“Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a backup app you can already build such yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”
Sure, the Dropbox comment will never stop being a meme.
But in a world where, for example, a competing product like Fantastical already exists, costs less and does more, it does seem valid to be wondering what is going on.
I think the point was that Dropbox was not at the time viewed as "seamlessly moving data around". We see it in retrospect as revolutionary, but that was certainly not the view at the time since many of us had already seen online storage platforms come and go (xdrive, anyone?).
I will not comment on whether this calendar app is revolutionary, it might not be, but it's also possible it is something that will make an impact. There's lots of untapped potential in the calendar and event space, in my opinion.
Personally I love seeing a funded company that's focused on client-side software to improve the productivity of general knowledge workers. It's a nice counterpoint to SaaS everything. Yes, there's a subscription fee. But that ensures ongoing development.
Looking at this product, I'd expect it to grow into a powerful, personal RPA product. They could build a high quality, MacOS-native view into all the APIs in your life, with automation tooling and a great mobile story.
Though in seriousness, YC has said it is more about funding people than specific projects. And who knows where this lands on the path to the destination.
My conclusion also, judging from a few latest Launch HN's that are prone to be featurized by the competition instead of building an ecosystem. Or being a good idea, but without a unicorn potential even if you strech your imagination. But I guess they only care about successful exits at a valuation that will make return on their investment.
Paul Graham: Startups at the begginning are alot more fragile than people think. It may be the case they've very little to show.
I'm not seeing some tipping point here. YC has always had startups that were a bit funny or outright weak sounding -- their investment strategy pretty much means the idea must initially sound bad in the pitch. They're aiming for things that are counter intutitive to give them an advantage.
I’m not sure I would use this as the example, Justin.tv was doing something a bit weird and different. Even if it didn’t pan out (which it didn’t before their pivot), it wasn’t clear at the time why it would work or not work.
This product has many competitors in a crowded space, and the risk of being sherlock-ed.
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 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.
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
I'll bet the Pro HDR folks groaned and got drunk after the Apple event yesterday where they showed the HDR functionality built in to the OS. They got Sherlocked!
sherlocked:
to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
Most companies (the majority, I'd wager) who were Sherlocked were _not_ bought by Apple. Most companies basically got a "sucks to be you", that they found out along with everyone else at an Apple launch event where Apple had, sometimes shamelessly and brazenly, cloned their product. Sometimes, to add insult to injury, Apple would then remove that company's product from App Stores as "duplicating OS functionality".
Allegedly Apple's strategy is often to make an offer to buy the company and acquihire some devs who understand the problem and have experience solving it, and if the answer is a no they implement the feature themselves. I have no idea if that's actually true, or if it happens a lot, but it could be the case that being "sherlocked" is what happens if you turn down an offer. If true, that would make being "sherlocked" irrelevant if the plan is to exit by being bought by Apple.
I commented on this risk. The founder smartly replied that they have much broader plans than just calendars. Still, anything that lives in the menu bar and serves such a core purpose as notifications is at risk of being “Sherlocked”.
>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
>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.
If they build a unified notification inbox, I will pay for that. I had one of those when I used a Blackberry and I miss it as I now have to check 10 sites periodically to stay on top of things.
I still have a special Z10 that I was allowed to keep after working there.
It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment.
Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Edit: 2 years after I left, Blackberry devices became Android devices... so I guess I was ahead of the curve or something?
It is probably not possible, you have to unlock on premises using a signed version of the tooling on a beta version of the OS on the device.
Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(
I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.
Man I really wish BB10 had come to the market earlier. I honestly don't doubt it'd still be around today if it wasn't for the fact it entered the market so late. BB were too busy dragging their feet for years after iOS and Android hit the scene. If they started work on BB10 as soon as the iPhone was released, I think we'd still have BlackBerries and more importantly a third platform. The Apple/Google duopoly benefits no one except Apple and Google.
I still have a Q10 somewhere, it's such a nice phone too.
There's still a lot of things I can't talk about because some of the people who I worked with, who are great people still work there.
Internally, 33% of every dollar went to the Blackberry Wireless division because Blackberry was created before commoditized mobile chips existed. In effect, this means we paid for the chips, paid an extra fee to unlock it just so we could flash our software.
It was an ongoing battle between the spec for Bluetooth being released and having our own version, validating it against every single thing out there that could connect to it and then shipping it out. This made it extremely pricy to deliver a feature on the wireless stack and often things just weren't supported which came with the original chipset.
It's difficult to turn the ship around without just firing everyone involved and going "just grab what's there just like Android is doing"
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? I'm not sure why you need to check sites for notifications, that seems like the opposite of a notification.
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means?
BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.
Isn't this just notification center? I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it, but most services have some form of notification support that will redirect you to the proper app context
I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it
I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.
Yeah, this is the other thing I'm baffled about here. My iPhone is my unified notification inbox and I can do all of those things right from the lock screen. I definitely never have to visit sites to check notifications.
Honestly, the last thing I want is a unified inbox. I get inputs from a dozen different streams and have segregated them by platform to better manage my time.
I want it to be really easy for people to get a hold of me if the information is important or if they are important to me, e.g. via SMS or voice.
I want it to be very difficult to be overwhelmed by low signal content unless that is my focus at the time, e.g. mailing lists, work email, etc.
And I want to be able to select my focus. When I am reading about mountain bikes, I want to read about mountain bikes. I don't want to sort through work messages, family memes, or tech news at the same time.
And you can add calendar, todo, notes, etc etc widgets to it. It is slow and you can’t use the keyboard to navigate it. I think developers are very limited in what they can do with it. That said, it covers 80% of what users are looking for here ...
What's the alternative? You could try to centralize all of your apps onto Google or Microsoft or Zoho, but frankly if you want the best user experience, you have to work with several different companies.
So many different functions. My company is purely cloud and we use Google as much as possible, but we still have tons as we need a help desk, a task board, HR software, credential management, Office for some people, Udemy, etc.
One, every subdivision of a company might have similar needs, but each one has niche table stakes that only one app provides. Case in point: Lawyers still use WordPerfect [1].
Two, and this is where I think Superpowered, the company in question, will stumble, is that every attempt to unify these disparate needs has ended up into a unholy giant mess of "Enterprisey" software that tries to be all things to all people. Inevitably there's at least one key area where it sucks to bad for the table stakes requirement of that user base that they never adopt it, strike out on their own, and now you're back to "why do we have so many apps?".
Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later.
I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.
> 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 in to att.com and trying to shop on homedepot.com. Microsoft should not be in a discussion with those two head-lice.
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.
Correct, but my point was that there is room for said new player if that is the best we have right now. It is truly basically unusable for me on my device. I don't plan on getting a new device, but rather quitting the part time work that requires me to use that mess (along with so many other bad decisions they make, that make my work about 80% more time consuming than it should be).
I’ve spent almost a decade in the productivity space (founded Shortcuts at Apple, fka Workflow) and everything is always confusing.
Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unreasonable way to go about it. It’s important to have a larger vision, but execution is perhaps the most important in this space (as with most consumer tech).
