Can the Hacker News crowd predict the success of YC companies?
A regular occurrence on HN is a new YC company launching and a bunch of people lambasting it as derivative/trivial/lame.
PG has often pointed out that the people judging these companies based on the intial launch are almost certainly not judging them very well.
It’s hard to disagree with that. Of course we don’t know what their World Domination Plans are, as he does. He saw their application, heard their pitch, and worked with them for months.
It got me wondering though. If the HN crowd can’t predict whether something is going to be a failure or not, could it at least predict the big successes? Are the comments indicative of anything?
I proceeded to do a little unscientific poking around, looking at HN’s reaction to the first significant post each company got. To make it simple I looked only at top-level comments and only ones with unambiguous sentiment.
The Big 3
Heroku
Heroku Lifts Ruby on Rails Development into the Cloud (YC Winter 08)
Believers: 12
Doubters: 1
Total comments: 36
Dropbox
My YC app: Dropbox – Throw away your USB drive
Beleivers: 23
Doubters: 5
Total comments: 72
Airbnb
Y Combinator’s Airbed&Breakfast Casts A Wider Net For Housing Rentals As AirBnB
Believers: 1
Doubters: 1
Total comments: 13
Other Companies
Hipmunk
Reddit CoFounder Dips Back Into YC With Travel Startup Hipmunk (YC S10)
Believers: 6
Doubters: 2
Total comments: 80
Rapportive
Rapportive – making excellent service scale
Believers: 9
Doubters: 2
Total comments: 53
Olark
Olark (YC S09) Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners
Believers: 5
Doubters: 2
Total comments: 18
Dead Companies
SplitterBug
Splitterbug (YC S11) private beta: track expenses with friends from your phone
Believers: 5
Doubters: 5
Total comments: 38
Notifio
Notifo (YC W10) Is A Simple Mobile Notifications Platform For Anything
Believers: 6
Doubters: 4
Total comments: 68
Snipd
Y Combinator’s Snipd Launches To The Public
Believers: 3
Doubters: 2
Total comments: 23
SocialBrowse
Socialbrowse: Y Combinator Startup is Twitter For Links
Believers: 11
Doubters: 3
Total comments: 49
TipJoy
TipJoy Launches (YC winter 08)
Believers: 10
Doubters: 2
Total comments: 54
Conclusion
You decide. I’m not confident about the methodology I used or the results.
I think it would be pretty interesting to do this kind of analysis in a more rigorous way. It would also be rather interesting to compare HN to TechCrunch, since they’re famously rather dickish on TC — but who knows, maybe they’re also more honest. I know I’m pretty much rooting for every single company that launches on HN, even if I have serious doubts about their chances.
