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Splitterbug (YC S11) shutting down
- swanson 15y agoAnd I just recommended this to a family member about a week ago :( This scenario happens on family vacations all the time. If you've ever gone on vacation and rented a big house for 3-4 families, you end up having to split the grocery bill, dinner bills, group activities; it's a huge pain, everyone has to always keep cash on them to divide the cost right away or people forget.
- ams6110 15y agoIf you've ever gone on vacation and rented a big house for 3-4 families A mistake you will make only once, believe me. Everyone paying his own way UP FRONT is the only way to make these sorts of things work.
- blahedo 15y agoProtip: keep an envelope of pre-split money. Anytime money is added to it, every contributor adds an equal amount (or whatever agreed-upon proportion). Money can then be spent from the envelope without splitting. Also useful on long road trips where gas money is being split.
- shuttlebrad 15y agoWhile the app's a work in progress (and if you forgive the shameless shill), Splitsies (http://splitsies.net http://splitsies.net) does more or less the same thing and is freely available in the App Store. Doesn't do groups yet (because I haven't worked out how to make them awesome yet) but its coming...
- gaius 15y agoThe way to do this is to start a kitty upfront into which everyone places $X and all group spending comes from there, no-one pays for anything in common individually. Every time it runs low, everyone puts in the same again. Anything left over at the end you blow on booze and/or give to charity.
- shuttlebrad 15y agoInteresting: if I may ask, what lead to the decision?
- tilt 15y agoPG: “Who needs this?”
- habitatforus 15y agoI was wondering the same thing, but PG must have thought someone needed this.
- dlss 15y agoBut then why did he fund them?
- tilt 15y agoYC fund founders not ideas. He probably gave them a "warning" or a chance to give it a try expecting them to be ready for a pivot anytime soon. jm2c
- stipes 15y agoMy guess? The team was solid. Since they found something else (i.e., something better), they probably are.
- pg 15y agoThis wasn't even the idea they applied with.
- hagyma 15y agoSometimes I put my team into a situation where they have to complete a really small product or tool "on their own". Usually when someone new is joining the team, so they learn the way of working together and how get over issues in that area. Maybe this was the case here...
- arkitaip 15y ago
- angryasian 15y agothat was fast. Would be nice to share more of a postmortem
- sean_lynch 15y agoI've got all the parts of a good postmortem post floating around in my head. Unfortunately, it's probably going to have to wait a few weeks while we tackle our new product.
- MatthewB 15y agoIs your new product still part of your YC experience?
- sean_lynch 15y agoIt is indeed. One of the amazing things about the YC program is the amount of support we received from the partners and other companies when we were facing the decision.
- joeyespo 15y agoThere was no link to any blog (or any kind of site to see a postmortem for that matter). Any chance you could send a followup to the goodbye email when you finally get around to writing something? I'm very interested in reading it and I have this fear that it'll slip between my frequent HN checking.
- sean_lynch 15y agoWe're not staying in the same space so I don't think we'll want to spam our current set of beta testers with our new product. If you track me down on Twitter though (sean_lynch), I'll send you a heads up when we launch.
- joeyespo 15y agoWas afraid that might be the case. That's an ok compromise though. Following.
- wccrawford 15y agoWow, that's remarkably similar to website I thinking of making... It was going to just keep track of who owed you what, and what you owed to who. The splitting app on top of it would make it even better. I'm surprised this didn't take off at all. (If anyone wants to steal my idea, don't feel bad. I rarely get around to them. And I want the app. lol)
- shuttlebrad 15y agoMy take on the problem has been live since end November (yeah, working on the marketing & design side now). http://splitsies.net/ http://splitsies.net/
- wccrawford 15y agoLooks nice! Android please. :) Edit: I signed up. Looks like it -just- does splits, and not separate IOUs. Unless I say that I paid, but the cost goes to someone else? Might be worth having a separate IOU interface to save confusion. Just a thought. :)
- shuttlebrad 15y agoWe're looking at it. I'll probably go for mobile web first - 1 developer and a backlog of essential work that needs to be done. But I hear the call for Android, its definitely on the urgent list. (edit to respond to edit) What do you mean "just does splits"? It doesn't (at the moment) do a good job of explaining that the IOUs balance each other out: if I buy you lunch, then you buy me lunch, we're probably pretty close to balanced out. I'm working with a great designer at the moment to try and fix some of the programmer-isms in the UI.
