Preying on the vulnerability/need for validation of most startup founders?

However, for many startups, funding details will be public (and available via crunchbase or startupsearch) -- and generic ownership percentages can be pretty easily inferred. Asking whether investors own <10% or 10-40%, etc, isn't really saying much.

As for the rest of the information (mostly how the team relates to each other, their background, and previous work experience), I can't imagine this would be sensitive either, but if it is, by all means, don't give it out.

You can gauge how much they (or anyone for that matter) care by the response you get when you try and engage with them. In this respect, my past experience has not been good (no response to emails/queries/etc), but maybe that is because I am not significant to them as an individual.

When I compare this to the engaging experiences I find with many YC start-ups (http://www.socialbrowse.com springs to mind) and others (e.g. http://www.huddle.net and http://www.freshbooks.com), the difference is night and day.

Maybe this is just my experience. Still, I’d be more likely to provide sensitive information to sites I trust and that seem to ‘care’.

* The connections-drawing tool is somewhat broken: First it wouldn't show for me at all ("Loading..."), and then when I wanted to correct something, the eraser didn't remove the lines (although I think it did invalidate them, because I could draw new lines on top of the old ones)

* Entering team details is very tedious when every single question is on its own page. I got tired of clicking next, and would very nearly have quit the process there.

I also have Firebug 1.2.0b4 installed.

Cash!

Brilliant generic tag line.

The entire YouNoodle process feels like a phishing scam.

Of course, I'd be happy if YouNoodle was correct in their assessment... but if someone offered to buy tarsnap for $3.71M right now -- or offered to buy any fraction of tarsnap for a corresponding fraction of that amount -- I'd have no hesitation in accepting the offer.

EDIT: Yes, I do realize that the assessed value is effective a year from now -- but I still think $3.71M would be a generous amount to pay for tarsnap. Of course, tarsnap might take off faster than I expect...

BTW: When are you launching?

Depends how you define "launching". I haven't got the accounting code written yet, so revenue is still a month or more away -- but if you mean in the sense of "providing a service which people want", tarsnap has been up and running for three months.

As mentioned by others, the results provided do look very optimistic (at least from what I can tell based on the values it provides for things I am involved with) and with refinement once they get the datasets will probably go down significantly in most cases.

Time will be the real judge. It will be interesting is to see what they predict and what actually happens in the next years. Hopefully they will provide this information (semi-)publically, but it seems unlikely.

Anyone ambitious enough to survey a set of Younoodle inputs and outputs so we can estimate the valuation formula?

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scaling = fail