5 ms·

Is it just me or are a lot of the recent YC companies extremely niche, almost where they could just be a feature of another website? Maybe I'm just in a negativ

Is it just me or are a lot of the recent YC companies extremely niche, almost where they could just be a feature of another website? Maybe I'm just in a negative mood today.

arctangent 15y ago
I don't know whether you are right or not about that. However, I do think it's a good idea to be "extremely niche", especially when the size of your market - in this case, people who like watching movies - is very large. I'm sure that a good movie trailer recommendation system would work well on other sites, but those sites may have already moved past the startup/development phase into business-as-usual, where they are trying to squeeze money out of what they currently have without searching for new value propositions. I'm currently working (albeit in a tremendously half-assed way) on a very obvious movie-related idea because I know I can do it better than the big sites and because the market is enormous.
webwright 15y ago
If this isn't on the YC FAQ, it should be. A lot of great companies start small. One of my favorite PG-isms is this: If you can make a simple product for a niche audience and make them amazingly happy, it's clear what you need to do next. Find more people like that. Move into adjacent markets (e.g. Craigslist started as an SF classifieds mailing list, Amazon started with books). If you make a product that makes a huge audience ambivalent, you often have no freakin' clue what to do next. Add features? Take them away? Change your positioning? So imagine if these guys OWNED movie trailers on mobile. Do you think they'd be stuck there? Could they, perhaps, move on to dominate broader short-form video to satiate micro-boredom? Could they then move onto longer form stuff?
- iamelgringo 15y ago
  There's also a lot of companies that start small, stay small and die of attrition. But, those don't make for sexy blog post reading, however. That's not to detract from the above company.
nibo 15y ago
which ones are you referring to?
- MatthewB 15y ago
  I'd rather not call out specific companies but most of the recent launch announcements have been uninteresting to say the least. They are either slight variations of products that are already out there or their market is extremely niche. Maybe PG just expects these startups to build a quick product and sell off to a Google, Facebook, Zynga etc. I know he chooses startups by their founders, maybe that is because he expects them to be acq-hired. The most exciting thing I've seen announced on hackernews lately is codecademy and they aren't even part of YC.
  - emmett 15y ago
    Hm, I don't understand what you mean by "niche"...codeacademy is much MORE niche than Can't Wait, at least right now...a lot more people watch movies than program. Remember, what the startup does when it begins is not what it will grow into. Facebook was a place you could make a simple profile as a Harvard student. Microsoft made a Basic compiler (talk about niche at that time!).
  - mlinsey 15y ago
    YC has always preached launching as soon as possible, which means that upon launch you'll only get a tiny hint of a startup's future ambitions. I actually think the way forward is a little bit more obvious for this one. Without even talking to the founders or seeing their pitch, you should be able to think of a number of interesting directions. To pick the most obvious one, wouldn't being the IMDB of the mobile/social era be pretty cool? Is that even really "niche"?
  - webwright 15y ago
    "Maybe PG just expects these startups to build a quick product and sell off to a Google, Facebook, Zynga etc." YC makes very little on quick-flip startups. Count the number of YC partners and the number of LPs they have, do some napkin math on their expenses (weekly dinners for 150+, funding 120 startups per year, presumably moderate salaries for partners and staff, legal bills, flying hundreds of people to SV for interviews every 6 months, etc), and tell me how needle-moving it is for them to turn a $20k investment into $240k (before taxes)... Which is exactly what they'd get for a $4M exit. AFAIK, YC always advises founders who have an early flip opportunity to stick it out (though it's supportive if the founders don't want to do so).
paul 15y ago
AirBnb started out as a site for renting airbeds and now they're worth over a billion dollars, so I'm not too worried.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - paul 15y ago
    It was actually just in their own apartment to start with. It went so well that they then decided to make it possible for other people to rent out airbeds in their apartments. Eventually they discovered that people would rather rent bedrooms or whole apartments (or the country of Lichtenstein), but that took a while longer.
    - MatthewB 15y ago
      Fair enough. I understand your point and you definitely know the beginnings of Airbnb's business better than I do. I have just seen an inundation of "we are the x of y of z" lately and they all just seem like derivatives of derivatives. Airbnb was always a very interesting and unique idea from the start (at least once they realized to expand past their own apartment).
      - paul 15y ago
        There's no such thing as a totally unique idea. When Airbnb was in YC, most people saw it as a derivative of couchsurfing.
      - nibo 15y ago
        I see what you mean. As pg points out: "One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy." (http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html) Regarding the fact that they are all "we are the x of y of z" and seem derivative, pg says: "One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It's like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It's like an answering service, but for email. It's eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Don't worry that it will make your idea seem "derivative." Some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas no one realized could be combined." (http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html)
temphn 15y ago
Know what you mean. It's mobile and social, but is it local? I suppose it is if the monetization is to send to a nearby movie theater to see the movie whose trailer you liked. Seriously though, props to them at least for choosing something that is theory monetizable. Movie producers would pay big bucks to reach the influencers that get everyone else to see a movie.
madh 15y ago
It's niche, but studios pay billions a year to market movies. That's not a small market.
6ren 15y ago
You highlight a real tension: a great strength of a tiny startup is to thrive on niches so tiny that established companies cannot justify entering - so they don't compete. The tension is that it's not exciting (unless you're prone to visions). Also, a tiny niche is probably all you can cope with, with limited resources.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Ah, but consider how much easier a sell this niche is than Convore was. I have read exactly one sentence about Can't Wait and I already know who it is for and what it does. I have signed up on Convore and I still have no idea what it's really best at. In my short time there, I saw it used for HN meta-chat, and a bunch of Ruby chat. And I watched tptacek try to start a conversation about his field, but it kind of died, so I guess it's not the go-to place for that. Branding is important. Marketing is important. Far, far more important than novelty or impressive technology. Novelty is fleeting - my god, we're already used to Google, and it's literally an epochal advance in library science - and impressive tech tends to confuse people for the first few years, which may be more years than your little startup can afford. EDIT: I see that Can't Wait also has a revenue stream: Affiliate fees from Fandango.

