Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

1

Wanderlog

This. Having gone through YC, I know that starting with a niche is good advice and advice they likely would have gotten.<p>Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.<p>Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (<a href="https://wanderlog.com" rel="nofollow">https://wanderlog.com</a>), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"<p>Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318</a>.

#Travel #Travel Tools #Travel Planning 21 social mentions

2

Fantastical 2

I'm going to repeat that Fantastical does 95% of what Superpowered claims to do. And Fantastical has features that Superpowered clearly does not have, such as a really good natural language mechanism for event and task creation.<p><a href="https://flexibits.com/fantastical" rel="nofollow">https://flexibits.com/fantastical</a>.

#Calendar #Appointments and Scheduling #Office & Productivity 26 social mentions

3

Notion

My opinion on pricing for software is pretty straightforward:<p>If its a local app, cloud/sync/whatever "anything" should be optional/opt-in. Developers should charge an upfront fee for a point-in-time of that release, bug fixes are included for N years, but feature releases are available as an annual/whatever upgrade.<p>If cloud/sync/whatever makes sense for an app, then that should be available as a separate, monthly service fee. If it makes sense, then the developer can "bundle" both that monthly fee and the annual/whatever feature upgrade fee into a single subscription.<p>That unified subscription is what most apps do, but its important that it be separate and opt-in, while giving customers a way to pay you otherwise. That way, your revenue is aligned with customer happiness. I think back to the 1Password transition to the subscription model, where they left tons of customers behind on the non-sync product without giving them a way to pay; now, their revenue is not aligned with the success & happiness of those customers. They're still customers! Yeah, they're not paying you every month. They'll probably pay you again in the future. But, oh no, they can't fit into your MRR metrics that you need to communicate to investors; that's your problem, but you're making it the customer's problem, which means you're actually anti-customer.<p>If we're speaking of a website, then fundamentally, you've willfully unaligned your business model with any ability to price it transactionally. Maybe that's fine; if I think about something like Slack, that app makes zero sense to price transactionally, it's gonna be monthly, so I can't complain about that business model. But, Notion [1] is an example of an app which <i>should</i> have a transactional model; not everyone wants sync.<p>Everything is connected to Money. And, in software, I think the biggest reason why customers have began noticing how much slower and less reliable software has become is literally because of Money; its because every app now needs to be a web service. Because your app is a web service, it has to live on the web. It gets served to customers by underpowered AWS m5.large instances; did you know that your customer's iPhone is more performant than an m5-tier AWS instance? It has to travel a thousand miles over the internet. The data model lives in a database; your customer has a 5Gbps SSD hardwired to the PCI-E bus of their CPU, but instead, by putting the data In The Cloud, you're making sixteen network hops just to query for something.<p>None of this is better. Some of it is <i>necessary</i>, for some product domains, but don't fool yourself into thinking its better.<p>[1] <a href="https://notion.so" rel="nofollow">https://notion.so</a>

#Productivity #Work Collaboration #Note Taking 438 social mentions