Y Combinator presents 26 new startups • Hacker News Board

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#91

Post by greendestiny » Tue, Mar 23, 2010, 11:44 PM UTC

rokhayakebe wrote: post #87

greendestiny wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well whatever the reason I think I've seen it said for every bunch of startups. Its easy to criticise and I doubt there is any correlation between startups that look interesting and success. And although I'll regret being negative myself I will just say - Zenedy, really? I think if wanted to write a startup style description of a affiliate marketing site that'd be it.

He did not criticize. He just said he was not impressed. Frankly how often are you impressed with a product other than yours? Not so many times. As for Zenedy. I think they are following the Demand Media model, and that has proven to be a business that generates a lot of money. Do not discount affiliate marketers. If you look at startups that operate affiliate businesses they tend to become quickly profitable (frugal…

I guess, I just hear some version of the startups not being impressive, interesting or whatever else enough each time. I don't think his point was, I'm not impressed because its not mine, I think his point was he was disappointed.

There's nothing wrong with affiliate marketing, I'm just a little surprised to see the YC funding the old "pick area, get low quality freelance content, build search rank, sell affiliates" model.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#92

Post by robryan » Tue, Mar 23, 2010, 11:57 PM UTC

adamhowell wrote: post #6

callmeed wrote: post #5

Embedster and Embedly ... confusingly similar names

I can't ever keep any variation of -ster, -ly and -ify straight.

While I understand why they have to do this, I hate those types of names.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#93

Post by tiffani » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 12:40 AM UTC

jpatte wrote: post #78

philwelch wrote: post #3

A couple of single founders in this season's batch. Interesting.

I wonder if they were single founders from the very start or if the team broke during the program?

I know the Notifo guy, Chad, was working by himself. Dude's amazing. :)

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#94

Post by Locke1689 » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 1:01 AM UTC

gridspy wrote: post #36

Locke1689 wrote: post #21

I'm really interested to see what happens to Crocodoc. Back in high school a programmer friend and I built a rough website to do joint collaboration that we called Collaborate. In our minds it was mainly a solution for all the peer reviewing we had to do for English class, but it follows the same track as Crocodoc. We ended up shutting it down because Google released Google Docs and a number of other real-time collab…

For every person using Google Docs, there are another 10 or 100 who haven't heard of it, don't understand it or think it is too hard. Don't give up in the face of competition. It just validates the marketplace. For instance - Dropbox went up against many other cloud storage systems and is winning.

That's a very good point. I sometimes wish I had been a little older when we started this project because we had some cool little features that even some of the larger players haven't come out with (three-way document merge, for example).

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#95

Post by richcollins » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 1:04 AM UTC

iamwil wrote: post #67

richcollins wrote: post #44

Zenedy is taking the opposite approach by first determining algorithmically what content people are searching for, then identifying what portion of that content could effectively be monetized through targeted advertising Sounds like MFA spam. So much for make something that people want.

In this case, 'people' would be writers, not readers.

Sounds like a zeroish sum.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#96

Post by ziadbc » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 1:33 AM UTC

From my experience YC is sort of like the state of Missouri. Show me don't tell me.

The ideas on this list might not be pie in the sky, but they are most likely something people can get their head around, and are fairly polished.

This makes sense as the next step for many of these teams is going to be to try to raise capital. The more pie in the sky, the harder it is to get buy in from an investor, unless you have the goods. In three months I'd bet these groups have something pretty nice to show for their time spent in YC and inching toward an even larger goal that might not be evident from their 3 line description.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#97

Post by smurthasmith » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 1:40 AM UTC

ErrantX wrote: post #32

fnid2 wrote: post #2

I'll take the contrarian stance and say I'm not really impressed with the list. There are some that may be good, but there's not much new. Mostly me too products. Perhaps my expectations are too high.

Greplin looks like an interesting possibility. Some of the others have potential. But, yes, I think you've got the general sentiment.

Greplin does sounds interesting. I actually applied with essentially the same idea - cloud data indexing and search. Check it out and let me know if you want a beta invite:

www.nutmegsearch.com

Daniel Gross, if you are out there - let's talk.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#98

Post by jacoblyles » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 1:57 AM UTC

matasar wrote: post #18

fnid2 wrote: post #2

I'll take the contrarian stance and say I'm not really impressed with the list. There are some that may be good, but there's not much new. Mostly me too products. Perhaps my expectations are too high.

I think the team is by far more important than the two sentence summary of the idea, so in that sense it's too early to judge.

Ideas matter too. If you have really smart and capable people working on a product that not many people are going to use, then they're not going to be very successful.

Programming smarts != market smarts.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#99

Post by patio11 » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 2:02 AM UTC

fallintothis wrote: post #46

dadkins wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, indeed. Spot the buzzword: We make social games. a social data request and fulfillment system adding social data leveraging social media identify active social networkers Infoharmoni visualizes the real-time social web social sports (and soon pop culture) betting applications

I was giggling at Gamador's summary. We make social games. We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better. "Use metrics better"? I guess that one wasn't crafted with consumers in mind.

If it makes you feel better, you can pretend they said "We make the games our customers want to play rather than the games we think they should want to play." Because that is what they said.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#100

Post by jacoblyles » Wed, Mar 24, 2010, 2:10 AM UTC

jlangenauer wrote: post #48

I have to say I'm not that impressed with the list either - but I offer the following anecdote as to why my opinion shouldn't count that much. A VC was being told about a new web startup in the 1990's. The startup involved people putting their goods up for sale, where people would bid for them, then exchange the goods and money. The VC said "People who've never seen each other, sending goods and money to one another,…

eBay has a pretty good business model on its face. It's hard to look back in time, but you could tell that eBay COULD be big, if it surmounted enough obstacles. On the other hand, a startup to tell bloggers about your startup has limited room to grow.