the middle, you would die.

Apple managed to create a luxury product - the iPhone (differentiation) at mass-market scale (low cost base) which has driven the majority of their profitability since it's launch.

This is a great resource, and some thoroughly well researched pieces included, thanks for bringing it all together!

One category that seems notably missing is exits. I'm sure this is some of interest to 100% of the community, and doesn't seem as widely discussed as fundraising, but arguably more important.

A lot has changed in viewpoints since PG's 'Don't Talk to CorpDev'[1]. Consensus is moving towards developing relationships with partners being a benefit. ONe of the best pieces I've read on the subject is Patrick Lowndes' 4 part documentation on selling VendorHawk to ServiceNow[2].

It would be great if YC are willing to share their views on harnessing partnerships, inflection points (ie, it's not always best to raise the next round, and an inflection point should bring together all the options), creating a competitive bidding process, due diligence, how investors think of exits etc etc etc.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html [2] https://patricklowndes.com/2018/07/16/getting-acquired-1-of-...

Yeah, Grubhub were touting themselves to restaurants as more of a marketing channel partner - find customers, advertise etc. Still, I'm not sure why that business service warranted a 20% commission fee in the first place to be profitable from.

Grubhub for years were just a marketplace for customers to find food to order online / restaurants to find customers online. They'd charge a commission on order amount for fulfilling the match but the restaurant would have to deliver the food, manage their own delivery drivers etc. This is why they were profitable for years - they were a two-sided marketplace with a high commission percentage and low cost based since they didn't have any delivery costs.

DoorDash came along (after Postmates btw) and offered the same marketplace, but with delivery drivers too (a three-sided marketplace) - so that a restaurant didn't need to employ delivery drivers. This meant a higher cost base for DoorDash, lower for the restaurant, but similar commission fees. The simplicity of offering online marketplace ordering and delivery was very enticing for restaurants not wishing to manage this themselves, hence DoorDash's huge rise in market share, at the cost of Grubhub's over the last 2 years.

Grubhub has now for the past 3 years been busy spinning up delivery in its markets but is way behind DoorDash and Uber Eats. They have also admitted to falling behind in their Q3 2019 announcement[1] to the new competition (their late admission caused their stock to drop 43% in 1 day on the earnings announcement), and started also spinning up the non-partner side of the marketplace (adding restaurants without an agreement in place) to give customers more to order from (this is what Postmates then DoorDash pioneered). This is why they've started hemorrhaging cash and became loss making.

[1] https://s2.q4cdn.com/772508021/files/doc_financials/2019/q3/...

Awesome, good luck with fielding questions and comments for the rest of today!

Yeah, I love Ritual for ordering - the bonus points system is great as it's real cash back - similar to the star quests on Starbucks app which get a little addictive.

>I see it as you're selling to a shrinking market.

I'd respectfully disagree. Food delivery is a huge and growing market but it has also bred a whole new ecosystem of other ways of thinking about on-demand food consumption. There are a bunch of companies that have raised a lot to tackle niches within the industry such as Ritual (lunch pick-up, raised $113M), Allset (order ahead to sit down at a restaurant and pay in-app, raised $8M). Uber Eats just started offering a dine-in option and DoorDash and Postmates also now offer pick-up. These are all value add in cities and dense areas.

Congrats Tim & James on the Product Hunt launch today! This is a very powerful solution for independent coffee shops to access similar demand-side market effects to Starbucks - I could imagine you doing the same for the supply-side for them eventually too with increasing purchasing power on behalf of the independents.

I'd love to chat - I run a menu data company (Woflow) that could help you onboard these coffee shops quicker as well as add a lot of coffee shops on the west coast. We work with other YC companies too. will[at]woflow[dot]com

I don't think Superhuman should have caved to this criticism as quickly as they did. Good that they kept the feature, albeit dumbed down. People pay for a power user email client because it's exactly that - a power user tool, which should be fully featured. If you remove read receipts then there are a whole host of other email clients that will gladly give you that feature (bye-bye revenue). Is someone going to write a Medium post calling out each of these companies too? There is also a bunch of companies that aren't primarily email clients - like CRMs (Pipedrive etc) that offer this feature out the box, as it's exceptionally useful for sales teams.

