12 ms·
From YC Rejection to 10,000 Users in 1 Month (with stats)
- mirsadm 15y agoWell done guys! Your web site looks pretty great and I'll be trying it out in a sec. I wondered myself if submitting early is a wise decision. I submitted our application a month before the due date but then we changed our idea entirely. I would hope the guys didn't read the original one and moved on. Edit: I also think that YC should not be what decides whether you create your startup or not. It is great to see you guys kept going. The people that decide to change ideas or abandon their startup because of not getting into YC tell me that they are pretty good at picking people that aren't serious about creating a successful business.
- dlf 15y agoI like the edit. Anyone that would stop working on their startup because they didn't get funded by YC or TechStars probably shouldn't be doing a startup in the first place.
- csomar 15y agoI just want to add one thing: The quality of the presentation, design, and execution is better than many Ycombinator start-ups (at launch day/ first couple of months). I haven't tried the actual product, but from outside it looks neat and well presented. Now there are lots of pretty damn good sites that YC alumni are making from launch day; but the fact that a good number isn't, suggests that PG might want to improve his filter process a bit.
- alagu 15y ago> suggests that PG might want to improve his filter process a bit. I'm not sure how this is related. From what I've observed, PG selects promising founders, not great site-builders. Is it fair to expect all of them to create beautiful sites?
- __abc 15y agoyes. If you in theory pick the "best of the best" you expect .... the "best". that include the visual packaging and presentation of the companies products / services.
- csomar 15y agoWell, if you are in the SaaS business, I expect that you have a beautiful and functional interface. If you are providing me something not related to the interface, then I don't care. (e.g. I'm using prgmr.com but I don't really care about the interface, their site design or an admin back-end; all I need is the shell).
- alagu 15y agoI understand interface is important. What I'm trying to understand is, if a team of amazing hackers don't understand site design, html and css - should they be rejected at YC?
- patio11 15y agoNow there are lots of pretty damn good sites that YC alumni are making from launch day; but the fact that a good number isn't, suggests that PG might want to improve his filter process a bit. Do beautiful sites at launch day correlate well with IPOs? I'll supply the answer: no. Many beautiful sites will not IPO. Many tech companies which IPOed had abominable sites at launch day. The long-term salience of this is an amusing historical footnote and nothing more.
- kappaknight 15y agoAm I reading this right? 10,000 users - 1,400 on free trial = 8,600 paying subscribers. If so, congratulations! =)
- MattBearman 15y agoThe blog has a graph showing around 1500 paying customers, which is still amazing (nearly $15k / month revenue!). I'm guessing the missing 6000 odd are staying on the free plan.
- yesimahuman 15y agoSorry, that's misleading (though I do wish :)) There are about 1500 customers in a trial plan that hasn't expired and doesn't require a credit card, so we will only convert some percentage of them to paying customers. However, we just pushed an update last night that has dramatically increased our conversion rate from free to paid trials. Only time will tell by how much!
- lusr 15y agoI'm surprised the potential here wasn't recognized; seems like a no brainer given the target market (one that's growing ridiculously fast with no signs of slowing down) and the obvious level of quality! Of course what doesn't look like a no brainer with the benefit of hindsight ;) Out of curiosity what change did you make that led to your conversion rate increasing so dramatically? You mentioned something in your post too, but didn't elucidate.
- yesimahuman 15y agoFor the free builder we added a feature to immediately upgrade and save your work in progress in your dashboard, instead of just telling you to upgrade, forcing you to decide between losing your work or doing it all over again.
- janlukacs 15y agoso the avarage conversion rate is about 8%? that's very good :)
- MattBearman 15y agoI'd never heard of Codiqa until I read this post, but I'm glad I did. Really impressive app, I'll definitely be using this to build mobile apps in the near future.
- shyknee 15y agoCongrats guys - very interested to see what happens when the free trial period ends for the users who joined after Codiqa showed up on the jQuery Mobile site.
- j45 15y agoIt's great to see bootstrappers getting some well deserved love. Lots of attention goes to the startup lottery winners and it's good to have a reminder that you really can do it without funding just as well.
