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Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
- ColinWright 11y agoHmm: 502 Bad Gateway Plus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10754546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10754546
- nautical 11y agoStill down http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ycgiftideas.com.html http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ycgiftideas.com.html
- jl 11y agoSorry, not sure what happened but right after I launched this, my computer crashed! My blog post: https://blog.ycombinator.com/holiday-gift-ideas-from-y-combinator-companies https://blog.ycombinator.com/holiday-gift-ideas-from-y-combi... This was a lot of fun and came together really fast given the time constraints. Colleen was amazing and did the write-ups quickly. I've been working frantically to get this out. Still needs work though. Please send comments. But first, I need to go drink some water as I haven't left my desk in many hours. UPDATE: as I suspected, my inbox is exploding with emails from other YC startups with gift ideas. Will update as fast as I can.
- minimaxir 11y agoIt should be much more explicit on the gift site itself that the site is a Y Combinator property. (I see the logo now, but it is easy to miss) I honestly thought it was a fan page at first since there is no clarification on who the "We" is that selected the companies.
- bdegman 11y agoWish this was posted a week ago :)
- cfcef 11y agoI was thinking about Instapainting, but then I realized - way too late for Christmas.
- ethbro 11y agoThat was one of the tabs I opened. I was kind of hoping they offered gift certificates. My use case is probably letting the recipient choose the photo.
- chrischen 11y agoWe discontinued gift certificates while we develop something unique. But you can place an order without uploading a photo and we create a project page after the order. You can send this page and it lets the recipient upload their photo and talk with the artist.
- chrischen 11y agoOK, just built the Gift Card feature: http://www.instapainting.com/gift-card http://www.instapainting.com/gift-card You can specify a recipient email at checkout and we'll send them instructions via a special page where they upload photos, talk to the artist, and track the status with the pricing hidden. Because I'm lazy, your recipient won't know what type of painting or what size until the artist is finished. But let's just call that a feature for now ;).
- caskance 11y agoReading the description of Memebox after it caught my eye while scrolling was by far the largest disappointment I've had today.
- __jal 11y agoTypo on the Pebble ad. "...models are 20% just…"
- buechs 11y agoGood catch! I pinged Colleen. Thank you!
- hn9780470248775 11y agoSkyMall is back!
- nostromo 11y agoYet.ly: a yeti statue that monitors your heart rate, sleeping patterns and stress level, just like a real yeti.
- adevine 11y agoI'm not sure whether I'm happy or sad that I know exactly which Yeti statue you are referring to.
- krisdol 11y agoNow we just need monthly subscription boxes of personalized skymall and as-seen-on-tv ridiculousness, delivered and assembled by independent contractors
- spydertennis 11y agoyeah and its dope now
- notliketherest 11y agoThis website design makes me feel queasy.
- abuehrle 11y agoOh man, Pantelligent is the perfect gift for one of my family members, but it's backordered until next year! Such a bummer. Wish I knew about it sooner.
- compumike 11y ago(Pantelligent co-founder here.) Sorry about that! We got some amazing reviews / press coverage [see TIME Magazine, Macworld, a few others] in November and all our inventory got sold super fast. We're building more as fast as we can right now.
- guelo 11y agoYou could go for the smart countertop grill with an iphone app.
- biot 11y agoJust buy an electric skillet for a fraction of the cost and then use one of the many cooking apps out there which already prompt you with times, etc. An electric skillet has the benefit that it will keep precise temperature without any action on your part. Pantelligent seems to have reinvented an expensive solution for a problem that was solved over half a century ago: http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=electric+skillet+vintage http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=electric+skillet+vintage
- tlb 11y agoI prefer my Pantelligent because I can clean it like a normal pan (with soap and water in the sink), instead of like an electrical appliance (wiping carefully, trying not to get most of it wet). Also, it heats up faster so you can cook eggs in 4 minutes (1 pre-heating, 3 cooking).
- biot 11y agoMany electric skillets are fully submersible and dishwasher safe. They pretty much all have removable plugs that has the thermostat control and what's left is a sealed unit. As for heating up, that's a function of your skillet vs. stove wattage which varies from appliance to appliance.
- darrelld 11y agoThe LeTote link is broken. Goes to ttps//letote.com/gift_cards :)
- jl 11y agofixed
- sotojuan 11y agogive me tap! looks perfect for me. Guess I'm getting myself a small gift.
