Ask HN: What are some successful startups built on top of other services?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593427

by tzz • 12 years ago

14 19 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Are there any successful startups built solely on top of other services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google App or others?

mercwear• 12 years ago

Gnip (http://gnip.com/) was just bought by Twitter. I would argue that they built their whole business on top of twitter & other social media companies.

calcsam• 12 years ago

Zynga was basically built on top of Facebook. Upworthy was built on link traffic from FB. Then FB changed the way they allowed / promoted sharing and both companies took a hit.

mirador2• 12 years ago

Dropbox and Heroku are built on top of AWS (amongst thousands of other companies)

eam• 12 years ago

And also many companies are built on top of Heroku...

TwitPic on top of Twitter.

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

They use aws as infrastructure but aren't inseparably welded to it. They could presumably switch to hosting elsewhere without changing their product itself.

cnaut• 12 years ago

You can see them as abstractions of AWS in some ways. An average consumer wouldn't go through the trouble of dealing with AWS to backup their files and even for developers heroku provides a nice level of abstraction

x-separator• 12 years ago

Youtube was originally a Myspace widget.

aesopwolf• 12 years ago

Really? Do you have a source?

mailarchis• 12 years ago

Search for jawed karims talk at CMU I guess. One of the key reasons of YouTube fast growth was the HTML snippet that you could embed in you MySpace page.

pydanny• 12 years ago

Never heard this before. Got a source?

dapvincent• 12 years ago

NextBigSound is built on top of plenty of social media companies.

alinajaf• 12 years ago

AppointmentReminder by patio11 relies pretty heavily on Twilio AFAIK.

bdunn• 12 years ago

Baremetrics (https://www.baremetrics.io) by Josh Pigford is built off of Stripe. There are also a handful of dunning-related services that sit on top of Stripe, also.

chrmaury• 12 years ago

Siri was built--and still relies--on Dragon Mobile Speech Recognition from Nuance

AbhishekBiswal• 12 years ago

Shit, I didn't know that. Whoa.

ig1• 12 years ago

Lots in the social media space (ad tools, social analytics, crm, big data tools) also in the enterprise space (i.e add-ons for Salesforce, SAP, etc.)

nyddle• 12 years ago

Heroku on Amazon

Ask HN: What are some successful startups built on top of other services?

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