25 ms·

Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1

132 points by zaveri 13y ago

namwen 13y ago
"Today, some $29. 6 billion in smartphone cases are sold every year." Really? No way. I'd be amazed if this was a correct figure.
pisarzp 13y ago
Kivo sounds really fantastic. I can remember having 272 versions of the presentation back in the day I worked in the bank. The only obstacle I see is that majority of the potential users are not allowed to install any software themselves, but given that they already signed up some big customers they definitely can cope with that.
- patmcguire 13y ago
  Also starting with consultancies is smart. Once you get Deloitte and McKinsey they're going to be recommending that to clients since it's what they know.
sologoub 13y ago
Looks like the screwed up tagline for SpoonRocket - "reviews for everything" looks like a copy/paste from Toutpost right above it...
- frakkingcylons 13y ago
  Yeah there's another error in the Floobits section. The bit about earlier coverage was mistakenly copy-pasted from the section about Standard Treasury.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Prim: interesting and I'm sure useful for a lot of people. I hope they're right that they can eventually lower prices though because that seems very expensive. Also is there a trend towards or away from using laundromats? Where I'm from it's unusual not to have your own washing machine and I wouldn't move anywhere that didn't have one. RealCrowd: Really interesting startup but with the recent housing crisis they may have trouble convincing people it's a worthwhile investment and not a total gamble. I'm really interested to see where this goes and if it ever moves to include the general public (i.e. non-accredited investors). StatusPage.io - I'll be using this immediately. Useful product and it looks like they already have quite a few high profile companies as customers. Hard to have an opinion on the pricing as I've no idea how many users would subscribe to these notifications.
- adamhooper 13y ago
  Founder of RealCrowd here - thanks for the comments. We're focused only on commercial assets now that produce stable cash flow - think of a starbucks or an office building in SoMa that has consistent monthly income from rental payments. Homes should be viewed as shelter, not as a primary vehicle to create wealth. It will be very interesting to see where the JOBS Act goes and how we can incorporate pure crowdfunding into our platform. Bringing access to this class of investment is what we're after and we're really excited to do so!
dirtyaura 13y ago
Article claims that Prim's 10% weekly growth is "low by Y-Combinator standards", but in "Startup = Growth" pg wrote that 10% weekly growth is great growth pace, and above 5% is good. Has the baseline of YC companies improved that much?
- kevin_morrill 13y ago
  Techcrunch author may be reacting to growth rates right after launch that Demo Day pitches tout, which of course are through the roof (often over 100% week-over-week). The 10% PG talks about is something you try to do week in and week out long after your press spike. It's insanely hard to do, but even if you come anywhere close you are doing very well.
jhuckestein 13y ago
There is no way that YC now considers 10% weekly revenue growth low. That's 142x a year. I'm pretty sure any investor would be happy with that kind of traction, especially if the company has their unit economics figured out, like Prim appears to have.
- applecore 13y ago
  > A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
citizenkeys 13y ago
all the companies are listed here: http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies most of them have already been on techcrunch by the time demo day rolls around.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
frakkingcylons 13y ago
Floobits works really well from my limited experience. I've used it in Sublime while my friend was in vim and it worked flawlessly. Much better than our experience with attempting something similar with Screenhero. We tried Flooty (live terminal-sharing) as well, and it's in a mostly-working state. If you've ever tried Nitrous.io's shared tmux sessions, it works almost as well. I see Floobits becoming a tool used by many, many developers. I like Toutpost's idea, but I'm not convinced by their approach at the moment. Though I'm actually in the process of making something pretty similar for a specific audience in Django. If they were in my area already, I would probably try out SpoonRocket immediately. I already prepare and cook all my meals, but I'm still prone to getting some food near campus once or twice a week. $6 for a delivered "designer" meal is pretty compelling if they manage to maintain that price outside of their current area.
6thSigma 13y ago
I wonder why GraftConcepts didn't go the Kickstarter route.
jasonkester 13y ago
I remember a time when this very TechCrunch article would come out and I'd read through it with a sense of dismay at the sheer unadulterated badness of every single idea. Things have changed. An example: Teleborder charges $5,000 per visa application, ... gathering documents, collecting information, and sending information to the government. This is one of those ideas where you just stop and wonder why nobody has run with it before. These guys are going to make bank. I rode a dotcom into the ground in the early 'aughts that was tackling a similar problem with 10x the paperwork of a H1B and roughly 0% of the hair-on-fire demand that tech companies with tons of money have for help getting labor into the country. That's the kind of company I wish I'd founded. Nice work.
- sharkweek 13y ago
  Teleborder definitely caught my eye - seems to be curing a major headache I think my favorite of the past few batches is still FlightCar; that's the one I looked at and thought "damn where has this been all my life"
