7 ms·

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

• Janteh 17y ago
  I suspect that in times of crisis people tend to play it safe and start more 'simple' companies, with safer business models, instead of swinging for the fences with experimental ideas that have no clear future or business model. Still, there are some very interesting companies in this batch that are not particularly sexy but might have great potential.
  • axod 17y ago
    I don't think these are safe business model companies. Call me a cynic, but it may be more of a case of "built for investors/acquirers in SV".
    • pg 17y ago
      It's not so much that you're cynical as that you haven't thought about where the descriptions of these startups came from. They came from an event where startups presented to investors in SV. So of course the descriptions sound like they'd be appealing to that audience; that's what they were trying to do.
      • thaumaturgy 17y ago
        Honest question: would tech-savvy investors' opinions of a short blurb really be that different from other technical businesspeople? Or, to put it another way: would it really require two completely different statements to appear attractive to both groups? And more critically: I realize that this is your baby, and you have had a large amount of involvement and personal investment in these projects over the last several months. However, you're coming off as both very defensive, and very dismissive of the criticism so far. It's surprising to me that YC would unveil its next batch of startups, and get such a "meh" reaction from the audience. That indicates a problem worth investigating, either in the community here, or in the specific projects that were funded this time 'round, or in YC's goals (specifically whether those goals might be diverging from those of the HN community).
        • pg 17y ago
          Yes, you want a different type of description for investors: you want to err on the side of explaining it in terms of stuff they already know. In fact, I explicitly tell YC startups to explain themselves to investors as "the x of y" whenever possible. See point 14: http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html The reason I've been so contemptuous of some of the comments on this thread is that I've been seeing the identical comments on web forums for 5 years. That's how I can be sure they're not a sign of a problem. They're just the same type of people making the same type of comments that always get made about newly launched startups.
        • lloydarmbrust 17y ago
          Were you there? I was and didn't see this "meh" reaction you're talking about.
• nailer 17y ago
  One example: "Our goal is to do what Gmail did to Outlook: replace a popular desktop application with a better online version." is badly begging the question. I'd be surprised if gmail + Google calendar had more active users than Outlook.
  • imp 17y ago
    I bet they have more happy users.
    • nailer 17y ago
      I think they'd be about the same. But Outlook users certainly aren't rushing to replace a PIM with a badly integrated and badly UI-designed equivalent, web based or not.
  • nhebb 17y ago
    I think the popularity of Gmail is overestimated by a lot of techies. Campaign Monitor posted user stats for over 300 million people last summer: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-popularity-june-2009/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-p... Gmail came in at only 5.5%.
    • jonknee 17y ago
      That's clients, not providers. I use Gmail and have for years, but I don't have an @gmail.com address that I use or access my mail from the web interface. My mail client is typically Mail.app or the Mail iPhone app. They are tracking these based on loaded images, which means Gmail users by default aren't counted. Some versions of Outlook (at least 2000) autoload images. Lots of mobile devices don't load images, which makes BlackBerry users undercounted. Not to mention sample bias--I also don't sign up for email newsletters. tl;dr those stats are a hot steaming pile
      • nailer 17y ago
        You probably don't use a lot of MS products. Outlook 2000 is 4 (maybe 5) versions old. At least 2010, 2007 and 2003 don't load images by default, I wouldn't be surprised if Outlook XP didn't either. More to the point: no large organization is using Outlook 2000 anymore. It's unsupported and you can get 2010, 2007, 2003 or even XP on your current license agreement.
• matasar 17y ago
  I think the team is by far more important than the two sentence summary of the idea, so in that sense it's too early to judge.
  • jacoblyles 17y ago
    Ideas matter too. If you have really smart and capable people working on a product that not many people are going to use, then they're not going to be very successful. Programming smarts != market smarts.
    • danicgross 17y ago
      people matter more. good people know how to fail bad ideas quickly and come up with better ones. good people > good ideas.
      • deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
• ErrantX 17y ago
  Greplin looks like an interesting possibility. Some of the others have potential. But, yes, I think you've got the general sentiment.
  • smurthasmith 17y ago
    Greplin does sounds interesting. I actually applied with essentially the same idea - cloud data indexing and search. Check it out and let me know if you want a beta invite: www.nutmegsearch.com Daniel Gross, if you are out there - let's talk.
    • deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    • newhouseb 17y ago
      Yeah, I actually pitched the exact same thing to PG a year ago (in interviews) and YC thought no one needed search beyond e-mail. Then again I hear Greplin was accepted to YC with a completely different pitch :)
      • smurthasmith 17y ago
        Frankly, it seems hard to imagine NOT needing search beyond email. I really only user a handful of web services (I'm sure that number is only increasing) and I can barely remember whether I sent something in an email, as a facebook message, saved it to delicious, etc. I started creating Nutmeg Search just so that I could find my own stuff, but the idea seemed useful so I'm trying to make it available to the world.
• emmett 17y ago
  Yeah, me-too products are never really interesting. I mean, does the world really need another search engine? There's already Lycos and Altavista. Calling an internet startup's idea "me-too" is a pretty lame criticism. Most of the most successful startups had "me-too" ideas on paper. The proof is in the eating.
  • idlewords 17y ago
    It's 2010 - there should be things in this list that are more awesome, even at first reading, than 'embedly' and 'embedster'.
    • staunch 17y ago
      Says the guy who created a Delicious clone in 2009! http://pinboard.in/about/ http://pinboard.in/about/ (I admit it's a bit ad hominem, but putting other people's stuff down for being derivative when your thing is the epitome of that seems lame to me.)
      • deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      • mccutchen 17y ago
        Ah, but he made a clone of del.icio.us from back when it was new and minimal and still really awesome. Which is much, much better than a boring old clone of modern Delicious.
      • Eliezer 17y ago
        formally: logical fallacy of ad hominem tu quoque
    • pg 17y ago
      Surely HN hasn't descended to making fun of startups' names?
      • and13 17y ago
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• AmericanOP 17y ago
  Well this post certainly needs a counterpoint. I don't think your generalization should be the dominant stamp on the latest batch. A percentage are really interesting, and unless you compare this to past groups how can you say this is a weak showing? Yes, some are twitter widgets but they're not bad for twitter apps. I can already think of a number of customers for 500 friends. Broad-brushed pessimism is the wrong frame when a number have obvious potential and we have no idea what pivots lie ahead for the others based on an elevator pitch. Let's judge Ycom by it's long-term record.
• Alex3917 17y ago
  Hey this is Alex from LaunchHear. We just finished our presentation fifteen minutes ago and we're hanging around outside the YC building now. I just wanted to say that a lot of these startups are actually really impressive, it's probably just not obvious from the three sentence descriptions. Also, a bunch of these startups are still under embargo so they aren't even being written about. Give it a year or so and then start complaining.
  • rokhayakebe 17y ago
    His/her comment does not read as a complain, and I believe his opinion is shared with many. The reason, as you mentioned, is the short description takes away from the service, so I am sure these companies are in fact much much more. Another problem is that all these products are version 0.1 of a much bigger version, so they need time to mature. Edit: However Zenedy's description was very good and there seem to have a real potential.
    • greendestiny 17y ago
      Well whatever the reason I think I've seen it said for every bunch of startups. Its easy to criticise and I doubt there is any correlation between startups that look interesting and success. And although I'll regret being negative myself I will just say - Zenedy, really? I think if wanted to write a startup style description of a affiliate marketing site that'd be it.
      • rokhayakebe 17y ago
        He did not criticize. He just said he was not impressed. Frankly how often are you impressed with a product other than yours? Not so many times. As for Zenedy. I think they are following the Demand Media model, and that has proven to be a business that generates a lot of money. Do not discount affiliate marketers. If you look at startups that operate affiliate businesses they tend to become quickly profitable (frugalmechanic, ticketstumbler etc..)
