I love YC. Grew monthly revenue 6.5x from $14k to $93k from September to October.
Sales & marketing used to be the bane of my existence as a technical founder.
Had to hammer it into myself until I was Stockholm syndromed.
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Madhav Lavakare
42 posts
Madhav Lavakare
@madlavak
YC F25 (@tryaircaps)
San Francisco Katılım Şubat 2023
29 Takip Edilen68 Takipçiler
Most people in the Bay don’t give a shit about privacy anymore the way people used to a few years ago.
Recording conversations is the de facto, and in some cases, actually expected.
But, the people who do care about it, care about it a lot. They get MAD about it.
Two questions:
1) how prevalent is this mindset in say, Tulsa, Oklahoma?
2) is the population of people who get mad going to increase or decrease in the next 2 years?
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I was this close to building a property tax compliance B2B SaaS Al but I thought it was too “moonshot”
@levelsio@levelsio
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@TurnerNovak You telling me I don’t have 139 zillion in ARR even though I got $5000 in 10 seconds from stripe transaction????
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There’s still too many people taking best day of revenue and multiplying by 365 for ARR
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@BenjaminDEKR Would be cool to have a Best Buy for software - showroom with bunch of laptops running cool compliance B2B SAASes all at once
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If you walked through a Best Buy a decade ago and today, there isn't actually much difference in tech
The iPhones still look the same, the drones are about the same, the flat screen TVs are a bit bigger
But there is no OH WOW! technology for sale that didn't exist 10yrs ago
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I’m so addicted to my stripe notifs now it’s not even funny I need to be less obsessed with revenue.
Dopamine hit from even a morsel more of MRR is crazy
Michael Grinich@grinich
feels like the era of hype is over. signups, views, free users, github stars.. all meaningless vanity metrics what matters now is revenue, margin, retention, and the sound of cash hitting your bank account the tide is changing. and we're about to see who’s been swimming naked
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@thatguybg Used to get pissed off at this then I started using it as an opportunity to troll, you should definiteyl try it
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vc: you see this? *sends competitor’s announcement*
founder:
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Didn’t know my Indian dad was a contributing author at MIT Technology Review
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That feeling when someone hits u w their Calendly link before u can.
Like bro I was just gonna send it to u why u gotta do my ego like that.
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@growing_daniel @sama “nGL bRo I bE closing hELLa SaFE MFN no meet no text”
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Genuinely curious, would you actually wear Mark Zuckerberg’s glasses with cameras & microphones on your face?
Feel like no one would but lots of people seem to be saying sentiment around Meta / privacy etc is getting better. Is it tho?
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@dmarcos Very true if they don’t have a burning problem. It’s just annoying, even people who need vision correction find them annoying. Mojo tried smart contacts but didn’t work. Although niche use cases with critical need still work (eg captions for Deaf people)
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Even G2. Get ready to wear the future. Launching on Nov 12.
At first, they might look like ordinary glasses. But the moment you wear them, everything changes.
A new extraordinary power is almost ready to be unleashed.
Launching on Nov 12.
evenrealities.bio/G2x twitter.com/EvenRealities/…
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@antoine_os @sandbar Love the ring but imo it’s more about conversation capture than form factor. What about a pen, for example? People often play with a pen, especially at work, keep it close to their mouth / face when thinking etc
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Unrequested take about @sandbar
The ring:
I was skeptical at first, but after seeing the video, it actually makes sense. The gesture, button, and touch interactions are well thought out: always there, but not in the way.
From an industrial design perspective, I’m not a huge fan. It’s simple, which is good, but it gives off a slightly toyish vibe. The charger feels like a weak point, it could have been a selling argument by presenting the device elegantly, but instead it looks like an anti-theft pin from Zara.
The app:
At first glance, it feels complex and a bit overloaded, like it wants to do it all. The good news: it’s much easier to fix the app than the charger, i'm sure it will get better.
Overall, there’s huge potential here. It’s a well-thought-out product that will definitely find its audience.
A real AI tool.
congrats @minafahmi and the team
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@karrisaarinen IMO companies like this are afraid to call themselves “ai-native marketing agency” bc it scares VCs. They should just own it tho
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@im_roy_lee Still undecided on whether startups saying “we’re cluely for X” is a good or bad thing
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[EXPLAINING THE CLUELY PIVOT (+ A BRIEF HISTORY)]
9 months ago, i built Interview Coder, an undetectable translucent desktop overlay that lets you cheat on leetcode interviews.
i knew it had viral potential, and posted about it constantly until I did go viral.
then I did it again. and again and again.
and then it made me ~$1 million dollars in profit. holy fuck!
apparently you can build a gpt wrapper, go hella viral, and become a millionaire.
could I do it again, but bigger?
so, I started cluely with 2 big questions:
> where else could this overlay be useful outside of leetcode interviews?
> can I keep getting this much attention?
the second answer came immediately. yes, I am very good at getting attention.
and thanks to the attention, we got hundreds of thousands of users ridiculously quick, and were able to use the data to figure out that our stickiest power users were using it in meetings.
so we just built for that.
the deeper learning, though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality.
no other tech startup has ever been able to do it this reliably or at this scale.
it’s really not luck, and most importantly, if done right, it works to grow companies.
interview coder proved it, and cluely continues to prove it, growing faster than ever in a “saturated” space.
the world is vast.
there are tens of millions of people in meetings every day, and 90% of them don't know what an ai notetaker is.
the market is big enough that you can be the most controversial person in the world and still win, as long as you can deliver the magic moment to the user.
TBPN@tbpn
Jordi: The problem with Cluely's move into AI notetaking is that it's a half-pivot. A half-pivot is always dangerous. They built a very controversial brand, very quickly. And now they need to leverage it for a pivot into a category that's squarely at odds with that brand.
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Madhav Lavakare retweetledi
AirCaps (@tryaircaps) is bringing AI assistance to real-world conversations.
Their software provides live captions, translations, and proactive AI insights on AR glasses. They’ve already processed 15,000 hours of conversations for hundreds of paying customers.
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