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- hpagey 13y ago
  I m not sure if this will work. The cost per app goes down with each additional app. After about 10 apps the company typically has figured out and streamlined the entire process. The documentation requirements for the H1B applicant are pretty well known. (previous status, transcripts, degree certificates,...). These are not overly complicated documents (unless you are a special case). Also 5k fee sounds kinds of high (I am assuming these are in addition to the government fees). A lawyer for h1b application should not cost more than 2 to 3k. So, why would a company pay more NOT to work directly with a lawyer? On the other hand, if the fees include government fees then this is a very good deal. H1b applicant feels secure in the knowledge that his application is handled by a lawyer. Its like buying an insurance, they are indirectly buying "peace of mind". If they find out that company is not directly using a lawyer, I am not sure how they will react. Am I missing something?
  - 13y ago
pla3rhat3r 13y ago
I love that every app is labeled "It's (insert other app) for (insert what is does)." Example: YAMMER FOR MOBILE WORKFORCE, Mint.com for legal spend, CLICKTALE FOR MOBILE, YELP FOR LATIN AMERICA. UGH!!
- kaeawc 13y ago
  It seems to be the best way to get new ideas across to people. How would you describe them in a clearer way that as many people would understand?
  - soneca 13y ago
    Also, Glio looks like a copycat, so it is exactly Yelp for Brazil. That is what they are building, not just a form of explain their model. Remember those times when people discussed how YC model was "cooler" than Rocket Internet model? Those times are gone.
    - robryan 13y ago
      I don't think that is an issue. The value in Yelp is largely in the reviews, the rest of how it works has been done plenty of times for plenty of different things. Just like a groupon or stripe, the venue reviews space really needs boots on the ground and some local knowledge to work right, so there is a big opportunity for essentially a copycat model for that market (same as has happened for a long time in china). Bringing these tried and tested ideas to places just catching up to the rest of the world with digital connectivity is probably going to be very lucrative over the next decade for people well positioned to do so.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - pla3rhat3r 13y ago
    I don't know. Maybe use some sort of journalistic tools.
  - jkaunisv1 13y ago
untilHellbanned 13y ago
meh. none of these ideas other than Standard Treasury seem particularly compelling, and there goes whats left of my karma...
nashequilibrium 13y ago
Is there a link to the video presentations?
prawn 13y ago
Liked this comment on the SpoonRocket story: "Reminds me of a tactic used by my father's friend, who owned a pizzeria. He noticed that about half the orders were for large pepperoni pizzas. So he had his drivers always carry an additional large pepperoni pizza in the car, and he'd call them mid-route if an additional order came in. It usually did, so thankfully very few cold pizzas died, and he sold more pizzas per hour than before. Saved on gas, drivers made more tips, and eventually he ended up getting heaters and drivers carrying as many as 10 per trip. Combine that with the deeper large pepperoni price cut he could now afford, it was quickly became the busiest joint in town. Too bad he never expanded." Makes me imagine a person/duo in a van, back filled with a limited range of curries on the go and rice cookers, driving around a particular area getting delivery requests and payment on their phone. Drive the short distance (you're already in the van with the product), ladle out servings and walk them to the door. It'd be hard to beat that sort of delivery time and it might make for a few impulse orders.
- confluence 13y ago
  > Almost all programming [pizza delivery] can be viewed as an exercise in caching. -- Terje Mathisen Extra food in the car is like the L1 cache of the food world. Now that I think about, I'm pretty sure that every company in the world is just an exercise in caching.
  - Ecio78 13y ago
    And in the case of food processing, cache "expiration" is definitely something to take into account :)
jamesbrennan 13y ago
StatusPage.io looks like a very good and needed product but I feel like the fact they are a 100% AWS service this wouldn't be ideal for companies who also host their product in AWS. What happens when an AWS-related issue comes up? Your customers may not be able to get to your product as well as your status page.
davedx 13y ago
Congratulations to the Apptimize team! Proud to have been a part of it. :)
velik_m 13y ago
I think GoComm and Kivo have the best chance of this batch. I think GoComm especially is a good idea and in retrospect so obvious, that i wish i would've though of it. Coordinating people, even in small scale events is painful. I remember when i helped with fencing tournaments our club ran (running computer system) it was a constant trouble tracking down free pistes, referees, making sure other stuff (refreshments, garbage and similar) was ok... we solved this with having a dedicated person on the floor in the hall, keeping an eye out and keeping me in the loop, but that isn't very scalable
gadders 13y ago
This is all very well, but what would Edward Sno.... Just kidding. Good luck to everyone in all three Techcrunch pages. Entrepreneurs are heroes and I hope you all make it big.
hatu 13y ago
How many "X for Y" ideas can you count?
diminish 13y ago
Please see the HN poll to predict top YC summer 2013 performers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249141

