Customer data platform
Exploring an interesting piece of internal tech: Co-founder spent weekend building out one piece of tech he thought was interesting; launched it and saw immediate interest.
University classroom lecture tool
Little to no interest
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-vfn97QTr0
“We originally applied to YC with the idea for a university classroom lecture tool (we were college students at the time), and we built that out over the course of the summer. It failed because we aren’t good at identifying real problems, and we decided that one reason is that we didn’t understand our users. We spent about 15 months pivoting and building various analytics products to help better understand users. None of them really took off, and we keep chasing the next idea that will get us users. As a growth hack, my co-founder Ilya built a little library called Analytics.js. The idea was that users can use it as a ‘drop-in replacement’ for Mixpanel or Kissmetrics and send us the exact same data as you would to each of them via one library. Users didn’t care much about our tool, but they seemed to like the idea of Analytics.js. Finally, we have about six months of runway left and we haven’t launched anything. My co-founder Ian thinks that the idea behind Analytics.js could actually be a big deal. We could effectively be the ‘API layer’ over all these annoying and similar, but inconsistent, data tools. We’re split on the decision. Peter thinks it’s the worst idea he’s ever heard and that there’s zero chance a company could be made from 100 lines of JavaScript. We all agreed to build it for a week and launch it on Hacker News. That day, it goes straight to the top of HN, and the rest is history.” —Calvin French-Owen, co-founder
1.5 years
One piece of tech