- janus24 11y agoIn France we almost have the same thing, it's call Noël de la French Tech [1] (Christmas of the French Tech). It's been three years now and it's wonderful to find Made In France christmas gift ! [1] http://noeldelafrenchtech.fr http://noeldelafrenchtech.fr
- penelopeliot 11y agoAnd we even created an English version this year with products that ship internationally :) You can check it out here: http://frenchxmas.com/ http://frenchxmas.com/
- praveenster 11y agoL better not a beta product.
- bduerst 11y agoCan you print the Spark Gift out at all? This is perfect for a gift exchange.
- bobhaigler 11y agoYes, you can print out a commemorative certificate and a gift card. A sample is available to view before purchase.
- thesimon 11y agoSparkGift seems to be for US-residents only. Does someone know an alternative for Europe?
- bobhaigler 11y agoYes, currently we're only setup for US residents. Europe is on the roadmap, but unfortunately we're not there yet :) Happy to answer any questions.
- colmvp 11y agoSome great ideas here. I really like Level Frames. Will definitely use them in the future for my space. The site makes me wish YC kept a publicly filterable curated list of products from YC companies that included these things like pretty images and a tagline that captures exactly what the company does.
- tedmiston 11y agoThat could be an interesting weekend project. I'm thinking roughly: - scrape the list from http://yclist.com/ - filter the ones that sell a physical product (somehow) - write a tiny scraper for each site's store (oh god) or try import.io - (potentially) bake in your referral code for each site
- yoodenvranx 11y agoSorry for ranting, but this type of modern webdesign and "user interface" is _horrible_. Who in their right mind thinks that putting a button called "Show me the list" dead center of the page? Hey guys, I have a novel idea: instead of adding a button, just _show_ me that list! And do you know what happens if you press that button? The website scrolls down a ~300 pixels and then you can see the first 1.8 entries of that list!? F*ck this shit! You have ~900 vertical pixels at your disposal and all you manage to do is to show me TWO lousy items? I actually tried to scroll down the list and it took me FORTYFOUR (!) scrolls of my mouse wheel to reach the end of the page. 44 scrolls to see a list of just 40 items?! This is horrible! In what world do you live if you think that this is a good user experience. There is a lot of stuff killing the web right now, but one of the things nobody ever talks about is this horrible "modern" design which is nothing more than a wasteland of white padding, waste of space, way too large fonts and oversized picture banners which take way too much bandwidth too load. In my opinion we should introduce a whitespace-to-content or padding-to-content ratio which punishes bad webdesign. Another offender for this is medium.com. Yes, it has good content, but you have to hunt for it in the wast amount of padding and oversized images. Just go and have a look at the mediums frontpage. What do you see? A few words, two buttons and a large image. In order to see any content you have to scroll down and even then they manage to only show you 2 items at the same time. If you want to see more you have to scroll constantly. /rant
- asdfologist 11y agoAgreed. It's a fad. This too shall pass.
- e0 11y agoAnd to pile on, whose bright idea was it to add items that aren't even available? Cinder, Eight, and Nebia look cool and all, but summer 2016 is a little too late for a holiday gift, n'est-ce pas?
- jl 11y agoIt was my (Jessica Livingston) idea. I'm giving one of these as a gift to someone who will love it and am simply printing a picture of it. Not as great as the real thing on Christmas Day for sure, but I'm hoping they'll still be pleased.
- run4yourlives2 11y agoI look at this site and a part of me thinks that there is a segment of the population that is seemingly incapable of doing very basic things like sleeping, cooking or buying clothes without being handheld by the computer in their phone. I'm being a little overboard of course, but I really wonder how dependent we will be on our machines to survive at all in a generation or two.
- wyldfire 11y agoI think that sites like this and similar ones become a real culture. And it's a much more uniform culture than the world had known in previous centuries. So there's a great opportunity to share culturally relevant items like this -- here's something I think you can take advantage of during this season.
- jdminhbg 11y agoCompared to your ancestors 100, 1000, 10,000, and 100,000 years ago, you're hopelessly dependent on machines and technology to survive. Fortunately you can harness the surplus energy and attention you aren't dedicating to just getting by in everyday life to do more productive and amazing things.