- wccrawford 15y agoLike, if I just wanted to say "Joe" owes me $20 for a lawnmower. There isn't a split, it's just an IOU. I think I could put at the top that I 'paid' $20 for the lawnmower (it's my mower! lol) and at the bottom that Joe owes that same $20. And that's basically an IOU. But it hurts my head to work that logic out, for some reason.
- forgingahead 15y agoI just re-read this essay yesterday, and it really rings true. http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
- guildchatter 15y agoThanks for the link. I especially liked these two sections: "One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating." "I like Paul Buchheit's suggestion of trying to make something that at least someone really loves. As long as you've made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track. It will be good for your morale to have even a handful of users who really love you, and startups run on morale. But also it will tell you what to focus on. What is it about you that they love? Can you do more of that? Where can you find more people who love that sort of thing? As long as you have some core of users who love you, all you have to do is expand it. It may take a while, but as long as you keep plugging away, you'll win in the end. Both Blogger and Delicious did that. Both took years to succeed. But both began with a core of fanatically devoted users, and all Evan and Joshua had to do was grow that core incrementally. Wufoo is on the same trajectory now." =]
- keeran 15y ago9 days from private beta to shut down? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2724933 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2724933 So a great offer for the other project or a well thought out early fold?
- Shenglong 15y agoNot sure if private beta ever launched. I signed up for TestFlight and to try the app out, and still haven't, to this day, received an opportunity to try it. I was looking forward to this though. Sad to see it go.
- dtran 15y agoIf you believe the Lean Startup thesis*: Success = F(#Iterations) #Iterations = Runway / Speed of each iteration Runway = Cash on hand / Burn rate Then things are looking quite good for this team if they can continue to build, validate, and iterate this quickly with the new project they are pursuing (Assuming they didn't spend their Start Fund money on hookers and blow in the past 9 days). [1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/cash-is-not-king.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/cash-is-not-kin...
- anilv 15y agoFor anyone looking for an alternative, I've been using https://venmo.com/ https://venmo.com/ with good success. They have been around for a while.
- dotBen 15y agoWhen I've needed to do this, I've used a spreadsheet (with some sophisticated conditionals to get a net "you owe" matrix for each person in the group based on a list of shared expenses paid for by different people. In other words, it isn't a startup IMHO - certainly not something I would pay money for. I should put the spreadsheet on Google Docs Templates I guess.
- streptomycin 15y agoI've done that too, but the average person would struggle to do it. That is (was?) the market.
- derrida 15y agoAnd I use a napkin.
- patrickmandia 15y agoSome shameless self promotion: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tabs/id383784290?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tabs/id383784290?mt=8 Not quite the same, but close enough :)
- dstein 15y agoWhatever happened to Y-Combinator funding startups tackling "hard problems", and searching for "the next Microsoft" ?
- kalvin 15y agoEven Microsoft started small. What PG likes to say is: YC is looking for startups building the next BASIC interpreter for the Altair (which was almost as obscure then as it is now.) Something minimally useful in or adjacent to a market that's going to explode, and started by determined/smart founders. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934374 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934374
- dstein 15y agoExactly my point. YC says that's what they're looking for, but YC startups tend to look more like this little "social calculator" web app then a company that will invent a new operating system, programming language, and personal computing paradigm.
- archangel_one 15y agoPretty sure pg said somewhere that it's a fool's game searching for the next Microsoft, because to get that you need another company to bend over at the right time to be the next IBM. I doubt YC has ever been expecting that.
- LargeWu 15y agoI know people who, if they were for example taking a long cross-country trip, would split up gas, hotels, meals, etc., down to the penny. I even heard of somebody who hounded one of his friends for $1.72 after the trip was over. This app sounds perfect for them. Still, I can't believe there's much of a market for them, since anybody who's cheap enough to care about $1.72 from a friend would never pay for this sort of app in the first place.
- keeptrying 15y agoI had a "friend" who hounded me about 35 cents once. And I'm not exaggerating, unfortunately.
- Confusion 15y agoExactly my thoughts: nobody that cares enough about exactly splitting bills is going to pay for an app like this. There is the alternative, that has always served me well, called 'pen and paper' that is faster and easier to access. And as long as you don't care about a few $ up or down, sharing expenses is incredibly easy.
- xyzzyz 15y agoYeah, me and my friends are using BillMonk and are quite content. On a side note, the problem of shuffling debts among a group of people, so that the total amount of checks written is minimized, is NP-complete.