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Of course you don't need phenomenal growth. Most of the best companies we've funded didn't have it when they applied. Looking for YC cos in small markets coul
by pg 15y ago
Of course you don't need phenomenal growth. Most of the best companies we've funded didn't have it when they applied.
Looking for YC cos in small markets could be misleading. By the time you know they're YC cos, they've been exposed to YC and so would have been encouraged to reconsider their market if they were in a bad one. There may be some that are still in what seem to be small markets, but if so that's probably because they're in the Altair Basic phase.
- bfe 15y agoA few like Wakemate and Octopart come to mind where they seem to serve small markets now, but it's easy to see how they could branch out into huge adjacent market space - not necessarily as obliquely as Microsoft starting from Altair Basic, more like Amazon starting out as just an online bookstore.
- johnx123-up 15y agoIn that case, what's your #1? Some ideas like Wikipedia, SocialAV might have sustained with very thin initial user base.
- newchimedes 15y agoI can see how it can be misleading looking at small market YC companies. Though I'm still wondering what's considered "small" by YC's standards. Someone mentioned Octopart and Wakemate as smaller market companies, but as a consumer/retail play it seems still like a decent potential market. This is a long about way of me asking if people consider the adult entertainment market small/big. That's where our startup is "disrupting." It's one of those industries where you hear talk of the "billions" being made, but not many share their numbers. One of the few well known exits in the adult space was AdultFriendFinder being sold to Penthouse for $500 million...and interestingly they grew the site from little to no outside money.