Sure, but saving a click or two when joining zoom meetings for mac users that don't use the native calendar app doesn't really scream "hair on fire"...
I ended up building my own solution to this because I regularly miss meetings by minutes and want a one-click solution to jump into meetings (I can have up to 10 a day) even though I use the native Calendar app.
I saw this and it resonated deeply with me. It's an exceedingly small paper cut, but a paper cut nonetheless.
The Zoom client has already a built in calendar integration. Once connected, it will show you all upcoming meetings for the day including a button to join the call. It's quite convenient.
As someone who has to have zoom, teams, and webex meetings with clients I would enjoy a tray item that would just organize all those into a lista and have one click access the task tray, integration with various calendars (mainly icloud and google) would be even nicer. Even if it just summed up my week. Extra points for cross platform. seems as if someone probably hasn't already built in emacs probably :)
It's not just a click or two when we are joining several meetings in a day. Personally I'm annoyed by repetitive tasks that are slow due to external factors. Joining a meeting through Meet on Chrome involves -
1. Open a new tab on the right user profile
2. Navigate to meet.google.com (second slowest task)
3. Click on a meeting. Wait for it to be setup (slowest task)
4. Join. Wait for a couple of seconds for the stream to setup.
I would rather club multiple slow steps requiring user action into one long wait time that I can completely ignore.
Also, if you want to make money selling software to consumers, Apple's platform is the one to target. Mac and iOS users are the most likely by far to actually pay for software. It's far more difficult to sell an app for actual money to Android or Windows users.
Again talking specifically about the consumer market here, not enterprise.
I have to put this on my wall. I made this point to a "designer" in love with the trend of the full-splash intro video. They wanted to use it on a website targeting managers.
Trying the demo on three middle-aged individuals, two did not have the habit of hitting page down or scrolling. So, two out of three did not find the "obvious" content of the website below the video.
Who are the audience and what are their true needs?
is what we have to concentrate on when we sell products. I am sitting in zoom sessions with individuals that complain about their "wireless" headphones failing / discharging. Yet they happily paid for them, hundreds of dollars.
Consumers are magic. I suggested they use a wired headset. They will not spend 10 dollars to buy one. One should contemplate deeply why, if one wants to sell to people like this. Observe them in their natural habitat. They can't explain why.
This is why having a digital product out in the market with paying customers is valuable in itself. You get to observe and measure, and pivot if you're lucky. The userbase is the resource, and the paying userbase is gold.
I'm purely talking about it from the perspective of user value. Whether users are customers or products, what are they getting out of the platform that drives them to use it regularly? Or more generally, what are they getting out of it that they couldn't get on 100 other platforms? Or an RSS feed?
At this point, the answer is just network effect, but that certainly wasn't the case when it was new.
while its true that the base functionality itself is extremely easy to implement with any CRUD framework (spring/django/RoR/phoenix/whatever), the created app would not be able to scale to the degree twitter has been scaled at this point.
vertical scaling only works to a degree, and horizontal scaling while keeping the data as close to real-time as possible is nontrivial.
I'm not talking about engineering complexity, I'm just talking about user value and user experience. I'm sure that scaling a calendar tool to a billion people is non-trivial too.
Well, is there some _specific_ reason to scoff now?
I'm not saying that's the
case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
For me that's still what it's best at and what it should focus on. "Paper", Signatures, Password, to me that feels like they're desperately trying to find something to not just be a reliable external hard drive for people. Oh and of course their number one ambition, trying to convince me to upgrade to whatever more expensive plan they have.
Dropbox could have carved out a niche for itself as a platform for backup and sharing of files. However, the amount of investment capital doesn't allow them to be just a successful medium sized enterprise.
Being the best in a completely commodified area is tough, especially when that solution set is thrown in for free in the world's most popular productivity platforms-- Office 365.
Dropbox has the best sync clients, but that's not enough to save them from being a commodity. Dead-simple and reliable sync seems like a nice-to-have that isn't going to save them from the incredibly large footprint the likes of Microsoft already have in enterprise markets. An IT purchaser might not care much about the usability difference between OneDrive and DropBox (which I'm not even sure exists since the last time I used both.)
Dropbox needs to think of what apps you can build on top of it and let people build those apps. They are a data lake. Enable advanced analytics and ML etc...
This. Whenever someone quips "that's a feature not a product" the reply should be "so why were they able to ship this feature and you weren't". Technical debt, opportunity cost(s), mission focus are all opportunities for arbitrage.
I think the discussion was always sure you can release a feature product and find success. One you reach a certain level bigger players will incorporate your features and you will cease to exist.
Being able to breakout of that feature product into an expanded ecosystem before your product becomes a feature of a bigger platform is the real end game.
Dropbox is in a weird place right now because its free tier is too small, the pair tier is too big and expensive, a $5 tier doesn't work financially, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple offer 80% as good solutions with 2.5x as much space for free. For corporate customers, again, they're probably Exchange or GSuite shops, so they can use one of those storage providers.
Dropbox addresses a real problem, it's just that the triviality of a business copying it means it became table stakes on a lot of platforms.
Dropbox’s killer app is: simply working. I have access to and use both Google Drive and O365 One Drive at work and it is shocking how often I have problems with them.
To be clear, my expected rate of problems for this functionality is “never.” The only service I have that experience with is Dropbox. With GDrive and One Drive I have seen folders lose sync, files get stuck syncing, and inexplicable conflicts.
In addition, sharing outside my org is way easier and more reliable with Dropbox.
I agree that copying files around seems like it should be trivial. Somehow it’s not, though. I don’t have an explanation, just observations from trying to get real work done on a Mac.
Nerds used to large corporate networks/university ones pretty much all had access to shared drives that "just worked" in the OS file browser.
The magic of DropBox was that non-technical users could just share that word document, have it everywhere and not have to deal with a weird terminal.
I wished Drobox built a (physicals, why not) wall at their HQ with the names of everyone who was able to miraculously recover their masters/phd thesis after hardware failure because they saved it in their Dropbox folder.
TBH I never understood the appeal of dropbox, drive, mega, etc
Is it the UI? Is it keeping your data safe? Is it the sync?
I never used their native applications because I hate constant syncing for no reason and running proprietary apps (especially if they're always on), but I use some of their free tiers to store stuff.
If I had to pay I'd just buy some space on some server at the cheapest price per gb there is.
On top of that: doing something that you could hack together 80% of the way over a weekend, but then providing careful attention to detail in terms of user experience and integrations, quality and responsive customer support, and a general intimate awareness of your customers' needs can make it into a valuable product. Many products could be dramatically amplified in their usefulness by way of a couple tiny UX tweaks, driven by understanding of users' problems. In fact this is a main factor in Apple's success, IMO.
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 narrow scope than a "out the door" experience with a huge scope.
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
Absolutely. It's a common startup tactic to release a product that costs more and does less than existing alternatives to get market share and brand awareness. This is just basic stuff. Marketing 101.
