
A Quick and Dirty Analysis of Apply HN - danieltillett
https://www.tillett.info/2016/04/12/a-quick-dirty-analysis-of-apply-hn/
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david927
I'm afraid you weren't objective enough to do this kind of analysis.

As one of the Apply HN candidates (Brodlist), the only category I can think
you sorted us into is 'existing competition'. While we did have some comments
saying that what we have wasn't interesting (some from those competing in the
same space), we also had comments hinting that it wasn't even possible.
Someone said we're trying to do the Tesla of databases. I'm also subjective,
so I see it as the latter. You would need TDD by an objective third-party to
know better, or just wait to see what happens after we launch.

Second, unicorn embryos don't show themselves that way or everyone would just
do it if it's that obvious.

~~~
david927
What would happen if someone had the Tesla for databases? What if it had a way
to query data that was also vastly better and simpler? (This wasn't mentioned
in passing in the comments on our application since we're not ready to show
it, but it exists and is reflection of the language.) If you squint you could
imagine that taking off and eating a large portion of the market.

Now let's take a random situation: You have a business that makes widgets. You
have customers, suppliers, parts, etc. Do you store that information in Word
as text? Of course not. You either have a spreadsheet or database, right? Text
is great for a novel or a poem... but not for data. That would be crazy.

Currently, the web is still a big collection of text documents. How optimal is
that? Deeply sub-optimal. The number of people going to the Google homepage is
declining because people are now just going directly to the database that
represents what they're looking for. Looking to buy a home? You go to Zillow
or Trulia and query their database. People want data, not text. 95% of the web
wants to be data.

Now imagine if that company mentioned before had significant market share. The
authentication is common across all of these databases, they all have the same
API (the language), and so instead of appearing as many databases, it appears
as one large database of everything. Suddenly a network effect kicks in and if
you have something you want to be discovered (which is what the web consists
of) it makes sense to join in.

The next Google won't be better text search but instead something completely
different -- it will be data. And the web will become essentially a massive
database. I don't know who will get there, no one can know, or how it will
happen, but it will happen; it's waiting to happen.

~~~
p4wnc6
I can't comment on the technical implementation, but just from visiting your
website I think you are doing yourself a disservice by having the up-front,
immediate form of communication be a negative comment about traditional SQL.

Traditional SQL stands up extremely well to modern use cases, and tons of use
cases never require the magnitude of data at which other solutions become
pragmatic. As a result, it's important to consider traditional RDBMSs with
respect, acknowledging that they are extremely resilient to tons of use cases,
schema or schema-less situations, distributed access, etc. etc., and active
development is making them better and better all the time.

By basically saying, "put away your boring old SQL database grandpa, it's time
for something better" you're giving sort of an immature and technologically
hasty vibe that's going to alienate people.

Your technology may be amazing, but people often don't respond to things that
present in this "your whole way of thinking is totally wrong" sort of way.

~~~
david927
Thanks for that -- I had no idea it could be taken that way. I meant for it to
come across as, "Here's something exciting and new." I'll look into changing
that; I definitely don't want to come across as disrespectful. Thanks again.

~~~
p4wnc6
You're not the only one to accidentally give off that vibe. I remember reading
this [0] article about "DevOps 2.0" and my jaw dropping.

In about 2 sentences, the author manages to alienate pretty much anyone who
would want to consider that product and the new features.

It's this massive unawareness that even though something like Docker is the
cool new way of doing it, probably 90+% of businesses (especially cap-
weighted) remain doing things with legacy systems and are necessarily slow to
adapt. Not only are they not using 2.0 ... they're not even using 1.0!

This kind of marketing might work when you mostly only want other start-ups
for your clients. But if you want bigger players, you have to think about it
from their perspective. Do you want to offend the 15-year veteran VP of
Operations who got a promotion 7 years ago when everybody thought signing some
enterprise contract was the right thing, and now your presentation basically
starts from sentence #1 saying "You did it all wrong, old man!" You're just
priming that senior VP, who wields the political power to utterly veto you
from their new product search, and motivating him to _want_ to make sure
you're not around to bring any kind of critical highlight to any of his
previous choices.

This is an important point in business. I never even thought about until I
read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" but now I start to see it more
often (especially when I do it, which is still too often for my goals).

[0] < [http://blog.shippable.com/devops-2.0-is-here-announcing-
ship...](http://blog.shippable.com/devops-2.0-is-here-announcing-shippable-
formations-and-enhanced-ci-capabilities) >

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smikhanov
The author should really have provided not only the groups and how many ideas
(he thinks) land in that group, but also what are those ideas. Not only this
would've make an entertaining read in 2026, but also give more ground for
reasonable discussion now.

~~~
danieltillett
I have the list so I will try to remember to comeback and do a postmortem in a
few years time. The likelihood is that every single application on the list
will fail to become a unicorn and very few will ever make a profit. This is
just the way the numbers fall out on early stage startups.

The reason I didn't actually list each of the companies in each category is
that the purpose was not to critic individual applications, but to look at
them as a whole and try to draw lessons from what I saw. There is a real
disconnect between what people are proposing and the questions investors want
answered. If you want someone's money you need to have good answers for these
questions.

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qu1mby
Thanks for doing this! Are we able to see which startups fell into which
categories?

~~~
danieltillett
Since this is just my subjective analysis based on limited data I don't think
it is fair to single out individual applications. The value I hope is in
making people think more about their ideas and asking objectively themselves
what category their startup falls into.

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david927
AirBnB at this stage (Apply HN is prototype-stage) would have fallen into
Network Effect and Lifestyle Business (the size of market for sharing airbeds
at conferences is small), and not into Unicorn Embryo.

~~~
danieltillett
I would not put the original AirBnB into the lifestyle business category, but
the non-profit category. If you look at how many people use AirBnB to share an
air mattress in their living room to strangers it was an idea that would never
have made money. It was only when they pivoted to their current approach that
they became a huge success.

Actually AirBnB is a good example of how you can solve the chicken and the egg
problem with networks. Because real estate rentals are local, it is possible
to bootstrap a strong network in a geographically small location and then
scale out. All the successful network businesses out there have used a similar
approach (Uber, Facebook, etc).

