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What is it about this service as a business model that prevents it from taking off? I’ve known at least two YC startups that tried to build businesses around th

What is it about this service as a business model that prevents it from taking off? I’ve known at least two YC startups that tried to build businesses around this idea. I think one or both were acquired and immediately shut down, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

jlokier 7y ago
Repeatedly being acquired to be immediately shut down sounds like quite a good business model, if your goal is to be paid. I wonder what other kinds of products and services would be good for that model. In other words, would tend to be acquired for good money in order to stop them.
- pezo1919 7y ago
  Acquired by who?
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Presumably, a company that wants your product to be shut down. Potentially apocryphal example: I've heard of a certain FPGA company that bought a startup which produced FPGA compilation tools that could target multiple vendors' devices, in order to stop multi-vendor tools from existing because it made switching vendors too easy.
omarhaneef 7y ago
I would guess: 1. Narrow target Your market is people who need scraped data to input into some kind of app/program/code, but don't have the resources/skills/time to use scrapy or whatever. 2. Sensitive to configuration This is also the problem with visual code and ML apps, but you even a small issue with the source you are scraping from -- say, captcha, or login, or some weird format or css you did not anticipate -- makes it almost useless, whereas if you were coding up a solution you can (usually, not always) deal with it more easily. Those are the reasons they shut down. The reasons why they launch: 1. Many developers have this need Many developers have built scrapers internally, and then used them so a lot of people have worked on this problem. What follows from this is that they can productize it, see that other people have the need, imagine the market etc.
tixocloud 7y ago
Possibly a mix between use cases, maintainability and economics. We used to scrape economic indicators data at a fintech startup and monetized it - every slight change to the website created an issue to the data feeds. It was a huge nightmare to maintain. Scraping any website is quite generic and doesn't really speak to a specific audience on a specific need. But more importantly, having been in the data and analytics industry for years, data has far lower margins than insights and recommendations. The market is willing to pay a crazy premium (look at how much all the consultants are being billed out for) to get insights and recommendations. Data itself isn't inherently valuable to most companies.
tsergiu 7y ago
I'm the founder of parsehub. We are doing well and are independently owned. I think there are 3 things that contribute to this: 1. It is very easy to make a prototype that looks "magical" but very hard to build something that works in real applications. There are an enormous amount of quirks that a browser allows, and each site you encounter will use a different set of those quirks. Sites also tend to be unreliable, so whatever you build has to be very resistant to errors. 2. There is a technological wall that every company in this space reaches where it is not yet possible to mass-specialize for different websites. So even if you're able to build a tool that works very well on any individual website, the technology is not there yet to be able to generalize the instructions across websites in the same category. So if a customer wants to scrape 1000 websites, they still have to build custom instructions for each website (5-10x reduction in labor vs scripting) when what they really want/is economically viable for them is to build a single set of instructions that will work for all similar websites (10000x reduction in labor vs scripting). This is something that we're working on for the next version of parsehub, but is still a couple years away from launch. 3. Many of the YC startups you hear about have raised funding from investors and have short term pressures to exit. The combination of the three makes it very tempting to give up and sell.
- swalsh 7y ago
  #2 is what would transform this from a nice niche tool, to something very valuable. In the ecommerce space, tracking competitor pricing is a great example of this type of thing. I can also see use casese for recipe's, finance, healthcare, you name it. Those b2b use cases are worth real money. Just curious, in your experimentation, have you found it necessary to train a new model for each "category"? Or have you found a way to generalize it?
  - colinchartier 7y ago
    I worked on this for a long time - 1. it's possible to make it "easy to switch" by having common building blocks and only changing the "selector" across sites - lots of companies in the space do this 2. it's impossible to do "just DOM" or "just vision/text" if you want to be able to generalize "get the price of the items" - DOM doesn't represent spacial positioning very well (see: fixed/absolute positioning, IDs and dom changing without the visuals changing, ...) so you'd need the equivalent of an entire browser rendering engine in your "model" anyways! - vision/text is messed up by random marketing popups (see: medium, amazon, walmart, ...), it's significantly more computationally expensive to do, and can't currently get >95% accuracy (which makes it useless, scraping needs very close to 100% accuracy in most use cases)
slowenough 7y ago
I applied to YC with an idea like this and was rejected. 12 times. Maybe it's not the idea. Maybe it's me. Or maybe it's YC.
- hk__2 7y ago
  I don’t know anything about your case, but the general rule is that ideas are worthless, it’s the execution that matter.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    Yeah, or https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4 https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4 But also, yes, execution definitely: https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz :D ;P ;) xx And still https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4 https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4

jlokier 7y ago

Repeatedly being acquired to be immediately shut down sounds like quite a good business model, if your goal is to be paid. I wonder what other kinds of products and services would be good for that model. In other words, would tend to be acquired for good money in order to stop them.