$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.
Why though? People who are price insensitive enough to pay 120 bucks a year for a menu bar widget are not your target audience, they are a tiny tiny minority.
They might be a minority. They might be a minority you're not in. So (I'm guessing) is the minority that buy genuine Louis Vuitton handbags. The question isn't the size of the market in total audience numbers, or the proportion of some arbitrary population they represent, it's the readiness with which they can be parted with a sizeable chunk of cash in aggregate.
Proving that the total addressable wallet is sufficient to sustain a YC company is a) non-trivial, and b) their problem. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there can be remarkably large markets in remarkably unexpected places, so while yes, this one looks like a totally conventional small-software-shop play, and the 75th percentile outcome across all YC companies is crater-shaped, I'm not going to second-guess whether they might have something.
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.
As was pointed out here, though... by pricing at such a point (initially), they find people who do.
And maybe that's the intent.
If you're not Apple, where price insensitive customers beat down your door, then finding them is a non-trivial problem. And not just any customers, but ones who would be interested in your (I assume) follow-on product in a similar space.
Plenty of successful products appeal to very few people.
I was just offering the way I would approach considering to buy something like this
Personally, I don’t think this tool would make me significantly more productive, but if it could truly save me a few hours a year maybe 120/yr isn’t that bad.
If you're living in a Western country as a coder you can afford $90 a year for something that can save you more hours than that unless something is taking most of your money (say alimony or garnished wages from bankruptcy caused by our poor medical system). I prefer emacs and vs code to IDEA editors but that's just me. Even when I was at $50K a year I wouldn't have though twice about $90 for an editor (or other tool) if I thought it would save me time and cussing.
Your comment comes with a very big assumption that the trivial amount of money you spend really serves your needs and that all marketing material is true and comprehensive. When you buy something and then realize it’s not really solving your problems, then you might apply the same calculation, buy another tool based on some marketing copy, be disappointed and then finally come to a “let me research this space better before throwing money at undeserving people and services” mode. I’m not saying this is how it will always play out. But those who do spend some time researching and trying things out aren’t quite stupid either.
I would also contest your claim that a lot of the HN audience makes $200K a year. I’d wager that it’s a lot lesser.
I'm comparing software to software. I want to buy honest software. If I'm paying $100/year for some program, then I'm expecting that another program with similar cost would require similar amount of engineering effort. I'm ready to pay $100/year for operating system. I'm ready to pay $100/year for sophisticated graphical editor like Photoshop.
Paying similar price for simple software? Well, I would expect something like one-time purchase for $10, that's how much I'm paying usually for those kinds of programs.
It might sound a little bit communistic, I know. Sorry.
If I'm making $20k/year, I could pay $10k for Intellij Idea. Because it's essential for my work. But I'm paying $90, because Idea creators put a reasonable price. May be that's because they're in a hard competition with free tools, I don't know.
I don't get when people say $X/month is too much. Too much for you maybe. But for me, if I can save 1 hour per month, that's worth $500. That's the top of what I've charged per hour for some consulting gigs. So $10/m is literally nothing for me if I can save time. Time is your most valuable asset. Money is nothing. Focus on time.
Well, GP did say that was the top end of their hourly rate, so maybe not that much, but I think it's safe to say they're very solidly into six figures. Under those circumstances the calculus does no doubt change/ I don't think it reflects the reality experienced by the majority of people with less otherworldly remuneration, families, etc.
Not exactly. To make it equivalent first you need to consider employer side of FICA, which take about $100k. Then health insurance and other benefits. And vacation, sick pay, and any equipment you need to do the work.
Finally, maybe the biggest variable is non-billable hours. Maybe there isn’t 2000 hours of work available at that rate. And a lot of people who charge that much spend a substantial time finding new clients, writing new project proposals (many of which don’t get executed), and doing things to promote themselves like conference talks or speaking to press.
It would typically net out to anywhere from $500k-$900k depending on how much of those overheads you have. Nothing to sneeze at but similar ballpark as senior FAANG comp
I don't do consulting anymore, but I know plenty of consultants that gross over a million per year. Of course, business expenses, taxes, etc. bring their net income down considerably.
Great, I'm hoping you'll sign up for my upcoming weather widget which tells you the weather in a single location. It's only $30 a month, and it will save you time as you will no longer have to use any other weather widget.
At some point in the future I plan on offering additional locations (at a compellingly low per location monthly service fee TBD).
If I lived in that location, and that widget had a great UI, maybe combined some reminders (good morning, 70% chance of rain today, don't forget your umbrella!), maybe it integrated with my calendar and let me know I need to leave early if I'm in a location far away from where I need to be and it's snowing really bad.
And all of that is ignoring the possibility that the idea is to build into some other thing, but there's minimal advantage to waiting.
As great as the endless possibilities software offers are, it really obscures the amount of effort necessary to bring real world products to life. The jump in hubris from “Great, I can code!” to “Well, I could build a tool to do that, so no one deserves to make a living/profit/native app/business doing it” is waaaay too prevalent around here.
Of course none of the people who say such things could actually do so. Instead, they continue to post the aforementioned type of comment along with the following:
- Ask HN: Where are all the profitable ideas?
- Show HN: I built some half-assed idea that no one will ever use to learn the latest technology fad.
- Who’s Hiring: I hate my job at some random SaaS firm because I hypocritically don’t assign worth to building software.
Anyhow, where is this mythical weather widget getting its data? How reliable are its forecasts? What makes it better than the tools Apple/Google build into their OSes after spending millions acquiring formerly indie weather tools?
I pay for this its called Forecast bar (https://forecastbar.com) and I love it. Basically Dark Sky for your Mac. Not $30 a month, but there's different tiers of service depending on your needs.
Would I pay for this startups calendar? Probably not, but it seems nice, and I can definitely see people paying 2 cups of coffee a month for it.
I have been looking for a dark sky replacement for a while! Thank you, I just installed forecastbar. If it is even marginally approximate to the original dark sky, I am subscribing!
Luckily, I live in a place where the weather is the same for 6 months, before it changes and is the same again for 6 months. The ultimate time saver ;)
If every comment has to be suffixed with “for me” or “IMO”, it would be quite tedious to read. In most cases it’s clear. In cases like this, it could also be that the writer isn’t earning a six figure USD income or is in a country where even a $10 here and a $10 there add up relative to one’s income.
It’s also very easy to say that X is most valuable and Y is nothing when you have very limited X and have a lot of Y.
on the contrary, it's very important for people to distinguish clearly between statements of objective fact and personal opinions. they ought to do it more often. imo.
more on topic, time is inherently more valuable than money due to its fundamental scarcity. there are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in a person's life. if you have time, you can always trade it for money. but if you have money, you can't always exchange it for time.
I think it’s very clear that different people have different amounts of money and thus different ability and willingness to pay certain amounts for certain things.
I don't get it either when you consider most people drop $10/month on plenty of other things. I'm pretty sure I spend a decent multiple of that on coffee.
