Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

[dang]

Here's your opportunity to help pick the winning applications for the Apply HN experiment. For background on the experiment, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627 and https://news.ycombinator.com/applyhn.

Below are the top 20 Apply HN submissions after they've been ranked using three criteria: upvotes received, number of comments posted, and quality of comments posted as assessed by multiple-moderator review. The top two choices will be the ones HN asks YCF to fund.

We've modified HN's poll software in two ways for this thread. First, the choices are randomized on each view (for logged-in users) to reduce bias. Second, we modified the voting mechanism to introduce some entropy and extra review as anti-gaming measures. You may not see your vote show up in the score right away. (Edit: koolba had a better idea—we'll just hide the point totals for now.)

The discussion below is for debating the merits of the different applications. Please don't post about the Apply HN process itself; we'll have a big post-mortem discussion later this week to talk about what worked well and what didn't. And if you're an applicant or a friend of one, please don't post in the thread below, except to answer questions about your startup.

A small number of applications (two or three) were disqualified due to abuse. If you don't see your application here and think it should be, you're welcome to email us at [email protected] to find out why.

Edit: voting is now closed. We'll unveil the scores and rankings shortly.

Edit 2: Hmm. We need some time to look more deeply into the voting patterns here. Please stand by.

Edit 3: Several users have complained about the voting being closed too soon. They have a point, so we've reopened voting and will let it run until some time tomorrow. Sorry about that!

Edit 4: Ok, we've closed the voting now, and HN has sent the ranked list to YCF. We'll try to announce sometime tomorrow (if so, it will be later in the day because I'm travelling tomorrow), but it depends on Kevin being able to talk to the startups first to make sure things are ok on the YC side. If there's an update about timing, I'll add it here.

Edit 5 (6:25 pm Pacific, 2016-05-04): Kevin has now talked to all the winning startups and I have now stopped travelling, so the announcement post is up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270. And so (in the thread) is an explanation of the thing you're probably all wondering about.

[argonaut]

A lot of people are evaluating too much based on the ideas, rather than the background of the founders and whether that background gives them the experience to execute the idea.

For example, I liked the Cadwolf idea because the founder has worked as an engineer in the kinds of organizations he wants to sell to. Many of these applications had no info about the founders that I could find. All in all, the vast majority of these apps gave little indication the founders have the necessary background to do their idea.

Just some examples: as far as I could tell, the founding team for Brodlist has no prior experience implementing the internals of database/distributed/operating systems. The Jury Board idea sounds really interesting, but it's an area where I'd like to see the founders have a lot of domain expertise (litigation experience?), and sadly the founder didn't provide any info on that.

Somewhat related, I think it's terrible to vote for Pinboard given the founder's stated dislike of YC (and the founder stating that this is a protest vote). The fellowship should go to founders that sincerely want to make full use of YC's resources for their startup.

[Suncho]

Hi, I'm Alex from Gresham Dollar (Now Greshm Dollar). I am pretty much the opposite of what you would want in a founder. My background is very shaky and I don't have a college degree. I barely graduated high school. I used to hack together CRUD apps until I got bored out of my mind and just stopped.

I was the first Druid on my realm to level 60 when World of Warcraft came out though, so there's that. But I wasn't really a team player and I couldn't get into any of the good guilds. I also never had any gold because I was busy doing fun stuff instead of mining thorium or whatever.

From 2006 to 2008, I worked on a virtual reality headset with my father:

http://www.leepvr.com

My father's health declined and our project never turned into anything. Well, that's not exactly true. Palmer Luckey used my father's lenses in the first prototypes for the Oculus Rift, but I had nothing to do with the development of those lenses.

Before I came up with the idea for Greshm Dollar, I briefly wrote a blog exploring some of the ways in which technology was transforming society:

http://www.suncho.com

I wasn't really trying to come up with an idea or looking for a way to make money. I just always assumed basic income was inevitable. For a while, I had known that a government could pay for a basic income through deficit spending (small leap from Post-Keynesian macroeconomics). But then when I was contemplating the crisis in Greece, I came up with an idea for how to smoothly introduce a new currency and it all clicked for me.

