The fledgling startups listed below will present their ideas and initial products to investors at this spring’s Y Combinator Demo Day on March 18. Of the 19 companies in this batch, 10 have already launched and only one remains in stealth mode. Most of them have been in development for only three months.
Chatterous
Chatterous connects various forms of communication so that people can message each other regardless of the form they use most. Currently the service ties SMS, email, IM, and web together so that messages sent using one technology will be received by others using any of the other technologies. This works by setting up a group on Chatterous’s website and putting down all the ways your friends can be contacted. You can then start sending messages to them immediately, meaning that they don’t even have to change their own behavior all that much. Chatterous launched in public beta last week.
Addmired
Addmired provides the AddHer and AddHim social network widgets, both of which display two user profile pictures at a time and ask users to answer certain questions about them, such as “Who’s more popular?” The founders argue that their widgets are more appealing to social network owners than other widgets, because they help drive traffic within the social networks, not siphon traffic out of them. They look to establish service level agreements with some of the smaller social networks. We covered the service in February here.
Snaptalent
Snaptalent is an advertising network for job listings that uses IP detection to determine whether website viewers work or study at particular companies or institutions. It then displays listings from employers who want to attract workers from organizations known for their talent, such as Facebook or Harvard. See our review of the service from this week here.
RescueTime
RescueTime helps individuals and businesses track how they spend their time at the computer, and consequently, find ways to become more productive. The web-based dashboard charts application and website usage over long periods of time and shows you whether you’ve been reaching your goals. So far, 278 businesses have signed up for RescueTime for a total of 26,132 seats. See our review from last May here.
MightyQuiz
MightyQuiz is a user generated quiz destination and widget provider that we covered recently. Users are encouraged to answer trivia questions from a wide range of categories. They can also submit their own questions and embed them on their sites. The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34.
Tipjoy
Tipjoy is an easy micropayment system for the web. It has been designed to cut out the steps necessary for website visitors to leave small amounts of money for content publishers, such as bloggers. The Tipjoy button placed on a website asks for only an email address and by default registers a donation of 10 cents. The service is nearing 70,000 impressions per day and the founders are exploring different models for micropayments, such as employing them to finance high definition video on the web. We wrote about Tipjoy here.
8aWeek
8aweek promises to save you hours of time wasted each week on time-drain websites like Facebook and Drudge Report. The 8aweek browser toolbar will track your website usage, remind you of how much permitted time you have left on each restricted site, and even block you from particular sites once you’ve spent too much time on them. See our review from February here.
WebMynd
WebMynd provides a visual interface for reviewing your browsing history. The founders draw comparisons to Gmail – just as Gmail obviated the need to sort messages into folders by providing effective search and tagging, WebMynd renders it unnecessary to manually bookmark sites and organized them into folders because it’s easy to search and visually flip through the pages you’ve visited. WebMynd operates as a Firefox toolbar and has already indexed 8M page impressions. We wrote about them in January.
BaseShield
BaseShield will protect Windows PCs from malicious viruses and attacks by leveraging virtualization software. Its methods improve on existing anti-virus solutions by preventing all types of attacks, not just the recognized and documented ones. The service has yet to launch.
Insoshi
Insoshi is an upcoming white label social networking platform. It will differentiate itself from many of the other social networking platforms by taking a completely open source approach (think: WordPress of social networks). The software has yet to be released.
Mixwit
Mixwit describes itself as a combination of Slide and iTunes. While it has more ambitious long-term plans, it currently provides an easy way to make sharable mix tapes with songs found through the MP3 search engine Seeqpod.
Omnisio
Omnisio will help you annotate and share videos from any website. It will also add structure to the existing video content on the web. The service has yet to launch.
Deluux
Deluux aims to become a distributed Facebook, or an inverted Ning, by relocating the center of people’s online identities to their websites, which exist outside of any one social network. The service will facilitate the distribution of personalized content around the web and help drive traffic to these personal websites. It has yet to launch.
Wundrbar
Wundrbar wants to improve upon the search bar experience by providing users with powerful inline commands. The idea is reminiscent of YubNub but Wundrbar strives to appeal to a larger audience and to incorporate functionality that helps people manage their personal online accounts in addition to searching the web.
YumDots
YumDots wants to be the go-to mobile application for finding places to eat when out on the town. Its emphasis on using interactive maps to display information about local restaurants makes it more efficient than other mobile review services like Yelp’s. The service has yet to launch.
280 North
280 North will debut with a web-based PowerPoint clone called “280 Slides” that strives to mimic the desktop experience and features the ability to export presentations to PowerPoint format. The founders’ longer term goals consist of providing a JavaScript-based development framework for building desktop-like applications for the web. None of these services, however, have been launched yet.
