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HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

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Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#141

Post by 3Dpuzzlepiece »

cpg wrote: post #89

I built a site to run tennis leagues. We have started in the bay area with 210+ matches taken place since February when it launched. Most other sites that try to do this look like they are built in the 90s and have little support for modern features like communicating via Whatsapp or decent mobile support. It could also be extended to other (racket) sports later. People pay a $20 fee for each league, which is about 8…

The concept is awesome - I would definitely check this out when it becomes available in Texas, but navigating through the website is a little confusing. It is hard to figure out where to go, where to sign up, and how everything works. Can the site/software be integrated or customized? There are lots of tennis clubs that could use racketlogger to organize their leagues and fill up empty time slots for their courts. I wonder if you could also partner with gyms and fitness facilities.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#142

Post by dpatru »

ismail wrote: post #27

Background: Every day in South Africa low income people suffer through 2+ hour commutes into work using public transport. This has a serious impact on their lives, due to long wait times and inefficiencies. I interviewed a single mother, who only got home after 7pm and leaves at 6am in the morning. We have built a ride share matching system: Our goal is to make use of unused seats in cars matching drivers and passeng…

Expecting regular commuters to continue paying is like a dating site expecting married couples to continue paying. Focus instead on helping irregular travelers find rides or minibus entrepreneurs find paying passengers.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#143

Post by mw67 »

dzine wrote: post #106
sama wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think picking an initial niche is a good one, but ideally you'd pick one that represents a complex task that is easier to get done in broken-down subsets, and that customers don't have an easy way to get done today.

Gotcha, that's a really good way of putting it. And I agree that reservations as tasks are not the way to go to prove the concept out. Seems like we have quite a bit of thinking to do. Any further advice for us? Thanks!

i know of a company doing something similar in hong kong. their niche is to get people in various locations aggregate data from brands by going to retail stores and take photos of their products. each user gets 3-10usd for doing this and the brands save on sending expensive people to each location.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#144

Post by S4M »

goldMIT wrote: post #45

Golden Speak ( http://www.goldenspeak.com ) helps you speak better by analyzing your voice for pitch, rhythm, vocab, fillers, and clarity. We'd like to talk about launching minimum features quickly vs. high user expectations that people have from apps like facebook, etc. Does it make sense to focus more on polish instead of launching within an almost embarrassing feature set?

Could Golden Speak be used to correct non native speakers with their accents? I have a (very) strong French accent when speaking English and I could use a tool like that.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#145

Post by ksks »

ismail wrote: post #128
ksks wrote: post #33

Hi, Kevin and Sam, I am the founder of https://ManualTest.io . My app automates manual testing. It generate and run integration tests by recording and replaying users' actions on their websites. Manual testing is still being used everyday (by developers or not), so this could be a huge time saver for them. My app is recently available on the Chrome Web Store, it only got a few users, despite having quite positive fee…

Hey, who is your market with this? From my POV developers doing testing have quite mature toolsets to do automated integration tests I.e selenium. So what other types of people would find it useful? Off the top of my head: 1. Tech Companies that have a testing/uat team that are not developers. For e.g i worked on a contract where testing was handed over from dev to a testing team which was largely manual. 2. Companie…

  Who is your market with this?
That is a very good question. My original intend is for developers. Although there are tools like selenium, setting up, writing and running automated tests can still take a lot of time for the developers. Thats why I believe most developers still do some levels of manual testing, either during developing a feature or after, because the cost of automating it is too high (can easily exceed the time to develop the feature being tested). My frontend developer friends find my app useful mainly because it allows them to validate their code, even in the middle of development where the code churn is very high, since creating and running the tests are almost effortless. Plus, I could add the feature to export the tests/scenarios into test code, which would also be a huge time saver for developers, but this could take weeks.

But like you said, since developers have other options, I am not sure if the value proposition is high enough to make this into a viable business model. Another possible kind of customers would be those that doesn’t have the technical still, but need to either validate their websites, or provide a way to validate their websites to someone else, like in your example 1 and 2. The problem is, I am not sure where and how to target this niche of market to focus my marketing on, as it seems they could be in many different industries.

This is part of the reason I asked the original question, if I focus on developers, is the app good enough for developers to find it useful? or do I need to spend more weeks to add more features? If I focus on nontechnical users, where and how should I target them? If you have any suggestions, I definitely like to hear them.

(for your example 3, there are already better tools like import.io, so I don’t think I will repurpose my app toward that usage for now.)