Everything I know about money, banking, economics, and finance, I learned through books and MOOCs.

Anyway, with my credentials, there's no way I'd get into Y Combinator or the YC Fellowship the normal way, so here I am!

[ismiseted]

Natural disasters are terrible. Voting for Pinboard is not terrible. I am certain that Pinboard sincerely wants to make full use of YC's resources, possibly in ways that will amaze and astound them. And I don't think that an unthinking cheerleader attitude to YC is a requisite here. If you like Cadwolf, vote for Cadwolf but - please - spare me the lecture on how I should vote.

[jedgardyson]

Hi, I'm Gabriel, one of the co-founders of Casepad.

A bit of background on us. I'm a '14 college grad. I'm also a self-taught software developer. I worked for a bit under a year as a data analyst, writing R, SQL, and processing excel spreadsheets, at a startup in NYC. While I was there I also volunteered at a public defense firm, usually one afternoon a week, running documents to and from court, rebuilding their HR filing system, building small a web-app for them. After I left my job I also spent A LOT of time doing research on the market and specifications for the system.

My brother and co-founder is getting his CS degree, but would work on this full time if we received the fellowship, in Brazil. He has work experience building/maintaining ERP software and a POS credit-access platform.

NOTE: If any other founders want to reply to this comment I asked Dang and he said it would be fine (even though there is no question written into it).

NOTE2: I'd encourage everyone to read through all the applications if you plan on voting.

[sharemywin]

I would argue following conventional "bias" and "rules of thumb" is exactly the opposite from the goal. YC has already picked plenty of "great teams" with "lots of "experience in the field". I would see this as the 10% exploration of a multi-armed bandit problem. Not to say that is what they intended but exploring alternate theories could help the process.

[vishalkgupta]

Vishal from WedWell here. This competition was a bit unstructured in general. So not surprised that many teams didn't talk too much about their teams, and spoke more about their ideas.

We're a small team lead by myself. I am technical (computer engineer by education), but have a more technical partner (full stack engineer) onboard, and my sister is helping as well. My sister has had to plan her own wedding from start to finish without a wedding planner. She's helping a lot with on boarding.

I have a background in building electronic trading businesses with a specialization in market structures. Marketplaces like Airbnb, and how they start are something that I love to study.

There are more details about me on my profile here. I think in the future, it may make sense to put a bit of structure to how people describe their idea/team.

[sandGorgon]

I like the Cadwolf idea as well, but I'm unsure about the architecture and what the founder thinks is possible.

For example today I can say I'm.building AutoCAD in the browser - what does that mean? Am I implementing the CAD algorithms in Java on the server... Or am I somehow interfacing with AutoCAD running on the server through RPC?

The founder claims he's working on version control - this means that the state of the CAD tool can be captured in version friendly formats : what is that format? I get worried when people invent too many things at once

[hoodoof]

A great team won't make a bad idea a winner. You should choose a great idea primarily.

As they say you can't polish a turd.

[bcoates]

Edit: This may have come across as too terse to pass the not-just-civil-but-nice test so I've added more explanation to my choices

I wasn't following the initial wave of submissions so here's my fresh-eyes take on the finalists. I'd particularly like to see other people's assessments of the whole field (vs individual submissions)

Not Ambitious Enough: These are in competitive spaces -- even if they delivered on their goals they wouldn't be #1 of their kind

  Krewe (There are so very many social networks -- and nextdoor already exists. What makes this indespensible?)
  Pikii (There are tons of pseudonymous social networks in particular -- what are you trying to accomplish?)

Too Narrow: I don't think there's going to be enough customers in love with this product for a funded growth business to thrive. Specifically, these have a low enough ceiling that they'd be stronger self-funding than taking outside money.

  Author Investments
  AutoMicroFarm

Bad Market: Your customers don't care about the problem you're solving:

  Casepad (Lawyers are pathologically tech-phobic and by their nature are spending someone else's money and taking a percentage. Cost savings are taking money out of their pocket.)
  Tiz.com (Liquor distribution is a de jure or de facto monopoly/kleptocracy. Being inefficient is a profit center for them.)

