I'd actually expect this product to have more traction at larger companies who require executives to make purchasing decisions. Instead of farming it out to an outside consultancy for hundreds of thousands, here's a simple SaaS that will enable your engineers to make the best decision at any given time.

“startups for startups” is not so much leverage as it is a way to enter the market. If your competition is too entrenched to take on directly, you find a way to “wrap” it with an adjacent product. Then once you have a foothold with joint customers, you expand your product to until your complement is reduced to unprofitable commodity, and customers derive all the value from you.

SaaS companies for other startups has always been YC's core strength - I don't think this is anything new.

It's actually quite ridiculous, I actually thought YC is starting to feel like a pyramid scheme. I took a look at the recent batches of YC companies and more than 70% of them seemed to be of the "meta" type, startups selling to startups. Of course these companies do well initially being able to tap into YC's huge community of startups. That doesn't mean they provide fundamental value to the economy, they're just sloshing around a lot of VC money.

On the other hand, maybe that's intentional, kindof of how sports players practice on each other before facing others in a real game. YC is like a startup playground, but the ones who "make it" are those who can use their experience to play in the wider economy. Still, I feel like YC is providing a lot of false hope to people by not being more selective in the ideas they fund.

It's much lower hanging fruit than say developing an embedded hardware device that does something novel (and most likely more useful). Why not just aggregate some data about _other_ services and run machine learning.