YouNoodle Startup Predictor now live to try it for yourself.

by babul • 18 years ago

20 35 18 years ago

sdpurtill4• 18 years ago

I built the majority of the survey, so if you see any bugs or have feedback reply to this. Thanks!

cperciva2• 18 years ago

Apparently my startup (tarsnap, online backups for the truly paranoid) will be worth $3.71M in September 2009. Given that I'm a sole founder and tarsnap is pre-revenue, I can only guess that YouNoodle is giving me very high marks for (a) having a doctorate from Oxford, and (b) having started university when I was 13 years old.

Of course, I'd be happy if YouNoodle was correct in their assessment... but if someone offered to buy tarsnap for $3.71M right now -- or offered to buy any fraction of tarsnap for a corresponding fraction of that amount -- I'd have no hesitation in accepting the offer.

EDIT: Yes, I do realize that the assessed value is effective a year from now -- but I still think $3.71M would be a generous amount to pay for tarsnap. Of course, tarsnap might take off faster than I expect...

rw• 18 years ago

"Online backups for the truly paranoid" is something I've been wanting for a while now. Good luck!

prakash2• 18 years ago

I understand where you are coming from. Some of those calculations might be based on, for a lack of a better term, VC math, meaning if you are in the process of raising a series A, the VC might value your company (pre-money) at say 4 million, give you a A round of 2 million and own 50% of the company.

BTW: When are you launching?

cperciva2• 18 years ago

BTW: When are you launching?

Depends how you define "launching". I haven't got the accounting code written yet, so revenue is still a month or more away -- but if you mean in the sense of "providing a service which people want", tarsnap has been up and running for three months.

dcurtis2• 18 years ago

Considering that about 70% of startups fail, shouldn't this actually give you a negative valuation most of the time?

sdpurtill4• 18 years ago

You can always sell the laptops back on eBay, right?

hooande• 18 years ago

YouNoodle is busy...

We're experiencing lots of activity so we can't handle your request just yet. Please click the refresh button and try again.

scaling = fail

sdpurtill4• 18 years ago

Appears to be a problem with our search index, we're on it ;)

plusbryan• 18 years ago

yeah, cause with twitter, scaling is a feature!

mixmax• 18 years ago

My unlaunched startup which I work on part-time will apparently be worth $10 million in 2011. maybe I should start working on it full time :-)

demandred• 18 years ago

YN wants the data -- not sure they really care about making an (accurate) prediction. Foolhardy exercise to fill in the information.

babul3• 18 years ago

On a side note, and without wanting to be negative, at times I am not really sure they care about many things apart from growing really fast and getting momentum/exposure/traction (which is understandable).

You can gauge how much they (or anyone for that matter) care by the response you get when you try and engage with them. In this respect, my past experience has not been good (no response to emails/queries/etc), but maybe that is because I am not significant to them as an individual.

When I compare this to the engaging experiences I find with many YC start-ups (http://www.socialbrowse.com springs to mind) and others (e.g. http://www.huddle.net and http://www.freshbooks.com), the difference is night and day.

Maybe this is just my experience. Still, I’d be more likely to provide sensitive information to sites I trust and that seem to ‘care’.

kirill• 18 years ago

Babul - we aim to respond to every email and query, sorry to hear your experience. Feel free to email me: kirill@younoodle.com with more details and if you think we didn't cover any particular issue properly. Thanks.

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

I would be very cautious about giving a lot of this requested information (funding details, % ownership, etc) out to some random website...

dcurtis2• 18 years ago

It's not random. It's funded by Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin.

flipbrad2• 18 years ago

does that lend weight to, or subtract from, his warning?

drusenko2• 18 years ago

Most of the information it requests is pretty generic. If you've raised a round and haven't announced it yet, then by all means, don't give it out.

However, for many startups, funding details will be public (and available via crunchbase or startupsearch) -- and generic ownership percentages can be pretty easily inferred. Asking whether investors own <10% or 10-40%, etc, isn't really saying much.

As for the rest of the information (mostly how the team relates to each other, their background, and previous work experience), I can't imagine this would be sensitive either, but if it is, by all means, don't give it out.

stats101• 18 years ago

My startup, InsideDesi (http://www.insidedesi.com), will apparently be worth 8 mill by 2011.

c3o• 18 years ago

Some feedback:

* The connections-drawing tool is somewhat broken: First it wouldn't show for me at all ("Loading..."), and then when I wanted to correct something, the eraser didn't remove the lines (although I think it did invalidate them, because I could draw new lines on top of the old ones)

* Entering team details is very tedious when every single question is on its own page. I got tired of clicking next, and would very nearly have quit the process there.

sdpurtill4• 18 years ago

I can't figure out what's wrong with the flash not loading - several people have reported this now. Can one of you guys hack it and reply with the answer? I'll buy you a pizza (no seriously, I will)

sanj2• 18 years ago

Seriously, pizza? Please!

Cash!

drusenko2• 18 years ago

Is just loading... on mine as well (and I gave it plenty of time). User agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1 FirePHP/0.1.0.3

I also have Firebug 1.2.0b4 installed.

fiaz• 18 years ago

Has anybody tried entering the details for a 1990s dot.com to see what kind of valuation you get?

flipbrad2• 18 years ago

"Give us your sensitive data, we'll make you feel good and optimistic"

Preying on the vulnerability/need for validation of most startup founders?

babul3• 18 years ago

These tools are really only as good as the information they are provided or access, and without looking at failure rates/reasons in the model do seem fundamentally flawed to me.

As mentioned by others, the results provided do look very optimistic (at least from what I can tell based on the values it provides for things I am involved with) and with refinement once they get the datasets will probably go down significantly in most cases.

Time will be the real judge. It will be interesting is to see what they predict and what actually happens in the next years. Hopefully they will provide this information (semi-)publically, but it seems unlikely.

Tichy• 18 years ago

"YouNoodle's model is based on rigorous quantitative analysis of historical data and the application of the latest relevant theory"

Brilliant generic tag line.

thenextweb• 18 years ago

Trying my start-up now. Does take a lot of time to fill out everything...

helveticaman• 18 years ago

I feel super iffy about completing the form.

jfornear• 18 years ago

My startup will apparently be worth $36 million in August 2011... total BS.

The entire YouNoodle process feels like a phishing scam.

jonmc12• 18 years ago

I'm surprised no one else has asked what the valuation algorithm is yet.

Anyone ambitious enough to survey a set of Younoodle inputs and outputs so we can estimate the valuation formula?

dkasper• 18 years ago

So,this may be a minor grievance, but why is the last name field white unlike the first name and email field even though it is required?

YouNoodle Startup Predictor now live to try it for yourself.

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