
YC W17 Launch: Claire, Peer5, WaystoCap, Symple, RankScience, and Kudi - craigcannon
https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w17-launch-claire-peer5-waystocap-symple-rankscience-and-kudi/
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derwiki
I'm pretty excited about RankScience. SEO can have a huge effect but also be
one of the hardest things to accurately measure; and it's an industry where
there's a fair amount of dogma and waving dead chickens around.

~~~
aresant
Also excited about this product but from their pitch:

"No one has solved automated SEO because SEO is a software problem that non-
technical marketers are trying to solve."

Great pitch, but untrue. Most SEOs I've met at serious companies are almost
always very technical people.

And this isn't a recent development, back in 2007 there was an SEO contest
held to grab the keyword for "Greatest living american".

An SEO named Brandon Wirtz took the win(1) and the guy would fit any
description as a very technical person previously having been the
compressionist and technical lead for Microsoft's Merlin Lab.

SEO is, at its core, a technical puzzle with constantly changing parameters,
and as a result attracts a lot of very talented technical people from diverse
backgrounds to solve.

(1) [http://www.adweek.com/lostremote/the-second-greatest-
living-...](http://www.adweek.com/lostremote/the-second-greatest-living-
american-brandon-wirtz-of-course/3715)

~~~
ryanb
>> Most SEOs I've met at serious companies are almost always very technical
people.

Companies of a certain scale can afford to have engineering teams focused on
SEO, and they should! Most companies can't afford this, though, and the vast
majority of people in the SEO industry are not technical.

Also, who's better at solving ever-changing puzzles with many variables:
humans or software? : )

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miguelrochefort
I don't understand "X for Y" businesses such as:

\- Kudi: "PayPal for Africa"

\- WaystoCap: "Alibaba for Africa"

\- Symple: "Venmo for business payments"

Can't PayPal, Alibaba or Venmo just target these customers themselves?
Duplicating these efforts seems like a huge waste of resources...

~~~
Nadya
The cost, difficulty, and research required to penetrate the market makes it
not worth the potential return for Paypal/Alibaba/Venmo. Instead - another
company can take the risks, build the market, then be acquired by one of those
larger companies. The larger companies now has a proven business model for the
market.

Like a typical Korean "grind MMO" businesses have two options:

    
    
        (a) Buy high-level gear for an extremely inflated price from other players
        (b) Grind to make it yourself (potentially losing more money than if you had bought it in the first place)
    

(a) is lower risk and makes more sense for businesses. They "could" spend
$300,000,000 - $800,000,000 to _maybe_ extend into a potential market. Or
maybe they fail and threw away $600,000,000. Maybe they try again and lose
another $800,000,000 with nothing to show for it. So why not acquire a company
for $3,000,000,000 and forego the risks altogether? (All figures made up for
example purposes.)

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miguelrochefort
It seems odd that PayPal/Alibaba/Venmo don't take these "risks" themselves.
Considering their extensive domain experience, if anyone is to successfully
acquire a market, it's them.

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Nadya
Which is why large businesses sometimes expand into markets they feel
_comfortable_ enough to expand into using their domain experience. Markets
they aren't confident they can thrive in - they don't join. There is simply
too much risk attached.

They have the option of expanding their existing markets instead of taking
risks trying to enter new markets. Let _other_ people take those risks then
simply buy out whoever ends up being successful. Sometimes this backfires when
the new kid on the block is better at your business than you are. That's a
potential risk and is also why _some_ acquisitions appear to be too soon and
have an extremely inflated price tag. Give them an offer they can't refuse
before they run you out of business entirely. :)

~~~
k__
Luckily businesses transform from innovators to job-generators when they grow,
so the small companies can get a piece of the pie.

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koolba
> Symple is Venmo for business payments.

This seems a close enough industry as Simple to be confusing:
[https://www.simple.com/](https://www.simple.com/)

~~~
xb
This may be true now, but Simple (the consumer online bank) is currently in
the process of shutting down.

~~~
ensignavenger
Source? I have been a Simple customer for years, and haven't heard anything
about them shutting down?

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jasonlbaptiste
good group of companies. See the need for a CDN that can handle television
volume audiences. Symple makes a lot of sense. Basically, bill.com that
doesn't suck/feel dated.

~~~
shacharz
Hi Peer5 co-founder here, thanks for resonating with our vision!

~~~
xb
WebRTC seems like a really cool opportunity to rethink certain kinds of
services. Video is an obvious candidate, I've also seen a bittorrent client
that uses WebRTC. What are other interesting peer to peer applications that
WebRTC could enable?

~~~
shacharz
_> I've also seen a bittorrent client that uses WebRTC_

Yea, webtorrent[1] is a great project.

We've also created Sharefest[2] a while ago which is basically WeTransfer with
no servers.

I think multiplayer web gaming has a nice potential and need for a high
performance network stack using WebRTC.

IoT might also be a candidate for direct p2p communication, without the need
for all the devices in your home/office to connect directly to the cloud.

[1]
[https://github.com/feross/webtorrent](https://github.com/feross/webtorrent)
[2] [https://sharefest.me/](https://sharefest.me/)

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pastaking
Peer5 is a brilliant idea! Glad to see they're doing well.

