Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

news.ycombinator.com

121–130 of 207 posts

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#121
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC funds widgets ? What are the economics of this thing. A thousand developers can copy or open source similar alternatives.

You will laugh, but a year ago I made same service in open source: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar/

Amazing, thank you. I will be using this. They were probably "inspired" :wink by your service

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#122
post #118

Awesome! Super stoked to try this. Couple of quick questions -- was the name a play on superhuman the email service? if so, smooth move. I've been waiting 3 years for SuperHuman -- it appears it's just soma users + the clubhouse inner circle. -- Was product hunt on your launch map? If so, to what extent on the radar. I ask because I have one to many micro-apps for the M1 Macbook Air [or tested on such] -- I haven't l…

Thanks so much, that's really kind of you!

> Was the name a play on superhuman the email service?

It wasn't inspired by Superhuman, but the name sounded strong and gave us the flexibility to change product direction. We got lucky since a lot of people now have the association of Super-x being a tool to make you faster or more efficient.

> Was product hunt on your launch map? If so, to what extent on the radar.

Yes it was, it was our first public launch four weeks ago: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/superpowered-2.

We launched the second we had something that provided a minimum amount of value to our users.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#123

This does not seem helpful to me. Part of the value of opening the calendar is seeing the day plus the week, to recalibrate priorities based on upcoming meetings as well as immediate meetings. I have desktop notifications for immediate upcoming meetings. If I wanted, I could set my calendar to one-day view and only see today's meetings. But I don't do that because I don't want that.

Thanks for your feedback. We've found our customers use Google Calendar in two modes, read mode (80%) and write mode (20%).

What you're mentioning falls into write mode. Gather a ton of context then make a number of changes. This is best done in Google Calendar.

We focus on read mode. 80% of the time I open Google Calendar, it's to check what's next or to get into my next meeting. When that's done 10+ times a day, it adds up.

That's going to be different for different people. Some of our customers who are product managers open Superpowered 30 times a day. For them, it's worth it.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#124
Back when I used a Mac in 2009 - 2012 there were a couple of applications that I loved.

One of them was very similar to this but had an extra very interesting feature: when you clicked on it and it dropped down it filled the screen horizontally and maybe 25% vertically. On that space it showed a timeline of the upcoming events crawling closer and closer towards the right side.

The time scale might have been logarithmic - I can't remember - but I remember it motivating me.

Agree with the others on pricing: I now have a general aversion against subscriptions and $10 a month is way too much (unless you offer perpetual license after 6 or 12 months or something, and even then it is expensive..)

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#125

I'm sorry for being negative, but paying $10 per month for what is essentially a calendar widget is blowing my mind. The fact that this is even in YC and not just a side project is taking what's left of my brain and blowing it into the stratosphere. > 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 an…

It’s the YC model. Throw money at smart upper-class kids in good schools with some ambition. Once in a while, those kids make Dropbox or Airbnb, most of the time they make calendar widgets and leverage the experience to jump the line at some FAANG and start out their careers a decade ahead of their peers. It doesn’t make sense to you and I because it doesn’t make sense. It’s a lottery ticket for the investors. YC just games the system by buying most of the lottery tickets.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#126
post #72

I really hope you're willing to share some metrics on your findings in regard what you said somewhere below was this exploration of the level of pain you're addressing. I would think that churn is going to be high and one of your bigger challenges unless there's stickiness that I don't see. Are you worried about iStat Menus, Bartender, Alfred or Better Touch Tool adding your product as a feature? Is there a hard prob…

Not the founder but I imagine the strategy here is to move first with a notification that has a big market like email. If they can prove that quickly, you've landed and now you expand to other kinds of notifications and suddenly you're much more defensible.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#127

I'm sorry for being negative, but paying $10 per month for what is essentially a calendar widget is blowing my mind. The fact that this is even in YC and not just a side project is taking what's left of my brain and blowing it into the stratosphere. > 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 an…

I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time. It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.

are you an investor as well?

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time. It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.

For context, Austen Allred is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda School, so efficiency wins are going to be pretty valuable for him. Also, as a CEO you are constantly thinking in terms of ROI. It doesn't matter how much software costs if it pays for itself several times over. This spills over into personal purchases too. (BTW, big fan of what Lambda School is doing Austen.)

You forgot to mention they're also a YC company...

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time. It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.

are you an investor as well?

No, he's _just_ a fellow YC alum.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#130
post #87
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried?

>Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried? I think the idea is that the upcoming calendar/appointment notification is live and always on the menubar . See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for personal use on Windows so I understand the value of this. Calendar notifications via e…

> is live and always on the menubar

I spend my time in fullscreen apps. The menubar is never visible.

Post reply on HN