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Show HN: Superwidget

19 points by ivankirigin 11y ago

ivankirigin 11y ago
Hey folks, I used to run growth at Dropbox. I ran dozens of optimization tests on top of the referral program and sharing flows. Now my startup YesGraph (YC W15) launched a widget that has all the same powerful sharing features. Our contact importer is actually 30% faster than Dropbox too -- I tested :) The link in this post is to an announcement post. Try it out for free without creating an account in YesGraph here: https://www.yesgraph.com/demo/ https://www.yesgraph.com/demo/
carolynjoneslee 11y ago
I was the lead engineer on this project--thoughts and feedback welcome :D
tacone 11y ago
This is the third attempt at this niche I see on HN. I guess there's definitely a market for this, so good luck :)
- ivankirigin 11y ago
  We don't consider other referral program competitors. We want to help them level up and work with our API to recommend contacts to invite. We're in talks with a few right now actually :)
jbob2000 11y ago
This is a really cool piece of functionality, but what surprises me the most is that they're trying to build a business around it. I would have never thought that this was enough of a problem to justify paying for. (Not intended as a negative comment. When I read the site, I thought it was going to be a node plugin or something...)
- ivankirigin 11y ago
  Actually this just makes adding our real product (recommended invites) very, very easy. Here is the VC pitch: YesGraph is replacing Facebook Connect. Instead of building a lobster trap social network and giving that data to developers, YesGraph is helping developers do more with their data (like imported email contacts and mobile address books). This is a big deal when you think about it. The "single line of code" seems like a small deal, but dramatically lowers the cost of more apps getting on YesGraph.
kentbrew 11y ago
Great to see the unminified source for Superwidget online.
- ivankirigin 11y ago
  Repo: https://github.com/YesGraph/yesgraph-superwidget https://github.com/YesGraph/yesgraph-superwidget This is the normal include: https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.min.js https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.min.js Just remove the "min" if you're, for example, debugging. https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.js https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.js
joeld42 11y ago
This looks really good. I've seen quite a few half-baked internal implementations of this kind of thing, it certainly seems to me worth paying for for a well-built, drop in one of these. A couple of questions.. How does the pricing work? If I sign up for the $199 tier and suddenly get 10058 users, does it block new referrals, or do I suddenly owe you $400? Are the contacts shared between installs? e.g. does my install "learn" from other company's installs? I tried it out and it picked some pretty bad recommendations, one was a well-known blogger who I had emailed once years ago, one was one of my other email addresses with the same name, and only the third checked suggestion was a good suggestion, a friend who I might actually recommend something to. A lot of the unchecked items on the "top" list were weird emails that I wasn't even sure why they were in my address book. Still, the invite interface was nice, and even with odd suggestions this is something I'd use. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!
- ivankirigin 11y ago
  Without our recommendations those "weird" emails are what everyone would see. There is a lot of noise in contacts. We have a pretty good blacklist, and it's getting better all the time. We'll soon have enough data to make the blacklist more automated -- essentially classifying patterns of email automatically. Right now, it's a whack-a-mole. This is a big focus of ours. The ranking for this demo example is only pretty good because not many people have used this flow. We just launched today. Normally we have a lot more data to train the ranking. We do extract patterns across thousands of users. For example, do people tend to invite those with the same last name? To enable this learning, we do keep the data around, but we don't share contact data across apps. We aren't a data broker. The basic model is that we won't send more contact data than a user already shared with you. But we do try to find more signal to help with the ranking, and that can include, for example, counting mutual contacts that we learn from any source. Again, this data isn't shared back, it only informs our ranking. As far as pricing, it's based on the number of address books -- not your user count. So the free tier actually covers a social graph with around 1M edges -- which is a huge value. No, the service doesn't automatically shut off or anything like that. If the pricing doesn't fit your app (e.g. you're very high scale and a free app), just email me: ivan@yesgraph.com We already priced things to match a high scale B2C app, so this pricing is a steal for most users.
eschutte2 11y ago
I want to try this, so I tried signing up for SendGrid but got an instant rejection for unknown reasons. I think the many-step setup involving multiple vendors is a bit of an obstacle here... although maybe it's a net positive for you to weed out less committed buyers. Do you think you could manage the email API on behalf of your users at least for low volumes? Wondering if there's a way to let people try it "for real" on their site without going through all the hoops. I know email is a challenge because of reputation and deliverability and all that.
- ivankirigin 11y ago
  Yeah, YesGraph doesn't want to get in the email deliverability game. There are a hundred vendors who can manage this, and every serious web app solves this problem. I think it's a feature to use your own email system. This gets really obvious when you start reusing your templates and centralizing your analytics. We'll implement many more backends than SendGrid -- including easier ones like Mailchimp.

