YC Office Hours with PG and Harj | Hacker News Reader

YC Office Hours with PG and Harj

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78 pointsfbuilesv19 comments

The first guy was doing K-6th iPad stuff, and Paul didn't have much advice. Anyone interested in this space should checkout ixl.com. Most people haven't heard of it, but they are crushing it when it comes to K-6 math skills. By my estimation, they do something like $100M rev/year. As far as I can tell, they actively avoid the press as they don't want competitors.

How do you come up with that number? According to http://www.edreform.com/Fast_Facts/K12_Facts/#ENROLLMENT, there are about 130,000 elementary schools in the US. Even if every single school in the nation used IXL, they'd only reach $25 MM in revenue. Given that IXL probably reaches some single-digit percentage of schools, $100 MM seems really high. Are parents buying this in droves?

You are sharply underestimating per-deal sizes for enterprise sales. $200 a class isn't so much to actually make $200 a class. $200 just establishes an anchor such that the school district demands a discount and you say "Alright, with 500 teachers teaching 4 classes each, we can let you have this for only $350,000 a year. That's a huge discount off our list price."

Welcome solidly to Enterprise Sales if you adopt this path, which has it's own set of challenges vs. e.g. selling to teachers directly. There are quite a few enterprise software companies which make good money. Some of them even produce good software, too.

40/60 school/parent revenue, and you are confusing "classes" with "schools". You should Google "dreft" to understand the shit parents do for kids in the US. Now google "1st grade math".

Interesting site but the navigation is a bit overwhelming and messing. It's not really clear what they are doing without digging around much. Thanks for sharing though.

Anytime someone asks you what makes you better than an established competitor please don't ever, ever say something along the lines of "because <competitor> sucks". It's better to acknowledge your competitor's legitimacy and respond with how your product is better.

Chauvinism has a place, but I think you have to be careful with it.

especially when <competitor> is a YC startup ;)

PG and Harj's pace is amazing - not a moment wasted. It's unfortunate to see that the lucky founders up there aren't really listening to their opinions. It seems like they're more interested in defending their product, rather than take suggestions.

agreed. I was honestly pretty disappointed in the quality of startups that went up. Most of those guys didn't really seem to be prepared or willing to seriously address the obvious issues they had.

I was trying to put myself in their situation to imagine what I would be doing answering those questions.

PG & Harj's pace is superb trying to utilize every minute.

I think the startups stand to gain much by being more open to criticism and looking for take-aways to improve their positioning, product etc., from their feedback.

I can sympathize with them in this case, it would be hard not to lean towards being defensive when your product is being probed on stage in front of 3,000 people.

When something is dear to you, it is also a natural thing to do. However, sometimes it is better to say 'thank you' and take the given advise to heart.

Key takeaways or at least the main ideas behind PG and Harj's questions & comments- What pain point are you solving? Is it something you dealt with (or the market deals with)? How do you go about using the product? What is the killer feature of your product that will allow a user to switch from their current method?

Also: How do people find-out about your product (search, word-of-mouth, etc)? Why did you get turned down (when pitching to an enterprise)?

For reference, a link to the hn thread discussing the session as it went live: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2988407

I understand that people get nervous when the pressure is on, but I can't believe how many times I thought to myself, "Answer the damn question!"

This whole video served as a reminder to me to slow down, listen to what people are asking you, and give a thoughtful response. I'm not claiming I'd do any better in this sort of situation, but the amount of marketing speak coming from most of these guys' mouths was practically dehumanizing to PG and Harj.

Its awesome for us to see how PG conducts office hours, but it seems like a bad idea to do this in front of so many people. I can imagine how hard it would be as a founder to answer these questions so publicly.

Sure, but I'm pretty sure it's a great character-building exercise - either your idea is validated, or you're determined enough to prove YC wrong. Win-win imho.

Is this a one-off type video, or is there others with different people too. If so I'd love to see more!

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