Pet Rocks: These solutions lack a problem

  Eat My Dust (It's free to check if you live next to a superfund site. Have you?)
  Utiliz (For almost every residential customer this is saving literally dollars a month)

Too Ambitious: These applicants are so far from winning that money would be premature

  Brodlist (This is one of the toughest markets on both tech and marketing grounds. You need to demonstrate that you are better than the teams that are currently struggling)
  Gresham Dollar (Your competition has an army and a navy)

Cowardly Lions: You already have what you need to succeed within you

  Hacksplaining
  Pinboard

Yet Anothers: Techie itch-scratching is an overserved market

  Brightwork
  Cadwolf

Survivors:

  Jury Board
  Siris Rooms
  Unnamed Infection-resistant materials
  Unnamed Trusted Skill Certification
  Wanderlust
  WedWell

[jedgardyson]

Hi, I'm Gabriel, one of the founders of Casepad. Your comment about our market, "lawyers are pathologically tech-phobic and by their nature are spending someone else's money and taking a percentage. Cost savings are taking money out of their pocket," is, based on our research, incorrect. We found that lawyers in the particular fields we are interested in, both young and old, are keenly interested in cost and TIME savings. In fact, most of these folks are so desperate for additional time that they would be willing to overcome any alleged "tech phobia" in order to get it.

Also, most public defenders, prosecutors, and court functionaries are not "spending someone else's money." Rather, at least in many metropolitan areas, they are salaried government or non-profit employees who are just trying to get the justice system to work.

On public defenders in particular (our first target market) I'd recommend reading a few of the NYT's op-ed series from this year which have good insight on how starved for resources and time much of our potential client base is: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/when-the-public-de... (New Orleans) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/us/public-defenders-turn-t... (Missouri) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/opinion/a-mockery-of-justi... (Fresno CA, South Dakota, Minnesota)

The folks we interviewed have said if you can save us x amount of time we would be thrilled to pay you $y per case because it will be more than worth it. We will only be able to see how much the market will bear once we're done building our product but, so far, the fact that we have been able to get a public defense firm to sponsor some of our development costs bodes well for the idea that lawyers are interested in spending on tech that saves them precious, precious time.

EDIT: I'd encourage everyone to read through the application posts. I think the Q&A in our thread fleshed out quite a few of the concerns about starting a business for this particular subset of the legal profession.

[jrpt]

I disagree about Eat My Dust. It's more than just "check if I'm near a superfund site" It's about checking your actual (or prepurchase) home for various hazardous materials, regardless of superfund sites. This already happens regularly today.

If you consolidated a bunch of different checks through one company, you could do a ton of really valuable things. First, it's convenience for the end user. But even cooler are what it provides for the business. For example, the data by location could be used for targeted marketing (send notices to neighbors advising them that similar homes have X problem, and they should get checked too). Or you could make the data SEO friendly, so when people search for "[local neighborhood] [problem]" it would show a map with incidences for their neighborhood. Or you could bring in service providers to compete for remedying the problem, while giving discounts and convenience to the homeowners.

It's a real problem too. I know someone who had serious health issues that were only fixed when they discovered a hazardous problem in their home.

(I voted for EMD)

[harigov]

I disagree about your assessment on AutoMicrofarm. If they execute it well, I believe there is a good market for such things. If it doesn't break my bank, I would love to have my own micro farm to product most of what I need, for the most part. I think its fun and I don't think I am alone in this regard.

[baron816]

I can give you a dozen reasons why Krewe IS ambitious. And the competitive space is a joke. Every other company is trying to do a "Tinder for friends," but that model is inherently broken. Krewe is doing something entirely different as it actually replicates the way people naturally make friends (particularly when they're young).

Response to edit: Krewe is not a social network in the same sense as something like Facebook. It's aims to get you to actually meet (in the real world) and get to know people who live near you. It does so in an a way that's both comfortable and convenient, which gives you the best chance of forming real friendships. Everything else fails at either comfort or convenience (or both), which is why no one has been able to make a dent in the (massive) market.