19 points by ivankirigin 11y ago

Hey folks, I used to run growth at Dropbox. I ran dozens of optimization tests on top of the referral program and sharing flows. Now my startup YesGraph (YC W15) launched a widget that has all the same powerful sharing features. Our contact importer is actually 30% faster than Dropbox too -- I tested :) The link in this post is to an announcement post. Try it out for free without creating an account in YesGraph here: https://www.yesgraph.com/demo/ https://www.yesgraph.com/demo/

carolynjoneslee 11y ago

I was the lead engineer on this project--thoughts and feedback welcome :D

tacone 11y ago

This is the third attempt at this niche I see on HN. I guess there's definitely a market for this, so good luck :)

ivankirigin 11y ago
We don't consider other referral program competitors. We want to help them level up and work with our API to recommend contacts to invite. We're in talks with a few right now actually :)

jbob2000 11y ago

This is a really cool piece of functionality, but what surprises me the most is that they're trying to build a business around it. I would have never thought that this was enough of a problem to justify paying for. (Not intended as a negative comment. When I read the site, I thought it was going to be a node plugin or something...)

ivankirigin 11y ago
Actually this just makes adding our real product (recommended invites) very, very easy. Here is the VC pitch: YesGraph is replacing Facebook Connect. Instead of building a lobster trap social network and giving that data to developers, YesGraph is helping developers do more with their data (like imported email contacts and mobile address books). This is a big deal when you think about it. The "single line of code" seems like a small deal, but dramatically lowers the cost of more apps getting on YesGraph.

kentbrew 11y ago

Great to see the unminified source for Superwidget online.

ivankirigin 11y ago
Repo: https://github.com/YesGraph/yesgraph-superwidget https://github.com/YesGraph/yesgraph-superwidget This is the normal include: https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.min.js https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.min.js Just remove the "min" if you're, for example, debugging. https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.js https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.js

joeld42 11y ago

This looks really good. I've seen quite a few half-baked internal implementations of this kind of thing, it certainly seems to me worth paying for for a well-built, drop in one of these. A couple of questions.. How does the pricing work? If I sign up for the $199 tier and suddenly get 10058 users, does it block new referrals, or do I suddenly owe you $400? Are the contacts shared between installs? e.g. does my install "learn" from other company's installs? I tried it out and it picked some pretty bad recommendations, one was a well-known blogger who I had emailed once years ago, one was one of my other email addresses with the same name, and only the third checked suggestion was a good suggestion, a friend who I might actually recommend something to. A lot of the unchecked items on the "top" list were weird emails that I wasn't even sure why they were in my address book. Still, the invite interface was nice, and even with odd suggestions this is something I'd use. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!

ivankirigin 11y ago
Without our recommendations those "weird" emails are what everyone would see. There is a lot of noise in contacts. We have a pretty good blacklist, and it's getting better all the time. We'll soon have enough data to make the blacklist more automated -- essentially classifying patterns of email automatically. Right now, it's a whack-a-mole. This is a big focus of ours. The ranking for this demo example is only pretty good because not many people have used this flow. We just launched today. Normally we have a lot more data to train the ranking. We do extract patterns across thousands of users. For example, do people tend to invite those with the same last name? To enable this learning, we do keep the data around, but we don't share contact data across apps. We aren't a data broker. The basic model is that we won't send more contact data than a user already shared with you. But we do try to find more signal to help with the ranking, and that can include, for example, counting mutual contacts that we learn from any source. Again, this data isn't shared back, it only informs our ranking. As far as pricing, it's based on the number of address books -- not your user count. So the free tier actually covers a social graph with around 1M edges -- which is a huge value. No, the service doesn't automatically shut off or anything like that. If the pricing doesn't fit your app (e.g. you're very high scale and a free app), just email me: ivan@yesgraph.com We already priced things to match a high scale B2C app, so this pricing is a steal for most users.

eschutte2 11y ago

I want to try this, so I tried signing up for SendGrid but got an instant rejection for unknown reasons. I think the many-step setup involving multiple vendors is a bit of an obstacle here... although maybe it's a net positive for you to weed out less committed buyers. Do you think you could manage the email API on behalf of your users at least for low volumes? Wondering if there's a way to let people try it "for real" on their site without going through all the hoops. I know email is a challenge because of reputation and deliverability and all that.

ivankirigin 11y ago
Yeah, YesGraph doesn't want to get in the email deliverability game. There are a hundred vendors who can manage this, and every serious web app solves this problem. I think it's a feature to use your own email system. This gets really obvious when you start reusing your templates and centralizing your analytics. We'll implement many more backends than SendGrid -- including easier ones like Mailchimp.