Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.
Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"
Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!
It's interesting to see they are branching out to smaller, lesser known more regional schools. Pretty far from their debut in Harvard/Kendall Square.
Never heard Stanford referred to as the "Waterloo of the United-States" either.
But hey, if you say so, I believe you internet stranger!
Proving that the total addressable wallet is sufficient to sustain a YC company is a) non-trivial, and b) their problem. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there can be remarkably large markets in remarkably unexpected places, so while yes, this one looks like a totally conventional small-software-shop play, and the 75th percentile outcome across all YC companies is crater-shaped, I'm not going to second-guess whether they might have something.
It’s also very easy to say that X is most valuable and Y is nothing when you have very limited X and have a lot of Y.
more on topic, time is inherently more valuable than money due to its fundamental scarcity. there are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in a person's life. if you have time, you can always trade it for money. but if you have money, you can't always exchange it for time.
At some point in the future I plan on offering additional locations (at a compellingly low per location monthly service fee TBD).
Of course none of the people who say such things could actually do so. Instead, they continue to post the aforementioned type of comment along with the following:
- Ask HN: Where are all the profitable ideas? - Show HN: I built some half-assed idea that no one will ever use to learn the latest technology fad. - Who’s Hiring: I hate my job at some random SaaS firm because I hypocritically don’t assign worth to building software.
Anyhow, where is this mythical weather widget getting its data? How reliable are its forecasts? What makes it better than the tools Apple/Google build into their OSes after spending millions acquiring formerly indie weather tools?
Would I pay for this startups calendar? Probably not, but it seems nice, and I can definitely see people paying 2 cups of coffee a month for it.
To make it crystal clear – it seems odd to launch a product that's much more expensive than your competition and delivers much less.
And all of that is ignoring the possibility that the idea is to build into some other thing, but there's minimal advantage to waiting.
If you want those features, you'll have to look at my competitors' more economy priced offerings, I'm afraid.
Finally, maybe the biggest variable is non-billable hours. Maybe there isn’t 2000 hours of work available at that rate. And a lot of people who charge that much spend a substantial time finding new clients, writing new project proposals (many of which don’t get executed), and doing things to promote themselves like conference talks or speaking to press.
It would typically net out to anywhere from $500k-$900k depending on how much of those overheads you have. Nothing to sneeze at but similar ballpark as senior FAANG comp
How long of chain of dependencies on other technologies does a conventional Meat Thermometer have?
However, if you work on your own product, you might save more than $10 per month indeed.
Now that's a tool to actually work, not increase your productivity (or mess with it). So $90 is pretty affordable.
People who are surviving on a $500-$2000/year budget, are not on the market for a full-fledged IDE.
On the other hand, researching and trying out alternative free/cheaper tools might take hours. For a busy person making good money, $10/mo to make them more productive isn't a crazy ask IMO.
I would also contest your claim that a lot of the HN audience makes $200K a year. I’d wager that it’s a lot lesser.
And maybe that's the intent.
If you're not Apple, where price insensitive customers beat down your door, then finding them is a non-trivial problem. And not just any customers, but ones who would be interested in your (I assume) follow-on product in a similar space.
I was just offering the way I would approach considering to buy something like this
Personally, I don’t think this tool would make me significantly more productive, but if it could truly save me a few hours a year maybe 120/yr isn’t that bad.
Paying similar price for simple software? Well, I would expect something like one-time purchase for $10, that's how much I'm paying usually for those kinds of programs.
It might sound a little bit communistic, I know. Sorry.
If I'm making $20k/year, I could pay $10k for Intellij Idea. Because it's essential for my work. But I'm paying $90, because Idea creators put a reasonable price. May be that's because they're in a hard competition with free tools, I don't know.
Text editor for 30€ is a good business, everyone needs a text editor.
Database client for 30€ is probably a little less profitable, not as many people need that.
Client for a specific database like the protein data bank for 30€ -- well, you might sell two or three copies.
All of these are probably a similar amount of work, but you can't sell them for the same price.
That being said, a menu bar widget has such a huge market that I don't see why they are pricing it so high.
