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The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator’s S12 Demo Day
- ekianjo 14y agoWhere are the ''Kill Hollywood'' startups?
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago9gag.com, new "kind" of entertainment. PS: I saw 9gag.com often in Facebook. OFTEN. While I never visited the site, I noticed their presence.
- thronemonkey 14y agoThis seems difficult because what makes Hollywood profitable is the movies they make, which cost big dollars and often license expensive IP from others (think Transfomers, superhero movies, etc.). It seems like the kind of thing that's hard to disrupt on a low budget.
- fecklessyouth 14y ago>“Forget everything you know about telepresence robots.” Done.
- twakefield 14y agoI just have to say (post upvote) that this was one of the funniest comments I have read on HN. It so perfectly points out how ridiculous much of tech coverage is.
- ed209 14y agoWell, you might say that... but by coincidence BBC news covered a telepresence robot in hospital today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19341028 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19341028 :)
- tokenadult 14y ago9gag certainly illustrates how hard up the Internet is for high-quality humor. (Just now, browsing the site, I didn't find anything I would want to share with my friends.) Fundersclub sounds quite disruptive. Bufferbox might be useful (at the right price) once it is within walking/bicycling distance of my house, as a UPS store location already is.
- polshaw 14y agoIMO 9gag shows how a reliable stream of quantity can beat out quality of content on the web. Every time you go to 9gag (AFAIK, can't say i've visited much) there is new content. It preys on the 'seeker' human behaviour (like reddit, minecraft, even HN). Maybe next visit there will be something hilarious? A lower volume of higher quality wouldn't invoke the same response.. visits would often have no new content, and users wouldn't regularly visit.
- cookingrobot 14y agoI think even more important than volume is that 9gag, reddit etc have lots of bad content, with an occasional gem. That's the most effective reward schedule for creating compulsive behavior. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_reinforcement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rein...
- polshaw 14y agoThat is precisely what I was alluding to, yes.
- jcollins1991 14y agoOne of the biggest selling points of BufferBox originally (to me) was that it was in the main student building of uWaterloo so pickup can be any time and you don't have to miss class or go all the way to a post office. Given that they've already expanded to Union Station in Toronto, their next expansions will likely be targeting similar situations (places where people with busy lifestyles go on a daily basis). So chances are you won't be getting a BufferBox nearby for a while. Regarding price, IIRC the prices for service (in the Beta at least) were extremely attractive, only a few bucks for the couple of credits needed for a decent sized box. For larger item's I'd probably find a cheaper way to get it shipped direct and avoid their charges, but for small items (4 or 5 books from Amazon maybe) their fee is pretty insignificant.
- jhuckestein 14y agoThis is click bait. Expect to see a similar post with a different selection of startups on GigaOM, VentureBeat, TNW, Mashable, Pandodaily and every other such site. You also have to wonder about how they select these startups (other than at random)? It's comparing apples to oranges and doesn't even seem to have a consistent metric (expected roi, innovativeness of idea, best pitch, etc). Why is instacart not on there?
- 3am_hackernews 14y agoYes, I was really curious about their metrics for ranking the startups. As you correctly pointed out - why is instacart missing while 9gag is present? I can name so many much better alternatives to 9gag: instacart, KIPPT, Everyday.me etc.
- lacker 14y ago9gag is a pretty obvious selection - they have tens of millions of users.
- 3am_hackernews 14y agoI was under the impression that quality triumphs over quantity for these cases.
- endersshadow 14y agoYour opinion of the content/product being sold should not be mistaken for the quality of a business model. The two are vastly different things. For example, I don't smoke cigarettes--hate the things, but I'll be damned if tobacco wasn't a great way to make a buck in the past century.
- zio99 14y agoBut what if there is a way to rank these startups? Similar to how there are algorithms to pick startup winners: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428427/an-algorithm-to-pick-startup-winners/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428427/an-algorithm-to-... and software to pick Blockbuster hits: PDF: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1329.pdf http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1329.pdf and of course, my very own academic research in this arena: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29634915106/what-i-learnt-from-yc http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29634915106/what-i-l... What if the only criteria required by this article was to list startups that sold something (rather than be a platform or <insert disruptive buzzword here> that doesn't currently monetize. E.g. Makr.io, ReelSurfer). So that would boil it down to: Double, Coco Controller and a handful others. As investor Kevin O'Leary would say: Follow the money.
- samstave 14y agoThis article crashes safari on my ipad2 - three times in a row now... Anyone else care to test it?
- thejteam 14y agoIt works on mine.
- snprbob86 14y agoI've been noticing that if I open two or more TechCrunch articles in tabs, all of the TechCrunch tabs become unresponsive. I have no idea what they are doing to upset Chrome so badly...
- benologist 14y agoThey have a lot of JavaScript stuff going on, in addition to their own stuff: http://imgur.com/vt8Qq http://imgur.com/vt8Qq
- samstave 14y ago>I have no idea what they are doing to upset Chrome so badly... I think it would be Chrome's grammar and spell-check function that gets overloaded....
- a_bonobo 14y ago>9gag aggregates memes and jokes from around the web — much like Reddit Evil persons would mention that much of the content on 9gag is copied from Reddit's r/funny (which is on a large scale hard to proof) - but they got funding, so why not, looks like a viable business model. The example-pic the article uses can be found on Reddit, with the same title, over Google: http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ykrlh/when_links_are_more_than_ten_words_long/ http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ykrlh/when_links_are_... Can't tell which one came first, as the article's pic doesn't have a time. >Its founders say that in July, 9gag had more than 65 million unique visitors, compared to Reddit’s 39.7 million According to Wolfram Alpha, Reddit has roughly double the amount of unique daily visitors when compared to 9gag: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit+9gag http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit+9gag (Keep in mind these numbers are daily, not monthly like in the article)
- alanfang 14y agoWolfram Alpha also uses Alexa which is next to useless for traffic estimates.