Krewe is bottom up vs Nextdoor which is top down. Krewe places you in a group of five other people and then lets you expand from there. Nextdoor dumps you into a chat room with all your neighbors -- it doesn't exactly encourage you to meet people. It's really more like Craigslist. My neighborhood (which has 60,000 people in it) has no activity in it.

I can go on on how Krewe's different, but rest assured, it is very different from anything that's out there. I have exhaustively looked.

[cwilkes]

+1 on the problem with a law startup. A couple of years ago I went to some law firms and asked about their need for search over all their documents. They weren't really interested in it as they can bill out s librarian at $125/hR while paying them $45/hr. So they actually make money on this.

That isn't to say this can change in the future but until then it is a very hard market to crack.

Oh and lawyers are cheap, many of them still use word perfect as why pay to upgrade?

[flomo]

> Tiz.com (Liquor distribution is a de jure or de facto monopoly/kleptocracy. Being inefficient is a profit center for them.)

This might make for a crappy exponential growth "startup", but there is most likely a great business there.

If you can grok Vertical Market X well enough that you can build software to make their life simple, Vertical Market X will happily share their inefficiencies with you.

(And it wouldn't surprise me if the incumbent in this market is a Delphi/VB/FoxPro/Access guy who eventually gets around to coding new features while sitting on the balcony of his beach house.)

[theuttick]

I am the founder of CADWOLF. There is no product that links a CAD model to a mathematics background to an FE model to a part tree system to a documentation and analysis system. While there are a number of products like Matlab to solve mathematical problems, we are looking to redefine the entire field of engineering.

Our system as it stands now with web pages that act as documents that solve mathematical problems is just a first step. It represents a large amount of work already put into the platform, plus the ability of the founder to achieve the stated goals, and the ability to break the system up into steps that can hopefully make the company financially viable without large scale funding.

[tomplace]

Bcoates, At Utiliz we have spent a significant amount of time looking at the energy market, average usage and addressable customers and our estimate on savings is more than a few dollars. Kevin came up with this idea after saving a few hundred last year through frequent switching. We estimate we can save the average household on the order of $150-300/year, at a cost of $30. It's free money, and that doesn't include the time we save people having to do it themselves. The bigger ambition is that by doing this we rationalize the chaotic consumer electricity market, force bad suppliers out, reduce electricity rates through broker negotation on our increasing client book, and finally help states deliver on the promise of deregulation. That is the moon shot

You can categorize the potential customers into 4 main cohorts: (1) Educated and spend time every few months finding the best plan and enjoy it - we will never get these guys (2) Educated and spend time every few months finding the best plan and hate it - we will win all of these - Kevin lives here (3) Educated and keep forgetting to switch on time - we will win all of these - Tom lives here (4) Not educated and need to better understand the whole process - this is a massive cohort where we can probably win 25 - 50%

Happy to continue the discussion

Tom

[GreyZephyr]

Feynman nano (unnamed Infection-resistant materials) definitely ticks both the ambition, problem and market boxes. There is currently a ~$30 billion market for catheters, production at scale of nano-structures is currently unsolved. Combined with the current growth of antibiotic resistant golden staph infections, they would seem to be poised for market dominance if successful.

[david927]

Too Ambitious: Brodlist

Just for clarification, Brodlist is finishing its Alpha version. The money would get it into Beta, and the YCF advice would get it out of Beta.

It would be too ambitious if it was just starting, but it's finishing.

[josh_carterPDX]

Co-Founder of Brightwork here. Just wanted to address the classification of "Yet Anothers" because I feel like the summary YC put next to our name may have done more harm than good when it comes to what we actually do.

Brightwork is an API Developer Platform. Meaning we built a platform that enables Developers to see usage data, performance information, as well as cost projections of their APIs. No other API Management platform offers this level of granularity.

On top of the aforementioned feature set, we also allow API swapping in which Developers do not have to re-code or re-deploy their application.

We're also offering pre-bundled APIs to enable fast prototyping so Developers can focus on the front-end design rather than the cumbersome task of standing up a back-end which can take some time.

