
Companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 Demo Day (Day 2) - stenlix
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/22/yc-demo-day-s17-day-2/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
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davidivadavid
Can't wait to see how "CocuSocial" is received in France.

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lotteryfest
My sleeper out of the bunch: Loop Support sounds like a really awesome idea.

Companies will pay tens of thousands of dollars/month to hire good support
staff. If Loop can automate easy tickets away with a knowledge base (with
NLP/ML + humans), the unit economics of their pricing seems really good. Any
company with a large volume of non-technical support tickets could benefit
from Loop. Does anyone know how competitive the space is?

Some advice to Loop founders though: please learn how to design a website -
looks like a badly clobbered Bootstrap job.

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alextheparrot
Great variety of companies, really looking forward to some of the biotech in
particular. I am a bit worried about Vanido (The singing app), though, as for
me (With no ability) a 34% improvement might leave me in the same place ;).

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plaidfuji
Entocycle stood out to me as having significant long-term prospects. Bug
protein is a fundamentally disruptive product at a time when demand for
sustainable protein is growing all over the world.

~~~
giarc
From what I've heard, the problem isn't finding customers, the problem is
breeding and raising bugs at scale. I think if you solve the scale problem,
you will be successful.

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nimos
>The startup hopes to someday be the “Monsanto of Cannibis.”

Not sure that's a comparison I'd invite in that market.

~~~
amsilprotag
The marketing choices are interesting. I don't think we'll see that line in
their B2B copy. The names Covetly and PreDxion feel like a tonal mismatch for
their more rulebound audiences. The cartoonish visuals of Construct Simply and
CarDash also feel a bit off relative to a pick-up truck or motor oil ad. But
in those cases, the clients often drag the service providers to the platform.

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DanielShir
Lots of startups are basically existing ideas, just for India. Looks like YC
is doubling down on that particular economy.

~~~
anubisresources
Copying an existing idea into a new market is incredibly lucrative. It's also
a lot easier than coming up with something new.

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bruceb
What's the difference between Flowspace ( AWS for warehousing) and already
existing Flexe ?

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ovi256
Could be just YC-level focus on execution. That was enough for a lot of
previous companies.

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40acres
Are most of these companies using bootstrap as a JS template? This look feels
very familiar.

~~~
bduerst
The couple I looked at were on Wordpress or React.

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indescions_2017
Piggy (piggy.co.in), the "Vanguard for India"!

Just wow. Now there is a concept that sells itself. It's easy to see the Total
Addressable Market potential. Savings institutions such as Vanguard and
BlackRock are completely embedded in our lives. Every high school student who
graduating this summer was probably given the same advice to start saving
early and I'm guessing for those who did, many selected a Vanguard fund. At
least those not speculating in BTC and ETH.

For Asia's emerging middle class, solving the problem of where to safely
invest for generational periods of time looks daunting but enormously
rewarding. Am interested in hearing about all aspects of the issues and
Piggy's solution. What are the cultural roadblocks to getting young Indian
professionals who just want to spend on travel, living material goods, etc. to
think about investing long term? What comprises the funds holdings? How do you
solve the issue of liquidity? Are you considering developing your own products
such as market ETFs for direct investment?

~~~
shubhamjain
The concept isn't novel. In fact, I would argue that they're late to this
game. I am using Scripbox for a while which works fine. As I see, they're not
launching their own fund, they would be investing in existing ones, which kind
of makes "Vangaurd for India" a misnomer.

I think the addressable market is huge, partly because the major things
allowed in the tax saving section 80 (C) are life insurance premium, a
government backed retirement fund (PPF), and long term mutual funds. The last
one is the easiest to invest into. That means it's relatively easy to onboard
working professionals if they are want to save tax in that section.

One issue is that the public isn't knowledgable enough about merits of equity
markets. For some, it's a gamble and would rather go with fixed-rate funds.

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giarc
I think there is definitely a market for OneLocal[0]. I've been renovating my
house lately and dealing with trades is a mess. I had a few very reputable AC
guys come in and quote on installing a unit. After they left there was no
follow up whatsoever... no email, no text, no call, not even automated stuff.
If OneLocal could solve that problem they could probably help SMBs convert
more customers.

0- [http://info.onelocal.com/for-business](http://info.onelocal.com/for-
business)

~~~
Gargoyle
I did some work for a company doing this for home improvement contractors
back...geez, it must have been a decade ago. The problem is they don't respond
to middlemen like this any more than they do end customers. It's a lot of work
to manage them, even just on the customer relationship side of their business.

