Mattermark Index: Y Combinator Summer 2013 Companies

http://mattermark.com/fastest-growing-y-combinator-summer-2013-companies-ranked-by-mattermark-score/

by SparksZilla • 13 years ago

33 20 13 years ago

Based off of Danielle Morrill's previous blog posts ranking startups and this Mattermark post, I get the sense that a lot of this ranking is putting certain companies "against" each other even though it's like comparing apples and oranges. For example, does it makes sense to compare a SaaS company with a $10K ACV that makes Google Adwords work against a company that gets 10 tweets a second because it's viral?

dmor5• 13 years ago

It's just ranking the growth rates of the signals I listed in the post - not saying which company is "best". Frankly, I think a lot of these rankings differ greatly from what I think the overall potential of a company is (I saw them present yesterday at Alumni Demo Day), but potential is not what we're measuring here. Growth is certainly another data point for investors to consider, and historically has been a part of massive information asymmetry - VCs are already looking up all these metrics about companies (manually) as they research, source and diligence. We're just making that more efficient and transparent.

At the end of the day investors do have to choose one company over another, as very few can justify investing in all of them. We're trying to give them more info to go off beyond hype. All of these companies tackle large markets with varied margins, and I believe investors are smart enough to sort that out for themselves and make decisions based on their domain knowledge, relationships, and expertise.

ringdabell• 13 years ago

"We're trying to give them more info to go off beyond hype."

All you're measuring is hype though. Startups that rely on likes, follows, etc. as a gauge of success/traction are by nature, hype driven.

There are many industries - B2B, EdTech, etc. - where lack of social media traction is not at all an indicator of the health of a startup. I know because I run one. We have 0 likes, 0 mentions, 0 follows, but a hundred paying customers and on track to hit 1MM in revenue in less than 20 months since launch (with only 4 employees).

I hate to be critical of other founders, but all you're doing is contributing to and validating all the silliness that is the SV startup scene.

7Figures2Commas• 13 years ago

One of the problems with your business appears to be your belief that information asymmetry is a problem for investors. It is not. In fact, information asymmetry creates opportunity for venture firms. If all firms had the same information about the same startups at roughly the same time, it would be much harder to identify attractive investments before competing firms, and competition for deals would be even fiercer than it already is.

There's a reason that so many tech-focused venture firms are located in Silicon Valley. It makes it easier for partners, associates and analysts to hit the pavement and keep their ears to the ground. Why do they want to do this? One of the big reasons: to obtain meaningful information about potential investment opportunities before (hopefully) it becomes widely known. This is particularly valuable in the context of early-stage investments.

If, for the sake of argument, we assume that Mattermark has actually developed a model that can identify promising startups that aren't getting the attention they deserve, you're destroying the value of that model by selling its output to anybody willing to shell out a paltry $6,000/year for your pro service.

awwstn2• 13 years ago

We've ranked the current Y Combinator Summer 2013 batch by Mattermark Score – which awards points to each company on a weekly basis for increasing their website traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and LinkedIn followers.

It's hard for me to understand how this formula could be a valuable measure of growth of a startup, since most of these things can be easily purchased. I'd guess that growth of Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, LinkedIn followers and website traffic are more accurately a measure of a company's ad spend than their actual growth in revenue and users.

dmor5• 13 years ago

Those things are easy to purchase in the short term, but it quickly becomes very expensive to purchase 10% week-over-week increase of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, web traffic, etc (I know, I've tried this before). The Mattermark Score reflects long term growth trends, short term spikes aren't enough to move the needle.

minimaxir• 13 years ago

"Weekly scores are averaged over 90 days," for companies that haven't received press until atleast 90 days ago is hardly "long term".

That's literally 12 data points per startup, way too little for any type of smoothing to have an accurate effect.

awwstn2• 13 years ago

I think that could make sense in the long term, but with YC companies on demo day, I'm not sure it does. Most of these companies appear to have <1000 followers on the services you're measuring. If Likes and Followers cost a dollar each, then it wouldn't be too expensive to buy a spot at the top of your list in this case.

It's interesting that the company at the bottom of your list (Reebee) has 3x the Twitter followers and 6x the FB followers that the company at the top of the list (OneMonthRails) has. If Reebee started out (i.e., when you started tracking them) with a couple hundred followers on each of these services and OneMonthRails started out with none, then Reebee had the deck stacked against them, needing to add 100x+ the number of followers added by companies that began with no traction, during a limited time frame.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Seems like there are an awful lot of programming tools, restaurants, and delivery. The programming tools I get - these are hackers developing for hackers. Is delivery a wave because of Amazon and others trying to provide convenience, or is it the softwarization of our industry? And the food - is that on the back of the GrubHub and SeemlessWeb success?

ramanujam• 13 years ago

The index and score from Mattermark are great for consumer facing companies and mobile app companies but are pretty useless for most other industries. I checked some companies that are making making millions in revenue and they had a double/triple digit mattermark score. I am pretty sure that isn't a good representation.

Also, a note for those signing up for the trial, there is neither an option to cancel your subscription directly nor information about billing inside the application. You have to email them to cancel the account and i got a response after 5 days(3 working days) when i sent an email asking them to cancel my trial account. While it is totally acceptable for an early stage startup to not have those features and i am sure they have it in their backlog, just make sure you don't send that cancelation email the day before your trial ends.

justinbeaver• 13 years ago

Not only are these Mattermark posts becoming quite boring and repetitive, but for the company's sake it's time to move on. Readers of HN aren't going to make a purchase. And if entrepreneurs/hackers are the target market, then it's time to rethink that strategy a bit.

eclipxe• 13 years ago

Concur.

johns• 13 years ago

I think you underestimate the number of investors reading HN. They may not post. They're definitely reading.

nnnnnn• 13 years ago

Interesting index. One funny note: http://www.hackermeter.com/ and https://onemonthrails.com/ use the same photo. Found that kind of funny

unz• 13 years ago

This is a great tool for other startups, funds, and companies. Just clone these companies in that order, they're already pre-vetted by good VC's like PG and also somewhat market tested.

A smart VC could just send of them as a spec to dev team in Russia/India, and hire mechanical turkers to blitz forums. Even hire a few good writers to create blogs and post to HN.

Mattermark Index: Y Combinator Summer 2013 Companies

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