        • 17y ago
• Estragon 17y ago
  Crocodoc looks like a solution for a serious painpoint of mine.
  • mattlong 17y ago
    I'm a developer with crocodoc. Thanks, that's what we're trying to do! Would you mind sharing the details of your painpoint? Feel free to email if you would prefer not to reply publicly, my email address is in my HN profile.
  • tlb 17y ago
    It sounds derivative, but in fact crocodoc is great. While there are lots of document markup tools, I actually use and like crocodoc. Use it a few times to mark up a real document and you'll see.
• jmtame 17y ago
  if it helps, farmville was a near duplicate rip-off of farm town, and it's now one of the most successful facebook apps. you don't always need to have 100% unique ideas. zynga spent more money advertising, and is now profitable with something like 100+ million players.
  • dannyr 17y ago
    But they had to spend boatloads of cash to acquire users. I don't think YC startups have lots of money to spend on advertising.
    • patio11 17y ago
      If COCA is less than first months earnings you have nigh infinite cash until you run out of channel. If Google found me ten million dollars worth of ads I'd have a stressful month doing daily credit card payments and calls to bank, but it would end with fifteen million in pocket and more miles than I want to think about.
• Shorel 17y ago
  The ones I though were good: Zencoder Zenedy The rest are very under promising.
  • Hexstream 17y ago
    That's a great vaccine against missed expectations!
• nhebb 17y ago
  I think Card Pool could make some money, but it also got me thinking about the retailers. Don't many of them operate on thin margins? If they offered card holders 90% cash back on the card amount, they might actually make more money from partial reimbursements than they would from the merchandise sales.
  • ericd 17y ago
    They make quite a bit from unused and expiring gift cards, so I think they'd very much prefer to limit the options there.
• staunch 17y ago
  There's nothing contrarian about what you're saying, and your expectations aren't too high. You're just doing what most people (outside of HN at least) do: calling the game way too early and without enough information. These companies need time to develop/morph/mature before anyone will have any real clue as to their prospects for innovation or success.
• pmjordan 17y ago
  I initially had a similar reaction, but now I'm not sure that's quite fair. I think the innovations aren't so much technological, they're more like business model innovations. They have the potential to generate value for customers regardless.
• dskhatri 17y ago
  NewsLabs sounds cool. There may be a lot of journalists out there frustrated with the constraints of working with a big media organization and want to do their own thing. NewsLabs could create the next Arianna Huffingtons. Data Marketplace is promising: market research firms charge ridiculous fees for their reports which are usually overkill for what you are looking for. Data Marketplace could solve this problem. Greplin sounds cool. 500Friends sounds like it'll generate revenue straight off the bat.
  • pbiggar 17y ago
    RE NewsLabs: That is exactly what we're trying to do. Also, that's exactly how many of our journalists feel.
  • GFischer 17y ago
    NewsLabs is the most exciting one from the list for me, but probably not the one with the most upside. The list sounds good. I'd add Notifo to the most promising ones (going just by this short description of course!).
• zaidf 17y ago
  Mostly me too products. like... "Google.com: A search engine that looks at link popularity to find the best search results. It's going to revolutionize search." Talk to investors from the starting days of Google, and they'll cite you a dozen examples of similar sounding pitches. It's hard to tell from few liners about the future of a company.
  • rmorrison 17y ago
    Just because there have been successful "me too" products, doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits. It seems that Google is too often played as a trump card to support ideas that don't stand on their own as viable businesses. (Although, I'm not saying that's the case with this list)
    • zaidf 17y ago
      doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits Similarly, just because they are "me too" product doesn't mean they won't succeed. It seems that "me too" product is too often played as a trump card to discard new startups.
      • rmorrison 17y ago
        Fair enough = )
• pg 17y ago
  You flatter yourself by saying your expectations are high. Actually you're just not a good judge of very early stage startups. If you saw Google when they were Backrub, or Microsoft when they were making Basic for the Altair, you would have said the same thing. Minor, derivative products.