If there really was such mass hysteria regarding read receipts in emails (WhatsApp has it by default too?) then it should be your email provider that should be leaned on to secure their system. Google has known for a very long time about this, and has changed the loading of images to stop location tracking, presumably the only thing they actually think is controversial with read receipts.

Have you looked into Containers to see if this will work as you want profiles to? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

We hire a number of folks both as traditional contractors as well as freelancers. Here's some thoughts based on my experience:

1) Are they an employee or a contractor? You mention "employees" but talk about them invoicing you. If they are requesting payment via invoice then it sounds like a contractor. It's very important that you define this relationship early on. There are different rules for both (health insurance, paid time off, taxes owed and by who) that are handled very differently. You might have seen a lot in the press about Uber / Lyft etc handling their drivers as contractors and a lot of these reasons are the reason why. So if you're deeming them as contractors (1099s) then make sure you have a contract that makes this explicit. You can find good templates from places like Upcounsel[1], but make sure you have a lawyer take a look.

2) I spoke with the founders of Deel[2] (YC W19) just last week. Their value proposition is that they'll handle the contracts, paperwork and payments (according to your payment schedule) for a small fee (I think $10/m/contractor). This seems like a very good value prop if you hire more than 1 or 2, and one I'm looking into.

3) If you have only a few contractors, then creating a standard contract and making payments to them on submission of their invoice and time sheet (if hourly) is pretty simple. I request our contractors only send invoices monthly to limit the admin for me, and then I pay them via Transferwise (they have a USD-USD beta program that I'm not sure is open to all), because it has cheaper fees than our bank.

4) Assuming you're using a fully fledged accounting/ payroll service or otherwise, then lots of these do have a contractor payment part. The payment part isn't the difficult part, the real benefit of these systems is handling the paperwork with the government for you. We use a full PEO called JustWorks[3] which is awesome - you tell them you have a contractor, you're paying them outside JustWorks and they'll handle all the year end 1099 forms etc.

5) Freelancers. We hire many freelancers to do work for us via Upwork. It's a great tool to get things done, and will do all payments/contracts/compliance for you, for cheap. The downside is the freelancer pays pretty hefty fees, which go down over time [4]. We pay $25/m for all our freelancers paid through the system (30+ freelancers), so it works really well for us.

Happy to answer any other questions you may have!

[1] https://www.upcounsel.com/free-legal-documents [2] https://www.letsdeel.com/ [3] https://justworks.com/features [4] https://www.upwork.com/i/how-it-works/freelancer/

Yeah I have seen the Owl before and haven't had the best experience when I'm dialing in to a group that is using one. Can you set it up to just work like a normal camera for when you need a 1 on 1?

It's a shame to say goodbye to something that is quite synonymous with San Francisco life. From the comments a lot of people don't "get it" and then think that this is the reason it failed. I'm sure it's a decision based on the complexities of scaling and working with each city and county to make a truly successful business that they ran into too many problems.

Not all businesses need to grow to huge heights to not be considered successful. It's a shame they can't continue to operate in the areas that it works well in (such as here in SF). Scoot have had a hard time growing, but are as successful as ever in SF, so that should be seen as a success in itself. We now have very lofty expectations for businesses either Blitzscaling [1] or dying, but surely it doesn't need to be that binary.

Clearly private solutions to commuting need to exist, people are not satisfied with the public transit in most cities. In a capitalist country, the markets will reward those who succeed. Lyft/Uber are helping somewhat, but you can point to as many articles [2] showing how over congested cities become because of them (even with pooling), which take up much more road space than buses. Let's hope someone else gives this another shot, and we don't shoot them down if they don't become a unicorn.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blitzscaling-Lightning-Fast-Building-... [2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-uber-ly...

Thanks for this, yes I think these could be good ideas. Just quickly on d) I meant it would be visually useful to see a table showing the data for the top 5 or 10 countries too, or else you have to hover over each country to see, and then you could show vs 2017 to see if there has been a large increase in a given country for example.

