

Ask HN: What are some successful startups built on top of other services? - tzz

Are there any successful startups built solely on top of other services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google App or others?
======
bdunn
Baremetrics ([https://www.baremetrics.io](https://www.baremetrics.io)) by Josh
Pigford is built off of Stripe. There are also a handful of dunning-related
services that sit on top of Stripe, also.

------
mercwear
Gnip ([http://gnip.com/](http://gnip.com/)) was just bought by Twitter. I
would argue that they built their whole business on top of twitter & other
social media companies.

------
calcsam
Zynga was basically built on top of Facebook. Upworthy was built on link
traffic from FB. Then FB changed the way they allowed / promoted sharing and
both companies took a hit.

------
ig1
Lots in the social media space (ad tools, social analytics, crm, big data
tools) also in the enterprise space (i.e add-ons for Salesforce, SAP, etc.)

------
x-separator
Youtube was originally a Myspace widget.

~~~
aesopwolf
Really? Do you have a source?

~~~
mailarchis
Search for jawed karims talk at CMU I guess. One of the key reasons of YouTube
fast growth was the HTML snippet that you could embed in you MySpace page.

~~~
anthony_franco
I remember MySpace ended up blocking YouTube from their site. And YouTube, a
small startup at the time, turned to their users to plead to MySpace to
activate them again. A few weeks later, they were back in business. But it's
interesting to know how close YouTube was to hitting the deadpool.

Edit: Dug up an older article about it:
[http://www.blogherald.com/2005/12/22/myspace-users-angry-
ove...](http://www.blogherald.com/2005/12/22/myspace-users-angry-over-news-
corp-censorship-of-youtube/)

------
chrmaury
Siri was built--and still relies--on Dragon Mobile Speech Recognition from
Nuance

~~~
AbhishekBiswal
Shit, I didn't know that. Whoa.

------
mirador
Dropbox and Heroku are built on top of AWS (amongst thousands of other
companies)

~~~
jiggy2011
They use aws as infrastructure but aren't inseparably welded to it. They could
presumably switch to hosting elsewhere without changing their product itself.

~~~
cnaut
You can see them as abstractions of AWS in some ways. An average consumer
wouldn't go through the trouble of dealing with AWS to backup their files and
even for developers heroku provides a nice level of abstraction

~~~
mirador
Agreed, that's the way I've seen these companies. AWS has truly become a layer
that powers a huge part of the applications on the web.

------
alinajaf
AppointmentReminder by patio11 relies pretty heavily on Twilio AFAIK.

------
dapvincent
NextBigSound is built on top of plenty of social media companies.

------
nyddle
Heroku on Amazon