pezo1919 7y ago
Acquired by who?
- jlokier 7y ago
  Presumably, a company that wants your product to be shut down. Potentially apocryphal example: I've heard of a certain FPGA company that bought a startup which produced FPGA compilation tools that could target multiple vendors' devices, in order to stop multi-vendor tools from existing because it made switching vendors too easy.

omarhaneef 7y ago

I would guess: 1. Narrow target Your market is people who need scraped data to input into some kind of app/program/code, but don't have the resources/skills/time to use scrapy or whatever. 2. Sensitive to configuration This is also the problem with visual code and ML apps, but you even a small issue with the source you are scraping from -- say, captcha, or login, or some weird format or css you did not anticipate -- makes it almost useless, whereas if you were coding up a solution you can (usually, not always) deal with it more easily. Those are the reasons they shut down. The reasons why they launch: 1. Many developers have this need Many developers have built scrapers internally, and then used them so a lot of people have worked on this problem. What follows from this is that they can productize it, see that other people have the need, imagine the market etc.

tixocloud 7y ago

Possibly a mix between use cases, maintainability and economics. We used to scrape economic indicators data at a fintech startup and monetized it - every slight change to the website created an issue to the data feeds. It was a huge nightmare to maintain. Scraping any website is quite generic and doesn't really speak to a specific audience on a specific need. But more importantly, having been in the data and analytics industry for years, data has far lower margins than insights and recommendations. The market is willing to pay a crazy premium (look at how much all the consultants are being billed out for) to get insights and recommendations. Data itself isn't inherently valuable to most companies.

tsergiu 7y ago

I'm the founder of parsehub. We are doing well and are independently owned. I think there are 3 things that contribute to this: 1. It is very easy to make a prototype that looks "magical" but very hard to build something that works in real applications. There are an enormous amount of quirks that a browser allows, and each site you encounter will use a different set of those quirks. Sites also tend to be unreliable, so whatever you build has to be very resistant to errors. 2. There is a technological wall that every company in this space reaches where it is not yet possible to mass-specialize for different websites. So even if you're able to build a tool that works very well on any individual website, the technology is not there yet to be able to generalize the instructions across websites in the same category. So if a customer wants to scrape 1000 websites, they still have to build custom instructions for each website (5-10x reduction in labor vs scripting) when what they really want/is economically viable for them is to build a single set of instructions that will work for all similar websites (10000x reduction in labor vs scripting). This is something that we're working on for the next version of parsehub, but is still a couple years away from launch. 3. Many of the YC startups you hear about have raised funding from investors and have short term pressures to exit. The combination of the three makes it very tempting to give up and sell.

swalsh 7y ago
#2 is what would transform this from a nice niche tool, to something very valuable. In the ecommerce space, tracking competitor pricing is a great example of this type of thing. I can also see use casese for recipe's, finance, healthcare, you name it. Those b2b use cases are worth real money. Just curious, in your experimentation, have you found it necessary to train a new model for each "category"? Or have you found a way to generalize it?
- colinchartier 7y ago
  I worked on this for a long time - 1. it's possible to make it "easy to switch" by having common building blocks and only changing the "selector" across sites - lots of companies in the space do this 2. it's impossible to do "just DOM" or "just vision/text" if you want to be able to generalize "get the price of the items" - DOM doesn't represent spacial positioning very well (see: fixed/absolute positioning, IDs and dom changing without the visuals changing, ...) so you'd need the equivalent of an entire browser rendering engine in your "model" anyways! - vision/text is messed up by random marketing popups (see: medium, amazon, walmart, ...), it's significantly more computationally expensive to do, and can't currently get >95% accuracy (which makes it useless, scraping needs very close to 100% accuracy in most use cases)

slowenough 7y ago

I applied to YC with an idea like this and was rejected. 12 times. Maybe it's not the idea. Maybe it's me. Or maybe it's YC.

hk__2 7y ago
I don’t know anything about your case, but the general rule is that ideas are worthless, it’s the execution that matter.
- slowenough 7y ago
  Yeah, or https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4 https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4 But also, yes, execution definitely: https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz :D ;P ;) xx And still https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4 https://media.giphy.com/media/huDTE2qLxErrkLodUN/giphy.mp4