If you have further questions don't hesitate to ask or email me at [email protected] Hope that helps!

[Suncho]

Edit: Fair enough. My competition does have an army and a navy. But I still think we can do it. Unless they start providing a basic income in their own currency, I'm confident that my currency will disrupt theirs.

The two I voted for were Brodlist and Gresham Dollar (my own). Why do you feel that they're too ambitious?

[chatmasta]

Customers can save a lot more than dollars a month on utility bills.

After my freshman year, I interned at a small company in Texas that had the same business model as Utiliz. Send us your bill, we analyze your usage data and get you on the best plan. You split the savings with us.

Do NOT underestimate the energy bills in Texas... The average prices I saw were ~ $800. Obviously this was a luxury market, but your perception that people are spending 80-150 on energy is completey wrong. Not only that, but they are often far overspending from what they need to.

The problem with electricity deregulation is that every company is selling and reselling the same service, often even from the same plants. So the only differences are superficial pricing and marketing differences. Two customers living a mile apart, in similar size houses, using similar amounts of electricity, might be paying drastically different amounts of money.

When I got there, the processes were all manual... but I automated a bunch of it. The whole business is very automate-able, as it's just a matter of parsing .pdf electricity bills and comparing prices on the homepage.

[vishalkgupta]

Vishal from WedWell here.

Thanks for the breakdown of the shortlisted startups. It's really thorough and I largely agree with your assessments.

Your breakdown reminded me of a PG essay (http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html). It's essentially a long form checklist for coming up with and testing your start up ideas.

I had a doc that I created, that distilled this essay into a sort of checklist to help validate some of the ideas I came up with. Feel free to take a look at my checklist here - https://medium.com/@vishalkgupta/how-to-get-startup-ideas-a-...

I'll try to answer some of my check list here to validate why we think there is a great deal of promise in our small little startup.

>> Problem/Solution — 

1. Are you solving a problem that you, as founders, have themselves? Yes. We have all either gone through the painful process of planning a wedding or see that process happening in our horizon. Speaking for myself, I'm starting to budget the money and time necessary for my eventual wedding, and I kept asking myself.. Why can't I do something a bit smarter when iterating with vendors. After using 99designs, I thought that their process of iterating with potential designers could work well for wedding vendors.

2. Is this a solution you/your team can build? Yes, Absolutely. We don't think this is necessarily a hard technology build and we have backgrounds in electronic trading systems/marketplaces.

3. Do few others realize that this is a problem/solution set worth doing/building? While the wedding space is big, we have yet to see any innovation in the process behind actually planning a wedding, iterating with and paying vendors.

Well — 

4. Is there a small “well” of users who need your solution urgently? Yes! We have already a small group of clients who don't have the time to try to line up vendors, sit with them, and iterate with them to produce a proposal.

5. Who wants this “crappy first version” now? Pretty much anyone who wants to save a bit of time when it comes to wedding planning and wants someone else to do the leg work to get vendors to bid on their ideal wedding.

6.Starting with a small market is good, but do you have a fast path out of it (to grow into a bigger market)? As mentioned elsewhere the wedding market is globally as big as $300 bn globally.

Self — “Live in the future, then build what’s missing.”

7. Are you a “leading edge user”/”living in the future” of this silo? Yea! I kept asking myself, when I looked at budgeting time/money for wedding, why can't I do more of this online? Why does iteration have to be face to face?

8. How is this a “gap in the world”? Literally anytime I hear anyone say the word "paper checks" my startup mind turns on. There will be a world where not only will a couple get to iterate quickly through technology, but we will be able to pay initial and final payments with the press of a button.

Those were just a few questions/answers from PG's essay, but it could be helpful for other startups to think about these. Would love to hear from others.

Thanks again!

[minimaxir]

Since it is being left up to community vote, and only 2 startups can win, isn't including Pinboard unfair to the other 19 startups?

As noted in the previous thread, Pinboard is indeed eligible for YCF by the letter of the law, but including a 7-year old startup with a popular founder doesn't seem to fit the spirit of Apply HN.