- a_bonobo 14y agoTrue, because it's based on their spyware-toolbar, so you only measure the people who are relatively clueless about their computer - but in absence of the 9gag-people citing their sources there's not much more to do. I don't know how ranking.com generates the numbers, but in their ranking reddit.com is 11,763, 9gag is 11,768 and 4chan is 11,775 - all kinda identical.
- necubi 14y agoActually, 9gag does release their numbers, via Quantcast[0]. According to those, they have a long ways to catch up to Reddit, which even in 2010 [1] had more than double the visitors (3mm vs 8mm "people" monthly). Incidentally, the 65mm visitors from that quote seems to have been actually referring to page views, of which Reddit had 429mm monthly in 2010. [0] http://www.quantcast.com/9gag.com http://www.quantcast.com/9gag.com [1] http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-traffic.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-... (disclaimer: I work for Quantcast).
- salman89 14y agoA common trend I am noticing amongst these startups are that they target a particular industry pain point, and have the ability to charge for their product. None of them seem the type that can be huge businesses, but they all seem like they can turn a profit. Call it lower risk investments if you want.
- 6ren 14y agoA pain point is the way to start. Some, like the perfect fitting shirt or the package delivery kiosk, could give a strategic advantage to an existing industry player, and therefore provoke an acquisition bidding war. Or, they could conceivably found a new player in that industry.
- chimi 14y agoThis is a good crop and I can see a lot of success coming from all of these companies. There's a market out there and it's waiting to be tackled. Several of them are known solutions applied to another niche. There is more of a real world feel to these companies. Robots, Big boxes of delivered things, instacart which isn't in this list, but is another example. I also notice there's a lot more traction already with these companies than I remember -- it's a more mature bunch. I wish you all the best of luck. The journey hasn't even begun yet, but you've come a long way already.
- samstave 14y ago>This is a good crop... Personally, I am not to fond of that word... crop...
- wheels 14y agoPart of the perceived increase (though certainly not all of it) is that the batch sizes are several times larger than before. Whereas before you might have a shooting star or three in a single batch, now you might have a dozen, even if the proportions remained about the same.
- chimi 14y agoINteresting when you put it that way. There are 75 in this batch and this is only 10 of them. Being in ycombinator in earlier years almost guaranteed you'd be covered in the big blogs and well... heard of. There are some of the 65 remaining startups in the bunch I'll probably never hear of.
- volaski 14y agoI wonder what happened to Diaspora. http://allthingsd.com/20120511/diaspora-says-its-back-on-track-joins-y-combinator-program/ http://allthingsd.com/20120511/diaspora-says-its-back-on-tra... I was really expecting to see what kind of product they would launch. Did they just not launch at the demo day but still working on it, or did they actually pivot into something else?
- jmonegro 14y agoThey launched Makr.io (https://makr.io https://makr.io) a few days ago here on HN.
- zio99 14y agoI asked this question before: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4391638 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4391638 and still wondering: 1. Does Y Combinator then own a stake in Makr.io or Disapora? 2. When a company pivots, does YC own a stake in the pivot? 3. How about side projects?
- jmonegro 14y agoYC owns a stake in Diaspora. Diaspora owns Makr.io, therefore YC owns a stake in Makr.io, as long as the Diaspora team set it up as an entity separate from Diaspora, not owned by Diaspora (the company, not the team). When a company pivots, it's the same thing. It's usually the same company legally and fiscally, in which case YC still has a stake. If the company pivots and the founders decide to set up a new company, and the old company does not own the new company, then YC does not have a stake in the new one unless the founders are good sports and cut them in. Side projects are usually built under the corporate umbrella, in which case the profits/losses from the side project count as part of the owning company's. In this case, YC's stake in the parent company carries over to all side projects (unless, again, they set it up as something separate from the company).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dopp 14y agowww.virool.com - Platform to distribute and market videos. Company makes $0.12/second.
- dj2stein9 14y agoMost of these seem like derivative of other successful startups, like most of YC companies. They all just seem "done" already, so what's the point? On another thread there was the release of a YC-based iPhone controller which was no better than 5 or 6 other competitors in the exact same space. So what kind of advantage do these fancy-pants YC companies really have over their competitors over the MEGA HYPE of demo day? Probably nothing. The consumer putting up his bucks is what really matters.
- dirtyaura 14y agoNo, these ideas are not "done". Do you have telepresence robots in your office? Or Bufferbox-like delivery boxes in your mall? I don't. Saying these businesses are "done" is like saying mobile phones were "done" when Motorola launched their first phone. Startups are about creating businesses, not about materializing some idea the first time on the Earth.
- coopdog 14y agoSame idea, better execution? For investors you also get startups that have already been vetted enough by the ycombinator team for them to invest time into, so you know that the startup already has connections in the right places
- pawelwentpawel 14y agoDouble Robotics looks very interesting! I've seen teleconferencing "creatures" before but this one seems very appealing. Quite surprised about 9gag though. When did they start? Their pictures were so popular for some time it gives me the feeling that they've been online for ages already.
- esschul 14y agoHuh, we've had something like bufferbox in Norway for years now(I think). Don't know how popular it is though.
- softrhinoskin 14y agoNot trolling. Genuinely curious. What exactly does TC rankings mean? It is not like they have a good track record of non-biased tech news reporting. I have avoided their websites/articles like the plague for the past 3 years so I don't know what their record has been as of late, but I doubt it has changed for the better since then. Judging by headlines I see here on HN, I am willing to bet that it has changed for the worse if that is possible.