dmor

It. is. not. ranked. by. web. traffic.

Web traffic is one of several signals used to produce the ranking.

I noticed that. I'm thinking it might be because TechStars doesn't have a Bay Area franchise, and YC requires founders to move here.

This argument doesn't make sense. Should Tumblr not get credit for subdomained blogs, or Wordpress.com? This seems tantamount to not giving Facebook or Pinterest credit for logged in sessions. How is this traffic any less an indicator of usage?

Fixed

Looks like it is time for me to make a data driven index of NYC startups. This is such fluff.

You're totally my target ;) Enjoy the album, and keep an eye out for more clues

This feels right. There are a lot of people asking what comes next and this gives us a manageable way to talk to them.

I'm leaving clues about what we're doing in plain sight, but we're not quite ready to announce it yet. Not being able to share/show/tell and be open yet is necessary but not fun.

I think he was referring to Everyme's launch, they also launched Origami (though perhaps not on purpose, it was an announced pivot)

You might be surprised how difficult it is to get press for anything outside of company launch, product launch, funding and exit events. It would seem this blog post, although you might not have expected it to do this well on Hacker News, is effectively a launch of sorts and you might have scooped your own story. But HN readers might be much better customers for a tech-friendly family site than TC readers.

But then I went on TechCrunch to read your original launch post I saw you actually did announce Origami on TechCrunch about 6 months ago: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/everyme-origami/

I'm confused, how does this fit with "what I recommend – and what we’re doing at Origami - is not launching at all"?

That's true. I messed with other ways of weighting it, or just putting the absolute number of new followers (e.g. Dropbox gained 70,000) but already has 2.3M. Thoughts?

HA! Okay, I'm looking into that right now, will get back to you.

Update: It went from 21,369,458 to 13,900,665 in the past week - so I probably need some sort of lower bound for these. In some cases that can indicate an up-and-comer, and I am even using a log scale for the delta so this a pretty serious outlier. Thanks for letting me know it is dead though, i will remove from the DB.

Thanks, I have that activity data and will be packaging it up for a future post.

Thanks, I'm collecting it in a massive database and I love hearing all the ideas of what could be done with the data.

As to what gets measured gets managed - legitimately increasing traffic, audience, brand awareness etc. is all about the top of the funnel. Considering how many startups I meet with who are hemming and hawing about doing marketing, only to later end up dead, I think this could be a very good thing. We'll see.

I think Square is actually just on the wrong side, it should be on the B2B list. I'm working on figuring out how to move it over.

Update: fixed

Couple things:

1. I could post the raw data, I've held back doing so because it is quite expensive to collect and organize and I'm hesitant to give it away for free.

2. I agree that this data may skew toward companies with a great deal of hype, there is more data I look forward to collecting down the road to produce a more complete picture. Employee count is quite meaningful for B2B companies, and because B2B companies are not ranked against B2C companies their respective Twitter followers do have some meaning. If you build a "boring" B2B business and it is doing well on social media, you probably have a pretty strong brand.

Maybe I should say it dies eventually?

I strongly second this, and thinking making sure they have an outlet for concerns/ideas about career growth and other interpersonal, HR, culture or other "soft" things from time to time is important too. It's amazing how easy it is to go a year without bringing any of this up, only to have someone give notice when it could have been avoided through a few important if perhaps slightly uncomfortable conversations.

I'd also make some room for praise, given in private and in detail.

Not necessarily, in fact that was was of the fallacies of the dot com bubble. Revenue is traction if it is gained at a reasonable cost. There are definitely unit economics that look like growth but come at an unsustainable cost.

Splitting out consumer vs. B2B companies is definitely on my list in the near future

Thank you, especially for hearing my earnestness through all the noise - I'm glad it comes through. Without revealing too much, I can tell you that I have a much varied and interesting data set to use to rank companies for the next full YC index. I expect there will be feedback on the method for that one too, but with every iteration it is getting massively better.

Crazy idea - javascript startups can put on their site to report their actual data to me?

Yeah, they're sort of weird edge case but I can see a case for wanting to benchmark against them, let me think about it a bit.

9gag's global traffic rank dropped from #328 to #329 in the sample period. The list does not include companies whose traffic went down, even if they are in the top 250,000 of all sites globally. I included an explanation of this in the post.

It sounds like the value may be in who is on the list and growing. Maybe the order is not as important as the fact that these are all companies worth watching?

Well this is the kind of graph I dream about :) http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/newsblur.com#

I hear you, and for the startup index we are now collecting 9 data points and v1 of the new one is a labor of love that I will hopefully have out in the next week or so. Iterating like a mofo :)

I generally don't include companies that have exited. You can view the YC index here and download the data. The April version will be out soon. http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/the-y-combinator-inde...

I considered it but was on the fence so I wasn't going to use log this first time, but it sounds like that really might be the best approach. Give me a minute and I'll make a spreadsheet you guys can check out to see if it makes more sense.

UPDATE: Here you go! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGM...

I absolutely agree with you regarding seasonality, I simply don't have a snapshot from a year ago. But a year from now I will be able to do this now that I am collecting the data each month.

What sources would you suggest they use to do their research? This data was from Crunchbase which is the first place most entrepreneurs tell me they look, so I wonder if these New York firms are less motivated to update it. Is there some other place where they're announcing their deals and signaling to the community that they are active? I am researching this and would love to know what sites I should regularly crawl.

New York 500 Startups dude Shai Goldman has a good list going here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArI2sAC4lTszdGN...

It's certainly not retribution, I posted that story and I think it's interesting - and then it turned into a TC story!

Refer.ly recently pivoted - in fact every stat about our business is on the front page of our site. We aren't raising Series A, we have ~18 months of runway left at our current burn.