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Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

techcrunch.com

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Re: Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

#31

Congrats to the team. I thoroughly checked out the site, and this is clearly backed by a smart team. I see dozens of subtle smart decisions, and no obvious mistakes. Compared to YC companies, they are way ahead on SEO and other web marketing strategy. YC demo day companies tend to suck at SEO in obvious ways.

why not say what those "obvious SEO suck" are, instead of just being inflammatory?

Re: Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

#32
post #25

Congrats to the team. I thoroughly checked out the site, and this is clearly backed by a smart team. I see dozens of subtle smart decisions, and no obvious mistakes. Compared to YC companies, they are way ahead on SEO and other web marketing strategy. YC demo day companies tend to suck at SEO in obvious ways.

I would downvote this comment for extreme, petulant vagueness if I had the karma to do so.

Agreed.

If we are going to "pump" up the SEO factor, things like https://www.yourmechanic.com/book/#/addj=10021 for "Car is not starting" would not be in place.

Instead, maybe something like https://www.yourmechanic.com/fix/10021/car-is-not-starting

So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily hold this site up as heavily SEO optimized. Nothing against the company as they are a young company just not a good example IMO.

Re: Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

#34

Some config issues? curl -I https://www.yourmechanic.com HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Server: nginx/1.2.2 Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 05:05:23 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 168 Connection: keep-alive Vary: Accept-Encoding

  $ curl -I -A Mozilla https://www.yourmechanic.com
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: nginx/1.2.2
  ...snip...
They're "blocking" curl for whatever reason.

Re: Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

#36
post #15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Edit: deleted comment I replied to was saying two of the judges were investors in the company. Wow really? If that is the case how can they not have received favorable treatment? Even with the best of intentions those judges must be intimate with every aspect of the business and would be unable to separate that knowledge from what the other judges are basing their decisions on. I know the TC bias bashing is a bit of…

Funding announcement[1] includes SV Angel (David Lee) and CrunchFund (Mike Arrington). Not sure the best way to handle this when you're trying to get the best judges and most promising startups. But it does smell.

1: http://www.pehub.com/165503/do-publish/

Re: Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

#37
post #25

Congrats to the team. I thoroughly checked out the site, and this is clearly backed by a smart team. I see dozens of subtle smart decisions, and no obvious mistakes. Compared to YC companies, they are way ahead on SEO and other web marketing strategy. YC demo day companies tend to suck at SEO in obvious ways.

I would downvote this comment for extreme, petulant vagueness if I had the karma to do so.

I agree that I should be down-voted to the extreme. I chose the vagueness because calling out individual YC companies is now considered bad form. I was trying to be polite.

Compare their SEO strategy to a YC company that repairs iPhones, or the one that sells cars. If you don't know the urls, send me an email and I'll tell you the ones I am talking about.

The YC anti-SEO pattern exists, it is just not polite to call out SEO mistakes, because if anyone builds anything, then we must be supportive.

Re: Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

#39
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would downvote this comment for extreme, petulant vagueness if I had the karma to do so.

Agreed. If we are going to "pump" up the SEO factor, things like https://www.yourmechanic.com/book/#/addj=10021 for "Car is not starting" would not be in place. Instead, maybe something like https://www.yourmechanic.com/fix/10021/car-is-not-starting So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily hold this site up as heavily SEO optimized. Nothing against the company as they are a young company just not a good example IMO.

I don't think pumping is necessary. Their site is not a solution to the general case of "car is not starting", thus should not have a page for that. That would be gaming google, which is fine, but a bad first move for a startup.

I'll now call out YC companies to prove my point. I went to the techcrunch demo day round 1, and have a look at http://vastrm.com/ It is a complete SEO disaster. No reasonable advisor would have said that was a good idea for an e-commerce company.

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