Is it just me or are a lot of the recent YC companies extremely niche, almost where they could just be a feature of another website? Maybe I'm just in a negative mood today.
A lot of great companies start small. One of my favorite PG-isms is this:
If you can make a simple product for a niche audience and make them amazingly happy, it's clear what you need to do next. Find more people like that. Move into adjacent markets (e.g. Craigslist started as an SF classifieds mailing list, Amazon started with books).
If you make a product that makes a huge audience ambivalent, you often have no freakin' clue what to do next. Add features? Take them away? Change your positioning?
So imagine if these guys OWNED movie trailers on mobile. Do you think they'd be stuck there? Could they, perhaps, move on to dominate broader short-form video to satiate micro-boredom? Could they then move onto longer form stuff?
It was actually just in their own apartment to start with. It went so well that they then decided to make it possible for other people to rent out airbeds in their apartments. Eventually they discovered that people would rather rent bedrooms or whole apartments (or the country of Lichtenstein), but that took a while longer.
Fair enough. I understand your point and you definitely know the beginnings of Airbnb's business better than I do.
I have just seen an inundation of "we are the x of y of z" lately and they all just seem like derivatives of derivatives. Airbnb was always a very interesting and unique idea from the start (at least once they realized to expand past their own apartment).
As pg points out: "One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy." (http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html)
Regarding the fact that they are all "we are the x of y of z" and seem derivative, pg says:
"One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It's like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It's like an answering service, but for email. It's eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Don't worry that it will make your idea seem "derivative." Some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas no one realized could be combined." (http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html)
I don't know whether you are right or not about that.
However, I do think it's a good idea to be "extremely niche", especially when the size of your market - in this case, people who like watching movies - is very large.
I'm sure that a good movie trailer recommendation system would work well on other sites, but those sites may have already moved past the startup/development phase into business-as-usual, where they are trying to squeeze money out of what they currently have without searching for new value propositions.
I'm currently working (albeit in a tremendously half-assed way) on a very obvious movie-related idea because I know I can do it better than the big sites and because the market is enormous.
Ah, but consider how much easier a sell this niche is than Convore was. I have read exactly one sentence about Can't Wait and I already know who it is for and what it does. I have signed up on Convore and I still have no idea what it's really best at. In my short time there, I saw it used for HN meta-chat, and a bunch of Ruby chat. And I watched tptacek try to start a conversation about his field, but it kind of died, so I guess it's not the go-to place for that.
Branding is important. Marketing is important. Far, far more important than novelty or impressive technology. Novelty is fleeting - my god, we're already used to Google, and it's literally an epochal advance in library science - and impressive tech tends to confuse people for the first few years, which may be more years than your little startup can afford.
EDIT: I see that Can't Wait also has a revenue stream: Affiliate fees from Fandango.
You highlight a real tension: a great strength of a tiny startup is to thrive on niches so tiny that established companies cannot justify entering - so they don't compete. The tension is that it's not exciting (unless you're prone to visions).
Also, a tiny niche is probably all you can cope with, with limited resources.
Know what you mean. It's mobile and social, but is it local? I suppose it is if the monetization is to send to a nearby movie theater to see the movie whose trailer you liked.
Seriously though, props to them at least for choosing something that is theory monetizable. Movie producers would pay big bucks to reach the influencers that get everyone else to see a movie.
I'd rather not call out specific companies but most of the recent launch announcements have been uninteresting to say the least. They are either slight variations of products that are already out there or their market is extremely niche.
Maybe PG just expects these startups to build a quick product and sell off to a Google, Facebook, Zynga etc. I know he chooses startups by their founders, maybe that is because he expects them to be acq-hired.
The most exciting thing I've seen announced on hackernews lately is codecademy and they aren't even part of YC.
"Maybe PG just expects these startups to build a quick product and sell off to a Google, Facebook, Zynga etc."
YC makes very little on quick-flip startups.
Count the number of YC partners and the number of LPs they have, do some napkin math on their expenses (weekly dinners for 150+, funding 120 startups per year, presumably moderate salaries for partners and staff, legal bills, flying hundreds of people to SV for interviews every 6 months, etc), and tell me how needle-moving it is for them to turn a $20k investment into $240k (before taxes)... Which is exactly what they'd get for a $4M exit.
AFAIK, YC always advises founders who have an early flip opportunity to stick it out (though it's supportive if the founders don't want to do so).
YC has always preached launching as soon as possible, which means that upon launch you'll only get a tiny hint of a startup's future ambitions.
I actually think the way forward is a little bit more obvious for this one. Without even talking to the founders or seeing their pitch, you should be able to think of a number of interesting directions. To pick the most obvious one, wouldn't being the IMDB of the mobile/social era be pretty cool? Is that even really "niche"?
Hm, I don't understand what you mean by "niche"...codeacademy is much MORE niche than Can't Wait, at least right now...a lot more people watch movies than program.
Remember, what the startup does when it begins is not what it will grow into. Facebook was a place you could make a simple profile as a Harvard student. Microsoft made a Basic compiler (talk about niche at that time!).
Can't Wait! is awesome. Movie trailers are actually perfectly sized bits of content to be consumed when you're bored, it also happens to one of the few bits of content I love to see my friends recommend.
The app is really well put together too, I've gotten used to apps scrolling tons of images to be rather bad performing, but Can't Wait! scrolls like a champ.
Am I alone in trying to avoid trailers? I find they tend to give away too much of the story, and always contain the best special effects from the film. I want to be surprised by the movies I see, and trailers act against that.
I am sure you are not alone, but there are a significant number of people who enjoy trailers, possible the majority. Trailers can be more entertaining than most films they portray.
So what do you go when you see a film, come in 20 mins late?
This is a really bad title on TC. Reading that title made me think "Oh God, not another useless social network!". But then I read the article and realized it's an iPhone app that's actually very useful.
Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! We're happy to answer any questions you have in this thread--ask away. We're very excited to show what we've been working on, and we can't wait (sorry) to show you all where we're headed in the future.
All of our trailers are actually being streamed from YouTube. We're using the YouTube API on the website to build a nice HTML5 player, and then in the app, HTML5 plays using the native player.
I always assumed you could not do that as the terms of service say
You agree not to distribute in any medium any part of the Service or the Content without YouTube's prior written authorization, unless YouTube makes available the means for such distribution through functionality offered by the Service (such as the Embeddable Player).
Congrats on the launch! I've been using the beta for a while and been really impressed. I had an eerily similar idea several months back but never executed on it. I'm so happy to see it come to life. Good luck, Erics!
I used to watch movie trailers on trailer.apple.com but I had no idea which of my friends were interested in the same movies. I have been using Can't Wait beta for a few weeks now and its's fun to use. Good way for me to kill some time on transit.
Which happens to be posted by MovieClips.com, a company that pays the studios to license their trailer data. Is CantWait paying MovieClips.com? Does it pay YouTube? Does it pay the rights holders of the trailers?
Is Sony Pictures cool with CantWait's use of its trailer within a commercial app and website?
I am curious if CantWait is at all concerned about being shut down for commercial redistribution of content from YouTube? Or is CantWait paying YouTube for the content and its bandwidth? What if CantWait scales and YouTube says, enough is enough?
Really cool as I am addicted to trailers. I would also add a piece to their business model. They could let you browse old movies trailers as well (I would watch them!) and let you rent the movie from Netflix, taking a percentage. What do you think?
Hah this is funny. I was sitting in the theater this past week hoping there was an app just like this that I could get reminders for trailers I see that I want to make sure I catch the full movie when it comes out. Just wish the android version was out....