- run4yourlives2 11y agoNo, not really. (I mean, I don't want to come off as a Luddite by any means, but...) I'm 40, so perhaps things have changed a bit more than those younger than me, but I can still make most food from scratch ingredients, have no issues sleeping outside in the cold, and can iron and mend my own clothes. I don't really see that much of a difference between myself and a person 100 or 1000 years ago, spare electricity, and I certainly don't need that in any real meaningful way. Perhaps it's a generational gap, perhaps it's my jaded old fart genes kicking in, but I look at this list and I see, for lack of a more fitting phase - a lot of useless shit. I mean, who the heck justifies a smartphone controlled grill? Who's next purchase priority is a $250 blanket that you program with your smartphone to keep different areas of the bed warm? Is there really a demand for a gadget that helps with your mindfulness and tells you to calm down? Isn't that what a good friend is for? Granted, there are certainly a lot of items that do seem to have useful needs - and I love that many of them seem geared towards sustainability and such, but my god I don't think every single article on the planet needs to be "smart". Then again, I'm a person that still doesn't see the use case behind the smart watch (that's dependent on the phone in your pocket, at least), so maybe I'm just completely out of touch. At any rate...don't read too much into my comment, I'm not as trite as I probably sound. Just getting a little put off by the trend that seems to be focused on using technology to power hyper-narcissism ("Your own shampoo flavour!") in the name of positive technological advances. :-/
- teddyh 11y agoSome of the pictures are ridiculous: The Pantelligent picture just shows a picture of a box with “Pantelligent” written on it, not the actual product. The uBiome one is straight-up meaningless clip-art (of a robot holding a wrapped present) with the company logo badly pasted on. Sure, the nature of the product makes it hard to get a picture of it, but the clip-art could most certainly have been chosen better. The Craft Coffee one only shows pictures of text-only ads for the product, not what you would get when you actually subscribe.
- cpach 11y agoWow. So many YC companies I had never heard of!
- taneem 11y agoIt would be fairer to the companies at the bottom of the list if you had the list randomly resort itself with each page load, instead of being rendered in alphabetical order.
- spydertennis 11y agoyeah but then it would be harder to find things when revisiting the list. oh wait you cookie everyone and preserve the order on an individual basis. sick.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- teng 11y agoYea the list was getting long, so the site was updated with categories!
- therobot24 11y ago> Eight is a smart bed cover that learns about you and improves and personalizes your sleep experience -- you can even program one side of the bed to be a different temperature than the other. Starting at $249, Eight is available now for pre-order and set to ship in April 2016. LOL wut? After scrolling through the rest, this has to be one of the best collections of first-world problem junk.
- lquist 11y agoHonest question: Are you serious? What kind of person thinks to themselves, "Man, I really wish I had a gift idea list based on a particular financial investor."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- prawn 11y agoThink of this as like a department store catalogue. When you get a catalogue, do you comment "Man, I really wish I had a gift idea list based only on things stocked by a particular store", or just accept that it's marketing/inspiration of a particular category or supplier?
- rhino369 11y agoMost gift lists are all the same. This one is sort of outside the box. I enjoyed it.
- arasmussen 11y agoMe too. It actually had things on it I'm considering buying.
- kissickas 11y agoCool idea, some great products there. But why would pre-order only items be included in this time-sensitive list? As a side note, I am shocked at how non-HN-user-friendly most of these sites are. I saw an insane number of tracking scripts blocked and most were rendered completely unusable without JS.
- physcab 11y agoThanks for putting this together. I peruse HN pretty much everyday and I haven't heard of half of these products. Pretty neat.
- jl 11y agoRather than responding to everyone's complaints about the site: I whipped this together in less than a day, I was mostly focused on content, no one at YC who usually makes beautiful designs was available to help, I can't program, I'm using Strikingly, this is version 1. I'm happy to get feedback, but please go easy on me. We will plan much further in advance next year and make it easy to scroll through ideas and look beautiful and not be annoying in the countless ways it seems to be currently :)
- jameshk 11y agoThanks for making this! Lots of great ideas, and it's easily readable.
- pavornyoh 11y agoFor what you set out to accomplish in the short amount of time you had, it works and good job. Really like Instapainting and just forwarded it on to a few people:).
- rokhayakebe 11y agoNot knowing who made it and why, my first reaction was: "I won't be buying anything, but I want THIS UI for my online shopping."
