
Show HN: Superwidget - ivankirigin
http://blog.yesgraph.com/superwidget-flow/
======
ivankirigin
Hey folks, I used to run growth at Dropbox. I ran dozens of optimization tests
on top of the referral program and sharing flows.

Now my startup YesGraph (YC W15) launched a widget that has all the same
powerful sharing features. Our contact importer is actually 30% faster than
Dropbox too -- I tested :)

The link in this post is to an announcement post. Try it out for free without
creating an account in YesGraph here:
[https://www.yesgraph.com/demo/](https://www.yesgraph.com/demo/)

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joeld42
This looks really good. I've seen quite a few half-baked internal
implementations of this kind of thing, it certainly seems to me worth paying
for for a well-built, drop in one of these. A couple of questions..

How does the pricing work? If I sign up for the $199 tier and suddenly get
10058 users, does it block new referrals, or do I suddenly owe you $400?

Are the contacts shared between installs? e.g. does my install "learn" from
other company's installs?

I tried it out and it picked some pretty bad recommendations, one was a well-
known blogger who I had emailed once years ago, one was one of my other email
addresses with the same name, and only the third checked suggestion was a good
suggestion, a friend who I might actually recommend something to. A lot of the
unchecked items on the "top" list were weird emails that I wasn't even sure
why they were in my address book.

Still, the invite interface was nice, and even with odd suggestions this is
something I'd use. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!

~~~
ivankirigin
Without our recommendations those "weird" emails are what everyone would see.
There is a lot of noise in contacts. We have a pretty good blacklist, and it's
getting better all the time. We'll soon have enough data to make the blacklist
more automated -- essentially classifying patterns of email automatically.
Right now, it's a whack-a-mole. This is a big focus of ours.

The ranking for this demo example is only pretty good because not many people
have used this flow. We just launched today. Normally we have a lot more data
to train the ranking.

We do extract patterns across thousands of users. For example, do people tend
to invite those with the same last name? To enable this learning, we do keep
the data around, but we don't share contact data across apps. We aren't a data
broker. The basic model is that we won't send more contact data than a user
already shared with you. But we do try to find more signal to help with the
ranking, and that can include, for example, counting mutual contacts that we
learn from any source. Again, this data isn't shared back, it only informs our
ranking.

As far as pricing, it's based on the number of address books -- not your user
count. So the free tier actually covers a social graph with around 1M edges --
which is a huge value.

No, the service doesn't automatically shut off or anything like that. If the
pricing doesn't fit your app (e.g. you're very high scale and a free app),
just email me: ivan@yesgraph.com

We already priced things to match a high scale B2C app, so this pricing is a
steal for most users.

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eschutte2
I want to try this, so I tried signing up for SendGrid but got an instant
rejection for unknown reasons. I think the many-step setup involving multiple
vendors is a bit of an obstacle here... although maybe it's a net positive for
you to weed out less committed buyers. Do you think you could manage the email
API on behalf of your users at least for low volumes? Wondering if there's a
way to let people try it "for real" on their site without going through all
the hoops. I know email is a challenge because of reputation and
deliverability and all that.

~~~
ivankirigin
Yeah, YesGraph doesn't want to get in the email deliverability game. There are
a hundred vendors who can manage this, and every serious web app solves this
problem.

I think it's a feature to use your own email system. This gets really obvious
when you start reusing your templates and centralizing your analytics.

We'll implement many more backends than SendGrid -- including easier ones like
Mailchimp.

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jbob2000
This is a really cool piece of functionality, but what surprises me the most
is that they're trying to build a business around it. I would have never
thought that this was enough of a problem to justify paying for.

(Not intended as a negative comment. When I read the site, I thought it was
going to be a node plugin or something...)

~~~
ivankirigin
Actually this just makes adding our real product (recommended invites) very,
very easy.

Here is the VC pitch: YesGraph is replacing Facebook Connect.

Instead of building a lobster trap social network and giving that data to
developers, YesGraph is helping developers do more with their data (like
imported email contacts and mobile address books).

This is a big deal when you think about it. The "single line of code" seems
like a small deal, but dramatically lowers the cost of more apps getting on
YesGraph.

------
tacone
This is the third attempt at this niche I see on HN. I guess there's
definitely a market for this, so good luck :)

~~~
ivankirigin
We don't consider other referral program competitors. We want to help them
level up and work with our API to recommend contacts to invite.

We're in talks with a few right now actually :)

------
carolynjoneslee
I was the lead engineer on this project--thoughts and feedback welcome :D

------
kentbrew
Great to see the unminified source for Superwidget online.

~~~
ivankirigin
Repo: [https://github.com/YesGraph/yesgraph-
superwidget](https://github.com/YesGraph/yesgraph-superwidget)

This is the normal include: [https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-
invites.min.js](https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.min.js)

Just remove the "min" if you're, for example, debugging.
[https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-
invites.js](https://cdn.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-invites.js)

