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Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

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Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#81

Post by leviathant »

commercetools is seeing incredible growth, and it's only going to become more prominent in the ecommerce space.

Having worked in ecommerce for a while now, I noticed back in 2008 that ecommerce flourishes when the economy goes sour. It's not strictly recession-proof- during the economic disruption, you will see separation of the wheat and the chaff, but new ecommerce technology that works gets supercharged.

A decade and a half ago saw the emergence of Magento, BigCommerce, and while Demandware (based on Intershop) had been around for a bit, they emerged from the recession with afterburners on full blast. Shopify would hit stride later, eating into Magento and Demandware's lunch around the time they each got bought up for billions of dollars by Adobe and Salesforce, respectively.

There were plenty of companies in the space that fell apart during the great recession too, but their talent moved on to the dominating players. You're seeing that happen during the last couple of years too. There have been some infamously rapid collapses - the implosion of Fast, Shopify's stock prices making a rapid return to normalcy. I strongly suspect you'll see other VC-backed 'disruptors' in the space fall apart. A newer 'headless' platform that talks a big talk recently put out a press release trumpeting a new deal that comically only listed former customers in the name-drop brag section of a press release, not a great look when you're the new kid on the block.

Commercetools is where enterprise companies go to get away from legacy ecommerce platforms like Oracle (RIP), Salesforce, SAP Hybris, and homegrown systems - but in the last year it has also increasingly brought on graduates from the Shopify Plus and BigCommerce ecosystems.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#82

Post by ChadNauseam »

dccoolgai wrote: post #60
NickM wrote: post #12

I find the whole "economic gloom" sentiment a bit odd. We're at extremely low unemployment, and GDP took a small dip in Q1/Q2 but is projected to start growing again in the second half of the year. The S&P 500 is down less than 10% from it's all-time high. Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluat…

The real "reason" for this "recession" is all those stupid articles about the "great resignation". I knew as soon as those appeared the billionaire ruling class would rather cut off their own arms than allow the notion of workers getting access to some of the wealth they create. Thus: "Panic! Recession! Work harder!"

Do you have any substantiation for that?

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#83

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

dionidium wrote: post #64
AnEro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing people that make under 60k a year, and how harder their lives got and how hard it is to pay back loans and other obligations they where ulitmately strong armed into taking to improve their position. Not to mention how alot of western nations have a large majority of people are pay check to pay check regardless of their tax bracket. Working class is a good litmus of how the economy is doing vs S&P because spec…

> how hard it is to pay back loans and other obligations they where ulitmately strong armed into taking to improve their position It's been a while since I've been in that income bracket, but I don't remember ever being strong-armed into taking on unnecessary debt. What are you referring to here?

It doesn't have to be strong-arming, but what about propaganda?

High schoolers are still being told "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!", yet a high schooler certainly can't pay the $15K+ per year to get a degree, so they take out student loans.

And then, the same people who hounded them to get a degree then hound them when they beg for student loan forgiveness, telling them they shouldn't have taken out a loan they wouldn't be able to afford to pay back.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#84

Post by kkielhofner »

bruceb wrote: post #80
kkielhofner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the feedback! Yes, I'm glad the core sentiment and functionality comes across. One of the biggest issues in the space (for Tovera and FNFTF) is that the crypto ecosystem is so sleazy no one in our targeted user/customer base (slightly sophisticated users and beyond) trusts anything or anyone - and rightfully so. In reaching out on Twitter, etc getting anyone to engage with something like FNFTF to even u…

Ok I got way to into this. Here are some verbiage changes: https://imgur.com/a/oXGcgcW Now this is coming from, as I said, a person not in the space. Your users more sophisticated but still think language could be sharper. If could already show last few NFTs searched for might be the best (yes always easy for person to suggest things they don't have to implement, ha)

Wow, thank you! Don't be surprised if you see some of these suggestions deployed in the near future.

YES - we're already building front-end support for more "wow" factor on various NFT statistics, recent searches, realtime newly minted NFTs, etc. I'm the furthest thing from a UI/UX person but I have faith in the team that we'll be able to certainly come up with something more engaging than what we have today (which isn't saying much)!