If you're someone whose main work tool is your calendar (C-level execs, PAs, salespeople, project managers, etc) then that puts it in exactly the same ballpark as you and Intellij Idea.
Even in the poorest of countries, $90/year is not too much for any serious (heck, even amateur) software developer. A coffee costs around $1 (in poor countries), that's $365/year and most people drink more than a cup per day.
Now that's a tool to actually work, not increase your productivity (or mess with it). So $90 is pretty affordable.
I'm really talking about home-made coffee (with some milk). Even in the cheapest countries, a cup of coffee (in a cafe) costs more than $1: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310492
People who are surviving on a $500-$2000/year budget, are not on the market for a full-fledged IDE.
first off, you're calling bulgaria, india etc. poor countries. relatively, okay, but op was about even poorer countries. But more to the point the prices you quoted were about buying coffee in restaurants. Most people drink their coffee at home (or at work) not in shops. And it's much cheaper then. E.g. I usually drink senseo and it costs me about 25 eurocents per cup.
You might be surprised but if coffee is imported, it might actually be cheaper in Europe than in these poor countries. Import duties, corruption, bad port infrastructure... all of these issues inflate costs.
There are plenty of completely free editors that are within striking distance of IDEA editors, and some of us even prefer them. $90 is fine since it's not a requirement for 99.9% of the coding jobs out there. I wouldn't be too worried that it is $90
> 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.
This. From my YC experience, I know that starting with a niche is good advice and advice they likely would have gotten.
Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.
Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"
Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!
Skeptical me says it's for collecting data about the users. The data and the analytics would be the actual value. Not the users, though, only to the investors.
I can see this going one of two ways: either nobody signs up, they get made fun of a bit, get the message and pivot, or the publicity they're generating gets the app in front of the niche they are targeting, they get users, feedback, and the ear of people who put this kind of value on the productivity boost they get.
Either way, I don't see the harm in putting it in front of people now, and I see a big downside to either polishing it more, or pivoting without having tested it on people.
>most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside
It’s enough that they made it into YC to conclude that there is a lot more going inside.
They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...
Regarding focusing on a niche it was a lesson I learned when I was filtering startups for investments I wrote about about my lesson before and how dumb I felt for passing on startups because they were too niche
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507122
> They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...
Plenty of people get into YC with nothing more than an idea.
Getting into YC is sort of like getting into Harvard. Yeah, lots of people there are impressive, but not all of them. YC doesn't have a perfect filter.
FWIW I got into YC without anything remotely resembling a business, and I don't think I'm that impressive. My company failed almost immediately.
I would claim it also doesn't want a perfect filter. Maybe the team is great and they expect the (future) pivot leading to success. Also failures are cheap for YC, they live on their successes.
Sure, but YC has definitely diluted its brand over the years. I don't think most people hold it in the same regard as they did a decade ago. I certainly don't.
I get why they do it. It's an easy way to make more money. But the average YC founder today is nothing like the average YC founder a decade ago. They will argue otherwise, but I disagree based on personal experience. And everybody knows YC was really started by pg (I am fully aware of the entire history), and he hasn't been actively involved for years.
Yes, you're right. In fact the founders practically say as much in their Launch HN post.
I'm assuming the reddit post is by someone who is just really unfamiliar with YC and modern tech entrepreneurship. Hopefully, their question was sincere and they'll receive sensible answers.
As for the question of whether YC has lost its way - most institutions lose their way at some point, so it's a fair question, but I don't think it's fair to single out this particular company.
I actually posted this on reddit (mainly to get other viewpoints besides the HN echo chamber), and I’m not new to the tech entrepreneurship scene. I’ve launched 3 startups, two bootstrapped that are chugging along quite well and a third one VC funded that is doing just ok.
This is less an attack on Superpowered as it is a critique of YC. I think the idea of a unified Notification Center is interesting but the space is quite simply too crowded. You have slack, plus all of the companies like station trying to solve the same problem with much more features and a much bigger moat. YC used to pick companies that were more or less going to be at least decently successful even if they had never encountered YC, while this one seems like it wouldn’t have been successful without YC.
It seems like YC has fully switched to the shotgun model of fund everything and see what sticks instead of the boutique smaller cohorts of the past. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but that also comes with a reputation change as well.
I use Itsycal which is sensibly the same thing, and it really changed my relationship with my calendar. I would never pay a subscription for such a widget, but for the value is provides I would gladly pay a fixed price.
Something was going to get sherlocked by a big fruit company or reinvented by a Chrome Extension for free or integrated into their own taskbar by a trillion dollar software company.
Am I right f.lux? I don't think we'll get an answer from this company if the 'competition' decides to go the way on what they did to f.lux.
Realizing a meeting is starting right now and then struggling to extract the Zoom link because the invite writer put it in some non-standard field or there's a surprise and it's some other meeting software happens often enough it's close to $10/month worth of pain.
I guess what I would worry about is can they handle strange link placement, different meeting software, and times when I'm double or triple booked with different meetings?
did y combinator ever find its way to begin with? besides making money, have any really useful things been funded by them? airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists
> airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists
If you leave aside the fact that it destroyed housing in many cities, like the one I live in. A handful of landlords got richer, turists could travel cheaper (not necessarily a good thing overall), but an entire class of citizens got kicked out of the city as now no landlord wants to regularly rent their flat.
If you ask for disruption, that's what you get. When you disrupt a market, you also disrupt many lives, even indirectly.
I haven't seen a lot of "hard" startups, more like "lets chuck money at this and see if people buy it and then get out after 3 years" companies of late.
The only purpose of wealth these days is to create more wealth. These accumulated assets are not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly:
>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups.
YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup.
YC and other seed investors are betting more on people than on the specific business plan. If a founding team seems really smart, skilled, and driven, but is working on an idea that doesn’t seem to make immediate business sense, then it can still be worth betting on that team, because one of two things is reasonably likely to happen:
1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to something else, which might be.
2. The team was actually perceiving an opportunity you didn’t understand, and the idea ends up being a big success.
This doesn’t have to work out all the time, or even most of the time - if you fund even one team that ends up pivoting into a runaway success, it pays for all the “bad” (in hindsight) bets that didn’t pay off.
There's even a third option when you bet on people: The company can get acqui-hired by a bigger fish who's already a big presence within the almost same problem space.
Doesn’t YC normally invest in the team rather than the idea? From their Launch HN post:
> We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem.
Based on the how it started / how’s it going, it looks like they started in YC with one idea and realized they needed to pivot. The fact that this is what they came up with isn’t great, but at least it’s something. It wasn’t their first idea and it probably won’t stick, but that’s not terrible. I don’t think this one single company is a valid criticism of the entire system. Failure is the default end state for startups, so you take the not as good with the unicorns. And at least this one is still going!
Apologies in advance for the nitpick, but if you're just dropping your product and doing something else that's not really a pivot. Pivoting is more like changing your plan than throwing it out - targeting a different audience, changing your product plan based on feedback, that sort of thing.
