See our review of the YouNoodle startup valuation predictor from a couple of days ago (as well as our skeptical post from earlier this year). The product just came out of private beta. Look for a tab in the top right corner of the site called “startup predictor”, or just click on younoodle.com/predictor and fill in the questionnaire.
The company, which is funded by The Founders Fund, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, uses detailed data about startups and a proprietary algorithm to make a guess on the likelihood of success of a startup. They even go so far as to estimate the value of the company three years out.
The key factors in determining likelihood of success are the team, financial factors, the concept and advisors. The tool wants to know everything. For the founders, their age, education, previous startups (and how they did), and their long term relationship to the other founders. For the concept, YouNoodle gathers information on the business idea (probably extracting keywords for analysis), where it’s located, and lots of other data.
See our previous post for valuation predictions for a few high profile startups like Slide, RockYou, Twitter, FriendFeed, Cuill and Mahalo. Then cast your aspersions appropriately. The most interesting and insightful (or just plain funny) commenters get a TechCrunch tshirt in the size of their choice.
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Hey Mike, I hope you are aware that most of the world is not able to access techcrunch. Thats why the number of comments on all the recents posts are so less, in case you are wondering.
fyi, I am posting this through google proxy
yeah, we’ve been having crazy issues all day. Still not sure what it is.
Mike, we’d be happy to help out if you want. I’m on Skype all day.
Too bad you didn’t build the site on Ruby on Rails.
YouBaloney not noodles!
when your in a bubble and have no where to turn for support you create another website to support the bubble. Than get bubble crunch to mention it. theil and levkin did not create this site for profit, just to support the bubble they live in. thats how you get a baloney domain name like younoody. Toss the bubble bone to tc and let the bubble blossom. Who do they think they are kidding.
well I don’t think you’ll be getting a t-shirt….
one important question about the predictions below - were the companies below included in the 3000 company training set? if so the numbers are useless
Slide: $124 million (actual: $550m)
RockYou: $71 million (actual: $250m)
Mahalo: $118 million
Powerset: $104 million (actual: $100m)
Cuil: $95 million
Twitter: $110 million
Friendfeed: $86 million
We did not include the examples above in the 3000-company training set; they were tested after we built our models.
techcrunch is a good reminder;) didn´t visit younoodle since i signed up.
Imagine this tool getting really popular. Venture firms start using it to determine what startups they should invest in (Investing 2.0 is born).
It seems to me that startups like Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, which is total fail btw, will get valued ridiculously high, then get funded for a couple of millions. Or you could just lie (manipulation is easy) on the questionnaire, then brag about how much your startup is worth.
Thus the dot-com bubble 2.0 is born. Yep, who knows Younoodle will make the bubble burst.
That’s a medium sized t-shirt for me, Michael.
Hmmm, I tried it and it says I will be in debt of $2 million.
Must be working right then.
Sounds very interesting. Will I trust it? Nope, but will I use it? Probably.
HAHAHAHAHA!!! They chose YouNoodle to make a statement about the fools that take this seriously. There logo should should be a hand pointing out from the screen towards the goon that even wastes a few minutes on this site.
Straight from Dictionary.com
noo*dle (noun) 2. a fool or simpleton
Nice it’s down.
On to the next startup that will go belly up because it can’t keep a simple site running..
Its a great way for them to collect huge amounts of data on startups and see what is going on! I think that with time they will gather some powerful information.
YouNoodle should re-brand and use the domain for marketing erectile dysfunction meds.
Slogan:
“You Noodle? We can help!”
I am glad this didn’t exist in 1998 or Google would have probably never come into existence
don’t see this post adding any more value over the previous one …
My little startup has a predicted valuation at 07 August 2011 of $80,100.
Could be right.
Too bad the tool is not really suitable for a yet-to-be-launched startup.
Laurent - the current version is optimized precisely for early-stage startups
If it’s just you at this point, maybe try again when there are more folks involved.
“Details on the education, entrepreneurial experience and other information founder and key employee.”
Mike, you’ve gotta get some English interns. Not a grammar nazi over here, but I think TC should go for complete sentences. Somehow that managed to get printed twice.
Has techcrunch killed younoodle… cause i could see the home page, but no functionality was working!!
Does their algorithm take into account how many girls the geeks have slept with? Having virgins in the team would increase the valuation.