[toyg]

TBH none of these look like unicorns in the making, so the only meaningful choice is really Pinboardy McPinboardface.

[sandGorgon]

Siris rooms is interesting - it's pretty much what most startups in India are building towards. Like the billion dollar OyoRooms (Lightspeed), Fabhotels(Accel), GoIbiboRooms (Naspers).

This model works well in countries where the law and order situation does not permit for a Airbnb to flourish.

The problem is that soon you will need to reserve rooms to work with these hotels - and here comes the differentiation in approach: some startups will just reserve 1 room in a hotel, and will not have enough of a stick to control quality ( http://yourstory.com/2016/04/oyo-customer-service/ ) or will book sizeable number of rooms in fewer hotels and so will grow slower (by orders of magnitude).

However as a model, I think it can work in Africa.

EDIT : I think YC has a lot of experience around Airbnb (working with regulators and in the product space of hotel bookings). They could bring some serious value to the founders and really accelerate the learning curve for them.

[hawkice]

I disagree with some of the other commenters about the nature of Mr. Ceglowski's candidacy. I do not think it is a protest vote. I voted for him, and I cannot imagine what I would protest -- I've loved PG's essays and read Hacker News for years.

I think the corporate-BS-avoiding, efficient and useful product built, not on design, but on a valuable service which successfully competed against mega-corp offerings is the core of what YC has been about since the start. It's not about rapidly increasing headcount. It's about _delivery_. And I think it's clear who leads the pack in that regard.

[gilrain]

Maciej is consistently excellent across his every project, and Pinboard is a great product I use every day, albeit with some rough edges. I'd be really excited to see what he could do with this fellowship. I fully expect I would be delighted, one way or another!

[cperciva]

Infection-resistant materials

Suggestion to the founders of this: Explore insulin pump infusion sets and continuous glucose monitoring sensors as a possible market for your technology. This is a significant and growing market, and it's one where infection resistance is important: Non-professionals in non-sterile environments, inserting devices through the skin which stay there for between a few days and a couple weeks. Skin infections are one of the most common complications of both CSII and CGM systems.

[jonwachob91]

I'll definitely take a look at it!

[jallmann]

"Infection resistant materials" are sorely needed, especially in catheterization (which seems to be the initial use case). I wish the team all the success in the world, even if they don't make it to YC this time around.

[tptacek]

Let me be the first to say what a lot of my startup/YC dork friends are only going to say privately on Slack:

If you're not going give Pinboard one of the two HN/YCF slots, because Maciej is HN-famous or too well-established, then just make a third slot for him. This is the cheapest access you will ever get to Maciej Ceglowski.

YC came up with an interesting idea and actually tried it. Something interesting happened as a result. Let's see where it goes!

[Q6T46nT668w6i3m]

Voting for Pinboard feels like a protest vote. Naturally, I voted for Pinboard.

[goodJobWalrus]

How many can we vote for? I voted for 3 of them total (voting as I was reading through), but now I wonder whether only the first one will count.

[blazespin]

I know we weren't supposed to comment on this, but the truth is, it's impossible to evaluate these like this. Doing such a shallow pass is just completely unfair to the founders here.

I think a better idea would be more of a facemash approach, where you have to evaluate just two and pick which one is better. That way you can do a deeper dive and say something sensible with your vote rather than something stupid.

I vote that the results are thrown out from this thread and a round robin type approach is done.

[ig1]

I didn't get a chance to read all of them but this was my reasoning on the ones I read:

(note I'm excluding founder background from evaluation as almost none of the posts mention it; but it's generally considered a key factor for angels)

WedWell: Large market, hacking it with initial customers, however no unique insight, no clear customer acquisition strategy in an expensive market, lots of dead startups in this space. Pass.

Pinboard: Has product users love. Not clear if he wants to go “big”. YCF would probably accept him anyway. Pass.

Gresham Dollar: Interesting idea, lacks users validation and idea doesn’t seem to have been fully thought through. Underestimates adoption difficulty of online currencies. Pass.

