Lessons of Y Combinator: Things I’d do differently after 2 startups

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/02/ycombinator/

by babul • 18 years ago

61 27 18 years ago

augustus• 18 years ago

Not sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time.

a-priori2• 18 years ago

While I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to (depending on the price, I may be one of them -- I'm a big fan of RescueTime), my understanding is that they are targeting businesses with their paid version.

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

RescueTime is probably the most useful yCombinator app out there. I would certainly consider paying for it.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

That depends on the price. If it saves me one hour per year, it's technically worth $50 or $60 per year, or more.

Of course, I'd have to think about that, whereas I'd pay $14.99 without a second thought. ;)

ardit33• 18 years ago

"Not sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time." --- Maybe not you, but your boss may. Rescuetime needs a function, where it can work in the background, so bosses will see what their employees are doing online.

I worked on a big financial company, and they monitor a lot of stuff. I wouldn't be suprised that they will find something like this useful.

vaksel• 18 years ago

they already have complete access to your system using VNC, and they already have complete stats of all your browsing

jfarmer2• 18 years ago

No, but your boss would.

gms• 18 years ago

Not exactly making the world a better place, is it.

edw519• 18 years ago

This is a great post with a lot of good data that oughta be very interesting to people here. Possibly the best kind of post we could have. I'd like to see a lot more of these. Thanks, Tony!

DenisM• 18 years ago

Tony writes plenty of good stuff on his blog over here: http://www.tonywright.com/

In terms of amount-of-insight/word his blog is perhaps the most informative I follow.

coglethorpe2• 18 years ago

I loved the landing page design. Great layout, big red call to action buttons, multi-column displays... That alone got me to sign up.

josefresco• 18 years ago

Their web designers went to the "let's see how close we can get to a 37signals design" school apparently.

I've seen it 100 times and it's always boring.

jfornear• 18 years ago

I wouldn't blame the designers directly. In my experience designers tend to be pressured into trendy styles. The 37signals look just happens to be what's in right now.

coglethorpe2• 18 years ago

That's odd you should say that. OtherWeather looks rather 37 Signals. Are you planning on changing the design?

axod4• 18 years ago

I hate to be a downer, but sometimes these things don't sit right with me. "After successfully launching their consumer offering (7% week-over-week growth!)"

Why are the traffic charts essentially flat for the last 6 months, or worse on quantcast.

I think "3. We didn’t spend enough time on marketing" is probably the most important, but then I'm not convinced the idea is "sticky" enough in the first place.

Still an interesting read though :)

mrtron2• 18 years ago

I use their product and haven't visited the site in months. I just look at the weekly summaries to get a decent picture of how productive my week was (hours in work opposed to waste of time).

Traffic to their site is not nearly as useful as their signups growth is for statistics.

axod4• 18 years ago

Fair point. Might be worth having the application show something from the website, so that website stats are more representative, or at least look more impressive :)

emmett• 18 years ago

QuantCast is horribly unreliable, far worse than even their competitors who are themselves terribly unreliable.

axod4• 18 years ago

Unless you're quantified of course. I have to say I find Alexa to be pretty accurate these days though. It's got lag, but it seems to get sites in the right sort of ballpark.

webwright• 18 years ago

do you seriously think any of the public stats sites are able to understand traffic of small sites like ours? Not so much, as it happens. And this fact is pretty well documented (seomoz has some good posts documenting how comscore, alexa, and quantcast don't do so well with smaller sites/services). I'm in NYC on an iPhone- I'll find the posts next time I'm in front of a real screen.

The 7 percent number (we were up to 9 for a while) is user growth-- not traffic. Both are still growing nicely.

redorb• 18 years ago

I think the group version could be cool, and might be worth paying for... Think as a project manager you can see how exactly everyone is doing - I.E. the designer spending 30% of each day researching design, and 20% in photoshop... just sounds neat, Im trying the personal version for sure!

a-priori2• 18 years ago

It does, however, have the potential for being an employee's worst nightmare in the hands of a micromanaging boss. That's my concern with it being used in a corporate environment.

"Why did you spend 31 minutes 40 seconds reading 'Hacker News' today?!?" "Gee, boss, because sometimes I need a break..."

However, that's not Rescue Time's fault.

bob_dole• 18 years ago

Things we did right: "didn't focus on internet marketing" - Things we did wrong: "didn't do enough marketing"

mleonhard• 18 years ago

I'm reluctant to have my data stored on their server. If it's software that I run on my PC, why does it need to save its data on their system?

Lessons of Y Combinator: Things I’d do differently after 2 startups

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