Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

A great team won't make a bad idea a winner. You should choose a great idea primarily.

As they say you can't polish a turd.

>Since none of the other startup ideas posted to Apply HN have especially credible founding teams (not a ding!)

How credible does the founding team have to be Thomas? While I might not be as well known here on HN as Maciej or yourself, I think I have more than enough of a track record to be credible.

> Tiz.com (Liquor distribution is a de jure or de facto monopoly/kleptocracy. Being inefficient is a profit center for them.)

This might make for a crappy exponential growth "startup", but there is most likely a great business there.

If you can grok Vertical Market X well enough that you can build software to make their life simple, Vertical Market X will happily share their inefficiencies with you.

(And it wouldn't surprise me if the incumbent in this market is a Delphi/VB/FoxPro/Access guy who eventually gets around to coding new features while sitting on the balcony of his beach house.)

I knew very quickly that Feynman Nano was an in for me. I read through the comments, and when they mentioned they could coat grout, it became a definite in.

While it is really obvious to coat medical implants, iv leads, ect - I know that pending material review, I'd be happy to buy a cutting board coated with the stuff for chicken and meat.

I even think they would be smart to figure out how to coat woods, granite/stone, synthetic stones, formica, steel, and iron. ( anything that could be used as a kitchen surface) If you can also figure out how to wash them in a dishwasher, more power to you. You'd be the only seller on the market for truly anti-infectious kitchens, and people would go crazy for it.

I occasionally make my own preserves and pickles, and then water bath can them. Before I do so, I bleach my counters, in order to decrease my risk of introducing pathogens in the food I put up. Getting countertops coated with your stuff means I can switch to a light cleaning, because they would ALREADY be low risk, and I won't have to expose myself to chlorine gas.

You'd basically own every high end kitchen of parents in the US. Parents freak out about pathogens, and chlorine gas, and this sort of stuff, and have no time to clean, ect.

And that would be on top of medical devices as a business.

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I actually wanted to take a close look at WedWell. I'm in the target market (female, engaged though no date yet, actually from the NYC metro area ironically, sometimes bemused by how wedding planning works). While I haven't started wedding planning yet, the one thing I have done is started to collect budgets and tips(note 1) from friends/acquaintances who have gotten married in the past 5 years(ish) nationwide. One of the striking things about these budgets is there are priority lists of items and ideas inside the budgets, and various ways to negotiate within those priority lists.

Because of this, the idea of a "Vendor bidding service" seems a little off. It is less bidding than "dating." Furthermore, I also suspect that much like there are coalitions of doctors as collegues referring each other, which causes improvement of service between all of them as they work semi-togther, this might be true for vendors as well. It might be more effective to think of yourself as a semi-day of coordinator with swap-in/swap-out vendors depending on the "mood"/vendor group. I also think you'll be more likely to get vendor buy in with that sort of model if only because they are not going for "lowest common denominator"/dilution of their brand.

That said, without testing all of this I really don't know, and weddings are super competitive as an area to advertise to.

I consider this an uphill battle that needs more testing and then a big marketing budget, and I honestly don't know if YC is the right fit. I can see it growing big, but it may actually do better in a group that isn't YC and that is more tailored to your market.

There were thre others that really also called my name to think about

Eat My Dust

Utiliz

and Tiz.com

Eat My Dust on closer inspection seems to be in a very competitive area. It is also one ripe for disruption, but I am not sure the idea as it stands is different enough from its competitors. I almost want to know what it would be like if you did a lab on a chip and stuck it into a vacuum instead, and charged saas prices to always analyze

Utiliz and Tiz were very close. Both make markets more efficient. In the end, my vote went with Tiz. My only concern with Utiliz is while it has more potential to earn a lot of money, it also has the potential to lose it too, thanks to oil price fluctuations. I'm not sure scale alone will help. I think the founders are the right type to solve that issue by background - still, it weighs on my mind that they could go from billions to insolvency in order to make it work, leaving an otherwise great business and important need for customers of sorts out of luck.

note 1: the reason is the only type of wedding I've ever been to have been Orthodox Jewish weddings, which in a lot of ways are atypical from what appears to be standard American weddings for people my age. I wanted an idea of a baseline.

Eat My Dust founder here. The mission statement for our company is to enable everyone to live and work in a clean and healthy environment. At first, we'll start by sampling dust from your environment and based on our analysis provide a health report and alert you to any potentially dangerous materials (and what to do about it). As we grow, we'd like to drive the price of these tests to near 0. If we are successful, we may not even need to do a test, but rather we can predict your environment based on several features that prove to be predictive across the data set.

We are still validating the idea at this point. If awarded the YC fellowship, we'd use the funds to test the market for this service. The goal is to collect data on what type of customers would use this service, what problems this would solve for them, what is total addressable market size, etc. For example, if we can acquire 100 paying customers who would be willing to pay $20 for an "Eat My Dust" report, we may end up spending $200 per customer to provide the service. However, at the end of this exercise we'd know whether or not this an idea worth pursuing further.