Siris: Growing middle-class in Africa and adoption of mobile services makes this interesting plus initial traction with hotels. Not clear what the size of the market will be and if they’ll be able to buy discounted capacity. $12k will make a major difference to them. Accept.

Wanderlust: Another space with lots of dead startups, no insight on on why they’ll succeed when others have failed. Pass.

Brightwork: Not clear if there’s enough demand for this product. You can already get wrapper libraries for things like social integrations but people prefer to integrate directly for the flexibility. Segment which did this for analytics are moving away from this space into ETL. Pass.

Hacksplaining: Solves a genuine problem, user interest. Largely a content business though, tough to scale. Not clear there’s a huge market. Pass.

Krewe: As a rule of thumb social sites generally need ~1m+ users to raise a Series A from top-tier investors. Given the inherent lack of viral in this concept and lack of stickiness (after group is formed you never need to come back) seems like a dead-end without a significant rework. Pass.

Utiliz: $30-$50/user/year isn’t enough to build a sustainable business. Would essentially mean a $10-$15 CAC which feels low for this space and expected conversion rates. Pass

[ig1]

And on a few more:

Jury Board: SaaS note taking to enrichment (third-party api) to ML; solid long term strategy. Real user interest. With a large unique dataset you could essentially build a monopoly business. Founder seems to understand the space, but perhaps not commercial/sales side. Selling to legal firms will probably mean a salesforce which results in a much higher per-unit cost but that’s potentially sustainable. Not clear there’s a large enough market to take to IPO but could be a decent size trade-sale to someone like Lexis-Nexis or Reuters. Accept.

AuthorInvestments: Interesting approach to modernising “advances” structure of book publishers, likely extendable to other markets. As more content creation becomes freelance this could provide an alternative for creators that doesn’t rely on fans (ala Patreon) or pre-buyers (Kickstarter) but rather treats it as a form of alternative investment. Not clear if the founder is capable of delivering but definitely has potential to be a breakout. Accept.

Trusert: Seems to fix a hypothetical problem rather than a real one. Not clear what the market is for employers who are concerned that people crammed for test. Might be useful in markets with high-rates of cheating on exams. But doesn’t seem generally applicable. Pass.

[Suncho]

Gresham Dollar: Interesting idea, lacks users validation and idea doesn’t seem to have been fully thought through. Underestimates adoption difficulty of online currencies. Pass.

If I could go back and rewrite that description, I would. The idea, at least on the economic side of things, is fairly fully fleshed out. The key thing, which I didn't even mention in my initial description, is the timer/expiration mechanism:

Rather than offer on-demand exchange between USD and GD, we will automatically exchange GD for USD after it remains in a user's account for a period of time. When an amount of GD is transferred from one account to another, that GD's lifetime resets. Consequently, the more that GD circulates, the less we will convert GD into USD and the less we tap into our USD reserves.

Here's a white paper (also linked in another comment) that describes it in more detail:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2jhCMrrxoeONVNQTVd6NG5pNz...

Other online currencies are not both pegged to USD and handed out for free, so Greshm Dollar doesn't face some of the same adoption challenges that they do. Instead of thinking about Greshm Dollar as just another online currency, try thinking of it as a payment/credit system with a basic income attached to it. Or like PayPal but with free money continuously added to your account.

You can think about it that way for user adoption purposes, but, of course, that's not the whole picture.

[tomplace]

Ig1. Absolutely it is enough to build a sustainable business. Lets look at NY as an example. Over 7.2MM households and at our low end price point and a 0.5% penetration (36K customers) that’s over $1MM annual recurring revenue for electric alone. That's a drop in the bucket when you look at how we scale. 1) 15 deregulated states + DC: well over 50MM households with the ability to switch suppliers 2) commercial - over 3MM businesses 3) natural gas - upsell on gas to a subset of the above market (gas has fewer deregulated states) 4) deeper penetration into our markets through marketing and education.