Cool, thanks for sharing the link! Perfect for entrepreneurs like myself looking for something to assess how our businesses are going
What about dropout founders like Bill Gates? With no prior startup experience but ONE hot idea coupled with extreme execution out of the garage?
I say, this is nothing but B.S. with a cherry on the top!
By dropout I meant college dropouts.
lol - my valuation is $5,830,000
woohoo.
This is bs, but it’s a cool novelty site for startups.
It seems to me like a data gathering service mostly.
I got a $9.5 million …. nice
Valuations are bs and very subjective.
To play it safe, they should have a general rule of thumb…like say revenue X 10.
that’s it.
don’t make it more complicated than it has to be, by adding these subjective variables left and right.
Lawrence - for some more background on these kinds of models, here’s a thoughtful piece published today in response to the TechCrunch review, by Harvard Business Publishing:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.c.....ugh_a.html
Cheers for the link & Article Mike
We scored 309 / 1000 which without a scale I didnt really know how to interpret.
The valuation came in at $20,100,000 which was probably boosted somewhat significantly by our new advisors experience
Fan History’s valuation came up at $9,170,000 with a score of 213/1000 for predicted valuation at 01 May 2010. Interesting number.
My god. We got owned big time. Younoodle is using the startup predictor to gather very private information about all the startups in the world (personal data, education etc.). This is data gathering at its subtle best. Imagine what they could with those data…. VCs would pay them off with chicken wings to get those data off their hand. I take my hats off them.
WARNING: When filling in predictor data, they claim they don’t use team members’ email addresses without telling you. But they immediately send an email to each person claiming you’ve invited them to join YouNoodle.
Here’s what the email looks like:
=====================
Hi,
[name removed] has invited you to join YouNoodle, the place to discover and connect to the hottest startups!
Click here to check it out:
http://younoodle.com/register/contact?key=*snip*]&email=[*snip*]
Thanks,
- Team Noodle
Robert, we don’t send those invites unless you decide to create a startup page after the end of the test, -and- choose to invite the team on the same step. If you think that you did something otherwise, please email me directly with the details: kirill@younoodle.com. Thanks.
it sent email invites to the people that I had entered and I specifically did not create a startup page. think you should test this more…
Same thing happened to me. I specifically clicked don’t send but it sent anyway.
I tried it on one of our services and it valued it at <100k.
Give up now?
I found the predictor rubbish! Spent 5 minutes ended up giving up. Can’t be bothered to enter each founders details
. Great way to gather data and piss off users!
Soon, there will be a startup — a widget, maybe — that connects you to EVERYTHING on the internet. So you can move seamlessly from YouTube to FaceBook, from Yahoo to Amazon to Google — with one password and one user account. It will be a “master user account” so you can just log on and do everything, all at the same time, or whenever you want.
It will be the highest valued internet company ever — at $427 billion.
It’s name? QYNG.
Just wondering if younoodle used younoodle on itself and found out what their valuation will be in 3 years? if so, please let us know so we’ll know whether it’s work using it or not
Hal - we did use YouNoodle on ourselves, and received a predicted valuation of $96M and YouNoodle Score of 496. Make of that what you will
Kirill,
As I mentioned in a previous comment we scored 309 / 1000. is there any resoure available to show where that rates or what exactly that means.
I could understand the $20.1m bit but not the random number in the sky! lol
Since we’re all on valuations here, thought you guys & gals would find these posts to be of interest:
http://pedatacenter.com/pedc/blog/view/10 Facebook
http://pedatacenter.com/pedc/blog/view/11 LinkedIn
http://pedatacenter.com/pedc/blog/view/12 Slide
“Ok, so we’ve decided to use YouNoodle for our only pre-money valuation metric, and sit down with investors to go over what sort of $ we’re looking for, our cap table, etc…When one asks, ’so, how did you guys get this valuation number here?’ ‘YouNoodle’ I respond.”
Ahhh, YouNoodle, THE source for company valuations. Good luck with your algorithm guys.
Kirill, you seem to be here so let me ask you here: The score seems to be related to the valuation, but the relationship isn’t clear. If I get a $5MM with a 900 score, is that better than $25MM with a 300 score?
As evidenced above, the only number people seem to be interested in is the dollars.
Nice idea!
I also use http://www.cubestat.com
For instant valuation and some more information.
