

Mattermark Index: Y Combinator Summer 2013 Companies - SparksZilla
http://mattermark.com/fastest-growing-y-combinator-summer-2013-companies-ranked-by-mattermark-score/

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ramanujam
The index and score from Mattermark are great for consumer facing companies
and mobile app companies but are pretty useless for most other industries. I
checked some companies that are making making millions in revenue and they had
a double/triple digit mattermark score. I am pretty sure that isn't a good
representation.

Also, a note for those signing up for the trial, there is neither an option to
cancel your subscription directly nor information about billing inside the
application. You have to email them to cancel the account and i got a response
after 5 days(3 working days) when i sent an email asking them to cancel my
trial account. While it is totally acceptable for an early stage startup to
not have those features and i am sure they have it in their backlog, just make
sure you don't send that cancelation email the day before your trial ends.

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awwstn
_We 've ranked the current Y Combinator Summer 2013 batch by Mattermark Score
– which awards points to each company on a weekly basis for increasing their
website traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, Twitter followers, Facebook
likes, and LinkedIn followers._

It's hard for me to understand how this formula could be a valuable measure of
growth of a startup, since most of these things can be easily purchased. I'd
guess that growth of Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, LinkedIn followers and
website traffic are more accurately a measure of a company's ad spend than
their actual growth in revenue and users.

~~~
dmor
Those things are easy to purchase in the short term, but it quickly becomes
very expensive to purchase 10% week-over-week increase of Twitter followers,
Facebook likes, web traffic, etc (I know, I've tried this before). The
Mattermark Score reflects long term growth trends, short term spikes aren't
enough to move the needle.

~~~
awwstn
I think that could make sense in the long term, but with YC companies on demo
day, I'm not sure it does. Most of these companies appear to have <1000
followers on the services you're measuring. If Likes and Followers cost a
dollar each, then it wouldn't be too expensive to buy a spot at the top of
your list in this case.

It's interesting that the company at the bottom of your list (Reebee) has 3x
the Twitter followers and 6x the FB followers that the company at the top of
the list (OneMonthRails) has. If Reebee started out (i.e., when you started
tracking them) with a couple hundred followers on each of these services and
OneMonthRails started out with none, then Reebee had the deck stacked against
them, needing to add 100x+ the number of followers added by companies that
began with no traction, during a limited time frame.

~~~
dmor
We're very aware of these issues and our algorithm accounts for them.

You're welcome to sign up for free trial to poke around and see why each
company's score it what it is. We provide graphs and details on all the data
points for each company.
[http://www.mattermark.com/app/signup](http://www.mattermark.com/app/signup)

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jonathanjaeger
Based off of Danielle Morrill's previous blog posts ranking startups and this
Mattermark post, I get the sense that a lot of this ranking is putting certain
companies "against" each other even though it's like comparing apples and
oranges. For example, does it makes sense to compare a SaaS company with a
$10K ACV that makes Google Adwords work against a company that gets 10 tweets
a second because it's viral?

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dmor
It's just ranking the growth rates of the signals I listed in the post - not
saying which company is "best". Frankly, I think a lot of these rankings
differ greatly from what I think the overall potential of a company is (I saw
them present yesterday at Alumni Demo Day), but potential is not what we're
measuring here. Growth is certainly another data point for investors to
consider, and historically has been a part of massive information asymmetry -
VCs are already looking up all these metrics about companies (manually) as
they research, source and diligence. We're just making that more efficient and
transparent.

At the end of the day investors do have to choose one company over another, as
very few can justify investing in all of them. We're trying to give them more
info to go off beyond hype. All of these companies tackle large markets with
varied margins, and I believe investors are smart enough to sort that out for
themselves and make decisions based on their domain knowledge, relationships,
and expertise.

~~~
ringdabell
"We're trying to give them more info to go off beyond hype."

All you're measuring is hype though. Startups that rely on likes, follows,
etc. as a gauge of success/traction are by nature, hype driven.

There are many industries - B2B, EdTech, etc. - where lack of social media
traction is not at all an indicator of the health of a startup. I know because
I run one. We have 0 likes, 0 mentions, 0 follows, but a hundred paying
customers and on track to hit 1MM in revenue in less than 20 months since
launch (with only 4 employees).

I hate to be critical of other founders, but all you're doing is contributing
to and validating all the silliness that is the SV startup scene.

~~~
argumentum
I think you make good points .. and also that mattermark probably would agree.

One problem is stats like you mentioned are hard to count, as for one you may
have a competitive incentive to hide them. For another, there are no easy APIs
or ways of scraping that data.

What mattermark could do (and are probably doing) is learning what stats are
signals of success for what types of startups. For a consumer web or mobile
startup, mattermark's data is likely a very good health indicator, for a b2b
thing likely not.

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jonathanjaeger
Yes I agree that this data is better to have than to not have. A savvy
investor can use this as a starting point for their own research, I was just
worried at the framing of the posts ranking companies (in the past based off
of alexa mostly and now off of other metrics such as likes, follows, tweets).

A couple examples to play devil's advocate even when discussing consumer
startups against other consumer startups: 1) The social media startup that
relies on spammy incentives to retweet or like something. 2) The ecommerce
startup that relies on free giveaways or hefty price cuts to get people to
tweet or post deals that are not sustainable from a business perspective.

Unless there are other signals that you can combine with this data, in many
instances it can be deceiving. Like I said, the data can still be a great
starting point because you at least see the data ranked with the names of the
startups and then can investigate those startups closer from other
perspectives.

~~~
dmor
At the end of the day investors still need to meet with founders and do their
diligence, but I believe we may be able to bring attention to _good_ companies
that are not spammy or dishonest but also don't get a lot of press, attention,
etc.

Within Mattermark Pro investors can filter by stage, vertical, business model,
geography and many other factors to create useful comparisons between
companies... Mattermark scores for B2B companies are quite meaningful when
comparing apples to apples. I know it is painful to judge and be judged in
this ecosystem, but I hope people will see that we are blogging about
interesting stuff that others aren't covering and bringing more transparency
and information symmetry than before.

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justinbeaver
Not only are these Mattermark posts becoming quite boring and repetitive, but
for the company's sake it's time to move on. Readers of HN aren't going to
make a purchase. And if entrepreneurs/hackers are the target market, then it's
time to rethink that strategy a bit.

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johns
I think you underestimate the number of investors reading HN. They may not
post. They're definitely reading.

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mathattack
Seems like there are an awful lot of programming tools, restaurants, and
delivery. The programming tools I get - these are hackers developing for
hackers. Is delivery a wave because of Amazon and others trying to provide
convenience, or is it the softwarization of our industry? And the food - is
that on the back of the GrubHub and SeemlessWeb success?

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nnnnnn
Interesting index. One funny note:
[http://www.hackermeter.com/](http://www.hackermeter.com/) and
[https://onemonthrails.com/](https://onemonthrails.com/) use the same photo.
Found that kind of funny

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unz
This is a great tool for other startups, funds, and companies. Just clone
these companies in that order, they're already pre-vetted by good VC's like PG
and also somewhat market tested.

A smart VC could just send of them as a spec to dev team in Russia/India, and
hire mechanical turkers to blitz forums. Even hire a few good writers to
create blogs and post to HN.

