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Y Combinator Demo Day Roundup
- tx 19y agoMy favorite is TipJoy. The problem was in the air, PG himself teased everybody with it, but yet nobody took the trouble of actually tackling it. Neat approach, nice execution. Bravo! Another big one, I think, is SnapTalent. The existing system of finding people to work is pretty much an "offline approach" ported over the net. SnapTalent actually uses the technology to improve the effectiveness of the process. I only hope that their users (companies) will be smart enough to recognize the potential. If I were monster.com (are they still around?) I'd grabbed these guys immediately.
- cperciva 19y agoMy favorite is TipJoy I like the basic principle of aggregating micropayments, but I think TipJoy going to be very limited until people can actually get money out (which of course means that TipJoy has to deal with the regulatory issues). So far they've accumulated $1531.54 in tips (assuming their website is up to date), which means that their 3% cut adds up to a grand total of $45.95... which isn't going to make anyone rich in a hurry.
- pg 19y agoYou can't tell much from the numbers of a startup this young. They've generated more revenue than Google had at the same age.
- cperciva 19y agoSure -- my point was just that taking a 3% cut of $0.10 payments means that TipJoy needs to get very very big before it will be making much money. Can TipJoy get big enough fast enough?
- pg 19y agoTipping is just the initial form of micropayment they've implemented. Eventually they plan to support all forms. Could being able to charge people small amounts for digital content be big? Yes.
- cperciva 19y agoTipping is just the initial form of micropayment they've implemented. Well, that changes things. :-)
- ivankirigin 19y agoI know you might expect this from a cofounder, but I think Tipjoy is going to be huge.
- ivankirigin 19y agoPG is right - we'll be doing much more. You can give far more than $0.10. That is just the default. It is really simple to give up to $10, and we might raise or remove that limit. Also, we earn interest on money in our system. That makes the earnings closer to 6%. But we don't take a cut per tip, only on cash-out. This means that if A tips B who then tips C, each of those tips is overhead free. If C cashes out, we take a cut. The potential for a zero overhead transaction system is huge.
- bootload 19y ago"... They've generated more revenue than Google had at the same age ..." But that's not a really good comparison especially if Tipjoy is dealing directly in money while google was search. Having said that, maybe Tipjoy is onto something because the last micro-payment startup to do something interesting was paypal which started 10 years ago.
- nextmoveone 19y agoThat's a faulty comparison, the playing field was TOTALLY different when Google started.
- ivankirigin 19y agoWhen google started, no one thought you could make money from search. Pretty much everyone agrees you can make a great deal of money from micropayments if you can make them work.
- nextmoveone 19y agoI'm not saying micro payments wont work, I'm simply saying when Google started there were not NEARLY as many internet users as today, so it's definitely A LOT easier to grow a user base/become profitable online now then it was before.
- ivankirigin 19y agoThanks!
- ivankirigin 19y agoThe presentations were awesome. The total value of the tech in the room was huge.
- DarrenStuart 19y agois there any video of the presentations? on paper some of these seem like hacker projects not startups so I would love to see how they see value in these startups.
- hwork 19y agonope, no video from the event. i have some pictures i'll post at a point yet to be determined.
- garbowza 19y agoThis is natural when you abide by "release early and iterate." Most of the companies 11 weeks old. When you release, you haven't yet implemented your entire vision. That takes much more time to develop internally and become obvious to outsiders. But the founders know that the first release is just the tip of the iceberg.
- ivankirigin 19y agoThere is pretty much not a single startup in this session that isn't directly attacking a large market or has plans to expand into a market orders of magnitude larger. There isn't any video. If you're curious about one in particular, contact them. They're all stand up folks.
- webwright 19y agowhat percentage of breakout success storieson the Internet did NOT start as hacker projects? Facebook, google, yahoo, etc. All started that way.
- antiismist 19y agoAs counterpoints, myspace, flickr, and digg were not hacker projects. edit: removed google from the above list.
- brett 19y agoI was curious where they were hosted so I thought I'd share. The script is based on an old post by cperciva http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65022 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65022. Slicehost LLC 6 tipjoy.com baseshield.com mightyquiz.com insoshi.com stanfordturf.com 280slides.com Amazon.com, Inc. 4 8aweek.com webmynd.com deluux.com wundrbar.com SoftLayer Technologies Inc. 3 snaptalent.com chatterous.com omnisio.com Peer 1 Network Inc. 2 rescuetime.com addher.com HERAKLES LLC 1 mixwit.com Hollywood Interactive, Inc. 1 yumdots.com
- fallentimes 19y agoNot a lot of love in the techcrunch comments, but I guess that's to be expected.
- SwellJoe 19y agoNo better or worse than usual (actually maybe a little less hostile than the last three batches--I know Winter07 had more hostility in the comments, although this one may catch up by the time all is said). TC comments are always full of also-rans and never-was entrepreneurs who are spitting vitriol, and they come out in force for the YC demo day roundup.
- socmoth 19y agoi'm not sure that guy wasn't just flamebaiting.
- comatose_kid 19y agoMany sound like good ideas, but I'm most intrigued by Deluux.