I’d call changing the entire plan a “hard pivot.” I mean Slack started out as a video game (and Flickr - same game IIRC). But as the counter point, here’s an article that argues against doing that in favor of simply shutting down (including comments from a YC partner no less)!
In this case though, the company is brand new. There aren’t a lot of employees involved. The valuations are low and most of the costs are sunk. There isn’t much to lose by trying something different. And they went from a video conferencing platform to managing scheduling for video conferences. It’s at least in the same ballpark.
I guess what I’d say is that it is completely fair to criticize the team for the product they made. It isn’t something I’d spend money on and is in a crowded market with existing players (both free and paid). Not the best plan.
But don’t criticize them for switching tracks. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But at this stage, I don’t see much downside in them trying.
I think it's always fair to criticise somebody's work - after all, starting a company is stepping into the public sphere. I don't know if what they're doing will be successful or not because I presume they've investigated the market more than I have. The proof is in the pudding though - we'll see in a few years if the idea was good or not!
Must be semantic drift then because my understanding of the definition in Lean Startup was that it was a moderate course correction based on what you learned, not throwing the whole thing out.
Semantic drift happens though, and pivot certainly sounds nicer than "we gave up to do something else", so it's liable to become a broader term out of sheer convenience.
"SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION: We share your Personal Information with third parties (analytics tools) to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use analytics tools to track our users to improve our product and provide a better experience."
Calendars, like contact lists, like emails, like all of the other personal content people produce everyday is sensitive. In lieu of saying how this is protected, apart from just saying it's simply used to make things better, I'm reluctant to link any accounts containing sensitive personal data to startups in search of a revenue-generating business model.
And this is for a paid product as well. Bit of a pisstake when they charge you for the product and spy on you through it. It's like when you pay for a streaming service and it still shows you ads (looking at you, Amazon).
It's hardly the dumbest thing to come out of YCombinator.
I think the other thing to remember is that these guys started with a videocall platform for professors, which is what won the pitch with the partners. Then they got cold feet and pivoted to this.
I also don't think a single bad investment ruins the YC brand.
- I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.)
- Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.
A subscription has to provide SOMETHING that I consider “ongoing” to be of value to me - 1Password syncing for example, or email - before I’ll consider it. Otherwise I’m looking for another option as I can’t be five and dimed to death by little subscriptions.
Do you consider "ongoing" to be synonymous with "server costs"? As someone trying to figure out a pricing model for a currently-local-only app, I'm genuinely curious.
Personally I've thought this over a few times as has many others.
As a software dev myself I'm fully aware that at least internet facing software must be maintained and that maintenance is actual work and should be paid.
On the other hand there are so many apps where a subscription feels flat out dumb, so here are some alternatives:
- tokens instead of subscriptions. Just don't make it another dumb whaling business or a toddler trap. E.g: local play free, networked game takes one token from one player. I'd be happy to not have to type payment details into my kids phones. You could even make a social thing out of it. Maybe I'll pay as much but 1. if I stop using it won't drain my bank account until I realize (making me feel stupid) 2. I don't lose access to my data.
- meaningful upgrades/add ons
- yearly releases
- monthly but with perpetual license for the last paid release (Jetbrains model)
I'll tack on: I've happily paid for Fantastical (which is a monthly subscription, granted), and it has the nice menubar interface, a button to join video calls (works with Teams, BlueJeans, Zoom, probably more), integration with ANY calendar system, and it's only $4.99 a month. And I get a full desktop app and iOS app with it, and regular significant updates. I'm not as put out by the subscription model here because this is an application I'd be renewing my license for every new release anyways.
My opinion on pricing for software is pretty straightforward:
If its a local app, cloud/sync/whatever "anything" should be optional/opt-in. Developers should charge an upfront fee for a point-in-time of that release, bug fixes are included for N years, but feature releases are available as an annual/whatever upgrade.
If cloud/sync/whatever makes sense for an app, then that should be available as a separate, monthly service fee. If it makes sense, then the developer can "bundle" both that monthly fee and the annual/whatever feature upgrade fee into a single subscription.
That unified subscription is what most apps do, but its important that it be separate and opt-in, while giving customers a way to pay you otherwise. That way, your revenue is aligned with customer happiness. I think back to the 1Password transition to the subscription model, where they left tons of customers behind on the non-sync product without giving them a way to pay; now, their revenue is not aligned with the success & happiness of those customers. They're still customers! Yeah, they're not paying you every month. They'll probably pay you again in the future. But, oh no, they can't fit into your MRR metrics that you need to communicate to investors; that's your problem, but you're making it the customer's problem, which means you're actually anti-customer.
If we're speaking of a website, then fundamentally, you've willfully unaligned your business model with any ability to price it transactionally. Maybe that's fine; if I think about something like Slack, that app makes zero sense to price transactionally, it's gonna be monthly, so I can't complain about that business model. But, Notion [1] is an example of an app which should have a transactional model; not everyone wants sync.
Everything is connected to Money. And, in software, I think the biggest reason why customers have began noticing how much slower and less reliable software has become is literally because of Money; its because every app now needs to be a web service. Because your app is a web service, it has to live on the web. It gets served to customers by underpowered AWS m5.large instances; did you know that your customer's iPhone is more performant than an m5-tier AWS instance? It has to travel a thousand miles over the internet. The data model lives in a database; your customer has a 5Gbps SSD hardwired to the PCI-E bus of their CPU, but instead, by putting the data In The Cloud, you're making sixteen network hops just to query for something.
None of this is better. Some of it is necessary, for some product domains, but don't fool yourself into thinking its better.
"Microsoft started out selling software and they still sell software. They haven't changed at all!"
"Facebook started with a social network and they're still a social network! They haven't changed at all!"
You're completely missing the point. You can do the same or similar things while starting with a small audience and scaling. Target a small pool to get product/market fit and gradually expand your target audience until you're a billion dollar company.
This comment is made with the hefty benefit of hindsight in which you can see what they've done since, and can now generalize to "electric cars" so that their whole arc has a cohesive narrative.
Fast forward 3 years with this company and if they build their unified notification inbox product, with the benefit of hindsight you could say "Superpowered started selling productivity software, and its still selling productivity software"
I have no idea if this company will pan out or not. But I do know it's very easy to craft historical narratives that seem so clear after the fact. I have watched many founders do it.
Well I guess the first order narrative around ycombinator is that they were successful by seeing opportunities that other investors missed. They think that you're like one of those investors, dismissing a company because they "are only creating a widget".
(Though certainly your assessment could be accurate, regardless)
Kind of a ridiculous product to find. When asked why a user needs to pay $10/mo, the answer was “We'd like to fall into the category of other consumer SaaS products”
That’s the reason? Just shows how jokes become reality - everything is a subscription because you can squeeze more money that way, not because of actual value.
I didn't read the objection as being that this company doesn't do enough for the common good of humanity, I read it as, this company doesn't have a large potential market.
Yes, you might read about Socially Responsible Investing.
Also, you can always contribute to charitable organizations. It's not an investment in the traditional sense, but changing the world to be 0.01% nicer is still a good investment.