Is it just me or are a lot of the recent YC companies extremely niche, almost where they could just be a feature of another website? Maybe I'm just in a negative mood today.

arctangent 15y ago

I don't know whether you are right or not about that. However, I do think it's a good idea to be "extremely niche", especially when the size of your market - in this case, people who like watching movies - is very large. I'm sure that a good movie trailer recommendation system would work well on other sites, but those sites may have already moved past the startup/development phase into business-as-usual, where they are trying to squeeze money out of what they currently have without searching for new value propositions. I'm currently working (albeit in a tremendously half-assed way) on a very obvious movie-related idea because I know I can do it better than the big sites and because the market is enormous.

webwright 15y ago

If this isn't on the YC FAQ, it should be. A lot of great companies start small. One of my favorite PG-isms is this: If you can make a simple product for a niche audience and make them amazingly happy, it's clear what you need to do next. Find more people like that. Move into adjacent markets (e.g. Craigslist started as an SF classifieds mailing list, Amazon started with books). If you make a product that makes a huge audience ambivalent, you often have no freakin' clue what to do next. Add features? Take them away? Change your positioning? So imagine if these guys OWNED movie trailers on mobile. Do you think they'd be stuck there? Could they, perhaps, move on to dominate broader short-form video to satiate micro-boredom? Could they then move onto longer form stuff?

iamelgringo 15y ago
There's also a lot of companies that start small, stay small and die of attrition. But, those don't make for sexy blog post reading, however. That's not to detract from the above company.

nibo 15y ago

which ones are you referring to?

