

Ask YC: Your favorite startups - robmnl

What are your favorite startups/projects?<p>Preferably ones that are not very known, and that are innovative.
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webwright
(looking across my browser toolbar)

RescueTime! (Okay, I'm biased) Versionate has really grown on me. Wufoo is
pretty neat, though I think the inability to have ranking questions ("rank the
following features") is pretty painful. Joost is pretty cool.

There are a couple of cool YC08 companies that I'm jazzed about but I can't
talk about 'em yet!

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tx
My favorites are all open source projects, not VC-backed startups who are busy
_"building something. getting it to the market. fast"_

I guess greed and innovation don't match very well.

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robmnl
Good reason to stay away from VCs when possible, and keeping it real.

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thorax
bug.gd -- big fan of 'collective wisdom' endeavors.

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robmnl
I was really surprised when I saw the title of the page. "Humanity's Only
Hope" is a nice tagline.

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apgwoz
It may be a nice satirical tagline, but it's by no means a good tagline
according to Steven Krug (<http://www.sensible.com/>). I'm by no means a
Steven Krug fanboy, but if you've read "Don't Make Me Think" you'll kringe at
"Humanity's Only Hope." It doesn't tell you anything about what the site is or
does.

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thorax
Good point.The first question on the FAQ should probably cut right to the
chase, too: <http://bug.gd/search/faq>

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apgwoz
I figured out the site pretty quickly, but I prefer to be able to infer more
from taglines, especially for companies/sites that aren't widely known.

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robmnl
Yes, I love rescuetime. Employeesugestionbox is a great idea. Share some more.

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Hexstream
Mine ;P

(Should be a good answer for most of us)

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robmnl
What is yours?

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Hexstream
Mine is to fix some crappy MMORPG from the outside, by making a fansite. This
post is structured thus: Description of the game, description of the problem,
description of the solution (= my startup).

 __ _The Game_ __The game is french only. It's a freemium model: the game is
free, but you can subscribe for 10$ a year for a couple additional services,
and you can also pay 10$ each time you want to relocate your kingdom on the
map (normally you can only do that by paying a fair amount of resources in-
game). There are 4 "primary" races (mystics, elves, dwarves, humans) and 12
units per race, which you can unlock by building the tech tree. Each unit is
of a certain type (melee or ranged or air) and may have some special abilities
(ex: +33% power while defending). You can attack or defend people to gain
population (and fight armies), which gives you more production power. There
are 4 basic types of resources (mana, wood, ore). You choose your race when
you register for a "round" (length: 6 months). There's a tick every hour where
for example, fights and the moving of armies are calculated. People can group
in alliances of up to 30. You have some amount of population that you can
assign tasks to (gather each type of resource or build buildings).

 __ _The Problem_ __1\. The game shows all kinds of information in one and
only one way, and sometimes you even have to cross-reference with the manual
of the game that's in a separate section (and the manual sucks, too). You even
have to make some quite tedious and boring work to know how much your army is
worth. Overall, there's not enough flexibility of information display. You
often find yourself "between" two pages, for example if you want to know what
your stuff is worth in resources (buildings + army), and many, many other
"cross-page-concerns". The game, overall, only presents a page for resource
management, one for building management, one for army management, etc. That's
just not enough.

People are so desperate to have the slightest idea of the situation in the
game that they rely on fucking crappy and boring Excel sheets to make some
calculations. Data entry is painful and it doesn't give much information and
it displays it in a crude way.

2\. That game is pretty stagnating, there hasn't been much development in the
last 5 years, and it shows because the number of players has declined to
record lows, and the situation is getting worse, overall. I think the makers
of the game are to blame. They're just incredibly lazy, they won't fix their
stuff, their code is obviously a big unmaintanable PHP mess (they won't
refactor), for example at some point I discovered that 2 different pages with
some information that should have been exactly the same, and hence should have
been managed by the same module in the code, displayed the information
differently (so they were coded separately after all). Also they use
1998-style HTML, not only do they not use CSS correctly and they use table-
style layout, but their HTML is not semantic at all. It even has lots of font
tags...

