I'm sorry for being negative, but paying $10 per month for what is essentially a calendar widget is blowing my mind. The fact that this is even in YC and not just a side project is taking what's left of my brain and blowing it into the stratosphere.
> We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.
It’s the YC model. Throw money at smart upper-class kids in good schools with some ambition. Once in a while, those kids make Dropbox or Airbnb, most of the time they make calendar widgets and leverage the experience to jump the line at some FAANG and start out their careers a decade ahead of their peers. It doesn’t make sense to you and I because it doesn’t make sense. It’s a lottery ticket for the investors. YC just games the system by buying most of the lottery tickets.
I understand Dropbox and Airbnb, but the long-term growth potential was clear to begin with - here, I just don't see it. It's a stupid calendar widget on a subscription.
I understand the potential for future expansion, but wouldn't it make sense for YC to wait until an MVP for said expansion is released before investing in it?
It's just a MVP... version 0.01 of their vision. The fact that they have paying users who use them daily is a very, very good signal - that's a hard thing to do! It's so much easier to add additional features to that group of users later.
The V in MVP stands for viable. Things that aren’t viable aren’t MVPs they are steps getting to an MVP. Part of the value of testing stuff is to check and see if what I think is an MVP is, actually is. When it clearly isn’t, if I call it an MVP then I’m either insane or a marketing person.
Prototypes are perfectly cool as long as expectations are met. Of course, charging $10 for a prototype doesn’t frequently work
The pro-sumer market is massive. It's really not that hard to deliver $10 worth of value to people whose time is very, very expensive.
As far as YC goes, pivoting and working on new ideas really rapidly is downright normal. Sometimes that looks like taking weekend hacks and seeing how far you can get with them (this one being a canonical example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819)
Genuinely curious why not pay for fantastical? It has basically the same widget, plus an iPhone and Mac app for a 1/3 of the price?
Not to be mean, but this seems like it only got traction because they got accepted to YC on another idea, otherwise would have been lost in the sea of dozens of other much more full featured or free calendar solutions?
For context, Austen Allred is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda School, so efficiency wins are going to be pretty valuable for him.
Also, as a CEO you are constantly thinking in terms of ROI. It doesn't matter how much software costs if it pays for itself several times over. This spills over into personal purchases too.
(BTW, big fan of what Lambda School is doing Austen.)
No problem at all. Definitely does, it's a broad problem and we're still figuring it out too.
As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser. We want to bring all the platforms we use for work into one native place. Does that make more sense now?
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Many people have the notification center on Do Not Disturb indefinitely. It's noisy and unactionable for a a lot of people, including myself.
We want to integrate deeply into SaaS platforms to provide one-click access to features within those platforms. For example, viewing and resolving comments on a Google Doc. This just isn't possible through Mac's notification center.
> Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.
The business value of missing a notification or meeting can be really high. I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting. Or even just closer. I imagine similar logic can be applied to other notifications.
I don’t think so because the notifications in chrome get buried for me. Email alerts for lost in the deluge of work emails. The Apple Watch helps a lot actually
I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for personal use on Windows so I understand the value of this. Calendar notifications via email and "reminders" on the iPhone are not effective for my workflow and I need something that's always active on my menu bar.
If this is all you need, why not just use an open source alternative? I'm using MeetingBar (https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar) and it covers all of these "issues". It even sends notifications, it's lightweight, scriptable and doesn't cost me as much as a Photoshop subscription.
> We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.