Yup. Right now there is a rush to invest in African loan apps that have finally found ways to scalably extend credit to poor people in African countries. Hits a sweet spot between doing good and making business sense. There are also big investments in Africa into IOT companies that enable hire purchase for solar-powered home devices. Same sweet spot
If you are lucky enough to solve a complex problem and deliver value expressed in a simple widget, that is a perfect starting point for a much bigger business.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadBut in a world where, for example, a competing product like Fantastical already exists, costs less and does more, it does seem valid to be wondering what is going on.
I will not comment on whether this calendar app is revolutionary, it might not be, but it's also possible it is something that will make an impact. There's lots of untapped potential in the calendar and event space, in my opinion.
In the thread, it was obvious that for some people it would alleviate a pain : keeping track of synchronous events across multiple platforms.
Why? There's no shortage of more serious and productive problems to solve.
Looking at this product, I'd expect it to grow into a powerful, personal RPA product. They could build a high quality, MacOS-native view into all the APIs in your life, with automation tooling and a great mobile story.
But it has to start somewhere. :)
Step 2, ads!
Though in seriousness, YC has said it is more about funding people than specific projects. And who knows where this lands on the path to the destination.
Or they may see what we mere mortals can't see.
Modern innovation at its finest
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318
I'm not seeing some tipping point here. YC has always had startups that were a bit funny or outright weak sounding -- their investment strategy pretty much means the idea must initially sound bad in the pitch. They're aiming for things that are counter intutitive to give them an advantage.
And has some pretty successful alumni!
This product has many competitors in a crowded space, and the risk of being sherlock-ed.
Fixed link.
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.
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
I can only see that these guys are at risk of being sherlocked by Calendar.app, Google Calendar and Calendar.exe.
Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk.
to have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update. It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.
I'll bet the Pro HDR folks groaned and got drunk after the Apple event yesterday where they showed the HDR functionality built in to the OS. They got Sherlocked!
by franketh September 02, 2010
"Apple buy hundreds of companies every year. Being bought by Apple is a potentially a valid exit strategy."
if (yolo(money)) { pivot_me(money) } else { shutdown() }
>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
>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.
It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment.
Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Edit: 2 years after I left, Blackberry devices became Android devices... so I guess I was ahead of the curve or something?
Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(
I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.
I still have a Q10 somewhere, it's such a nice phone too.
Internally, 33% of every dollar went to the Blackberry Wireless division because Blackberry was created before commoditized mobile chips existed. In effect, this means we paid for the chips, paid an extra fee to unlock it just so we could flash our software.
It was an ongoing battle between the spec for Bluetooth being released and having our own version, validating it against every single thing out there that could connect to it and then shipping it out. This made it extremely pricy to deliver a feature on the wireless stack and often things just weren't supported which came with the original chipset.
It's difficult to turn the ship around without just firing everyone involved and going "just grab what's there just like Android is doing"
BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.
I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.
I want it to be really easy for people to get a hold of me if the information is important or if they are important to me, e.g. via SMS or voice.
I want it to be very difficult to be overwhelmed by low signal content unless that is my focus at the time, e.g. mailing lists, work email, etc.
And I want to be able to select my focus. When I am reading about mountain bikes, I want to read about mountain bikes. I don't want to sort through work messages, family memes, or tech news at the same time.
The last thing I want is for all of those to be jammed into one app.
Whilst I agree, that's an organizational problem as much as a technology one. Why is the business built upon so many apps?
So many different functions. My company is purely cloud and we use Google as much as possible, but we still have tons as we need a help desk, a task board, HR software, credential management, Office for some people, Udemy, etc.
Two, and this is where I think Superpowered, the company in question, will stumble, is that every attempt to unify these disparate needs has ended up into a unholy giant mess of "Enterprisey" software that tries to be all things to all people. Inevitably there's at least one key area where it sucks to bad for the table stakes requirement of that user base that they never adopt it, strike out on their own, and now you're back to "why do we have so many apps?".
1. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/05/202768...
Edit: this should have been a reply to the parent of your comment.
Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later.
I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.
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.
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.
Edit: or perhaps anti-unified...
Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unreasonable way to go about it. It’s important to have a larger vision, but execution is perhaps the most important in this space (as with most consumer tech).
I saw this and it resonated deeply with me. It's an exceedingly small paper cut, but a paper cut nonetheless.
I would rather club multiple slow steps requiring user action into one long wait time that I can completely ignore.
Also, if you want to make money selling software to consumers, Apple's platform is the one to target. Mac and iOS users are the most likely by far to actually pay for software. It's far more difficult to sell an app for actual money to Android or Windows users.
Again talking specifically about the consumer market here, not enterprise.
Trying the demo on three middle-aged individuals, two did not have the habit of hitting page down or scrolling. So, two out of three did not find the "obvious" content of the website below the video.
is what we have to concentrate on when we sell products. I am sitting in zoom sessions with individuals that complain about their "wireless" headphones failing / discharging. Yet they happily paid for them, hundreds of dollars. Consumers are magic. I suggested they use a wired headset. They will not spend 10 dollars to buy one. One should contemplate deeply why, if one wants to sell to people like this. Observe them in their natural habitat. They can't explain why.This is why having a digital product out in the market with paying customers is valuable in itself. You get to observe and measure, and pivot if you're lucky. The userbase is the resource, and the paying userbase is gold.
At this point, the answer is just network effect, but that certainly wasn't the case when it was new.
vertical scaling only works to a degree, and horizontal scaling while keeping the data as close to real-time as possible is nontrivial.
Sometimes it's also just a startup pivoting due to a misfire or system, e.g, regulatory, problems
I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
Serious question - hasn't it? I know there are other players in the space, but it's absolutely the #1 solution I think of.
Easy peasy.
This. Whenever someone quips "that's a feature not a product" the reply should be "so why were they able to ship this feature and you weren't". Technical debt, opportunity cost(s), mission focus are all opportunities for arbitrage.
Being able to breakout of that feature product into an expanded ecosystem before your product becomes a feature of a bigger platform is the real end game.
Dropbox addresses a real problem, it's just that the triviality of a business copying it means it became table stakes on a lot of platforms.
To be clear, my expected rate of problems for this functionality is “never.” The only service I have that experience with is Dropbox. With GDrive and One Drive I have seen folders lose sync, files get stuck syncing, and inexplicable conflicts.
In addition, sharing outside my org is way easier and more reliable with Dropbox.
I agree that copying files around seems like it should be trivial. Somehow it’s not, though. I don’t have an explanation, just observations from trying to get real work done on a Mac.
The magic of DropBox was that non-technical users could just share that word document, have it everywhere and not have to deal with a weird terminal.
I wished Drobox built a (physicals, why not) wall at their HQ with the names of everyone who was able to miraculously recover their masters/phd thesis after hardware failure because they saved it in their Dropbox folder.
Is it the UI? Is it keeping your data safe? Is it the sync?
I never used their native applications because I hate constant syncing for no reason and running proprietary apps (especially if they're always on), but I use some of their free tiers to store stuff.