- tomgallard 15y agoNot only that, but the longer you can delay taking funding, the less of your business you'll have to give away. I hate the thought that getting funded is like winning the lottery. Yes, it is absolutely necessary for some startups, but far too many seem to treat it as an end in itself (presumably there are bragging points associated with being able to say you've been funded to the tune of X million) Bootstrapping encourages you to keep your costs tight, focus on profit and revenue, ship early, quickly and often, and build something people want.
- j45 15y agoBootstrapping profitable companies also have more leverage when ready for funding. My use of the term startup lottery was meant to describe the communual celebration and veneration of quite often earning some runway. The businesses that need it are ones that have to find a product-market fit and a repeatable business model. I just think you're better equipped to find validated scalable business models once you've done it without money. There's nothing quite like having to find and build what people are willing to pay for out of the gate instead of putting it off. From where I see it, I don't see enough technologically complex startups that need a runway, and in hindsight could have been built without funding. The startups that would, tremendously benefit from the coaching, introductions, and business model development are rare, and special, and maybe that reflects in the small number of startups accepted to Y!. The rest shouldn't consider themselves a failure either... this startup certainly fit the mantra build something people want (and will pay for)
- ma2rten 15y agoI would like to argue that having success at getting founding is more predictable than being successful at bootstrapping a company. However, I think the majority of businesses are bootstrapped, you just don't hear as much from them. It really depends on business idea if taking venture capital makes sense or not. Some businesses are able to generate money quickly and don't require a large upfront investment, others do.
- fam 15y agoChecked out the homepage on FF 11.0 and the gray text under "Pure jQuery Mobile" shows up as an unreadable light gray (vs. Chrome where it shows up fine). Might want to check that out.
- yesimahuman 15y agoHmm. Thanks for pointing that out, we'll look into it!
- Hitchhiker 15y agousers , revenue beats everything else. well done.
- highace 15y agoGreat idea and it does look very slick and well executed, but from the little playing around I did it just didn't feel as fluid as a desktop app would. I'd definitely prefer a native desktop application to html and js, perhaps with an option to view and tweak my creations with the web interface when I'm off site.
- kgosser 15y agoMax & Ben are some of the best developers in the midwest. Very excited for this project and for them!
- danvoell 15y agoAgreed, Great product and Great write up. Keep up the amazing work!
- yesimahuman 15y agoThanks guys!
- suhastech 15y agoInteresting aside? http://maxlynch.com/a-website-design-trend-that-needs-to-die http://maxlynch.com/a-website-design-trend-that-needs-to-die
- yesimahuman 15y agoGuilty as charged. Thanks for making me chuckle. We didn't put the "See" in front though :)
- rudiger 15y agoWhat's wrong with "Plans & Pricing"?
- caw 15y agoThis is just a guess as to the reasoning: You could just put "Plans", which because you're selling something implies it has a price. "Pricing" sounds like you're raising the issue of cost too quickly (on the landing page). Give them the value proposition of the plans, then tell them how much it will cost. For other options, there's always "Products" but that makes me think you have multiple products (Product Suite, Standalone 1, Standalone 2...) I always happen to look for "Plans & Pricing" these days; it's one of the things I scan for.
- tatsuke95 15y agoHe may be right for the population in general, but I can tell you that the "Pricing" header is something that I, personally, immediately look for. No point wasting my team reading anything on that site if the price is out of my league. Edit: Apparently just like you.
- damoncali 15y agoI disagree with that. A lot. The Pricing page is one of the most viewed pages on a typical app sales site (in my experience, at least), and the one that does the lion's share of the selling. People head to it straight away for a reason, and they need to be able to find it without effort - hence the obvious title. It's too important to not be bold and explicit.
- debacle 15y agoReally cool. Something that I'm going to look into in the future - one of the very few online tools that I might actually use!
- Nowyouknow 15y agoCongrats guys! I wholeheartedly believe in bootstrapping over funding. Keep that company to yourselves. I played around with Codiqa on the jquerymobile site and what you've put together is truly impressive. I've worked with startups in the past and I haven't seen any as well put together. Need a marketing person? Give me a call.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoAny chance you have screenshots for Gobuzz, or a more thorough explanation of product, or feature list?
