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Content Tagged with startups + YCombinator
Weebly challenges TypePad, WordPress
Weebly, a San Francisco-based web publishing start-up and a YCombinator alumnus, is throwing its hat in the hosted-blogging arena, challenging existing players’ SixApart’s TypePad and Automattic’s WordPress.com offerings.
The company also announced that it has raised $650,000 in angel funding by a group of angels that include Ron Conway, Steve Anderson, Paul Buchheit and Mike Maples.
Weebly got its start as an easy to use web publishing tool, targeting individuals and small business owners. Its drag-and-drop offering was dead simple and has helped the company attract over 25,000 users.
We met with David Rusenko, one of the three cofounders of Weebly, hours before he left for Pennsylvania for his graduation ceremony, and got a demo of the new service. The simplicity and the easy of use of their new blogging feature is stunning. While it is unlikely that any of our professional blogs are going to be using Weebly, but it will be particularly attractive to those who are looking to dabble in blogging.
The AJAX-based interface allows you to add (or subtract) different types of elements to the blog — text, pictures, videos, Google Maps, AdSense (currently in development, not live) — thanks to a widgetized architecture. You can get going in less than an hour, though it won’t allow you to set-up a personal domain just as yet. (That is coming soon.)
While the service is impressive, Weebly faces some considerable if not insurmountable challenges. Scaling the hosted blogging business is quite a challenge, as some of the more established players have learned. The company still has to figure out a viable business model. Rusenko thinks it can work on white-label versions for internet service providers, though that is easier said than done.
And the biggest challenge will be grabbing the mind share of mainstream users - who currently don’t read blogs, or perhaps don’t care much about all things Web 2.0, as Pew Internet recently reported. That said, the company does have an opportunity to carve itself a niche between Wordpress and Tumblr, another tool that is currently gaining popularity because of its ease of use.
Disclosure: Automattic and GigaOmniMedia, the publisher of this blog, have both received funding from True Ventures.
The YCombinator Clones
Given the success of YCombinator, it is no surprise that many are trying to replicate Paul Graham’s idea, the latest being YEurope (including the Y), hoping to further accelerate the innovation cycle across the pond.
A few months ago, I asked a mildly bemused Paul Graham, what he thought about those copying his model, and here is what he had to say:
… it was inevitable that people would copy us. People don’t copy you if you are not successful. It is also a sign that it is working…
Graham’s explanation is that the cost of going from concept to product has collapsed and that is why he thinks this is a model that is going to stick. Anyway, what do they say about imitation being the best form of flattery… !
HitForge, a new twist on incubators
Naval Ravikant, who in his past life co-founded Epinions and Vast, has started HitForge, a San Francisco-based outfit that is a unique twist on the incubator model.
HitForge is an entrepreneur cooperative composed of independent small teams, where people can apply with their ideas, join the team, and see their idea go from idea to product in a few weeks, largely with help of an offshore engineering team.
If it works, then the product is turned into a company. If it doesn’t work, the product is killed, and the team moves onto something new. HitForge is out of a few thousand dollars. The team whose product got killed still gets to share in the hits that come out of the cooperative, Ravikant says.
Ravikant argues that the start-up creation model - have an idea, start a venture, raise capital and then release a product - might have worked in the past, but now it doesn’t, at least when it comes to consumer web start-ups. In the world of consumer Internet start-ups, only the hits win. Today while it takes less capital to start and launch a company, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to be a hit. As Ravikant says, “Web businesses are unpredictable despite the best of intentions and execution.”
“What these are, are products that needed to be tested out in the market before becoming a company,” says Ravikant. Only the hits should become companies, since hits are the only ones that get consumer adoption, and have some sort of an exit event. Hedge funds use this “momentum investing” philosophy, and so does Sequoia Capital, that has done well by betting on growth.
The concept is very similar to that of Ev Williams, who has established Obvious to try out new web products, spinning out the ones that show sufficient adoption into companies — as he did last week with Twitter.
Others will argue that the smaller projects being snapped up by Google and Yahoo shows that it’s about hitting singles, not home runs. But like in baseball, it is the homers that fill the stadia and line the pockets. HitForge hopes to take the two approaches and mash them up with current industry trends - offshore developments, using Amazon S3 and EC2 services, open source, and new web marketing strategies.
Ravikant, when we met with him said,”Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled engineers yearning to code.” We thought he was joking. Instead he was dead serious. “But that’s how I feel about engineers with great passion who can’t raise money, usually because they were born in the wrong country or under the wrong circumstances. I want to create an abstraction layer that allows them to be entrepreneurs.”
Will it work? I am no expert on this, but given the success of YCombinator, it has a fighting chance. When thinking about this over the weekend, I remembered a similar experiment was tried in the music industry in the 1990s. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis created a hit factory that churned out R&B hits by the dozen and gave us stars like Janet Jackson. In England, Stock Aitken Waterman did the same and brought to us musical acts like Kylie Minogue. But there was Sonia, Sabrina, and Samantha Fox.
So question to all the readers: you think this twist on incubator model is going to work?
Iminlikewithyou: Love in the time of Facebook
This past weekend I got a chance to hang out with Charles Forman and Dan Albritton, the twenty-something, fast-talking co-founders of New York-based Iminlikewithyou, a new web-mobile hybrid service, that is going as addictive and as powerful as Facebook. And just as Mark Zuckerberg reinvented the Yearbook, Charles & Dan are going to reinvent the art of flirting.
