Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 326 posts

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

#151

Post by kllrnohj »

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…

> Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to.

A cheap tool to build an audience makes sense, absolutely, but this is very nearly the exact opposite of that. How many users is a $10/mo calendar widget only on MacOS and only with Google Calendar really going to attract? It's expensive, and the audience is a subset of a subset of a subset. Got to start somewhere, of course, but this is like the result of a weekend hackathon, not something that a significant audience is going to drop $120/year on.

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

#152

Post by peterthehacker »

I think that this is an important question and I disagree that “YC has lost its way”. I think that we’re seeing more and more companies come out of YC that have a bottom up, Growth/Product focus instead of the traditional Sales/Tech focus B2B companies have historically had, which makes companies like this look like nothing special tech-wise, but look at their love on PH . They’re onto something.

Martin Casado, from a16z, has a great post/talk about this trend. https://a16z.com/2019/08/09/video-growth-sales-and-a-new-era...

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

#153

Post by secondbreakfast »

w3designer wrote: post #112
secondbreakfast wrote: post #70

I clicked through thinking I'd agree this is silly, but this is an incredibly compelling app. Downloaded and got it set up in less than 2 minutes. Already in love. Weighing if $10/mo is worth it and my immediate reaction isn't "No"

Itsycal does the same thing, for free: https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

Looks cool, thanks for the link. Sounds weird but the "join zoom"/"join hangout" button is really the most helpful part of this plugin. Perhaps Mowglii can add. I'm always 60 seconds late to meetings, finding my calendar, finding event, finding mtg link

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

#154

Post by api »

vbezhenar wrote: post #146
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…

$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.

IntelliJ IDEA is one of the best software values for the money I have.

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

#156

Post by utborin »

fallingknife wrote: post #108

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 could sell a couple hundred. You could sell ten. You could sell zero.

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

#157

Post by andrewprock »

sgc wrote: post #143
908B64B197 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. Try O365. It just works. Seems like every app works well with the other ones. >>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar. That's risky. Major OS already have notification centers/aggregators.

O365? Outlook.com is terrible. Crazy a** js that doesn't mark messages as read with no discernible way to reliably trigger that, shows me the email message version from before spell check as I am waiting for it to send, super laggy, arcane hover triggered menus that want to do a million undocumented things, just to get an email address from an email chain, etc. The only two worse online experiences for me are logging…

Your critique is coming from a sincere place, and acts as a harbinger of the troubles that users of Superpowered are also likely to face.

The trouble is that this kind of SNAFU is common when you are dealing with multi-application use cases, so this criticism is going to apply doubly to any new player in the space, including the topic of this discussion.

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

#158

Post by regularfry »

vbezhenar wrote: post #146
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…

$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.

It is, however, a way to get a validated group of people who are price insensitive (compared to you, anyway) and willing to pay money for that specific sort of tool. Whether that's enough for a YC hail-mary to work is a them-problem.

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

#159

Post by achenatx »

brundolf wrote: post #139
adkadskhj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thank you. A handful of years back i realized every huge startup's new product was 90% empty air. Ie, startups would bite off more than they could chew - even huge startups. Doing one thing well is so much better to me than 100 things poorly. And there's still a ton of complexity and work to do the one thing well, usually. Be it integrations, sub features, whatever - i vastly prefer a full experience with a narr…

And especially today, when tech megacorps attempt to copy every successful product on any of their platforms, doubling-down on doing one thing extremely well is your best defense because that's what they struggle with

this is how you compete against walmart and possibly amazon.

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

#160

Post by zffr »

vbezhenar wrote: post #146
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…

$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.

Post reply on HN