- yesimahuman 15y agoGobuzz was basically google alerts for people and companies that matter to you. We would send you an email each day (or more) with news about these people and companies. Near the end we also supported NLP stuff to find new people mentioned alongside your important contacts. I still think it's a missing piece of the news world, but we lacked experience and did not dig in and focus.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI am working on what could be considered an MVP for GoBuzz. Did you guys use Google Alerts and souped it?
- yesimahuman 15y agoNo, we did the indexing and searching ourselves utilizing Solr and using a document service (can't remember the name, starts with an S, which was pricy). This let us take out a lot of "fuzzy" tokenization requirements and rely on pretty exact matches in content. I'd love to talk more about it with you. My email is in my profile.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoDefinitely will do. Thanks.
- monsterix 15y agoSince you guys are at it, may be I can ask. Is there a little something extracted from jQueryMobile, which lets me use only 'form-styling' of their otherwise huge piece of work? I want only the relevant css and javascript out of the entire thing. Any help would get a huge hug from me. And thanks, in advance. BTW nice work with Codiqa, I am in. [Edited for grammar]
- sachingulaya 15y agoI've been putting off developing a mobile app for my startup. With codiqa it looks like I can get a decent one going in a weekend. I'm pretty stoked.
- pg 15y agoBelieve it or not I like this being the top story. We know there are lots of bugs in our process and we want to hear the bug reports. I went back to look at the application. It fell immediately below the threshold for invitation to interviews. I.e. if even one of us had given them a grade one step better, they would have made it to interviews. When we make mistakes, it's usually in this phase. Most of the time when we screw up it's by not inviting a group to interviews, rather than by interviewing them and turning them down. So this startup is exactly where a mistake would be most likely to occur: in the applications that fell just short of the cutoff for interviews. The good news is, we'd already decided to fix this problem. We're going to do 3 interview tracks for s2012, which will let us interview 270 groups instead of the 180 we did last time. If we'd done that last time, we would have interviewed these guys. But last batch was the first time we did parallel interview tracks at all, and we needed to test whether it worked for 2 before we went to 3.
- bicknergseng 15y agoLook at it this way: at least you interview everyone you accept. Most colleges interview only a few prospective students, and that's for a four year program rather than a three month one.
- bicknergseng 15y agoI meant this as a compliment for the hard work you guys do evaluating all the potentials and making deliberate, thoroughly evaluated decisions on who you work with. I'm sorry if I didn't convey that properly.
- mirsadm 15y agoAre you guys keeping track of statistics of grades for applications? I am wondering if at some point there is a clear cut off that you can safely say we don't need to interview these groups. If it is a linear/gradual decrease I'd imagine it would be very difficult to find that threshold.
- pg 15y ago
- NameNickHN 15y agoIt just goes to show that even though others don't share your vision, you shouldn't necessarily give up on it.
- cinquemb 15y agoThis is what i like to hear! In the future, more and more start ups will be the ones choosing who to get funding from. Power always lies with those who create. Congrats, and keep up the good work!
- tstegart 15y agoCongrats guys! And way to represent Wisconsin!
- jordhy 15y agoCompliments on the execution of your site, platform and branding. This is well deserved success. Keep pushing and reapply to YC, I you want to, you'll make it!
- aiof 15y agoSomewhat off topic, but what do you Codiqa guys think about Sencha Touch 2?
- dustin 15y agoWell done and looks quite useful - bookmarked for the future. However, I have a really hard time reading some of the copy (contrast) on my laptop: http://i.imgur.com/fRzAe.png http://i.imgur.com/fRzAe.png
- yesimahuman 15y agoWhat browser are you on? Thanks!
- apsurd 15y agoGotta admit, I was blown away by the builder interface design. Well done, guys.
- lordlicorice 15y agoI played with your app on the jquerymobile site... what immediately frustrated me is that it doesn't seem to be possible to align elements to the bottom of the frame. At least have an option for Footer elements!