Thanks.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#146

Post by ankitml »

tlb wrote: post #129
trsohmers wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty awesome that you guys backed a semiconductor company. I didn't apply as I was skeptical you would invest in one... great to see YC expanding so far and fast though. We're looking at having full simulation capabilities (with physical verification in progress) come the end of this year, with a shuttle run (prototype) tape out in Q1 next year. It's about a 3 month turn around, so we are expecting to have o…

Are you sure the power savings for mobile base stations are worth building chips for? I don't know the numbers, but suppose for example that there are 100,000 base stations that currently use 100 watts each doing the DSP. That's 10,000,000 watts total, costing about $10M/yr at $0.12 / kWh utility rates. If you can save 80% and capture 1/3 of the savings for the first 2 years (typical of efficiency improvement sales),…

Mobile basestations in developing markets are badass. Grid doesnt work 24 hours. Small diesel power generator is used as backup. Backup usage ranges from 3 hours a day in good electricity areas to 21-22 is worst.

Although mobile device market is certainly better target as a market.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#147

Post by highCs »

kevin wrote: post #118
highCs wrote: post #23

I'm making a competitive real-time strategy game like starcraft (which is declining) but without the punitive aspect of the game which is why a massive number of players stop playing it I think. Starcraft is also the only decent competitive RTS on the market right now, a successor can grow at startup-level in the long term I beleive. I have a solid engine, nothing launched yet. My question is: why would you not fund…

Are you working on this by yourself?

Haha I know it sounds impossible but I think it is actually feasible. I beleive a game can grow like a typical startup product, you can start with a hundred players interested in a game with a handful of units and grow from there.

Here is a video of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIFd6jxQbY

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#148

Post by mw67 »

matrix wrote: post #10

I'm in the early stages of bootstrapping a marketplace similar to those that exist for hotels (e.g. Booking.com, PriceLine, etc). The supply-side is primarily small businesses ("merchants"). The demand-side is consumers. The initial target market niche is small (~$600 million/yr in the US), but the product can serve a much larger market niche and I will do so when resources permit. Today, this market niche is fragmen…

I think that would depend on the type of merchants. what kind of merchants are you talking about? how would you manage their inventory?

it's positive that customers like the product, is it an app or website? if you have enough users you can convince merchants that you'll bring them more business by showing them the numbers you currently have

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#149

Post by veb »

ph0rque wrote: post #100
sama wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be tempted to try a Nespresso/Gillette model, where the initial product is cheap and the "refills" are relatively expensive subscriptions, but very high quality and easy to use.

Thinking about it more, I could introduce the subscription model by knowing how far along each insert is in the harvest cycle, and offer to ship new inserts right as the existing insert harvest is winding down.

I wonder... you could advertise something like this as a health product. Let's say you have Celiac and you need to eat gluten free. Using this AutoMicroFarm, you can grow exactly what your customer needs (some lettuce strains may be hard on the stomach, some much better etc), so using your combined data from all units, customers, you can make sure that a certain AutoMicroFarm unit is completely fine tuned to that customers health needs.

Celiac is a silly example, but hopefully you know what I mean! I'd definitely be looking into this because it's realistic, and could help people a lot. Another wee example is that a lot of mass-produced foods are probably genetically modified and have odd chemicals which of course a lot of the population have adverse reactions to -- using an AutoMicroFarm unit, you can make sure that the food is completely organic, no chemicals, you have a record of everything that's gone on so you know you're safe to eat it.

Though, I'm probably talking crap!

p.s. I'm into hydroponics, etc. Done a few things like this unit with Tessel and stuff so I'm excited to see where you end up.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#150

Post by ph0rque »

veb wrote: post #149
ph0rque wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about it more, I could introduce the subscription model by knowing how far along each insert is in the harvest cycle, and offer to ship new inserts right as the existing insert harvest is winding down.

I wonder... you could advertise something like this as a health product. Let's say you have Celiac and you need to eat gluten free. Using this AutoMicroFarm, you can grow exactly what your customer needs (some lettuce strains may be hard on the stomach, some much better etc), so using your combined data from all units, customers, you can make sure that a certain AutoMicroFarm unit is completely fine tuned to that cus…

Thanks, I'll definitely keep that in mind! I have a friend who eats only organic for health reasons and to avoid ingesting the odd chemicals you mention, and he's definitely interested in an AutoMicroFarm.
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