zefi

Thanks for the comment. Did you have a chance to see how the dashboard of screenshots works at the moment? Is this what you're commenting on?

Thanks for the heads up. The button is only active after you've successfully added a comment - as we presume you haven't finished if you haven't made one. cheers!

think about everything YC/PG has said about 'toys' and the Altair BASIC/Microsoft comments

There is an absurdly high need for this service, but my god this is a hard task. I think the way to do this is spend 6 months working exclusively with about 10 early stage startups (pre PMF) which are relatively similar in the type of market they're going after. You then help them however you think you can in getting to PMF. Keeping the types of markets similar lets you get to actionable learnings quicker; an important learning for a gaming startup isn't going to be as useful for one built on enterprise sales. The help you provide could be customer interviews/sales/lead generation/landing page testing/anything. But the goal is to try and work out which of the tactics lead to the most progress for each startup, then create a playbook that can be applied to the next batch of 10 startups you help. Then as that playbook becomes more refined you slowly start to productise some of these services to speed up the process and add more startups to each batch. Then a few years down the line you have a low touch software product that will take founders through each of the steps you have worked out are most useful for startups operating in their type of market. This is a slow process for sure, but I think to be successful at this you have to acknowledge how broad the problem is and how little you know how to solve it right now.

This sounds like a bad idea. We are not King Solomon, nor should either party want his help. For simplicity's sake, neither party should take the opinion of anyone other than a lawyer on this.

This product looks great. I think that automating the sales process, from prospecting to closing will be a vertical that'll see huge growth over the next few years. Anything that helps companies make money faster and integrates with salespeople's existing workflows is an obvious winner. That's the good news, the bad news is how low the barrier to entry for this market is right now and will continue to be with the current business model. The company that becomes the leader in this will work out how to make something that is seemingly highly commoditisable (email sending and read receipts) solidly defensible so the next startup down the block can't just undercut you on number of prospects contacted per pricing tier. I suspect the answer will have more to do with more impressive mass personalisation rather than any network effects these companies can create. Fascinating space, this is a growth sector without doubt. The companies I recommend checking out: Stacklead, AutopilotHQ, Yesware, Streak and Docsend among others.

This is absolutely fantastic. Well done for creating such a great product Andrew, really well implemented.

I too would love to hear this. Leore?

Check out Stacklead they do exactly this - YC W14

This is so well designed, great stuff Trevor!

Oh, apologies for misunderstanding! And thanks for the compliment :)

I think it does look great. This is a really hard problem to solve and they've done an excellent job. I'm sorry if you feel otherwise.

This product looks great. I run Kivo (www.kivo.com YC S13) we're trying to address a lot of the same problems around sharing and storage that Dropbox et al have missed out on. Zocalo seems like a really good first pass, but I don't think tying users to a specific storage platform is the winning strategy for something that's fundamentally a collaboration app. It shouldn't matter where someone stores their files, collaboration applications should exist as layers on top of existing content. Forcing users to move to a new platform is one more point of friction when it comes to adoption. Storage companies releasing collaboration products is like email providers only letting their users email other users of their service - Gmail to Gmail email product. The reason why email works as a communication protocol is because it is an open one. Content collaboration is the same, the company that will win this market will be the one that addresses it without letting the politics of the 'storage wars' poison its simplicity. The 'it just works' of Dropbox comes from its ability to store and sync any file without any change in user behaviour - it's just another folder. No one's created an 'it just works' product for collaboration yet, where it doesn't matter whereabouts your files are stored or who it is that you want to work with. That's what we're trying to do at Kivo, and we'll be announcing a set of integrations very soon to make that so. If you'd like to help, get in touch, my email's in my hn profile.

Submit a late application to YC? I'm an Alum and would be happy to chat more. My email is in my hn profile.

I work with Leo at Kivo. Thanks for pointing this out, we'll be fixing this ASAP. Sorry you felt punished!

Thanks for the feedback! I work with Leo at Kivo. We've gone through a fair few iterations of our home page and we know it's not perfect yet. Right now we're trying to throw people right in to the product itself and then if they have more questions after that then they can find them in the site. But you're right we need to be upfront about a lot of information, it's just a balancing act, we're trying to find the right point. Thanks again.

Spot on.

Congrats on the coverage Ryan, I'm extremely excited to see this grow.

YC is run by some of the smartest people in the valley. Quora obviously see their ability to help with the direction and strategy of their business valuable.

you can probably 10x that average per month

This looks fantastic. Congrats on working out an awesome UX.

This is a very good free replacement - https://www.awesometalk.com/

Fivetran is probably the closest to it. They're also YC (W13) which makes sense. https://www.fivetran.com/

3 out of 600+ is not every.

Congrats Sam. Ace news.

Thanks guys for your very kind words. Feel free to reach out to me on zefi[at]kivo.com with any questions or comments.

We're Kivo (YC S13) building Git for documents. www.kivo.com - would love to chat more.

The lesson here is the same drawn from pg's essay on doing things that don't scale - http://paulgraham.com/ds.html.

If you were a multibillion dollar company acting at scale, it would make sense to spend time perfecting the contract. But because you could assess the risk of failure for all elements of the project and felt comfortable with them, there's little need to do the extra due diligence required by a company acting on a larger scale.

The majority of a founder's job is making decisions. But the point at which a decision needs to be made to be effective is the point where the founder often has only 10% of the information needed to feel comfortable making it.

SF - I think you'll be more challenged out here. That's a good thing.

Amazing job, excited to see where this goes.