>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unreasonable way to go about it. It’s important to have a larger vision, but execution is perhaps the most important in this space (as with most consumer tech).
I saw this and it resonated deeply with me. It's an exceedingly small paper cut, but a paper cut nonetheless.
I would rather club multiple slow steps requiring user action into one long wait time that I can completely ignore.
Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later.
I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.
I want it to be really easy for people to get a hold of me if the information is important or if they are important to me, e.g. via SMS or voice.
I want it to be very difficult to be overwhelmed by low signal content unless that is my focus at the time, e.g. mailing lists, work email, etc.
And I want to be able to select my focus. When I am reading about mountain bikes, I want to read about mountain bikes. I don't want to sort through work messages, family memes, or tech news at the same time.
The last thing I want is for all of those to be jammed into one app.
I still have a Q10 somewhere, it's such a nice phone too.
Internally, 33% of every dollar went to the Blackberry Wireless division because Blackberry was created before commoditized mobile chips existed. In effect, this means we paid for the chips, paid an extra fee to unlock it just so we could flash our software.
It was an ongoing battle between the spec for Bluetooth being released and having our own version, validating it against every single thing out there that could connect to it and then shipping it out. This made it extremely pricy to deliver a feature on the wireless stack and often things just weren't supported which came with the original chipset.
It's difficult to turn the ship around without just firing everyone involved and going "just grab what's there just like Android is doing"
It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment.
Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Edit: 2 years after I left, Blackberry devices became Android devices... so I guess I was ahead of the curve or something?
Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(
I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.
BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.
I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.
Try O365. It just works. Seems like every app works well with the other ones.
>>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
That's risky. Major OS already have notification centers/aggregators.
The trouble is that this kind of SNAFU is common when you are dealing with multi-application use cases, so this criticism is going to apply doubly to any new player in the space, including the topic of this discussion.
Edit: or perhaps anti-unified...
Whilst I agree, that's an organizational problem as much as a technology one. Why is the business built upon so many apps?
So many different functions. My company is purely cloud and we use Google as much as possible, but we still have tons as we need a help desk, a task board, HR software, credential management, Office for some people, Udemy, etc.
Two, and this is where I think Superpowered, the company in question, will stumble, is that every attempt to unify these disparate needs has ended up into a unholy giant mess of "Enterprisey" software that tries to be all things to all people. Inevitably there's at least one key area where it sucks to bad for the table stakes requirement of that user base that they never adopt it, strike out on their own, and now you're back to "why do we have so many apps?".
1. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/05/202768...
Edit: this should have been a reply to the parent of your comment.
Serious question - hasn't it? I know there are other players in the space, but it's absolutely the #1 solution I think of.
Easy peasy.
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
Dropbox addresses a real problem, it's just that the triviality of a business copying it means it became table stakes on a lot of platforms.
To be clear, my expected rate of problems for this functionality is “never.” The only service I have that experience with is Dropbox. With GDrive and One Drive I have seen folders lose sync, files get stuck syncing, and inexplicable conflicts.
In addition, sharing outside my org is way easier and more reliable with Dropbox.
I agree that copying files around seems like it should be trivial. Somehow it’s not, though. I don’t have an explanation, just observations from trying to get real work done on a Mac.
The magic of DropBox was that non-technical users could just share that word document, have it everywhere and not have to deal with a weird terminal.
I wished Drobox built a (physicals, why not) wall at their HQ with the names of everyone who was able to miraculously recover their masters/phd thesis after hardware failure because they saved it in their Dropbox folder.
Is it the UI? Is it keeping your data safe? Is it the sync?
I never used their native applications because I hate constant syncing for no reason and running proprietary apps (especially if they're always on), but I use some of their free tiers to store stuff.
If I had to pay I'd just buy some space on some server at the cheapest price per gb there is.
This. Whenever someone quips "that's a feature not a product" the reply should be "so why were they able to ship this feature and you weren't". Technical debt, opportunity cost(s), mission focus are all opportunities for arbitrage.
Being able to breakout of that feature product into an expanded ecosystem before your product becomes a feature of a bigger platform is the real end game.