Kirkland North
Kirkland North wants to take an infectious campus-wide game popular at Yale and Harvard last year and spread it to other campuses around the country. The Risk-like game pits sections of campuses against each other in a virtual battle for university-wide domination. While the founders have plans to roll out an integrated solution that can serve many institutions at once, they are currently rolling out individual versions of their online service, such as one for Stanford that launched only two weeks ago and already involves 20% of the campus.
Joberator
Joberator will help employers find developer talent by encouraging computer science students to refer their developer friends, of whom they have more intimate knowledge than any professional recruiter. Incentives for personal referrals are created by employers who list the bonuses they will pay to pay those who recommend candidates eventually hired. The service has yet to launch.
Yet more useless garbage on the net. The junk keeps piling.
here is Addmired’s myspace app
http://profile....endid=354091658
Wow, what a collection of worthless crap!
Why-combinator, indeed!
Craptacular all around!
If anyone uses Snaptalent to hire developers out of Google or Yahoo this week we’ll be stoked.
We’ve already seen some Yahoo applications.
Your Google targeted ads will be shown on Hacker News, or Steve Yegge’s blog (Goog) (http://steve-ye...ge.blogspot.com)
Just go to http://snaptalent.com
mmmmm at least they tried.
I don’t see any googles etc here.
I hope I am proved wrong.
Don’t know if they’re the first to do it, but that AddHer logo is kind of a new low to me. Now it’s ‘Beta!’ as though it’s a box of Uncle Sam with ‘20% More Fiber!’ Lord help us all.
mark – reading between the lines here, maybe its time to take a bit of a snooze before your next post, this one has an uncommon number of typos – nice roundup – some handy dandy stuff for sure but only a few “new concepts” vs. many enhancements to things people do on the web.
I do wonder who really gets to choose the startups, the teams themselves must have the technical ability to make something, the problem is the people behind YC are also technical people, in other words they just dont know what is in or cool/useful for people. Some may actually do well, but most look useless.
I’m launching UnSnapTalent.com, the SnapTalent blocking service.
Deep corporate discounts are available, please call for details.
Crap all around.
Some look very interesting, some look crappy. They all look like something created in 3 months.
The crappy ideas will probably go nowhere, but give the interesting ideas time. Like every year, a few ideas looked promising, some of them created early successes.
Why does everybody expect these start-ups to be perfect from day one?
What craptastic cliche amateur design work once again. My oh my people. Dunno who in the hell you’re kidding here but I sure hope that no money was paid for the “design” work I’m seeing. Fire your little brother//sister//mom//junior high school kid from next door and pay for some real talent.
These almost all look like they have great possibility to me. I have to wonder which other companies aren’t “Crap all around.” according to TechCrunch commenters; are any new web companies pursuing a good idea?
I would love to see the open source social networking app – hopefully good.
…could be a lot of crap but at least they are trying.
Looking like a good batch.
TipJoy is interesting. Much easier than requesting Paypal donations.
>These almost all look like they have great possibility to me. I have to wonder which other companies aren’t “Crap all around.” according to TechCrunch commenters; are any new web companies pursuing a good idea?
You’re a justintv guy. I understand why my comment might have ticked you off since I commented in another story how low justintv is ranked on alexa/compete/comscore.
I know the koolaid that YC sells… ‘buld a company for $10-15K’ and sell it for millions. Judging by their track record so far, they are doing worse than a real VC. YC has less than 5% of hits. That’s much less than any other VC.
DavidS,
YCombinator is 2 1/2 years old (so many of the big hits you probably haven’t seen yet because its too early – except for Loopt) The hit rate is far higher than 5%. Get your facts right before you troll.
Jamie,
YC has funded over 40 companies so far. You named one hit. I think I’ll rest my case.
Wow, nice batch. Always surprised how YC companies come up with original things on such a regular basis;
I particularly like Snaptalent, wundrbar and rescue time.
I wonder if these looser tc commenters even try out any of these products before spouting negative crap.
YC funded reddit.com. After the “supposed” purchase price for that one, I think I’ll rest my case.
@17
i dont know wat u consider hit. reddit comes to mind.im sure few others would have been acquired. fot the little investmernt they make(thousands) compared to millions by VCs, thier returns must be great.
It’s a woot off! YC bag o’ crapps!
@ShawnP What is your case? You don’t seem to make any.
reddit.com is a very significant website, and still has a very large audience. I know the founders are happy with what they got.
@DavidS (#10, 16, 18) At the start of this year, 23% of 60 YC companies were either acquired, had significant traction and/or VC funding. The fund itself was cashflow positive with stock in companies worth millions.