They won't honor the most reasonable and easiest of feature requests/bug
fixes. For example, right now when you send a message to someone via the
internal messaging system, you don't get a copy of what you sent. It's been
this way for YEARS, even if there has been REPETITIVE requests by MULTIPLE
people to fix this fatal flaw. Their response to that kind of justified
whining is that there's always a workaround. For example, you could use some
exterior means (ex: Word) to save your outgoing messages before you save them.
And if the proposal is to put a new link to go directly to a related page in 1
click instead of navigating through 2 other pages first, then their "solution"
is to... make those extra clicks!

3\. They have some messed up mentality, they won't automate anything because
they want their players to be forced to play the game longer unnecessarily.
There's also an elitist attitude, it's so hard to follow the game that those
who dedicate massive amounts of time to it feel really special about it.
Unfortunately it prevents people who have lives from playing the game, so it
caters more to 13-20 year-olds. Also they have a demonstrably lax attitude
about cheating, at some point lots of people openly admitted they shared their
password (which is illegal), but they did nothing at all. They don't seem to
realize that they're alienating the more desirable players by doing this. I
think they're trying to save what little clientele they have, but they should
clean up the mess instead.

 __ _Description of the Solution_ __

So, I want to make a fansite to fix that. Since I used to play that game, I
know fairly well what's missing and what I can do about it. First, I'll have
people synchronize their information manually between the game and my site
(automatic access to the site is prohibited and I want to do something 100%
legal and ethical). Then, I'll let them have the superior information display
capabilities I was alluding to earlier. And I'll give them a lot of powerful
data sharing capabilities to let them communicate easier. Right now, most of
them use MSN for communication, because the internal messaging system is so
basic. Infortunately, MSN is, like Excel, not adapted at all for that. I mean
it "gets the job done", but it's boring and not integrated at all. I want to
offer much nicer features, for example you could send army and techtree
description "in attachment" to your messages, and you'd have a summary
displayed within the message itself and then you could click somewhere to get
the full description. I'd also have much better access control, I want to have
very granular access privileges, for example within an alliance of 30 people
there's usually an elite, a group of let's say 6 people that are much more
active and take the big decisions, if they have some secret plan it's normal
that they'd want to share it only between themselves at first and not to the
greater alliance (in case of spies).

So, I want a win-win-win situation: The players will win because they will
have much more fun with the game with the aid of my site; I will win because
I'll make some money selling extended services even if my basic service, which
will offer quite a lot and fix most of the flaws of the game, will be free;
and the makers will win because their game will be much more attractive, AND
they won't even have had to work to make it happen! In fact I suspect they
might get jealous and finally get off their butts to fix their crap.

The players will finally know exactly what's happening, so turnaround time for
attacking and defending will be faster, so the game will be more dynamic.
Maybe I can even fight the cheater problem. I want to apply a "ban early,
forgive often" policy. Instead of tolerating abuses excessively until I
finally put a permanent ban on an account, which is an ineffective strategy,
I'd try to detect early when someone cheats and suspend their account for say,
3 days, telling them exactly why they were suspended and telling them to check
the rules and obey them next time, but if they don't take the warnings
seriously only then do they get banned. I feel a lot of players cheat only
because everyone else is doing it and they get away with it, and it wouldn't
take much to set them on the right path.

Also, since the tedious and boring calculation works will be done
automatically, people will have to differentiate by concentrating on more
desirable levels like roleplay. It won't be just a game where the one that
wastes his time slugging through piles of raw data by primitive means does
better anymore. I want to develop a strong community with the game as a
platform.

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PStamatiou
I might be biased but <http://skribit.com>

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shafqat
NewsCred? Yes, its my startup, but its my favorite one right now!

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hwork
I think mint is a fantastic startup.

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colortone
TuneCore.com

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danw
Tumlbr, FireEagle

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cstejerean
rescuetime.com

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jarvan
employeesuggestionbox.com

We have our employees submit at least 1 idea a month and after 4 months we
have already implemented 6 ideas resulting in a new product and other cost
saving measures.