Understandable about salary data, a shame though! Thanks a lot!

It's great that you have lots of data to be able to analyze, but I think you've missed the point with that you're analyzing. I'm not sure what the visualizing is doing to offer any insight? Just graphs of months where it goes up or down at a slight varied rate, and a geo graph showing that (obviously) CA and NY have the most job openings?

I think the only interesting "insight" (If you could call it that) is the popularity of different technologies (though not how its changed in 2018 vs 2017, or how it differs by company, or salary range).

Who's the audience - those looking for jobs in startups? Those who research the industry? Job posting sites use their data as a leading economic indicator - can you point to anything in this realm from this data?

Analysis that would make this more insightful and actionable would include:

a) Show the data compared to previous years, to say for example if hiring by month was actually cyclical

b) Jobs by startup - ie, what percentage of Carvana jobs are eng, sales, finance etc

c) No salary information analyzed - probably the most interesting data is missing

d) A table of top 10 countries by no. postings vs their previous year would give more info to your geo graph

e) Is startup appetite for remote workers growing over time? As a number of jobs and as a percentage of jobs - and what areas are there higher % of jobs going to remote workers?

A good example of a valuable data company is Statista [1] (links to how a geo graph works with a table), where they have this sort of data over a longer time horizon - which provides more actionable insights (eg, is my industry growing, what is the penetration rate?).

If there were more ways this pie was sliced then I could see many interesting insights coming from such a useful dataset!

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/15000000/109/consumer-elect...

I'd NOT recommend Bridge Bank for checking or credit cards. They pitch it as a startup friendly bank - they are currently billboarding San Francisco with an "Entrepreneur not Wantrepreneur" campaign right now - and I've had good rep experience, but it really isn't a seamless process, I've had to contact them on so many occasions about something that isn't set up, or is set up incorrectly. Their connection to Xero doesn't work often, you can't set up Apple Pay, their credit card system is something called EZ Business Card Management (third party?) and has no accounting integrations. It's a Western Alliance subsidiary and their infrastructure is extremely dated.

We've now got Brex (YC W17) credit cards, which is a great service - eg, after you use your card you get a text, take a photo of the receipt (or email it in) and it adds it to the expense - something so simple yet is incredible vs trying to use Xero / QB / Expensify. My one bother with them is they aren't able to help those that haven't raised >$500k in capital / have a large bank account - the only thing they use to approve the account is your checking bank account (shock - trying to link Bridge Bank results in an error!) that they then comb for income/expense history. They offer some good startup-focused rewards, like 2X points on recurring software [1]

[1] https://brex.com/rewards

Read it outside the WSJ paywall (normally need to Incognito it): https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.c...

Thanks for sharing, I had no idea these videos existed!

Not sure what you're selling, but if it's B2B SaaS at all, then Entrepid Partners have a great 40 pager on the sales cycle.

You have to sign up for their mailing list to get it, but here's the static file:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...

woflow | Full-Stack Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Full Time | Early-Stage | https://woflow.com | $60-100k + equity

We're an early stage (but with revenue!) SaaS startup with pre-seed funding who counts some of the largest online food delivery companies as our customers. Our product is used by teams to transcribe flat file data into structured data for use in food delivery apps. We're building a business that's profitable for the team, having already hit profitability with <6% outside funding - so please join us if you're excited in building and owning a real stake in the outcome!

We are looking to bring on our first engineer (outside of the founding team) to help us keep up with the technical demand from our current and future customers. Stack: Heroku, Ember.js, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL.

More info at https://angel.co/woflow/jobs/437014-software-engineer

I use Daysoft [1], they're their own brand of contacts, but by the inventor of the daily disposable, and I've used them for years and have been great. They're UK based so all you're required to do to "prove" prescription is check a box. No need to submit anything for prescription (since this isn't required by UK law, there's nothing to stop you buying contacts from anywhere in the UK). They're also <$20 for 30 lenses.

[1] https://www.daysoft.com/