
YC Office Hours with PG and Harj - fbuilesv
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17234044
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jcampbell1
The first guy was doing K-6th iPad stuff, and Paul didn't have much advice.
Anyone interested in this space should checkout ixl.com. Most people haven't
heard of it, but they are crushing it when it comes to K-6 math skills. By my
estimation, they do something like $100M rev/year. As far as I can tell, they
actively avoid the press as they don't want competitors.

~~~
bragen
How do you come up with that number? According to
<http://www.edreform.com/Fast_Facts/K12_Facts/#ENROLLMENT>, there are about
130,000 elementary schools in the US. Even if every single school in the
nation used IXL, they'd only reach $25 MM in revenue. Given that IXL probably
reaches some single-digit percentage of schools, $100 MM seems really high.
Are parents buying this in droves?

~~~
patio11
You are sharply underestimating per-deal sizes for enterprise sales. $200 a
class isn't so much to actually make $200 a class. $200 just establishes an
anchor such that the school district demands a discount and you say "Alright,
with 500 teachers teaching 4 classes each, we can let you have this for _only_
$350,000 a year. That's a huge discount off our list price."

Welcome solidly to Enterprise Sales if you adopt this path, which has it's own
set of challenges vs. e.g. selling to teachers directly. There are quite a few
enterprise software companies which make good money. Some of them even produce
good software, too.

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look_lookatme
Anytime someone asks you what makes you better than an established competitor
please don't ever, ever say something along the lines of "because <competitor>
sucks". It's better to acknowledge your competitor's legitimacy and respond
with how your product is better.

Chauvinism has a place, but I think you have to be careful with it.

~~~
iamdev
especially when <competitor> is a YC startup ;)

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Shenglong
PG and Harj's pace is amazing - not a moment wasted. It's unfortunate to see
that the lucky founders up there aren't really listening to their opinions. It
seems like they're more interested in defending their product, rather than
take suggestions.

~~~
danberger
agreed. I was honestly pretty disappointed in the quality of startups that
went up. Most of those guys didn't really seem to be prepared or willing to
seriously address the obvious issues they had.

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happyfeet
I was trying to put myself in their situation to imagine what I would be doing
answering those questions.

PG & Harj's pace is superb trying to utilize every minute.

I think the startups stand to gain much by being more open to criticism and
looking for take-aways to improve their positioning, product etc., from their
feedback.

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orky56
Key takeaways or at least the main ideas behind PG and Harj's questions &
comments- What pain point are you solving? Is it something you dealt with (or
the market deals with)? How do you go about using the product? What is the
killer feature of your product that will allow a user to switch from their
current method?

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chrisaycock
Also: How do people find-out about your product (search, word-of-mouth, etc)?
Why did you get turned down (when pitching to an enterprise)?

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wvl
For reference, a link to the hn thread discussing the session as it went live:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2988407>

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kariatx
I understand that people get nervous when the pressure is on, but I can't
believe how many times I thought to myself, "Answer the damn question!"

This whole video served as a reminder to me to slow down, listen to what
people are asking you, and give a thoughtful response. I'm not claiming I'd do
any better in this sort of situation, but the amount of marketing speak coming
from most of these guys' mouths was practically dehumanizing to PG and Harj.

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roneil
Its awesome for us to see how PG conducts office hours, but it seems like a
bad idea to do this in front of so many people. I can imagine how hard it
would be as a founder to answer these questions so publicly.

~~~
iamclovin
Sure, but I'm pretty sure it's a great character-building exercise - either
your idea is validated, or you're determined enough to prove YC wrong. Win-win
imho.

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deutronium
Is this a one-off type video, or is there others with different people too. If
so I'd love to see more!