Iminlikewithyou has emerged from the YCombinator program, and has been in stealth mode for almost six months. Charles and Dan bootstrapped this operation, and are using Amazon EC2 and S3 services as part of their infrastructure.
The company, based in a decidedly unglamorous part of Midtown Manhattan, has recently closed a Series A round of funding from pretty high powered angels, whose names the two co-founders are keeping close to their collective vests.
Unlike a lot of Web2.0 start-ups that simply automate all the fun out of dating, Iminlikewithyou has stepped back, rethought the whole courtship process. Instead, Iminlikewithyou uses technology to amplify the most organic form of human interaction: flirting. What they have come up with is a web service that can be described as luscious, simple and elegant. Did I say, addictive?
Flirting, or the art of flirting, one of the few joys left in these politically correct, over sanitized times. It is the aspect of dating that allows a man or a woman to not only display wit, but also makes innuendo acceptable. It is the sheer unpredictability of flirting – will the date ever happen? - that makes it a delicious delight. On the flipside, as French poet Victor Hugo said, “God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.”
Iminlikewithyou captures all that and bottles it in its web service, which is equally at home on your mobile phone as it is in a browser. It has taken flirting and turned into a game that is inspired in part by eBay-styled auction process. More importantly, it captures what could be the next big Internet trend: an intent-based web ecosystem.
Here is how it works:
You sign up for the service, by answering very basic questions: email, location, age and gender and what is your flirting preference. It takes about 10 minutes, and you are in the network. You add your photos and some other personal information, and you are rewarded with 500 points. Now this is where the game begins.
You are interested in someone, say a lovely lady from New York, you start the flirting process by basically bidding some of your 500 points on her, say 50 points. The bid indicates your intent to woo the young lady. Unfortunately for you, if you’ve made a wise choice, there will be others who will want to date her as well. They will try to outbid you and, well, the process goes on, till the young lady is convinced that you are the one to reward with her attentions. You get SMS and MMS alerts all through the bidding process.
Since the service is in closed beta, you are not penalized for being a loser, but when the service launches, be careful what you bid for.
If you happen to lose, you are not just out of luck with the lady, but out of those points, too. In the future you lose a percentage of your bid amount. The percentage may be quite large, to discourage too much ‘reaching’ on the part of guys who can’t reasonably get the girl.
This is why you need to be economical about how you bid your points, and judicious in indicating your intent. (Not so different from the triage we men use when doling out dollars in singles a bar, either.) And if you come up empty, don’t take it personally. As François de la Rochefoucauld put it - “What we find the least of in flirtation is love.” (You aren’t looking for love anyway, remember?)
The good news is you can recharge your points by answering random questions that pop-up on the screen. Every time you sign-in you get some points, and you can build up your points-balance.
Each question you answer gets you 5 points, and those questions help the company build a better profile of you, something that can be used for highly targeted advertising. A classic question: do you like gin and tonic? Answer is no, but you bet, I will see a vodka ad sometime in the future.
The service has built in communications features like instant messaging, and also has the ability to upload photos and videos. It also has anonymous calling features built into the service, again giving the ladies control over who can talk to them, without giving out their phone numbers.
One of the reasons this service is going to be successful is because it puts ladies in charge. A lot of my friends have said that they are sick and tired of getting emails from guys, which are obviously canned and rote. They all currently use the traditional dating sites, and were quite thrilled by the prospect of Iminlikewithyou.
Being an old fogey, I perhaps have forgotten that when you are in your 20s, flirting is more exciting that the prospect of finding a life partner. And yet I found myself spending ungodly amount of time on the site, collecting points and of course bidding. Nevertheless it would be foolish to suggest that it is a service that is targeting the gray-hair set.
Iminlikewithyou is a service for the Facebook generation, and its easy integration with Facebook tips their hand on which demographic they are focusing.
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Can Xobni cure Outlook’s ills?
Vinod Khosla, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and formerly of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has made a fortune out of betting on companies that tackle really big problems. Some of his bets – Juniper Networks, for instance – have paid off handsomely. Others have been marginally successful, at least from a financial standpoint.
He continues the tradition with his new venture fund, Khosla Ventures, investing in clean tech and alternative energy start-ups. He is taking a similar approach to his InfoTech investments as well. Khosla, like most of us, believes that email is a big problem and fixing it is a big opportunity. That perhaps explains his bet on Adam Smith and Matt Brezina, co-founders of Xobni, a San Francisco-based company that has come out of the YCombinator program.
According to Alarm: Clock, the company has raised $1.5 million of a $4.26 million Series A round, led by Khosla Ventures. Other investors in the company are Rony Conway and FirstRound Capital. The company proposes to build add-ons to the popular Microsoft Outlook email software, and add a level of analytics to the ever-growing email inboxes.
Our email inboxes continue to spiral out of control, beginning to resemble New York City when the garbage workers are on strike. Google Desktop Search, Microsoft’s own Lookout, and X-1 can help us find some of the emails buried in our inboxes, but it’s a long and tedious process on a lucky day.
Xobni, wants to solve all these problems, and indeed has lofty goals, as outlined on their website. One would indeed believe the two young co-founders if there was a product that we could test out. We ran into Brezina at the Start-Up School this weekend, and asked him for further details and presumably we will get those when the beta is made available.
For now, there is no definitive time line when the beta is going to be released, and as a result we are going to reserve our final judgment, erring on the side of skepticism about company’s claims. And that is despite being aware that it is unwise to bet against Khosla’s instincts.