  • zhyder 17y ago
    Ouch. If fnid2 is mistaken isn't it more likely because he has much less information about these startups and their founders than you or the attendees of demo day?
    • pg 17y ago
      It's certainly true that he knows nothing about most of these companies beyond a brief text description. But that is precisely the situation where someone who understood early stage startups would know to reserve judgment.
      • ErrantX 17y ago
        I think the "problem" is compared to some of the quality ideas in the past (dropbox, reddit etc.) a lot of this round seems a bit trivial. I'm pretty sure a couple of them, too, will bottom out quite quickly because they either don't appear to fit their market or understand it. fnid2 is being silly in latter posts though; interestingly he trivialized/picked holes in the ones I think might do ok and sort of passed over the ones I think have major flaws.
        • brlewis 17y ago
          People forget that reddit was widely viewed as a trivial digg clone in its early days. Dropbox also seemed trivial to some early on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  • fnid2 17y ago
    What's with the ad hominem? I was stating an opinion. You don't know when I came to know Google or Microsoft and you don't know what my opinion of them was. You also don't know how good a judge I am of very early stage startups, which is largely irrelevant, because hardly anyone is a good judge of startups at this stage. Almost everyone knows that. In fact, I asked how to predict startup viability right here and well, see for yourself, no one really knows: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146337 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146337 At least I admit it. That isn't even what I was saying, I was saying I'm not impressed with them. When I say impressed I mean in the "Do what is hard" sense. I mean in the blue ocean sense of creating markets. Building a product in an existing market and relying on a mastery of networking, pr, and marketing to make it successful simply doesn't impress me. It has nothing to do with the viability of the startup. The least impressive startups are often the most successful. I can go into more detail for you. Granted I don't know the founders, I only have a 2/3 sentence explanation, but here goes... LaunchHear -- This can be accomplished with a database of bloggers and the types of products they review and a list of companies that make that kind of product. When a company wants to send a product, they enter the type and get a list of addresses to send it to. It's a fairly simple app. It's not a technical problem, it's a sales and marketing problem. Plus the manpower to find the blogs and even that can be automated. NewsLabs -- Basically a blog with some SEO and Ad tools built in. How many journalists are doing this on their own right now? Seeing Interactive -- Plenty of startups, some of which are run by hn'ers are doing this now. I know of one out of austin, but can't remember the name. It's been done over and over -- not to say SI won't succeed -- it just isn't impressive. EDIT: You know what is hilarious? Seeing Interactive is the company I was thinking of from Austin. I was mistaken -- they're out of College Station, but I can be forgiven for that because it was many months ago when I saw them and haven't seen them sense. Notifo -- apparently a lot of people like this one, but still, there are lots of SMS api's and text messages can be sent via email address too. I don't know exactly how notifo differentiates itself from those methods, but it's basically sending messages to people's phones and that's not impressive. Zencoder -- This is old hat. It's an ffmpeg cluster with a queue. Put the file on your server, send the url to zencoder, it downloads the file, encodes it, then makes a callback to another url to let the requester know where to get the encoded files. I built one of these by myself 3 years ago. You could even edit the video online cropping out certain sections or adding different audio tracks. Nowmov -- Is it difficult to search twitter for links to movies and see who has retweeted them the most? While one is playing, find another one and change the innerHTML of a div to another embed tag. Crocodoc -- This one is actually fairly impressive. This type of marking up and editing is hard and I'd like to see what becomes of it. Gamador -- Really? Social gaming? Is it impressive? I just don't think so. How many social gaming companies are there now? Hundreds? Thousands? Why is Gamador better? It'll be a tough pitch, but if Kevin and Dan are badasses maybe that's all you need to make a great social games company. Cardpool -- a CRUD app like launchhear. A dating site for people with cards and people who want to buy them. This is a matter of trust mostly -- not technology, but trust has been established. It'll be hard here because how often do people get