- EREFUNDO 15y agoY combinator should only be one of the avenues to be explored by an entrepreneur. My team (PayGuard) submitted an early application hoping that they would have more time to look at it, we still plan to update it before the March 28 deadline. We will apply again in the winter if we don't get in this summer since we're already quitting our jobs anyway. Getting accepted in the program will certainly jump us in the fast lane but we will not even slow down if we don't get in. My team have debated and made improvements to the idea for the past 6 months then we realized that the time for theorizing has ended and the time for building a product is now. We can't wait to test this out in the real world because we think there is a serious need for a payment system specializing in long distance and cross-border transactions.
- serbrech 15y agoCodiqa seems really awesome. I bookmark it for this week end : There is StartupWeekend in Oslo. I will advertise it there and I'm sure you will get many subscription from Norway this weekend.
- patio11 15y agoCongrats on the success here. You asked for some suggestions in the blog post. I'm going to make them publicly for the benefit of other HNers but if you want rationales and don't want the followup public just find my email. 1) Strongly, strongly consider capturing CCs at signup. Yes, this takes a bit more work. Yes, this will decrease your conversion rate. However, you're going to get more people successfully charged than you do currently. 2) There exist things you can do to increase user engagement with the app which will increase conversion rate from "user" to "signup", even if you don't take advice #1. I have a video coming out in a little while about this. Short version: go take the free trial of Balsamiq Mockups and take copious notes about what they do. In particular, note how Balsamiq doesn't start you out with a blank screen and note the timing and frequency of prompts for you to signup. Implement both of those things. Your conversion rate will increase. 3) You captured my email address for a "paid" signup. Good! I got no email from you. Bad! You should, bare minimum, hit my inbox with "Thanks for signing up for Codiqa. Your free trial lasts until XX/YY." followed by the best three bullet point sales copy you can come up with, linking back to your site extensively. Why? Because I already forgot your domain name (literally true) and statistically speaking I already forgot I signed up for Codiqa. Hitting my inbox is a free chance at recapturing my attention tomorrow when I do my morning email pass. 4) But wait, if one email is good, isn't five emails better? YES! Put a wee little checkbox on your signup form saying "Can we email you a free course about JQuery mobile? Five emails, absolutely no spam, opt out any time." You'll get 40%+ signups. If they sign up, you hit them on day 0, day 6, day 15, day 20, and day 28 with emails of approximately the following format. Thanks for signing up for a free month-long course on JQuery Mobile by Codiqa, the jQuery mobile design app you used recently. (You asked for this when you signed up. Don't want it? No problem, click here.) This is your 2nd email out of 5. Today's topic is how jQuery mobile cuts app development costs while increasing revenue. (h2) jQuery Mobile Cuts Development Costs by 50% (/h2) Paragraph of copy. (~300 words) Link to codiqa docs or blog in here somewhere. (h2) Another bullet point (/h2) Another paragraph. (h2) Another bullet point (/h2) Another paragraph Conclusion paragraph goes here. Early in the email sequence the conclusion paragraph just mentions your service, establishes expectations for the next email, and invites them to email you at any time. Later in the sequence you get salesy as heck. What does salesy as heck mean? By the fifth email you should, if you're good at writing and jQuery Mobile, have your most engaged customers eating out of your virtual hands. The fifth email is less about education and more about one focused case delivered by their favorite jQuery Mobile expert on why buying the $30 a month plan, specifically, today, is the best possible thing they can do to improve their life today. Execute correctly on this and you will print money. How much money? Just a comparable: for BCC, which is far less sophisticated on the email than this trick is and which has terrible unit economics, I make about twenty cents per email I send. If I tell you how many orders of magnitude that number can be improved by, four different consulting clients are going to demand my spleen sauteed with a glass of chianti. 5) Charge more! Or at least give an option for charging more. $30 a month is rat droppings to a business doing mobile development. (You will not get that feedback from some HNers. That's OK. Five hundred HNers refusing to buy your product plus one business charged $500 a month = $6,000 of revenue a year.) Put a $250 a month plan in there. You will sell it, to someone who a) does not need to pay $250 of his own money to buy it and b) receives well in excess of that much value from your service.