Acquired:
- Reddit
- TextPayMe
- Parakey
- Anywhere.fm
- Zenter
(more about to be announced)
Startups with significant traction and / or Series A/B backing:
- Loopt
- Xobni
- Weebly
- Justin.tv
- Disqus
- Wufoo
- Virtualmin
- I’m In Like With You
- Heysan
The best VC’s return 20-30% on cash invested and YC is performing at at least that level. It’s really not something to hate on.
DavidS – check out our alexa again if you think we’re flatlining
.
But anyway, there have been 5 public Y Combinator exits: reddit.com, textpayme, zenter.com, Parakey, and anywhere.fm. Then there are the VC-backed startups that simply haven’t matured to exit yet (since most are less than a year and a half old): Xobni, Loopt, Scribd (and Justin.tv of course).
VirtualMin, octopart.com and Weebly.com are extremely awesome and very successful as well; there are probably more that don’t leap to mind at the moment, so my apologies to any other Y-Combinators who feel left out.
Yeah the haters must be YComb rejects.
THey have done well – not a Google yet…but takes time!
Also, many of these new ideas have spurred a new genre, received backing and created industries (Justin.tv has a bunch of competitors … Scribd too ).
Competition is the best form of flattery and validation!
And the deadpool grows…
Looks interesting. Can one attend this Demo day? if yes how and where?
Nice list. Go Y Combinator and the startup community! Let the haters hate and the speculators speculate…
…and let the innovators innovate.
>Yeah the haters must be YComb rejects.
Doubtfult. YC’ers here say YC funded 60 companies and only reddit was sold for millions. Rest of the “exits” were just talent acquisitions. Textpayme? What’s that?! Who uses it? No one. Loopt… they got a ton of money and where are they?! They have less than 100K uniques and sell an app through a third rate cell provider. That’s a success??
justintv… most boring place on the internet. It’s full of teen attention whores.
A little more than half seem doubtful at best (with two that seem worse than that).
The rest range from a bunch of “mmm… intriguing, I wonder if they fixed/thought of/have a plan for..” to a small handful of ideas that could turn out to be pretty exciting.
Looking at Y Combinator’s plan… that clocks out about right. They need to do a ton of ideas, and need to accept that the majority will die for some reason or other (earned or not).
Give them another 2 years and we can judge Y Comb’s success or failure.
DaveS your lack of knowledge of these companies I’m sure leads you to these conclusions. Did it every occur to you that the reason that Loopt is getting a ton of money pumped into them may not be just because of their consumer app? As for justin.tv, there’s this little site for teen attention whores that is kind of popular… it’s called myspace. How about a company like rockyou or slide? They just make stupid slideshows for teen attention whores. 40 million attention whores. That’ll never go anywhere…
Hopefully we can get http://www.prop...rtystampede.com on the list for the next demo day.
Chris
My votes go to:
-RescueTime (So freaking valuable!)
-Kirkland North (definitely going to grow their userbase quickly! (once they launch))
-Chatterous (Because I had a very similar idea)
p.s. insoshi has some indirect competition from lovdbyless… its a ruby on rails open source social platform, like ning but in rails and source code downloadable.
DaveS,
Wow. You really got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
YC has an excellent track record, so far. Its first batch is still its best, with regard to successful exits, but the so-called “talent acquisitions” which you’re considering failures have made a lot of folks wealthy. TextPayMe was one of those, Zenter was another, Parakey a third.
And, of course, you’ve written off several quite successful companies as failures with no actual knowledge of what they do or who they sell to. Some random dude on TC having never heard of them isn’t really much a of a flaw, when the fact is that most of the profitable companies in the world are companies you’ve never heard of. It doesn’t make them any less successful because of it. If you can look at Weebly.com, for example, and call it a failure because it hasn’t yet had an exit…well, let’s just say I’m glad you’re not my financial adviser.
I’ve met most of this batch of founders (my company was in Winter 07, and we’re doing fine, thanks for asking) and while I don’t “get” everything all of them are doing, I think you’ll be surprised by the number that do succeed. It won’t be all of them, of course, probably not even close. But, when the Winter 07 batch was profiled here at TC, there were lots of the same kinds of comments–angry, bitter, and full of vitriol, with very few kind words for any of them–and yet, of that batch, more than a third of those companies are doing fine. There have been multiple acquisitions (whether you call them mere talent acquisitions or not, the founders are now wealthy and working at Google or Facebook…I’m certain they’re quite content with their lot in life, and one can’t blame you for being jealous), several series A rounds, and plenty of those companies are profitable and growing rapidly. Even some that “failed” did so in a graceful manner…with developers ending up involved in other YC companies.
