

My Y Combinator Interview Experience and my Startup Postmortem - yesimahuman
http://blog.maxlynch.com/my-y-combinator-interview-experience-and-a-go

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rgrieselhuber
Seems like a shame to shut it down. I've never heard of your product until now
but the site is beautiful and it sounds like a super-useful service.

If your NLP is that good and you could figure out how to sell it for more
money, you could potentially take on companies like Meltwater News.

~~~
skmurphy
I agree, there is a clear need for a service like this.

Neither of the problems mentioned are fatal for an early company, you can get
better at customer acquisition and raise prices (or better introduce some new
tiers and grandfather your existing clients in).

"Despite the fact that the team thought our product was "clearly" better than
Google Alerts, they thought our product had too high of customer acquisition
costs and too low of a price point to leave us with big enough margins."

~~~
yesimahuman
Thanks. I don't know what the answer is. Some of the technology we are using
lives on in some new ways like with Fready (<http://getfready.com/>) but we
decided to not continue selling GoBuzz.

I'm always thinking of new ways to apply what we built over the years. I
certainly believe the technology has other applications but Fready is the
first one we've landed on.

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meterplech
Wait, did they choose to shut down because they weren't accepted to YC? I
haven't applied and can't exactly put myself in their place, but I feel like
the most successful people would continue to try to grow their company anyway.
Or is there a bigger story here I am missing?

Edit: grammar

~~~
yesimahuman
Though it might seem that way, it was more that YC was a last straw. We think
we had an interesting product and there were a lot of possibilities, but there
were also a lot of other problems as well, some I wrote about and some I
didn't. I definitely wouldn't let a YC decision have an impact on your
business, but consider their feedback one part of many that you will receive
while building your company, and react accordingly.

~~~
pclark
You should build something else instead of entirely stopping.

~~~
hubb
FTA: _It was a huge confidence booster that I will take with me into my future
projects. I hope to interview with YC again with whatever project I happen on
next (maybe Fready?)_

~~~
pclark
I hope he started the day after rejection, is what I meant

~~~
yesimahuman
Why would I ever stop? :) This product is no longer, but there are many other
related ones that build on what I've learned and I'm currently exploring them.

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il
Nice to see a fellow UW-Madison alum on HN.

Do you think being based in Wisconsin hurt your chances of success? I recently
moved from Madison to San Francisco, and the difference in the startup scene
is tremendous.

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retube
Interesting product. Care to share any details on the backend? Presumably a
lot of crawling was required to get content? And what were you using NLP for -
to understand the context of a keyword/filter match?

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ig1
You're right there's a market for integrating it with CRM, at one of my
previous employers we had an automated CRM system (built in-house) which
scanned you email and on your homepage automatically told you any news stories
related to your contacts.

(I think they did this by converting email -> domain -> domain to ticker
symbol -> ticker symbol to news feed rather than any sophisticated NLP
thought)

Personally I'd be more worried about legal issues than profit margin for a
service like this.

~~~
yesimahuman
I'm curious, what legal issues come to mind? We've thought through many and
what we always land on is "it's a gray area". Very little precedent and lots
of existing services with similar functionality.

~~~
ig1
Copyright primarily. Fair dealing/usage doesn't protect commercial use except
in fairly limit circumstances. Generally search engines get away with it
because of "implicit licensing" and the fact that content owners want to have
their content indexed.

When you're using the content of someone who doesn't want to be indexed,
there's no real legal defence for creating a derivative work.

(IANAL but I took a couple of courses in IP law at uni)

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ktsoi
It does sound like an interesting service. I'm sure you'll apply your
learnings from GoBuzz into your next venture.

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sundars
nice to see you pivot as fready. i do think that your idea and implementation
has legs ([http://sundarsubramanian.com/learning-from-a-y-combinator-
in...](http://sundarsubramanian.com/learning-from-a-y-combinator-interview-
experi))