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indogooner
Looks like pretty impressive monthly revenues for some of them eg. Leon &
George. If YC is the first investor (which is what I expect) they have done
very well being bootstrapped so far.

~~~
giarc
I don't understand Leon & George though (plant delivery). The TC bio talked
about finding the right plant for your space. Seems like they just sell a few
plants. I can walk into any florist, garden store or even IKEA and get the
same or better selection. So the value prop is delivery I guess? But does
delivery large plants across the country scale?

~~~
christudor
Bloom & Wild ([https://www.bloomandwild.com/](https://www.bloomandwild.com/))
do flower delivery and they're doing very well. They're only in the UK at the
moment, but I think they have plans to expand internationally.

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Dawny33
Dating site for muslims? When did YC start funding for ideas like these?

Don't the normal dating sites already cater to everyone?

~~~
ndh2
[https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/yc-backed-muzmatch-
definit...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/yc-backed-muzmatch-definitely-
doesnt-want-to-be-tinder-for-muslims/)

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stereobit
Retool sounds great. I've wasted so much of my time building internal tools
that are relatively simple and are just a bunch of forms and always thought
that finding an easy way to build internal tools is a massive market
opportunity. But I wonder if it's even possible to create a one size fits all
solution. Hope they find a way.

~~~
skummetmaelk
Sounds good, but there is no information about how it actually works.

EDIT: They had a show HN post a couple of months ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494)

~~~
stereobit
Ah, that gives a bit background. The visual programming language sounds cool.
Would love to play with it. About to set up a internal tool architecture and
so far it looks like it's gonna be react toolkit + separate graphql endpoint.

~~~
dvdhsu
What’s your email? I’ll shoot you a live demo!

~~~
stereobit
Sure thing, just pinged you an email to your profile addy.

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0bsidian
I am a bit puzzled by OneLocal.

It looks like it's a review generation / marketing automation / CRM solution
for small businesses.

Just off the top of my mind, i can think of the following venture backed
companies that do the same (at least on the reviews / marketing for SMB
front):

\- BirdEye

\- Podium.com

\- DemandForce

\- Signpost

\- Yodle

\- Womply

\- Broadly.com

\- Yext

What am I missing?

~~~
jacquesm
And don't forget TeamLeader.

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elmar
Strange (51) First day and (57) second day = (108) total on the record
companies only a single one on CryptoCurrency/Blockchain technology.

BTW Does anyone knows how many off the record presentations, the batch
official numbers are around (125).

Edit: one company dharma.io

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redditmigrant
there is dharma.io on second day.

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elmar
ok, only one company.

~~~
brandnewlow
The article (oddly) doesn't mention it, but Surematics is blockchain based -
[https://surematics.com/](https://surematics.com/)

~~~
SpeakMouthWords
I don't think that's odd at all. We should be doing away with our reverence
for this or that technology. Ultimately if there's no token/coin involved,
it's none of our business.

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shubhamjain
It surprises me how successful these companies are already. I don't think to
have more than $20K MRR is any less than having a product-market fit (of a
lesser scale, maybe). It's almost as if YC is not taking bets at all because
the companies that are applying seem to know well what are they solving. And
although it's not obvious from the article, it sounds like they scaled to that
revenue pretty quick (comparatively, to say the least).

If I compare with the companies in the batch 5-6 years ago, the difference
seems conspicuous. Where are the companies like Segment, AnyPerk that were
struggling to find a product-market fit and presumably, were working on bad
ideas? The companies who wouldn't have a good answer to what they're solving
and why? There are bets, like Greo, Goosbump, which would find it hard to
attain a sustainable revenue, but I think the numbers are still low.