If I had to pay I'd just buy some space on some server at the cheapest price per gb there is.
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 narrow scope than a "out the door" experience with a huge scope.
Absolutely. It's a common startup tactic to release a product that costs more and does less than existing alternatives to get market share and brand awareness. This is just basic stuff. Marketing 101.
Proving that the total addressable wallet is sufficient to sustain a YC company is a) non-trivial, and b) their problem. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there can be remarkably large markets in remarkably unexpected places, so while yes, this one looks like a totally conventional small-software-shop play, and the 75th percentile outcome across all YC companies is crater-shaped, I'm not going to second-guess whether they might have something.
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.
And maybe that's the intent.
If you're not Apple, where price insensitive customers beat down your door, then finding them is a non-trivial problem. And not just any customers, but ones who would be interested in your (I assume) follow-on product in a similar space.
I was just offering the way I would approach considering to buy something like this
Personally, I don’t think this tool would make me significantly more productive, but if it could truly save me a few hours a year maybe 120/yr isn’t that bad.
I would also contest your claim that a lot of the HN audience makes $200K a year. I’d wager that it’s a lot lesser.
Paying similar price for simple software? Well, I would expect something like one-time purchase for $10, that's how much I'm paying usually for those kinds of programs.
It might sound a little bit communistic, I know. Sorry.
If I'm making $20k/year, I could pay $10k for Intellij Idea. Because it's essential for my work. But I'm paying $90, because Idea creators put a reasonable price. May be that's because they're in a hard competition with free tools, I don't know.
Text editor for 30€ is a good business, everyone needs a text editor.
Database client for 30€ is probably a little less profitable, not as many people need that.
Client for a specific database like the protein data bank for 30€ -- well, you might sell two or three copies.
All of these are probably a similar amount of work, but you can't sell them for the same price.
That being said, a menu bar widget has such a huge market that I don't see why they are pricing it so high.
Finally, maybe the biggest variable is non-billable hours. Maybe there isn’t 2000 hours of work available at that rate. And a lot of people who charge that much spend a substantial time finding new clients, writing new project proposals (many of which don’t get executed), and doing things to promote themselves like conference talks or speaking to press.
It would typically net out to anywhere from $500k-$900k depending on how much of those overheads you have. Nothing to sneeze at but similar ballpark as senior FAANG comp
How long of chain of dependencies on other technologies does a conventional Meat Thermometer have?
At some point in the future I plan on offering additional locations (at a compellingly low per location monthly service fee TBD).
And all of that is ignoring the possibility that the idea is to build into some other thing, but there's minimal advantage to waiting.
If you want those features, you'll have to look at my competitors' more economy priced offerings, I'm afraid.
Of course none of the people who say such things could actually do so. Instead, they continue to post the aforementioned type of comment along with the following:
- Ask HN: Where are all the profitable ideas? - Show HN: I built some half-assed idea that no one will ever use to learn the latest technology fad. - Who’s Hiring: I hate my job at some random SaaS firm because I hypocritically don’t assign worth to building software.
Anyhow, where is this mythical weather widget getting its data? How reliable are its forecasts? What makes it better than the tools Apple/Google build into their OSes after spending millions acquiring formerly indie weather tools?
Would I pay for this startups calendar? Probably not, but it seems nice, and I can definitely see people paying 2 cups of coffee a month for it.
To make it crystal clear – it seems odd to launch a product that's much more expensive than your competition and delivers much less.
It’s also very easy to say that X is most valuable and Y is nothing when you have very limited X and have a lot of Y.
more on topic, time is inherently more valuable than money due to its fundamental scarcity. there are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in a person's life. if you have time, you can always trade it for money. but if you have money, you can't always exchange it for time.
However, if you work on your own product, you might save more than $10 per month indeed.
Now that's a tool to actually work, not increase your productivity (or mess with it). So $90 is pretty affordable.
People who are surviving on a $500-$2000/year budget, are not on the market for a full-fledged IDE.
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.
Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.
Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"
Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318
It's interesting to see they are branching out to smaller, lesser known more regional schools. Pretty far from their debut in Harvard/Kendall Square.
Never heard Stanford referred to as the "Waterloo of the United-States" either.
But hey, if you say so, I believe you internet stranger!
Either way, I don't see the harm in putting it in front of people now, and I see a big downside to either polishing it more, or pivoting without having tested it on people.
It’s enough that they made it into YC to conclude that there is a lot more going inside.
They filled out an application and had to have many milestones hit before they were accepted...
Regarding focusing on a niche it was a lesson I learned when I was filtering startups for investments I wrote about about my lesson before and how dumb I felt for passing on startups because they were too niche https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507122
Plenty of people get into YC with nothing more than an idea.
Getting into YC is sort of like getting into Harvard. Yeah, lots of people there are impressive, but not all of them. YC doesn't have a perfect filter.
FWIW I got into YC without anything remotely resembling a business, and I don't think I'm that impressive. My company failed almost immediately.
I get why they do it. It's an easy way to make more money. But the average YC founder today is nothing like the average YC founder a decade ago. They will argue otherwise, but I disagree based on personal experience. And everybody knows YC was really started by pg (I am fully aware of the entire history), and he hasn't been actively involved for years.
It may be "Mac first" rather than "Mac only".
I'm assuming the reddit post is by someone who is just really unfamiliar with YC and modern tech entrepreneurship. Hopefully, their question was sincere and they'll receive sensible answers.
As for the question of whether YC has lost its way - most institutions lose their way at some point, so it's a fair question, but I don't think it's fair to single out this particular company.
This is less an attack on Superpowered as it is a critique of YC. I think the idea of a unified Notification Center is interesting but the space is quite simply too crowded. You have slack, plus all of the companies like station trying to solve the same problem with much more features and a much bigger moat. YC used to pick companies that were more or less going to be at least decently successful even if they had never encountered YC, while this one seems like it wouldn’t have been successful without YC.
It seems like YC has fully switched to the shotgun model of fund everything and see what sticks instead of the boutique smaller cohorts of the past. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but that also comes with a reputation change as well.
Said nobody ever!
It is literally three clicks away...
1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button
I use Itsycal which is sensibly the same thing, and it really changed my relationship with my calendar. I would never pay a subscription for such a widget, but for the value is provides I would gladly pay a fixed price.
Something was going to get sherlocked by a big fruit company or reinvented by a Chrome Extension for free or integrated into their own taskbar by a trillion dollar software company.
Am I right f.lux? I don't think we'll get an answer from this company if the 'competition' decides to go the way on what they did to f.lux.
I guess what I would worry about is can they handle strange link placement, different meeting software, and times when I'm double or triple booked with different meetings?
If you leave aside the fact that it destroyed housing in many cities, like the one I live in. A handful of landlords got richer, turists could travel cheaper (not necessarily a good thing overall), but an entire class of citizens got kicked out of the city as now no landlord wants to regularly rent their flat.