I can only see that these guys are at risk of being sherlocked by Calendar.app, Google Calendar and Calendar.exe.
Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk.
to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
I'll bet the Pro HDR folks groaned and got drunk after the Apple event yesterday where they showed the HDR functionality built in to the OS. They got Sherlocked!
by franketh September 02, 2010
"Apple buy hundreds of companies every year. Being bought by Apple is a potentially a valid exit strategy."
if (yolo(money)) { pivot_me(money) } else { shutdown() }
(if (yolo money) (pivot-me money) (shutdown))Doing one thing well is so much better to me than 100 things poorly. And there's still a ton of complexity and work to do the one thing well, usually. Be it integrations, sub features, whatever - i vastly prefer a full experience with a narrow scope than a "out the door" experience with a huge scope.
A cheap tool to build an audience makes sense, absolutely, but this is very nearly the exact opposite of that. How many users is a $10/mo calendar widget only on MacOS and only with Google Calendar really going to attract? It's expensive, and the audience is a subset of a subset of a subset. Got to start somewhere, of course, but this is like the result of a weekend hackathon, not something that a significant audience is going to drop $120/year on.
Absolutely. It's a common startup tactic to release a product that costs more and does less than existing alternatives to get market share and brand awareness. This is just basic stuff. Marketing 101.
It’s enough that they made it into YC to conclude that there is a lot more going inside.
They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...
Regarding focusing on a niche it was a lesson I learned when I was filtering startups for investments I wrote about about my lesson before and how dumb I felt for passing on startups because they were too niche https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507122
Plenty of people get into YC with nothing more than an idea.
Getting into YC is sort of like getting into Harvard. Yeah, lots of people there are impressive, but not all of them. YC doesn't have a perfect filter.
FWIW I got into YC without anything remotely resembling a business, and I don't think I'm that impressive. My company failed almost immediately.
I get why they do it. It's an easy way to make more money. But the average YC founder today is nothing like the average YC founder a decade ago. They will argue otherwise, but I disagree based on personal experience. And everybody knows YC was really started by pg (I am fully aware of the entire history), and he hasn't been actively involved for years.
Also, if you want to make money selling software to consumers, Apple's platform is the one to target. Mac and iOS users are the most likely by far to actually pay for software. It's far more difficult to sell an app for actual money to Android or Windows users.
Again talking specifically about the consumer market here, not enterprise.
vertical scaling only works to a degree, and horizontal scaling while keeping the data as close to real-time as possible is nontrivial.
Trying the demo on three middle-aged individuals, two did not have the habit of hitting page down or scrolling. So, two out of three did not find the "obvious" content of the website below the video.
Who are the audience and what are their true needs?
This is why having a digital product out in the market with paying customers is valuable in itself. You get to observe and measure, and pivot if you're lucky. The userbase is the resource, and the paying userbase is gold.
At this point, the answer is just network effect, but that certainly wasn't the case when it was new.
Either way, I don't see the harm in putting it in front of people now, and I see a big downside to either polishing it more, or pivoting without having tested it on people.
I'm assuming the reddit post is by someone who is just really unfamiliar with YC and modern tech entrepreneurship. Hopefully, their question was sincere and they'll receive sensible answers.
As for the question of whether YC has lost its way - most institutions lose their way at some point, so it's a fair question, but I don't think it's fair to single out this particular company.
This is less an attack on Superpowered as it is a critique of YC. I think the idea of a unified Notification Center is interesting but the space is quite simply too crowded. You have slack, plus all of the companies like station trying to solve the same problem with much more features and a much bigger moat. YC used to pick companies that were more or less going to be at least decently successful even if they had never encountered YC, while this one seems like it wouldn’t have been successful without YC.
It seems like YC has fully switched to the shotgun model of fund everything and see what sticks instead of the boutique smaller cohorts of the past. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but that also comes with a reputation change as well.
Sometimes it's also just a startup pivoting due to a misfire or system, e.g, regulatory, problems
It may be "Mac first" rather than "Mac only".
Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to.
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.