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

Post by floatingatoll » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #30

2 observations: - I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.) - Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpet…

Post by birdyrooster » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

phsource wrote: post #176

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…

This. From my YC experience, I know that starting with a niche is good advice and advice they likely would have gotten. Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston. Having gone thr…

Post by tootie » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

411111111111111 wrote: post #92

tootie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by dreamer7 » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

Grustaf wrote: post #184

conradev wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unre…

Sure, but saving a click or two when joining zoom meetings for mac users that don't use the native calendar app doesn't really scream "hair on fire"...

Post by vbezhenar » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

zffr wrote: post #160

vbezhenar wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10/month is not a cheap tool. I'm paying $90/year for Intellij Idea which is my main development tool. IMO that cost is extremely prohibitive for most users and it's definitely not a way to get plenty of people on board to monetize it later.

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.