If you ask for disruption, that's what you get. When you disrupt a market, you also disrupt many lives, even indirectly.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-scam-london
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots
>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups.
YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup.
1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&i...
1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to something else, which might be.
2. The team was actually perceiving an opportunity you didn’t understand, and the idea ends up being a big success.
This doesn’t have to work out all the time, or even most of the time - if you fund even one team that ends up pivoting into a runaway success, it pays for all the “bad” (in hindsight) bets that didn’t pay off.
Don't invest in ideas invest in people.
> We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem.
Based on the how it started / how’s it going, it looks like they started in YC with one idea and realized they needed to pivot. The fact that this is what they came up with isn’t great, but at least it’s something. It wasn’t their first idea and it probably won’t stick, but that’s not terrible. I don’t think this one single company is a valid criticism of the entire system. Failure is the default end state for startups, so you take the not as good with the unicorns. And at least this one is still going!
https://www.reforge.com/brief/why-hard-pivots-in-startups-ar...
In this case though, the company is brand new. There aren’t a lot of employees involved. The valuations are low and most of the costs are sunk. There isn’t much to lose by trying something different. And they went from a video conferencing platform to managing scheduling for video conferences. It’s at least in the same ballpark.
I guess what I’d say is that it is completely fair to criticize the team for the product they made. It isn’t something I’d spend money on and is in a crowded market with existing players (both free and paid). Not the best plan.
But don’t criticize them for switching tracks. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But at this stage, I don’t see much downside in them trying.
The word 'pivot' in the startup context is used to mean precisely that.
Semantic drift happens though, and pivot certainly sounds nicer than "we gave up to do something else", so it's liable to become a broader term out of sheer convenience.
"SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION: We share your Personal Information with third parties (analytics tools) to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use analytics tools to track our users to improve our product and provide a better experience."
Calendars, like contact lists, like emails, like all of the other personal content people produce everyday is sensitive. In lieu of saying how this is protected, apart from just saying it's simply used to make things better, I'm reluctant to link any accounts containing sensitive personal data to startups in search of a revenue-generating business model.
I think the other thing to remember is that these guys started with a videocall platform for professors, which is what won the pitch with the partners. Then they got cold feet and pivoted to this.
I also don't think a single bad investment ruins the YC brand.
- I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.)
- Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.
Same. I often see good software then see they run on a subscription model and nope right out of there.
If it was a one-off reasonable price I'd pay.
Sometimes I am happy to pay a small yearly fee if it's real nice software and I wanna support the dev.
But monthly subscriptions is stupid to me.
As a software dev myself I'm fully aware that at least internet facing software must be maintained and that maintenance is actual work and should be paid.
On the other hand there are so many apps where a subscription feels flat out dumb, so here are some alternatives:
- tokens instead of subscriptions. Just don't make it another dumb whaling business or a toddler trap. E.g: local play free, networked game takes one token from one player. I'd be happy to not have to type payment details into my kids phones. You could even make a social thing out of it. Maybe I'll pay as much but 1. if I stop using it won't drain my bank account until I realize (making me feel stupid) 2. I don't lose access to my data.
- meaningful upgrades/add ons
- yearly releases
- monthly but with perpetual license for the last paid release (Jetbrains model)
Continual improvement also counts as ongoing - but for many small utilities there’s only so much you can improve.
A good thing I’ve seen is a subscription where you can buy a “lifetime” for what is probably 2x expected subscription value or something.
I don't see why I'd pay more for less here.
If its a local app, cloud/sync/whatever "anything" should be optional/opt-in. Developers should charge an upfront fee for a point-in-time of that release, bug fixes are included for N years, but feature releases are available as an annual/whatever upgrade.
If cloud/sync/whatever makes sense for an app, then that should be available as a separate, monthly service fee. If it makes sense, then the developer can "bundle" both that monthly fee and the annual/whatever feature upgrade fee into a single subscription.
That unified subscription is what most apps do, but its important that it be separate and opt-in, while giving customers a way to pay you otherwise. That way, your revenue is aligned with customer happiness. I think back to the 1Password transition to the subscription model, where they left tons of customers behind on the non-sync product without giving them a way to pay; now, their revenue is not aligned with the success & happiness of those customers. They're still customers! Yeah, they're not paying you every month. They'll probably pay you again in the future. But, oh no, they can't fit into your MRR metrics that you need to communicate to investors; that's your problem, but you're making it the customer's problem, which means you're actually anti-customer.
If we're speaking of a website, then fundamentally, you've willfully unaligned your business model with any ability to price it transactionally. Maybe that's fine; if I think about something like Slack, that app makes zero sense to price transactionally, it's gonna be monthly, so I can't complain about that business model. But, Notion [1] is an example of an app which should have a transactional model; not everyone wants sync.
Everything is connected to Money. And, in software, I think the biggest reason why customers have began noticing how much slower and less reliable software has become is literally because of Money; its because every app now needs to be a web service. Because your app is a web service, it has to live on the web. It gets served to customers by underpowered AWS m5.large instances; did you know that your customer's iPhone is more performant than an m5-tier AWS instance? It has to travel a thousand miles over the internet. The data model lives in a database; your customer has a 5Gbps SSD hardwired to the PCI-E bus of their CPU, but instead, by putting the data In The Cloud, you're making sixteen network hops just to query for something.
None of this is better. Some of it is necessary, for some product domains, but don't fool yourself into thinking its better.
[1] https://notion.so
How many months/years of maintenance (“warranty”) do you typically expect to be priced into a one-time purchase price for software?
However, it might be just a little tiny thing that they want to do. They launched ASAP. They've got some feedback. Etc.
Next thing might be that they will reinvent the way we use calendars. Who knows? Not YC. But they will give it a shot.
You start small (even if you have a trillion dollar ambitions), you grow.
"Facebook started with a social network and they're still a social network! They haven't changed at all!"
You're completely missing the point. You can do the same or similar things while starting with a small audience and scaling. Target a small pool to get product/market fit and gradually expand your target audience until you're a billion dollar company.
Fast forward 3 years with this company and if they build their unified notification inbox product, with the benefit of hindsight you could say "Superpowered started selling productivity software, and its still selling productivity software"
I have no idea if this company will pan out or not. But I do know it's very easy to craft historical narratives that seem so clear after the fact. I have watched many founders do it.
This app is ridiculous, but maybe they had a good pitch or whatever, who knows.
And if you have such a giant portfolio, they cannot all be diamonds.
(Though certainly your assessment could be accurate, regardless)
That’s the reason? Just shows how jokes become reality - everything is a subscription because you can squeeze more money that way, not because of actual value.
I mean, no disrespect on yc, but it performs what it says on the tin. It's a business for businesses.
Idk. I have tempered expectations moreso than some I guess.
You've got a point, I just wonder how egregious is TOO much.
Also, you can always contribute to charitable organizations. It's not an investment in the traditional sense, but changing the world to be 0.01% nicer is still a good investment.
If you are lucky enough to solve a complex problem and deliver value expressed in a simple widget, that is a perfect starting point for a much bigger business.