241–250 of 326 posts
“Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a backup app you can already build such yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”
Is there an opportunity to make a cheaper Dropbox? Their paid service is very expensive.
People misunderstand YC's business model. They invest 125K for a 7% stake in the company. That's a <$2 million valuation. If this company sells a couple thousand (at $120/y), YC breaks even. If they sell a couple million, YC gets back 1000x on their money. It's a great investment.
And if they sell four? Wish I still had a copy but there was a brilliant story printed years ago called something like "there are numbers smaller than 1%." It illustrated the fallacy in the thinking behind saying things like, "even if we only sell 1%, we'll be rich." Just because you pick some arbitrarily small number as your minimum sales doesn't mean it's actually the minimum, or even the most likely minimum. You c…
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…
How do you feel about Framework?
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>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 o…
> They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted... Plenty of people get into YC with nothing more than an idea. Getting into YC is sort of like getting into Harvard. Yeah, lots of people there are impressive, but not all of them. YC doesn't have a perfect filter. FWIW I got into YC without anything remotely resembling a business, and I don't think I'm that impressive. My…
Was there ever a time where YC only boosted deeply meaningful companies that were focused on uplifting humanity? I mean, no disrespect on yc, but it performs what it says on the tin. It's a business for businesses. Idk. I have tempered expectations moreso than some I guess. You've got a point, I just wonder how egregious is TOO much.
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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.
erm, isn't that assuming an income of $1,040,000 after tax based on a 40 hour work week?
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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).
I pay for this its called Forecast bar ( https://forecastbar.com ) and I love it. Basically Dark Sky for your Mac. Not $30 a month, but there's different tiers of service depending on your needs. Would I pay for this startups calendar? Probably not, but it seems nice, and I can definitely see people paying 2 cups of coffee a month for it.
To make it crystal clear – it seems odd to launch a product that's much more expensive than your competition and delivers much less.
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'm assuming the reddit post is by someone who is just really unfamiliar with YC and modern tech entrepreneurship. Hopefully, their question was sincere and they'll receive sensible answers.
As for the question of whether YC has lost its way - most institutions lose their way at some point, so it's a fair question, but I don't think it's fair to single out this particular company.
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> They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted... Plenty of people get into YC with nothing more than an idea. Getting into YC is sort of like getting into Harvard. Yeah, lots of people there are impressive, but not all of them. YC doesn't have a perfect filter. FWIW I got into YC without anything remotely resembling a business, and I don't think I'm that impressive. My…
I would claim it also doesn't want a perfect filter. Maybe the team is great and they expect the (future) pivot leading to success. Also failures are cheap for YC, they live on their successes.
I get why they do it. It's an easy way to make more money. But the average YC founder today is nothing like the average YC founder a decade ago. They will argue otherwise, but I disagree based on personal experience. And everybody knows YC was really started by pg (I am fully aware of the entire history), and he hasn't been actively involved for years.
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