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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?

#201

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

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 can see this going one of two ways: either nobody signs up, they get made fun of a bit, get the message and pivot, or the publicity they're generating gets the app in front of the niche they are targeting, they get users, feedback, and the ear of people who put this kind of value on the productivity boost they get.

Either way, I don't see the harm in putting it in front of people now, and I see a big downside to either polishing it more, or pivoting without having tested it on people.

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

#202

Post by leetcrew »

wtmt wrote: post #190
ryanSrich wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get when people say $X/month is too much. Too much for you maybe. But for me, if I can save 1 hour per month, that's worth $500. That's the top of what I've charged per hour for some consulting gigs. So $10/m is literally nothing for me if I can save time. Time is your most valuable asset. Money is nothing. Focus on time.

If every comment has to be suffixed with “for me” or “IMO”, it would be quite tedious to read. In most cases it’s clear. In cases like this, it could also be that the writer isn’t earning a six figure USD income or is in a country where even a $10 here and a $10 there add up relative to one’s income. It’s also very easy to say that X is most valuable and Y is nothing when you have very limited X and have a lot of Y.

on the contrary, it's very important for people to distinguish clearly between statements of objective fact and personal opinions. they ought to do it more often. imo.

more on topic, time is inherently more valuable than money due to its fundamental scarcity. there are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in a person's life. if you have time, you can always trade it for money. but if you have money, you can't always exchange it for time.

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

#203

Post by maram »

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…

>most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside

It’s enough that they made it into YC to conclude that there is a lot more going inside.

They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...

Regarding focusing on a niche it was a lesson I learned when I was filtering startups for investments I wrote about about my lesson before and how dumb I felt for passing on startups because they were too niche https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507122

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

#204

Post by drcongo »

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

Yeah, this is the other thing I'm baffled about here. My iPhone is my unified notification inbox and I can do all of those things right from the lock screen. I definitely never have to visit sites to check notifications.

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

#205

Post by blacktriangle »

monkey_monkey wrote: post #189
ryanSrich wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get when people say $X/month is too much. Too much for you maybe. But for me, if I can save 1 hour per month, that's worth $500. That's the top of what I've charged per hour for some consulting gigs. So $10/m is literally nothing for me if I can save time. Time is your most valuable asset. Money is nothing. Focus on time.

Great, I'm hoping you'll sign up for my upcoming weather widget which tells you the weather in a single location. It's only $30 a month, and it will save you time as you will no longer have to use any other weather widget. At some point in the future I plan on offering additional locations (at a compellingly low per location monthly service fee TBD).

If I lived in that location, and that widget had a great UI, maybe combined some reminders (good morning, 70% chance of rain today, don't forget your umbrella!), maybe it integrated with my calendar and let me know I need to leave early if I'm in a location far away from where I need to be and it's snowing really bad.

And all of that is ignoring the possibility that the idea is to build into some other thing, but there's minimal advantage to waiting.

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

#206

Post by ineedasername »

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…

And there's no reason the Mac widget could just be their MVP as they work on versions for other platforms.

It may be "Mac first" rather than "Mac only".

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

#207

Post by monkey_monkey »

blacktriangle wrote: post #205
monkey_monkey wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, I'm hoping you'll sign up for my upcoming weather widget which tells you the weather in a single location. It's only $30 a month, and it will save you time as you will no longer have to use any other weather widget. At some point in the future I plan on offering additional locations (at a compellingly low per location monthly service fee TBD).

If I lived in that location, and that widget had a great UI, maybe combined some reminders (good morning, 70% chance of rain today, don't forget your umbrella!), maybe it integrated with my calendar and let me know I need to leave early if I'm in a location far away from where I need to be and it's snowing really bad. And all of that is ignoring the possibility that the idea is to build into some other thing, but the…

No, it just tells you the weather in a single location.

If you want those features, you'll have to look at my competitors' more economy priced offerings, I'm afraid.

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

#208

Post by fchu »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #136
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 :)

I'm pretty sure they pivoted after starting YC, so in this instance the specific criticism about YC doesn't hold

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

#209

Post by ethbr0 »

adrianN wrote: post #167
zffr wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it into perspective, for someone making $200k+/yr (a lot of the HN audience), $10 is about 6min of their time/month (assuming a 40hr work week). Over a year it adds up to 72min of time. On the other hand, researching and trying out alternative free/cheaper tools might take hours. For a busy person making good money, $10/mo to make them more productive isn't a crazy ask IMO.

I think very few people buy things according to such a calculation.

As was pointed out here, though... by pricing at such a point (initially), they find people who do.

And maybe that's the intent.

If you're not Apple, where price insensitive customers beat down your door, then finding them is a non-trivial problem. And not just any customers, but ones who would be interested in your (I assume) follow-on product in a similar space.

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

#210

Post by sgc »

andrewprock wrote: post #157
sgc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O365? Outlook.com is terrible. Crazy a** js that doesn't mark messages as read with no discernible way to reliably trigger that, shows me the email message version from before spell check as I am waiting for it to send, super laggy, arcane hover triggered menus that want to do a million undocumented things, just to get an email address from an email chain, etc. The only two worse online experiences for me are logging…

Your critique is coming from a sincere place, and acts as a harbinger of the troubles that users of Superpowered are also likely to face. The trouble is that this kind of SNAFU is common when you are dealing with multi-application use cases, so this criticism is going to apply doubly to any new player in the space, including the topic of this discussion.

Correct, but my point was that there is room for said new player if that is the best we have right now. It is truly basically unusable for me on my device. I don't plan on getting a new device, but rather quitting the part time work that requires me to use that mess (along with so many other bad decisions they make, that make my work about 80% more time consuming than it should be).
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