Paul Graham used to insist that their first priority is the team, but I think
they have inadvertently raised the bar. Or, it could mean that startup wisdom
of building MVP, talking to users, has become mainstream to warrant the
decline in the bad ideas.

~~~
jacquesm
It's actually pretty easy to explain.

YC has global reach and is now very well known. That increases the applicant
pool and that in turn means there are more _quality_ applications as well.
Having a larger pool of quality applications means that it becomes easier to
select companies before a batch is considered 'full', lower quality
applications will therefore have a much smaller chance of getting selected in
a given batch.

So even if YC's first priority hasn't changed at all there is still a very
plausible explanation for the effect you are seeing.

~~~
austenallred
I'd argue it's just much easier to get to $20k MRR than it used to be. A lot
of companies barely have traction before YC and get it during YC, and $20k
isn't that hard to get to.

~~~
tarr11
MRR without in isolation, without churn, CAC or WoW growth is fairly
meaningless. It's basically just a different way to report run rate.

You can buy 20k in MRR with your YC investment, just for a pop at demo day.
Keeping up growth is another thing all together.

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slikq
I was expecting Slik[1] to be on this list. Anyone know why it was not
included? There were quite a few articles about this company since it was
founded by a 15 year old and a 16 year old [2].

There was also a WSJ article[3] today though I did not read it since it's
paywalled. Anyway to read the article?

[1] [https://blog.ycombinator.com/get-automated-leads-from-a-
data...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/get-automated-leads-from-a-database-
of-70-million-people-with-slik-yc-s17/)

[2] [http://betakit.com/slik-ais-founder-the-youngest-canadian-
en...](http://betakit.com/slik-ais-founder-the-youngest-canadian-entrepreneur-
to-join-y-combinator/)

[3] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-duo-behind-slik-to-
present...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-duo-behind-slik-to-present-
moneymaker-at-y-combinator-1503372945)

~~~
elmar
_> this company since it was founded by a 15 year old and a 16 year old_

Great to see such young entrepreneurs, who is the CEO? even in Delaware I
think you must be over 18.

~~~
elmar
Show HN: Slik Prospector – Find Anyone's Email (slik.ai) by wilozxc 288 days
ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12899814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12899814)

------
4010dell
observation:

Good: Hardly any entry of "Uber for X". That's a relief considering most "uber
for X" are not viable businesses.

Bad: we are going after "billion dollar market". How do you even estimate the
market size ?? why dream of revenue in billions why not millions. A small
company can be a great company. Bad: 50%-60% companies from day 1 or day 2 do
not have mission critical business. Their business is finding a problem for
some kind of solution that claim to have.

~~~
mattmanser
It's the fundamentals behind investing. Basically, you make no money gambling
$10 ten times on 10% chance of success with $100 returns, but you make money
if the returns are $10,000.

So, for investing in companies, there is no point funding companies aiming for
millions as you can't get a good return because of the failure rates. They're
basically taking up one of the slots of a potential billion $$$ company.

The point is for every 10 companies funded, have 1 become a billion $$$
company, while most of the rest will fail.

Say YC has a 6% stake, which gets diluted down to 1%(? I don't really
understand this side of it) and then the company sells for $10 mill. Great for
the founders, but YC only make $100,000. That doesn't cover the other 9
companies that failed (10 * $16,000 = $160,000 = $60,000 loss).

~~~
wastedhours
As much as I appreciate that's the VC model, perhaps less would fail if VCs
didn't push for billions in revenue? The failure rate might be less than 9/10
if it wasn't "all or nothing"? Guessing it still wouldn't make enough home
runs as an investment vehicle though?

~~~
Joboman555
Failure rate doesn't matter. 99% failure * 1B > 90% failure * 1M

~~~
CryoLogic
That's assuming 90% failure when looking for sustainable businesses. There are
some upcoming VC's which are doing well funding smaller companies. Momentum
Ventures is one I know of.

