

Leaving a Million Bucks on the Table: Why Flotype Pivoted in Y Combinator - g0atbutt
http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/06/23/leaving-a-million-bucks-on-the-table-why-flotype-pivoted-in-y-combinator/

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dshankar
To citricsquid, hipchan and others -

NowJS, and the free open source product "Now," is just one small piece of
Flotype the company.

We haven't launched and haven't disclosed the business-side of NowJS (tl;dr we
have an enterprise product that's extremely complex). So trust me, it's not
just a "dump open source js" project.

~~~
freshfunk
Go BEARS!

Looking forward to seeing what you guys have in store.

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paisible
Nowjs does looks cool - however I think Darshan should be giving Node.js more
credit when he talks about the startups that "couldn't/wouldn't" have been
built without their tech.

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weixiyen
as if node.js didn't make it trivial enough, it's built on top of socket.io,
which now handles the concept of channels for you :P

Bi-directional message passing in real-time is a solved problem and I am not
sure how many companies are willing to pay a license for this type of software
if they can get away with using a hosted service like Pusher.

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Hipchan
I didn't realize NowJS was a startup...

I wrote my own equivalent of nowjs in a few weeks about a month ago... maybe I
should apply to yc?

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lowglow
Everyone should apply to YC. I'm considering applying this upcoming round
myself. :)

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keeptrying
Can someone summarize please? I'm in the middle if nowhere with a slow
connection, thanks.

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jackowayed
The message is the standard "scratch your own itch", "work on something you're
passionate about", "pivot", etc. stuff you've heard before.

NowJS had been doing some iPad app that improved the online shopping
experience. That was going well, getting traction and good feedback, got them
an offer for $1M of investment, etc.

But they realized (thanks to PG questioning them) that they didn't actually
care about shopping that much, and they were a great team whose strength was
really solving really hard technical problems, which also interests them more.
So they were trying to decide whether to pivot away from a successful idea.
After some indecision they gave the idea that turned into NowJS 1 week of
their attention and built something very promising, so they gave it a bit more
time, and then they decided to go with it.

~~~
keeptrying
Cool thanks!

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fizx
$1M in funding is a hell of a lot different than $1M in cash. Misleading
title.