132 points by zaveri 13y ago

"Today, some $29. 6 billion in smartphone cases are sold every year." Really? No way. I'd be amazed if this was a correct figure.

pisarzp 13y ago

Kivo sounds really fantastic. I can remember having 272 versions of the presentation back in the day I worked in the bank. The only obstacle I see is that majority of the potential users are not allowed to install any software themselves, but given that they already signed up some big customers they definitely can cope with that.

patmcguire 13y ago
Also starting with consultancies is smart. Once you get Deloitte and McKinsey they're going to be recommending that to clients since it's what they know.

sologoub 13y ago

Looks like the screwed up tagline for SpoonRocket - "reviews for everything" looks like a copy/paste from Toutpost right above it...

frakkingcylons 13y ago
Yeah there's another error in the Floobits section. The bit about earlier coverage was mistakenly copy-pasted from the section about Standard Treasury.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Prim: interesting and I'm sure useful for a lot of people. I hope they're right that they can eventually lower prices though because that seems very expensive. Also is there a trend towards or away from using laundromats? Where I'm from it's unusual not to have your own washing machine and I wouldn't move anywhere that didn't have one. RealCrowd: Really interesting startup but with the recent housing crisis they may have trouble convincing people it's a worthwhile investment and not a total gamble. I'm really interested to see where this goes and if it ever moves to include the general public (i.e. non-accredited investors). StatusPage.io - I'll be using this immediately. Useful product and it looks like they already have quite a few high profile companies as customers. Hard to have an opinion on the pricing as I've no idea how many users would subscribe to these notifications.

adamhooper 13y ago
Founder of RealCrowd here - thanks for the comments. We're focused only on commercial assets now that produce stable cash flow - think of a starbucks or an office building in SoMa that has consistent monthly income from rental payments. Homes should be viewed as shelter, not as a primary vehicle to create wealth. It will be very interesting to see where the JOBS Act goes and how we can incorporate pure crowdfunding into our platform. Bringing access to this class of investment is what we're after and we're really excited to do so!

dirtyaura 13y ago

Article claims that Prim's 10% weekly growth is "low by Y-Combinator standards", but in "Startup = Growth" pg wrote that 10% weekly growth is great growth pace, and above 5% is good. Has the baseline of YC companies improved that much?

kevin_morrill 13y ago
Techcrunch author may be reacting to growth rates right after launch that Demo Day pitches tout, which of course are through the roof (often over 100% week-over-week). The 10% PG talks about is something you try to do week in and week out long after your press spike. It's insanely hard to do, but even if you come anywhere close you are doing very well.

jhuckestein 13y ago

There is no way that YC now considers 10% weekly revenue growth low. That's 142x a year. I'm pretty sure any investor would be happy with that kind of traction, especially if the company has their unit economics figured out, like Prim appears to have.

applecore 13y ago
> A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

citizenkeys 13y ago

all the companies are listed here: http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies most of them have already been on techcrunch by the time demo day rolls around.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

frakkingcylons 13y ago

Floobits works really well from my limited experience. I've used it in Sublime while my friend was in vim and it worked flawlessly. Much better than our experience with attempting something similar with Screenhero. We tried Flooty (live terminal-sharing) as well, and it's in a mostly-working state. If you've ever tried Nitrous.io's shared tmux sessions, it works almost as well. I see Floobits becoming a tool used by many, many developers. I like Toutpost's idea, but I'm not convinced by their approach at the moment. Though I'm actually in the process of making something pretty similar for a specific audience in Django. If they were in my area already, I would probably try out SpoonRocket immediately. I already prepare and cook all my meals, but I'm still prone to getting some food near campus once or twice a week. $6 for a delivered "designer" meal is pretty compelling if they manage to maintain that price outside of their current area.

6thSigma 13y ago

I wonder why GraftConcepts didn't go the Kickstarter route.

jasonkester 13y ago

I remember a time when this very TechCrunch article would come out and I'd read through it with a sense of dismay at the sheer unadulterated badness of every single idea. Things have changed. An example: Teleborder charges $5,000 per visa application, ... gathering documents, collecting information, and sending information to the government. This is one of those ideas where you just stop and wonder why nobody has run with it before. These guys are going to make bank. I rode a dotcom into the ground in the early 'aughts that was tackling a similar problem with 10x the paperwork of a H1B and roughly 0% of the hair-on-fire demand that tech companies with tons of money have for help getting labor into the country. That's the kind of company I wish I'd founded. Nice work.

