I understand the potential for future expansion, but wouldn't it make sense for YC to wait until an MVP for said expansion is released before investing in it?

I see so many negative comments and can't help but think of this (first comment on DropBox's HN launch): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Prototypes are perfectly cool as long as expectations are met. Of course, charging $10 for a prototype doesn’t frequently work

As far as YC goes, pivoting and working on new ideas really rapidly is downright normal. Sometimes that looks like taking weekend hacks and seeing how far you can get with them (this one being a canonical example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819)

It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.

Also, as a CEO you are constantly thinking in terms of ROI. It doesn't matter how much software costs if it pays for itself several times over. This spills over into personal purchases too.

(BTW, big fan of what Lambda School is doing Austen.)

How many QoL are you willing to buy? You’re essentially paying $10 for a netflix subscription only it’s a calendar widget in the top menu bar.

As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser. We want to bring all the platforms we use for work into one native place. Does that make more sense now?

Maybe I'm being dense here, but can't you use email?

But why would anyone be constantly checking GitHub notifications? Isn't that a distraction?

We want to integrate deeply into SaaS platforms to provide one-click access to features within those platforms. For example, viewing and resolving comments on a Google Doc. This just isn't possible through Mac's notification center.

Similar to ring camera. You're just paying someone to make your cctv camera available to you over thr internet instead of you setting it up yourself.

I personally hate these services but some people would pay $/month for this convince.

The business value of missing a notification or meeting can be really high. I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting. Or even just closer. I imagine similar logic can be applied to other notifications.

Maybe I'm being extremely naive, but isn't it already a solved problem with synchronized & shared calendars and notifications?

I think the idea is that the upcoming calendar/appointment notification is live and always on the menubar. See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png

I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for personal use on Windows so I understand the value of this. Calendar notifications via email and "reminders" on the iPhone are not effective for my workflow and I need something that's always active on my menu bar.

If this is all you need, why not just use an open source alternative? I'm using MeetingBar (https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar) and it covers all of these "issues". It even sends notifications, it's lightweight, scriptable and doesn't cost me as much as a Photoshop subscription.

I spend my time in fullscreen apps. The menubar is never visible.