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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?

#131

Post by krapp »

notyourday wrote: post #127
rvz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just ask AstroPad and f.lux who both have been targets of being 'sherlocked'. I can only see that these guys are at risk of being sherlocked by Calendar.app, Google Calendar and Calendar.exe. Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk.

> Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk. if (yolo(money)) { pivot_me(money) } else { shutdown() }

more like

    (if (yolo money) (pivot-me money) (shutdown))

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

#133

Post by VBprogrammer »

barbazoo wrote: post #123
dagmx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For me that's still what it's best at and what it should focus on. "Paper", Signatures, Password, to me that feels like they're desperately trying to find something to not just be a reliable external hard drive for people. Oh and of course their number one ambition, trying to convince me to upgrade to whatever more expensive plan they have.

Dropbox could have carved out a niche for itself as a platform for backup and sharing of files. However, the amount of investment capital doesn't allow them to be just a successful medium sized enterprise.

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

#134

Post by NotPavlovsDog »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #65
tootie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you aren't the customer

I have to put this on my wall. I made this point to a "designer" in love with the trend of the full-splash intro video. They wanted to use it on a website targeting managers.

Trying the demo on three middle-aged individuals, two did not have the habit of hitting page down or scrolling. So, two out of three did not find the "obvious" content of the website below the video.

   Who are the audience and what are their true needs?
is what we have to concentrate on when we sell products. I am sitting in zoom sessions with individuals that complain about their "wireless" headphones failing / discharging. Yet they happily paid for them, hundreds of dollars. Consumers are magic. I suggested they use a wired headset. They will not spend 10 dollars to buy one. One should contemplate deeply why, if one wants to sell to people like this. Observe them in their natural habitat. They can't explain why.

This is why having a digital product out in the market with paying customers is valuable in itself. You get to observe and measure, and pivot if you're lucky. The userbase is the resource, and the paying userbase is gold.

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

#135

Post by gorgonzolachz »

goatinaboat wrote: post #120
drcongo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.

Isn't this just notification center? I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it, but most services have some form of notification support that will redirect you to the proper app context

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

#136

Post by antoniuschan99 »

llaolleh wrote: post #113

Jesus Christ people. Give it a break. I hate this Reddit post. You're not going to build the next Apple today by making your first product a full fledged competitive modern computer. Remember that Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter. Apple themselves started with a niche computer back then that sold to less 500 hobbyists at a hobbyist computer shop. The next Apple would also have to build something extremely n…

It’s not a knock on the product but moreso on ycombinator. It’s questioning why such a product is being funded (at least at this stage when it’s so niche and only available on mac) and if there’s a bigger issue in the ycombinator system funding “trivial” startups

The other side of the coin could be they’re getting funded because yc likes the founders :)

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

#137

Post by monkey_monkey »

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…

> Building an audience with a cheap tool

Absolutely. It's a common startup tactic to release a product that costs more and does less than existing alternatives to get market share and brand awareness. This is just basic stuff. Marketing 101.

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

#138

Post by conradev »

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.

I’ve spent almost a decade in the productivity space (founded Shortcuts at Apple, fka Workflow) and everything is always confusing.

Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unreasonable way to go about it. It’s important to have a larger vision, but execution is perhaps the most important in this space (as with most consumer tech).

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

#139

Post by brundolf »

adkadskhj wrote: post #117
brundolf wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that: doing something that you could hack together 80% of the way over a weekend, but then providing careful attention to detail in terms of user experience and integrations, quality and responsive customer support, and a general intimate awareness of your customers' needs can make it into a valuable product. Many products could be dramatically amplified in their usefulness by way of a couple tiny UX tweaks…

Yes, thank you. A handful of years back i realized every huge startup's new product was 90% empty air. Ie, startups would bite off more than they could chew - even huge startups. Doing one thing well is so much better to me than 100 things poorly. And there's still a ton of complexity and work to do the one thing well, usually. Be it integrations, sub features, whatever - i vastly prefer a full experience with a narr…

And especially today, when tech megacorps attempt to copy every successful product on any of their platforms, doubling-down on doing one thing extremely well is your best defense because that's what they struggle with

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

#140

Post by goatinaboat »

gorgonzolachz wrote: post #135
goatinaboat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.

Isn't this just notification center? I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it, but most services have some form of notification support that will redirect you to the proper app context

I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it

I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.

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