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Ask HN: What are some successful startups built on top of other services?

14 points by tzz ↗ HN
Are there any successful startups built solely on top of other services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google App or others?

20 comments

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mercwear
Gnip (http://gnip.com/) was just bought by Twitter. I would argue that they built their whole business on top of twitter & other social media companies.
calcsam
Zynga was basically built on top of Facebook. Upworthy was built on link traffic from FB. Then FB changed the way they allowed / promoted sharing and both companies took a hit.
mirador
Dropbox and Heroku are built on top of AWS (amongst thousands of other companies)
eam
And also many companies are built on top of Heroku...

TwitPic on top of Twitter.

jiggy2011
They use aws as infrastructure but aren't inseparably welded to it. They could presumably switch to hosting elsewhere without changing their product itself.
cnaut
You can see them as abstractions of AWS in some ways. An average consumer wouldn't go through the trouble of dealing with AWS to backup their files and even for developers heroku provides a nice level of abstraction
mirador
Agreed, that's the way I've seen these companies. AWS has truly become a layer that powers a huge part of the applications on the web.
x-separator
Youtube was originally a Myspace widget.
aesopwolf
Really? Do you have a source?
mailarchis
Search for jawed karims talk at CMU I guess. One of the key reasons of YouTube fast growth was the HTML snippet that you could embed in you MySpace page.
anthony_franco
I remember MySpace ended up blocking YouTube from their site. And YouTube, a small startup at the time, turned to their users to plead to MySpace to activate them again. A few weeks later, they were back in business. But it's interesting to know how close YouTube was to hitting the deadpool.

Edit: Dug up an older article about it: http://www.blogherald.com/2005/12/22/myspace-users-angry-ove...

pydanny
Never heard this before. Got a source?
dapvincent
NextBigSound is built on top of plenty of social media companies.
alinajaf
AppointmentReminder by patio11 relies pretty heavily on Twilio AFAIK.
bdunn
Baremetrics (https://www.baremetrics.io) by Josh Pigford is built off of Stripe. There are also a handful of dunning-related services that sit on top of Stripe, also.
chrmaury
Siri was built--and still relies--on Dragon Mobile Speech Recognition from Nuance
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ig1
Lots in the social media space (ad tools, social analytics, crm, big data tools) also in the enterprise space (i.e add-ons for Salesforce, SAP, etc.)