- startingup 19y ago280Slides caught my attention - sounds like Zenter - The Sequel? In fact, RescueTime & 8AWeek also sound awfully similar, don't they? This raises an interesting question. As number of YC companies increases, the chances of "collision" increases too. How is that handled?
- ivankirigin 19y agoRescueTime & 8AWeek are actually pretty different. I use both. Try them out.
- vegashacker 19y agoTheir first release definitely sounds like Zenter, so I'm very interested in hearing how they might differentiate themselves. But the main focus of the companyis this Javascript library for writing desktop apps, so that seems very much not-Zenter.
- pg 19y ago280 North comes at the problem from a different direction. They're building infrastructure for making a new class of web-based apps that really feel like desktop ones. They just happened to pick Powerpoint to build first. But of the 60k LOC they've written so far, I believe 280 Slides is only 20k. RescueTime and 8aweek are also quite different: RT is for people and groups who want to track their productivity, and 8aweek is an alternative to blacklist-based web filtering. Our answer to the problem of collisions is that in any large market, which we encourage startups to be in, there is going to be room for several different approaches.
- wallflower 19y agoWhich company had the best demo?
- poppysan 19y agoI get so excited to see whats coming out next from the YC womb. I'm very excited about InSochi and tipJoy especially. I can see non-profits and charities even using tipJoy . Pretty hip stuff!
- mhartl 19y agoGlad to hear you're excited about Insoshi---just be sure to note the spelling! (We own the domains for a bunch of misspellings, just not the one you used. :-)
- Readmore 19y agoI'm really interested in TipJoy, it sounds like they finally came up with a system for micro-payments that could work.
- dskhatri 19y agoTipjoy seems to be gaining in popularity: It's already being filtered out by some enterprise firewalls (unfairly, in my opinion) being labelled as a Pay-to-surf site!
- ivankirigin 19y agoThanks for that heads up. It's the exact opposite: "pay for what I surf". Does anyone know if there is some automated reason this might have happened?
- nextmoveone 19y agoMy votes go to: -RescueTime (So freaking valuable!) -Kirkland North (definitely going to grow their userbase quickly! (once they launch)) -Chatterous (Because I had a very similar idea) ------------------------------------------------- My notes are to: -insoshi (you have an indirect competitor, lovdbyless, it's a rails based opensource social network maker thing) -deluux (my first interpretation of what you guys do was a single login for every site (like openID or w/e) but then my second interpretation was that I can show my facebook page or elements from it, on my own site? Like a widget(s)? That would be awesome!) -joberator(i think we simply need more developers, not referrals, because, at least in S. Florida, finding a developer through craigslist, career builder or monster is NOT easy, and my CS major friends dont have any referrals, period and they are in their last year of college, so I have to wait for them to graduate which is not sufficient) -wundrbar(dont know if this is possible, but if you could simply be an option in the dropdown that accompanies that search box in top right of FireFox and IE7, that would ROCK MY FREAKING WORLD!)
- garbowza 19y agoThey do have a search box plugin, along with a full fledged toolbar version (which has more functionality). http://www.wundrbar.com/static/extras http://www.wundrbar.com/static/extras
- mhartl 19y ago-insoshi (you have an indirect competitor, lovdbyless, it's a rails based opensource social network maker thing) Interesting. Our app is also in Rails, so it could actually help us a lot to have another project with complementary code. Any idea what their license is? There's almost nothing about them yet on Google. (I found the site of the guys who make it, but they don't list lovdbyless yet.)
- nextmoveone 19y agoHey no problem, I can give you their contact info...I am putting my contact info back in my profile now. It was supposed to be released under MIT license.. from what they were saying.
- 19y ago
- SwellJoe 19y agoIf I were a betting man, SnapTalent would be the first I'd put coin on. I didn't actually think much of it (and, in fact, I think when I first talked to them early in Winter08 they didn't even have any useful code written yet...but maybe I'm misremembering), until they'd actually launched. It really looks great, though--a perfect way to handle the tech jobs market, which is a HUGE industry in and of itself. Monster and Dice have been fighting it out for years, and spending millions just marketing themselves. SnapTalent allows the world of bloggers and tech sites to market for them. Recipe for win if ever I saw one.
- sharpshoot 19y agoHey Joe, Thanks for the comments. We're starting out in tech but will be moving to other verticals eventually. The other key advantage we have is that as the web's traffic is more international and as we add advertisers from different countries we can serve Ip targeted ads on the same publishers and be extremely local at the same time. We have a global and pretty ambitious vision - its how hotjobs started, we're aiming to be even bigger in this phase of the web.
- emmett 19y agoI was putting myself in the mindset of someone looking for a job, and I was extremely disappointed after viewing both awesome snaptalent ads that I could not click "Browse more". I wanted to see all your listings.
- smhinsey 19y agoI've been thinking the same thing for awhile. Initially I had just chalked it up to a browser issue since I'm running webkit nightlies. This seems like a pretty easy thing to remedy though.
- lanceusa 19y agoQuote: MightyQuiz ...The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34. Are 3-8 minute sessions any indication of success? My site gets over 10 minutes right now.
- Monti 19y agoNice job guys, wish you all the best. My startup launches in 3 weeks :)