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Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#12I see 4 very strong, smartly chosen brand names in this list: wevorce, fivetran, simplyinsured, errplane. But, wevorce wins this round.
Why do you say that these are strong brand names? I think all of the names are difficult to remember and spell. I know that finding a name is difficult, but the names of these startups are probably the least impressive aspect.
Wevorce - I doubt that people would remember this name
Startups can use a systematic method of determining if a name is memorable. I think the ability to remember the name and write it down and spell it correctly is the best indicator of a strong name.
I've done this previously by getting a short list of 15 names, then stating them several times in a video (in different orders), then using a crowdsourcing site such as amazon turk, get the person to watch the video and then write down which names they remember. This tests both their ability to remember the name amongst a crowd of other names AND their ability to spell the name. Certain names come way out on top.
Startups need to think very carefully about their name, because I believe the memorability of the name will have a huge impact on their success.
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#13I think buildzoom is going to be big. I'm remodeling a condo in Florida, and it has been a nightmare to find contractors. In fact on the flight on the way home I penciled out some ideas to improve this that aren't too different from what buildzoom is offering. Edit: After reviewing my notes, one thing I considered was that for better or worse, a lot of the industry is under the table and transient. Maybe buildzoom wi…
What about Redbeacon (squarely aimed at the same place), or Thumbtack or Yerbid?
This isn't a particularly new space, although I'm sure BuildZoom can do well in it.
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#14I think buildzoom is going to be big. I'm remodeling a condo in Florida, and it has been a nightmare to find contractors. In fact on the flight on the way home I penciled out some ideas to improve this that aren't too different from what buildzoom is offering. Edit: After reviewing my notes, one thing I considered was that for better or worse, a lot of the industry is under the table and transient. Maybe buildzoom wi…
What about Redbeacon (squarely aimed at the same place), or Thumbtack or Yerbid? This isn't a particularly new space, although I'm sure BuildZoom can do well in it.
I've never heard of these, which is part of the benefit of YC I guess. What that said, none of them seem to offer what BuildZoom does which is a list of all the contractors in my area sorted by reputation. Even if their reputation metrics are questionable at this point, at least they are making an attempt at it.
I just contacted a painter through buildzoom. Let's see how it works out. Contractors in my area (Tahoe) are notoriously hard to track down.
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#15I am of course preparing for the downvotes but the first two companies to me proffer the future of tech start ups. Wevorce I really had to double check to be sure I was not reading an extended parody of the HN front page. Try saying "tech-powered standard for civilised divorce" without hearing Jon Stewart. Then airware, already trying to turn UAVs into a app platform - UAVs are a big open frontier - but a hardware le…
What company would want to waste time and money customizing low-level UAV software?
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#16It seems a little strange that the TC article references DOS in two company descriptions (Airware, the "DOS of drones", and CircuitLab replacing "DOS-era tools").
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#17I see 4 very strong, smartly chosen brand names in this list: wevorce, fivetran, simplyinsured, errplane. But, wevorce wins this round.
Why do you say that these are strong brand names? I think all of the names are difficult to remember and spell. I know that finding a name is difficult, but the names of these startups are probably the least impressive aspect. Wevorce - I doubt that people would remember this name Startups can use a systematic method of determining if a name is memorable. I think the ability to remember the name and write it down and…
I think they are strong names based on either the language devices they employ or based on the existing brands they are carefully aligning themselves with, which I believe makes them memorable.
Here is a simple formula for one kind language device used in naming: 1) Find a key term: house 2) Find a word that rhymes with the key term: mouse 3) Find an idiom or common phrase that includes the rhymed term: mouse trap 4) Substitute the original keyword in place of the rhyming word ... result: house trap
Due to all kinds of fuzzy reasons that will never be arguably as good as testing names with real people (kudos for testing your names!), I prefer this method.
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#18I think buildzoom is going to be big. I'm remodeling a condo in Florida, and it has been a nightmare to find contractors. In fact on the flight on the way home I penciled out some ideas to improve this that aren't too different from what buildzoom is offering. Edit: After reviewing my notes, one thing I considered was that for better or worse, a lot of the industry is under the table and transient. Maybe buildzoom wi…
I am wondering how they are already getting 500k uniques per month & 1000 contractors a week signing up:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/14/buildzoom-connects-homeowne...
I mean, how on earth do you that? Some kind of mystical SEO? Befuddles me...
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#19As an ecom professional, fivetran is the most exciting to me.
Thanks! We've got a lot of features still to build and things to optimize but we're really excited about what's coming up.
Re: Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic
#20Wow, this definitely is the strongest looking batch in recent memory. Interesting to see a few companies in the group that are or will be competing head-on with previous YC alums. Airware is particularly exciting. There are a lot of parallels between today's hobby UAV market and the hobby PC market of decades past. I love Circuitlab, but "the founders estimate their market to be $500 million, because of CircuitLabs’…
Fivetran looks very cool, although I'm only worried that it's web based tool. Advanced Excel / SPPS/ Matlab is used by professionals, who want very fast and responsive, something that is hard to replicate in web based app. I wish them good luck though!
1010data provides a web product for performing transformation on large sets of data and it's quite nice. We used it when we used to do analysis of mortgage pools etc.