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Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

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Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#91

Post by afavour »

tim333 wrote: post #23
onion2k wrote: post #13

Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…

Indeed the founder says: >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 and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything. >We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.

Good luck to them with that.

Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later.

I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#92

Post by 411111111111111 »

tootie wrote: post #62
onion2k wrote: post #13

Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…

Lo these many years, Twitter still seems like an utterly trivial application.

while its true that the base functionality itself is extremely easy to implement with any CRUD framework (spring/django/RoR/phoenix/whatever), the created app would not be able to scale to the degree twitter has been scaled at this point.

vertical scaling only works to a degree, and horizontal scaling while keeping the data as close to real-time as possible is nontrivial.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#93

Post by dagmx »

onion2k wrote: post #13

Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…

I think the best example is when Dropbox was announced and how many people scoffed at the triviality of cloning data around.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#94

Post by alexhutcheson »

giu wrote: post #71
alexhutcheson wrote: post #24

YC and other seed investors are betting more on people than on the specific business plan. If a founding team seems really smart, skilled, and driven, but is working on an idea that doesn’t seem to make immediate business sense, then it can still be worth betting on that team, because one of two things is reasonably likely to happen: 1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to somethin…

There's even a third option when you bet on people: The company can get acqui-hired by a bigger fish who's already a big presence within the almost same problem space.

An acquisition doesn’t really score as a win for the seed investors in most cases, although it’s often a win for the team.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#95

Post by cbsks »

harperlee wrote: post #86
the-dude wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the curious : https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked

Thanks a lot! Could you paste it here? Work firewall blocks that site.

sherlocked

to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#96

Post by mbreese »

beaconstudios wrote: post #52
mbreese wrote: post #25

Doesn’t YC normally invest in the team rather than the idea? From their Launch HN post: > We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem. Based on the how it started / how’s it going, it looks like they started in YC with one idea and realized they needed to pivot. The fact that this is what they came up with isn’t great, but at least it’s somethi…

Apologies in advance for the nitpick, but if you're just dropping your product and doing something else that's not really a pivot. Pivoting is more like changing your plan than throwing it out - targeting a different audience, changing your product plan based on feedback, that sort of thing.

I’d call changing the entire plan a “hard pivot.” I mean Slack started out as a video game (and Flickr - same game IIRC). But as the counter point, here’s an article that argues against doing that in favor of simply shutting down (including comments from a YC partner no less)!

https://www.reforge.com/brief/why-hard-pivots-in-startups-ar...

In this case though, the company is brand new. There aren’t a lot of employees involved. The valuations are low and most of the costs are sunk. There isn’t much to lose by trying something different. And they went from a video conferencing platform to managing scheduling for video conferences. It’s at least in the same ballpark.

I guess what I’d say is that it is completely fair to criticize the team for the product they made. It isn’t something I’d spend money on and is in a crowded market with existing players (both free and paid). Not the best plan.

But don’t criticize them for switching tracks. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But at this stage, I don’t see much downside in them trying.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#97

Post by MattGaiser »

ehnto wrote: post #53
tim333 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed the founder says: >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 and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything. >We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.

> It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything. Whilst I agree, that's an organizational problem as much as a technology one. Why is the business built upon so many apps?

> Why is the business built upon so many apps?

So many different functions. My company is purely cloud and we use Google as much as possible, but we still have tons as we need a help desk, a task board, HR software, credential management, Office for some people, Udemy, etc.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#98

Post by drcongo »

MattGaiser wrote: post #39
tim333 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed the founder says: >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 and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything. >We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.

If they build a unified notification inbox, I will pay for that. I had one of those when I used a Blackberry and I miss it as I now have to check 10 sites periodically to stay on top of things.

As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? I'm not sure why you need to check sites for notifications, that seems like the opposite of a notification.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#100

Post by dave_aiello »

I'm going to repeat that Fantastical does 95% of what Superpowered claims to do. And Fantastical has features that Superpowered clearly does not have, such as a really good natural language mechanism for event and task creation.

And subscription costs are less.

https://flexibits.com/fantastical

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