sharkweek 13y ago
Teleborder definitely caught my eye - seems to be curing a major headache I think my favorite of the past few batches is still FlightCar; that's the one I looked at and thought "damn where has this been all my life"
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
hpagey 13y ago
I m not sure if this will work. The cost per app goes down with each additional app. After about 10 apps the company typically has figured out and streamlined the entire process. The documentation requirements for the H1B applicant are pretty well known. (previous status, transcripts, degree certificates,...). These are not overly complicated documents (unless you are a special case). Also 5k fee sounds kinds of high (I am assuming these are in addition to the government fees). A lawyer for h1b application should not cost more than 2 to 3k. So, why would a company pay more NOT to work directly with a lawyer? On the other hand, if the fees include government fees then this is a very good deal. H1b applicant feels secure in the knowledge that his application is handled by a lawyer. Its like buying an insurance, they are indirectly buying "peace of mind". If they find out that company is not directly using a lawyer, I am not sure how they will react. Am I missing something?
- 13y ago

pla3rhat3r 13y ago

I love that every app is labeled "It's (insert other app) for (insert what is does)." Example: YAMMER FOR MOBILE WORKFORCE, Mint.com for legal spend, CLICKTALE FOR MOBILE, YELP FOR LATIN AMERICA. UGH!!

kaeawc 13y ago
It seems to be the best way to get new ideas across to people. How would you describe them in a clearer way that as many people would understand?
- soneca 13y ago
  Also, Glio looks like a copycat, so it is exactly Yelp for Brazil. That is what they are building, not just a form of explain their model. Remember those times when people discussed how YC model was "cooler" than Rocket Internet model? Those times are gone.
  - robryan 13y ago
    I don't think that is an issue. The value in Yelp is largely in the reviews, the rest of how it works has been done plenty of times for plenty of different things. Just like a groupon or stripe, the venue reviews space really needs boots on the ground and some local knowledge to work right, so there is a big opportunity for essentially a copycat model for that market (same as has happened for a long time in china). Bringing these tried and tested ideas to places just catching up to the rest of the world with digital connectivity is probably going to be very lucrative over the next decade for people well positioned to do so.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pla3rhat3r 13y ago
  I don't know. Maybe use some sort of journalistic tools.
- jkaunisv1 13y ago

untilHellbanned 13y ago

meh. none of these ideas other than Standard Treasury seem particularly compelling, and there goes whats left of my karma...

nashequilibrium 13y ago

Is there a link to the video presentations?

prawn 13y ago

Liked this comment on the SpoonRocket story: "Reminds me of a tactic used by my father's friend, who owned a pizzeria. He noticed that about half the orders were for large pepperoni pizzas. So he had his drivers always carry an additional large pepperoni pizza in the car, and he'd call them mid-route if an additional order came in. It usually did, so thankfully very few cold pizzas died, and he sold more pizzas per hour than before. Saved on gas, drivers made more tips, and eventually he ended up getting heaters and drivers carrying as many as 10 per trip. Combine that with the deeper large pepperoni price cut he could now afford, it was quickly became the busiest joint in town. Too bad he never expanded." Makes me imagine a person/duo in a van, back filled with a limited range of curries on the go and rice cookers, driving around a particular area getting delivery requests and payment on their phone. Drive the short distance (you're already in the van with the product), ladle out servings and walk them to the door. It'd be hard to beat that sort of delivery time and it might make for a few impulse orders.

confluence 13y ago
> Almost all programming [pizza delivery] can be viewed as an exercise in caching. -- Terje Mathisen Extra food in the car is like the L1 cache of the food world. Now that I think about, I'm pretty sure that every company in the world is just an exercise in caching.
- Ecio78 13y ago
  And in the case of food processing, cache "expiration" is definitely something to take into account :)

jamesbrennan 13y ago

StatusPage.io looks like a very good and needed product but I feel like the fact they are a 100% AWS service this wouldn't be ideal for companies who also host their product in AWS. What happens when an AWS-related issue comes up? Your customers may not be able to get to your product as well as your status page.

davedx 13y ago

Congratulations to the Apptimize team! Proud to have been a part of it. :)

velik_m 13y ago

I think GoComm and Kivo have the best chance of this batch. I think GoComm especially is a good idea and in retrospect so obvious, that i wish i would've though of it. Coordinating people, even in small scale events is painful. I remember when i helped with fencing tournaments our club ran (running computer system) it was a constant trouble tracking down free pistes, referees, making sure other stuff (refreshments, garbage and similar) was ok... we solved this with having a dedicated person on the floor in the hall, keeping an eye out and keeping me in the loop, but that isn't very scalable

gadders 13y ago

This is all very well, but what would Edward Sno.... Just kidding. Good luck to everyone in all three Techcrunch pages. Entrepreneurs are heroes and I hope you all make it big.

hatu 13y ago

How many "X for Y" ideas can you count?

diminish 13y ago

Please see the HN poll to predict top YC summer 2013 performers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249141