I’ve got my favorites in this batch, ones that I’d put money on, and others that I don’t have such high hopes for (and I’ve occasionally been surprised on both counts with prior YC batches). But to dismiss them all exhibits a stunning lack of imagination.
As Malachi points out, it’s too early to know whether the YC model is significantly more successful than traditional VC. So far, it looks like the answer is “yes”, but the number of data points is still too low to be sure. But, I’d rather have YC backing than any other seed investor, given what we know, so far.
What a negative bunch the people commenting are!
I’m using RescueTime, and if you’re the sort of person who is interested in how your time is spent then it’s very valuable. In my case I specifically wanted to spend MORE time on one particular activity, and RescueTime helped me focus on doing this. It would have been equally effective if I’d been trying to cut back in some area.
RescueTime could also be effective as a simple way of monitoring what your computer is being used for when you’re not at it (although you ideally need to be able to break down the hourly data in order to do this).
I like MightyQuiz, despite the overwhelming (and sometimes ridiculous) North American bias in the questions.
Some cool idea’s there. I like:
- rescue time
- omnisio
- mixwit
- mighty quiz
To the nay sayer’s our there – don’t be too quick to judge and dismiss, even a waterfall the size of Niagara Falls started with just one drop..
“But, I’d rather have YC backing than any other seed investor, given what we know, so far.”
Really? You’d like to get as much money as a mediocre consultant could make in a month or two for a significant chunk of your company? What’s the point of taking enough money to pay 2 maybe months rent, and then have to go back and beg for another round? Half the YC startups could have saved the equity and just worked their day job for another month or so.
“But, I’d rather have YC backing than any other seed investor, given what we know, so far.”
“Really? You’d like to get as much money as a mediocre consultant could make in a month or two for a significant chunk of your company? What’s the point of taking enough money to pay 2 maybe months rent, and then have to go back and beg for another round? Half the YC startups could have saved the equity and just worked their day job for another month or so.”
OK. You go your way, and we’ll go ours. Since you’ve opted not to identify yourself, we can safely assume you have little to be proud of so far, and little evidence of your own success in your entrepreneurial endeavors. We’ve been quite satisfied with the value for the equity we gave to YC. You’re welcome to check back with us in a year or two, and see how we’re doing. I won’t be able to compare our relative success to yours, since we have no idea who you are, but I’m sure you’re capable of making a reasonable assessment on your own. Feel free to email me and gloat when you have your exit and it’s larger than ours (or smaller, but the amount of equity that we gave to YC makes all the difference and you end up richer than me by a few points). I promise I’ll be a gracious loser. Until then, of course, I’m gonna keep being smugly satisfied by how well things are going for us, and pleased as punch about the folks we’ve got pushing for our success.
From your site, it does look like things are going well, 500 hosting customers after 2 years, but I have to ask, if the company has been able to survive for 2 years, and get 500 corporate users, what does YC bring to the table? Surely, if you could get even 10% of those users to pay a fee, either for support, consulting, or something else, this would be a recurring revenue that exceeds typical YC investments. That means, either you think YC gets you media exposure or access to connections that could get you acquired, or that you haven’t been able to convert users into paying customers.
500 business users is pretty good. I’ve seen companies bought for less. In fact, with that many users, some companies wouldn’t need an ‘exit’. For example, if you were selling say, mid-tier software for $1000/yr license, that would be $500k revenue which isn’t too shabby for a two person company.
I’m just curious why a company that is 2-years+ into development would take seed funding designed more for companies in a much earlier stage.
I’m using RescueTime and it is definitely going to be a big hit for Y Combinator. Personally, I think it’ll be a multi-million dollar sale when it sells.
It’s really not about the money YC puts in. It’s about the somewhat “academic advisor” role the YC plays for the startups. Most angels are not hands on–or techie enough to help you.
As far as ownership, for the percentage YC takes (usually below 10%), the startups get far more in return. For example, the coverage these startups are currently getting on TC is ABSOLUTELY due to their association w/ YC–you don’t think the founders benefiting from this coverage? When you factor in the advise, and the ability to demo in front of a bunch of “deal makers,” the YC does far more than give a 10% ROI to founders.
Haven’t used it yet. But this sure seems interesting!
i’ve heard about kirkland north and they seem to have gotten good traction where ever they go. i’d pour my money into them.
@48 – Do you mean Gocrosscampus, the company that’s been doing the exact same thing for longer and at more campuses? I thought yc wanted new ideas?
I pray for another DotCom holocaust to clean this trash out.
Christ.