- matt_morgan 11y agoNext year be ready for Hanukkah and I'm on board :-). You did a nice job.
- jl 11y agoFor sure in time for Hanukkah!
- pavornyoh 11y agoI know you did this for the holidays but why not just let it continue after the holidays? For example, it can be YC Online store (small one) where little things can be purchased from exclusively. So instead of buying Founders at work from Amazon, it can come from the YC store instead? Just a food for thought..
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- trevmckendrick 11y agoI don't understand any of the negatively about the items or the site. I just sent the site to my mom. She could pick anything and it'd be a great gift, it's that good.
- therobot24 11y agoi'm sure the negativity stems from seeing most of this stuff as the tech equivalent of junky bed, bath, and beyond "unitaskers" - you know the type: strawberry huller, banana slicer, etc. In reality, this list is a YC version of thinkgeek. Kinda fun, but most of it is utterly useless.
- duck 11y agoHonest question - how does something like Level Frames (and lots of others I see here that I've never heard of) meet this definition of a startup - http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html?
- karmacondon 11y agoThis is a great idea, but it seems like it would be more effective if there were fewer items listed. It took me quite a bit of effort to go through the list from top to bottom. An unsolicited suggestion: Maybe it would be best to have to "Buy From YC Companies" page or something like that, and then just select 6-8 of them on a separate "for the holidays" page. At least that way an everyday consumer could quickly scan the list without having to read 20+ startup descriptions (which can be tiring, even for the hn crowd). Personally, I thought it was worth the read. I had no idea that many of these companies were YC backed, or that some of them existed at all.
- tedmiston 11y agoPerhaps small categories would be beneficial. I read and opened almost every item anyway though. Personally, I'd like to view pre-launch items and gift cards separately from everything else.
- socialist_coder 11y agoIt pains me to see so many "first world problem" solvers. Nothing can illustrate the problem of the startup tech industry not tackling "real problems" like this list. And hey, I can't even talk; I make freemium mobile apps so it's not like I'm solving real problems either. It just sucks and I wish it was sexier and more profitable to go after real problems rather than silly stuff like e-sheets or digital frying pans that perfectly cook your grass feed beef steaks.
- jl 11y agoI hear you, though some folks will feel as if you are dismissing the impact of their products (e.g. Watsi). If it helps, check out (to name just a few randomly): http://www.helionenergy.com/ http://www.helionenergy.com/ http://bikanta.com/ http://bikanta.com/ http://ixchelsci.com/ http://ixchelsci.com/ http://www.standardcyborg.com/ http://www.standardcyborg.com/ https://www.detroitwaterproject.org/ https://www.detroitwaterproject.org/ http://www.oolusolar.com/ http://www.oolusolar.com/ http://bagaveev.com http://bagaveev.com
- woah 11y agoI would dismiss a lot of stuff on that list, but not the e-frying pan. Automating cooking could be a huge labor-saver, and really help with women's rights, like the washing machine in the last century.
- socialist_coder 11y agoI guess you could also argue that a lot of this stuff is a stepping stone towards a Star Trek future. We'll never get robots preparing our food if we don't start with e-frying pans, right?
- simplexion 11y agoI wouldn't bother with that automatic device. It is very expensive for a bluetooth odb2 device. You can buy them for bugger all on Amazon and buy the Torque app for $5.
- vacri 11y agoAs an aside, gift certificates/cards aren't particularly suitable for a 'gift idea' list. Gift cards are what you give when you can't think of anything.
- lkfnlkewmf 11y agoIsn't what sirum is doing illegal?
- secondbond 11y agoFantastic. I am surprised to learn that people gift condoms too for christmas.
- ing33k 11y agoI got some startup ideas after visiting this ;)
- egeozcan 11y ago> Sirum connects unopened, expired medications to patients in need. I guess it was supposed to be "unexpired".
- teng 11y agoAh thanks for this. Fixed now!
- onion2k 11y agoThe "Function of Beauty" link takes you to a page that asks you to enter the name and email address of the recipient - they're asking you to enter someone else's personal information. That's appalling.
- bambax 11y agoThe Vanhawks bike looks incredibly gorgeous (first time I learned of its existence), however isn't it better to buy a smart sports watch like the Garmin Fenix for example, and use any bike with it? Also: no mudguards??