MatthewB 15y ago
I'd rather not call out specific companies but most of the recent launch announcements have been uninteresting to say the least. They are either slight variations of products that are already out there or their market is extremely niche. Maybe PG just expects these startups to build a quick product and sell off to a Google, Facebook, Zynga etc. I know he chooses startups by their founders, maybe that is because he expects them to be acq-hired. The most exciting thing I've seen announced on hackernews lately is codecademy and they aren't even part of YC.
- emmett 15y ago
  Hm, I don't understand what you mean by "niche"...codeacademy is much MORE niche than Can't Wait, at least right now...a lot more people watch movies than program. Remember, what the startup does when it begins is not what it will grow into. Facebook was a place you could make a simple profile as a Harvard student. Microsoft made a Basic compiler (talk about niche at that time!).
- mlinsey 15y ago
  YC has always preached launching as soon as possible, which means that upon launch you'll only get a tiny hint of a startup's future ambitions. I actually think the way forward is a little bit more obvious for this one. Without even talking to the founders or seeing their pitch, you should be able to think of a number of interesting directions. To pick the most obvious one, wouldn't being the IMDB of the mobile/social era be pretty cool? Is that even really "niche"?
- webwright 15y ago
  "Maybe PG just expects these startups to build a quick product and sell off to a Google, Facebook, Zynga etc." YC makes very little on quick-flip startups. Count the number of YC partners and the number of LPs they have, do some napkin math on their expenses (weekly dinners for 150+, funding 120 startups per year, presumably moderate salaries for partners and staff, legal bills, flying hundreds of people to SV for interviews every 6 months, etc), and tell me how needle-moving it is for them to turn a $20k investment into $240k (before taxes)... Which is exactly what they'd get for a $4M exit. AFAIK, YC always advises founders who have an early flip opportunity to stick it out (though it's supportive if the founders don't want to do so).

paul 15y ago

AirBnb started out as a site for renting airbeds and now they're worth over a billion dollars, so I'm not too worried.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- paul 15y ago
  It was actually just in their own apartment to start with. It went so well that they then decided to make it possible for other people to rent out airbeds in their apartments. Eventually they discovered that people would rather rent bedrooms or whole apartments (or the country of Lichtenstein), but that took a while longer.
  - MatthewB 15y ago
    Fair enough. I understand your point and you definitely know the beginnings of Airbnb's business better than I do. I have just seen an inundation of "we are the x of y of z" lately and they all just seem like derivatives of derivatives. Airbnb was always a very interesting and unique idea from the start (at least once they realized to expand past their own apartment).
    - paul 15y ago
      There's no such thing as a totally unique idea. When Airbnb was in YC, most people saw it as a derivative of couchsurfing.
    - nibo 15y ago
      I see what you mean. As pg points out: "One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy." (http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html) Regarding the fact that they are all "we are the x of y of z" and seem derivative, pg says: "One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It's like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It's like an answering service, but for email. It's eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Don't worry that it will make your idea seem "derivative." Some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas no one realized could be combined." (http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html)

temphn 15y ago

Know what you mean. It's mobile and social, but is it local? I suppose it is if the monetization is to send to a nearby movie theater to see the movie whose trailer you liked. Seriously though, props to them at least for choosing something that is theory monetizable. Movie producers would pay big bucks to reach the influencers that get everyone else to see a movie.

madh 15y ago

It's niche, but studios pay billions a year to market movies. That's not a small market.

6ren 15y ago

You highlight a real tension: a great strength of a tiny startup is to thrive on niches so tiny that established companies cannot justify entering - so they don't compete. The tension is that it's not exciting (unless you're prone to visions). Also, a tiny niche is probably all you can cope with, with limited resources.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mechanical_fish 15y ago

Ah, but consider how much easier a sell this niche is than Convore was. I have read exactly one sentence about Can't Wait and I already know who it is for and what it does. I have signed up on Convore and I still have no idea what it's really best at. In my short time there, I saw it used for HN meta-chat, and a bunch of Ruby chat. And I watched tptacek try to start a conversation about his field, but it kind of died, so I guess it's not the go-to place for that. Branding is important. Marketing is important. Far, far more important than novelty or impressive technology. Novelty is fleeting - my god, we're already used to Google, and it's literally an epochal advance in library science - and impressive tech tends to confuse people for the first few years, which may be more years than your little startup can afford. EDIT: I see that Can't Wait also has a revenue stream: Affiliate fees from Fandango.