Mike,
younoodle –very intriguing concept. As per other messages, yes, it could be a bubble within a bubble, meaning useless…
Would you ask [and publish here] VCs’ for their opinion about it? You probably have, but is not likely you would write anything negative about its founders, as you have done with Jerry Yang and Yahoo…
Holly
We were valued at $12mil but were expecting close to $4mil. Found a few problems: It will email all of your team so if you don’t want this to happen use bogus emails, the “connect the dots” chart did not load in IE 7, no way to edit the prediction — would be nice to go back and test results based on changing a few variables here and there, it said on the final screen continue to view full report but I didn’t see any such report — maybe that’s coming in a future version.
@ Michael Arrington
I am not claiming I know this is the case, and I don’t mean to sound accusatory, but I seriously think this website could be a front for The Founders Fund, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel to gather precious information about stealth startup plans which they could then use to either copy and execute the plans themselves, gain an advantage and see what competitors’ plans are, or perhaps the slightly less scary possibility that they would want to fund our ventures.
Putting the information into here seems dangerous to me. Why shouldn’t we be afraid to give them our precious startup information, plans, and our own estimates for our startup’s future valuations?
I think I’m the 3rd person in this thread mentioning a similar fear, and it sure would be an interesting story to hear more about the reasons that this website came into existence, and what the potential implications could really conceivably be for startups filling out the form.
“For the concept, YouNoodle gathers information on the business idea (probably extracting keywords for analysis), where it’s located, and lots of other data.” — it really looks like they could be gathering information about the business idea for less necessary reasons. Categories to choose from, or related keywords would probably be a less suspicious way to gather those keywords for extraction.
they better not (run off with any submitted ideas), or i’m gonna have to sue some ass.
I would say that there is about a 99.5% chance that they are recording the data for their own benefit.
@Michael Arrington:
We can let your first post about this company slide perhaps as an over eager journalist chronicling his world.
But a second post?
Come on.
This is the startup equivalent of the Magic 8 ball.
Younoodle: how much is my Caltech/MIT/Princeton dropout friend’s startup building a social site to gather lovers of networked tivos/wiis/360s worth?
Gimme a break.
At best this is a joke. At worst this is a data gathering site. And even worst, this is a serious effort. In which case, it is just plain sad.
You reporting on it twice is beneath you.
Hey, relax! I don’t speak for Arrington, but it’s clear that lots of readers of this blog are very interested in the value of startups.
this is actually my third post, you should go back and read the first one.
Ok. Your first post was spot on.
Apologies for my earlier message here.
Cheers.
The first post is here: Will you noodle predict its own failure?”
I like that site - nice idea
I created a fake company and it said the valuation of the fake company is $12M.
Wow!
From all the news and stories about web 2.0 startups and their valuations, I can tell you “Bubble 2.0″ is brewing. You hear it first from me.
aborted attempting to load step 6 three times. Just wouldn’t load up
ms cleo of blogging startups
We launched public beta in Feb of 2006. So, I entered that, my education experience — including the fact that I “joined university” at age 17 — and some of the stuff from the founding advisors. Including one who spent a couple hours a week and once worked for a startup that’s now dead.
Here’s what the noodle people kicked back…
U Sphere, Inc.
Performed by Dave Van de Walle
on 07 August 2008, 11:30AM
Predicted valuation at 01 February 2009
$14,400,000 (our valuation)
298 / 1000 (our score)
I leave to the peanut gallery to decide whether this thing is even close to accurate. Meanwhile, I’m going to call my banker.
This new website is pretty cool. It needs some improvement to make it a better social network for entrepreneurs. For starters searching each start up profile or person profile takes too long and is either one slide at a time.
Over all it is super and reminds me of what TheFunded.com could have become.
woo hoo says jippidy will be worth $60 Million in 2011
hmmm… 594/1000 with a $37.5M valuation! i like this.
in fact, i think the TC50 crew should use this as an input into their interview formula this week. we’d be in for sure!
maybe we’ll start tomorrow’s demo with a visit to younoodle.
Are all the bugs worked out of YouNoodle? Are you sure there wasn’t an error and TechCrunch is actually worth $874 million?
I got 12,000,000 for Questler, not bad since we are based in Amman, Jordan!
I think its a nice tool to get you to know the things that might be of importance to investors, however, going all the way to a certification is just too much.
Score was 243/1000, not bad either…