cards like this? Is it really worth it to go trade them on a website? Why not just spend it at the store? You don't like the store? Lots of gift cards can be used at multiple stores. It's a "gift" card -- get yourself a gift. Tweetflow -- I am almost never impressed by a company that creates another company wholely dependent on the survival of another company whose survival is also in question. That said, natural language processing can be difficult, but in this case, a list of positive words and negative words and some searching is sufficient. It's neat and people will probably use it and may even pay for it. CHROMAom, Inc. -- I love colourlovers, but it's a community about color. It's neat and it's a big community and there are lots of great color patterns there, but it's not impressive in the pg do what is hard sense. Answerly.com -- tons of these exist already. I can't count them on two hands. People go to the internet to ask questions -- that's what they do. SEO on the question and there you go. Not impressive. Zenedy -- just watch google trends and see where there is a dirth of content for the keywords. Finding untapped markets is a neat idea, but this is mostly a horsepower problem. If you have the money to pay for the content, you can make money. Lots of companies do this. How many domains does the guy who started MySpace have? He's been doing this for a long time. Search for hiking trails and you'll get one of his sites. I'm not sure about the revenue for the foreseeable future though, because once you've found the market people know there's little competition there. Just watch what you are doing and then copy or steal the content. It's unethical, but even Mahalo does it! Data Marketplace -- This is a neat idea -- but not impressive. It's an online store for people with data. This model exists already -- like http://www.freebase.com/ http://www.freebase.com/ with a pay wall. Embedster -- Others have already commented on this one. You're adding monetization on top of embedded stuff that is often already monetized. It's kind of leechy in a way. I wonder how you're going to get past adblock plus. Etacts -- People seem to like this one too, but it's a CRM mashup with widgets. Embedly -- Is embeddability the goal? I got to video.bing.com and I can find all kinds of videos to embed. It's a web crawler looking for an embed tag -- it isn't special. It isn't impressive. 500Friends -- I'm not a big fan of popularity contests -- too introverted for that, so I just don't even care about this at all. I think sites like this devalue word of mouth advertising and tarnish trust relationships between people. If I tell you about a product, it's because it is a good product, not because someone paid me to tell you. Any amount of impressed I am by a few of the others here gets dinged for bing in the same list as these kinds of sites. Again, my opinion and many, I am sure, think I'm wrong. Doesn't mean it won't make a lot of money from companies who want to pay people to advertise for them. Infoharmoni -- Already mentione twitter before, I wish bit.ly didn't exist (another ding). Never heard of gowalla or used foursquare -- perhaps I'm a square. 140Bets -- I think sports is a net negative for society. I'm opinionated. We waste so much time on and money on stadiums that are built with lies and tax dollars and promises of jobs and increased economic activity -- and they are a horrible waste of space. Have you ever walked in a stadium neighborhood when there is no game going on? It's dead. It's wasted space that could be used for a park. Take the fence down and let people use the space -- they paid for it! Instead, 99% of the time it is unused or used by a minority of people to play a game. I love George Carlin's take on it. Give all the golf courses to the homeless people. Another ding. Greplin -- More social scraping? Really? I suppose by this point, I'm just kind of tired of reading all the references to twitter and social networks and yada yada. Where's the innovation? It makes me wonder how many really hard problems were submitted and how many candidates are shaking their heads right now having gone through this whole list wondering why some of these are on here and they aren't. I'm not a rich man and I'm not motivated by money so I'll probably never have enough to invest $25k or whatever in hundreds of companies, so we'll never know how good I am at picking early stage startups, but if I simply said every one of them will fail, I'll be about 99% accurate. But I never said these companies won't succeed or the teams aren't brilliant or your ability to pick early stage companies is crap. I'm simply not impressed by them -- it's nothing personal. I am not impressed by 99% of web startups. But I wanted to be impressed with your list and I wasn't, so perhaps I was too glibly open about my opinion. I expected a -4 for the comment and was extremely shocked by the amount of agreement.