Thanks again!

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#85

Post by dionidium »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #83
dionidium wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how hard it is to pay back loans and other obligations they where ulitmately strong armed into taking to improve their position It's been a while since I've been in that income bracket, but I don't remember ever being strong-armed into taking on unnecessary debt. What are you referring to here?

It doesn't have to be strong-arming, but what about propaganda? High schoolers are still being told "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!", yet a high schooler certainly can't pay the $15K+ per year to get a degree, so they take out student loans. And then, the same people who hounded them to get a degree then hound them when they beg for student loan forgiveness, tel…

> "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!"

I started college in 1999. The day my freshmen year started, jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that were already 60 years old.

This argument is revisionist bunk, in other words. Everybody knows there are some degrees that are more valuable than others, that some degrees lead to higher pay and that some don't. Everybody knows this. They know it today and they knew it in 1999 and they knew it in 1979 and I categorically reject this weird, revisionist insistence that nobody could possibly have known it or that 18-year-olds are hapless dopes without any agency or even the most basic understanding of how the world works.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#86

Post by missedthecue »

COGlory wrote: post #70
NickM wrote: post #12

I find the whole "economic gloom" sentiment a bit odd. We're at extremely low unemployment, and GDP took a small dip in Q1/Q2 but is projected to start growing again in the second half of the year. The S&P 500 is down less than 10% from it's all-time high. Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluat…

>Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluation, and inflation already seems to be dying down anyway. Man, this attitude is terrible. My life and all of my colleagues lives have been completely flipped upside down by this inflation. This comment just donwplaying it as a non-issue made me really angr…

The typical US poster on HN likely makes 3x or 4x the US national median income.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#87

Post by TrevorJ »

NickM wrote: post #12

I find the whole "economic gloom" sentiment a bit odd. We're at extremely low unemployment, and GDP took a small dip in Q1/Q2 but is projected to start growing again in the second half of the year. The S&P 500 is down less than 10% from it's all-time high. Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluat…

Inflation is still a huge issue. The last numbers we got indicated 8% inflation. The fed target is 2%. That means that not only are people seeing huge decreases in buying power, but the fed is going to have to continue putting the hurt on the economy in order to get things back under control.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#88

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

th1s1sit wrote: post #73
NickM wrote: post #12

I find the whole "economic gloom" sentiment a bit odd. We're at extremely low unemployment, and GDP took a small dip in Q1/Q2 but is projected to start growing again in the second half of the year. The S&P 500 is down less than 10% from it's all-time high. Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluat…

Because what are we working on? Amazon is running out of people willing to work in its warehouses; gig work gets old fast. Low unemployment is unsustainable if it’s unfulfilling errand running. There’s little net new invention going on in entrenched big tech; Bezos and co are riding high on mathematical inference by accountants; it’s a math scam being forced upon people who can’t “see” how he’s not really invented an…

> Video games? 40+ years old.

As a gamer, I find this is incredibly dismissive.

There's still tons of new ideas in games being explored. Factorio introduced the factory building genre in 2014, and we're still seeing new takes on it. Satisfactory made it first-person and beautiful. Dyson Sphere Program made it multi-planet and interstellar. Captain of Industry made destructible and moveable terrain.

The colony sim genre as we know it today did not exist 10 years ago. Now we have RimWorld, Banished, Oxygen Not Included, and more.

Even puzzle games continue to innovate. Baba is You is probably the most unique puzzle game I've ever seen, and then there's all the Zachtronics games...

So yeah...the product of "video games" might be 40+ years old, but it's silly to claim that there's nothing net new coming out.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups are thriving in the downturn?

#90

Post by draw_down »

NickM wrote: post #12

I find the whole "economic gloom" sentiment a bit odd. We're at extremely low unemployment, and GDP took a small dip in Q1/Q2 but is projected to start growing again in the second half of the year. The S&P 500 is down less than 10% from it's all-time high. Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluat…

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