Traditionally this market is underserved due to the customer acquisition cost (CAC) but our differentiator is to use social media / referral based rewards in addition to more traditional physical marketing and partnerships to drive sales at a low CAC

Finally this will be an incredibly sticky service, we are expecting hyper low attrition once acquired

We believe there is a $100MM opportunity here.

[vishalkgupta]

RE WedWell: I think it's less about unique insight, and more about timing/positioning. Couples expect to communicate with vendors over the phone/text, they don't want to write paper checks, they want vendors to find them. We're doing a lot of things that do not scale right now, but doing our best to keep clients happy.

I will say that initial customer acquisition in NYC is our hyper focus right now. The great thing about opening this discussion up on HN is that there are so many minds out there looking at your problems. I'd be happy to hear any ideas on how to best acquire these clients initially. We're doing a bit of FB ads, and think this will be a heavy marketing lift. But as we monetize our first couple clients, we are getting a clearer picture of customer value.

[baron816]

re: Krewe -- it does not end after your group is formed. You continue to gradually expand after you become close with your group, thus making it possible to make dozens of friends in your neighborhood. You're also 'born into' a decent chat application, so you don't have to head over to facebook groups and set that up. It also has functionality similar to Down to Lunch, so you don't have to set that up either. I have plans for many more features that will keep users engaged long after their first meet.

Krewe is not a "Tinder for friends." It's about giving people the kind of network they can rely of for anything including making career connections, finding romantic partners, becoming connected to their local community, and having incredible real world experiences.

[phantom_oracle]

I'm being biased towards anything that isn't software-first. I'd like to see something like the aquaponics idea get a kickstart from this Apply HN.

And of course, the venerable Pinboard deserves a vote as well, simply so that the owner can write about how he "scaled Pinboard after a major pivot":

    Pinboard is now THE marketplace for AAA-grade Argentinian beef

;)

[gills]

WedWell has promise, but it is a difficult space. I began building on a very similar concept 8 years ago and quickly ended up pivoting off into a subproblem, because [at the time] this ultimately boiled down to quite a lot of manual human coordination which I couldn't scale. Running solo, I decided it was infeasible. If you can scale vendor coordination in the wedding space, and avoid the temptation to build the technically interesting parts yourself right away, I think there is a decent addressable market that can benefit from the technology.

[klausa]

I want Maciej to grow Pinboard so he can stop paying any attention to it and just write about his travels full-time.

[mindcrime]

BrightWork looks like a really interesting proposition. Out of all of these, it's the one that jumps out to me as "I'd use this myself".

The other "I'd use this" for me, is probably Eat My Dust. After some of the recent debacles like Flint, MI, I've been really interested in "at home" testing for various contaminants in water, air, soil, etc. This is something that I think a lot of people care about and might use.

[malyk]

WedWell - $300 Billion dollar space...$55 Billion in the US (according to a quick google search), Median Wedding Cost: $18,000 (same search). Solving a problem in an interesting way while hopefully reducing the stress of planning a wedding.

[vishalkgupta]

Thanks malyk! It's a huge space.

Some more data that we find really attractive in this space:

Average cost of US Wedding(1): $32,641

Average cost of Wedding in NYC(1): $82,299 (We are located in NYC and are focused here for phase 1)

Most of those vendors are paid with paper checks. There's an obvious push towards better payment solutions.

Mobile Wedding Planning (2) : Couples are using smartphones more than ever to plan their wedding and they expect personalized solutions.

More Couples Depend On Professionals(2) : Couples are spending on wedding professionals to help them plan a perfect day, and to ensure they have long-lasting memories.

There's plenty to disrupt, and couples are more and more asking for mobile and easy payment solutions. WedWell is really excited to be working on this space!

Sources:

1 - https://www.theknot.com/content/average-wedding-cost-2015

2 - http://ir.xogroupinc.com/investor-relations/press-releases/p...

[siscia]

I actually voted the startup that can actually change the world on a meaningful way: Feynman Nano e Gresham Money.

I found all the other companies "small thinking" that won't impact my life in a meaningful way, maybe perfect for YC and even a better fit than the one I voted.

However since are not my money, I don't actually care if the companies success or fail but I care of those companies can change the way I live.