C++ 17 is Done - <AUTHOR> https://herbsutter.com/2017/03/24/trip-report-winter-iso-c-standards-meeting-kona-c17-is-complete/ <comment><USER2> For those who wants to know c++17 features

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38060436/what-are-the- new...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38060436/what-are-the-new-features- in-c17)

std::optional and std::any are one of the good things. std::apply and std::invoke can help you write better functional c++17 code.

Anyway thanks for C++17. For sometime, I thought I will learn Rust.

<comment><USER3> In modern gcc, std::variant doesn't look like a competent replacement for old- fashioned tagged unions.

On x86_64 Linux, it looks like a function with signature `void f(std::variant<int, char>)` expects its (8-byte) argument to be passed by reference, whereas `void f2(tagged_union_of_int_and_char)` passes its argument in rdi.

gcc (-O3) also generates miserable code for calling f(42):

      4004f0:       48 83 ec 18             sub    $0x18,%rsp
      4004f4:       48 89 e7                mov    %rsp,%rdi
      4004f7:       c7 04 24 2a 00 00 00    movl   $0x2a,(%rsp)
      4004fe:       c6 44 24 04 00          movb   $0x0,0x4(%rsp)
      400503:       e8 c8 ff ff ff          callq  4004d0 <f>
      400508:       48 83 c4 18             add    $0x18,%rsp
      40050c:       c3                      retq

as compared with calling f2(42):

      400510:       48 bf 00 00 00 00 2a    movabs $0x2a00000000,%rdi
      400517:       00 00 00
      40051a:       eb c4                   jmp    4004e0 <f2>

std::optional seems to have the same disease; the ABI is different from a plain struct containing a bool and the value and you get worse initialisation code. There's also a build time penalty to using std::optional; on my machine, including the code that uses optionals makes my trivial test program take 320ms to compile and link rather than 50ms.

These look like yet more new C++ features that are worse than what they're trying to replace.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone know what kind of assembly is generated when using std::option in Rust when make a similar function call?

<comment><USER5>
      void f(std::variant<int, char>)

would be

      f(x: IntOrChar)

roughly in Rust, I'm too lazy to make the types _exactly_ the same, but [https://godbolt.org/g/pZde2A](https://godbolt.org/g/pZde2A) is roughly it.

Actually, [https://godbolt.org/g/1vcMeG](https://godbolt.org/g/1vcMeG) might be even better to compare; I'm not an expert, but looks like the only difference is in the size.

last one, adding inline(never) so you can see the calls in main: [https://godbolt.org/g/cVDjQH](https://godbolt.org/g/cVDjQH)

      movabs  rdi, 21474836480
      call    example::f1@PLT

vs

      mov     edi, 5
      pop     rbp
      jmp     example::f2@PLT

so, yup.

<comment><USER4> Thank you! This is really cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Boy... Would be a nice time to learn C++ again.

I mean modern C++, with all lessons learned, all revisions thus far assumed to be supported, officially and unofficially deprecated coding styles marked in helpful tidy little "Don't do this and this is why!" red warning boxes. Bjarne Stroustrup himself said C++11... _11_ almost felt like a new language, and here we are already!

C++ is so big, and not only that, changing so much. I have a hard time catching up and a distilled "sum of knowledge" C++ programming language guide would be immensely helpful. C++17 including all its predecessors almost feel more like D at this point, soon enough only missing GC compared to that, which by itself have alternatives in modern C++ that some argue is even better.

I also think there's a disconnect in how people perceive C++ today. Many seem to think of an archaic language, Quora questions "Are C++ worthwile to learn today?" abound... Another argument for a high visibility language guide being useful?

Documents like these are helpful but not very easy to digest: [https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...](https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md)

</comment><comment><USER7> As a matter of personal taste, I prefer big complex languages over simple ones

And I do consider, that some of the strongest criticism of C++, and that is, "that most people use a subset of it, so it feels like many different languages glued into one", is actually a strength .. it means you can ignore some the complexity .. until you want it, or need it

I am very happy, that C++ is adding new features every 3 years .. and I do plan to invest more time in C++

Complexity is good

<comment><USER8> Nothing against personal preferences, but one side-effect of overwhelming complexity is that only very few people can be trusted to write safe C++. The better you know C++ the more suspicious you become of C++ code written by others. At least that is my personal experience.

And I think that's a major reason why C++ usage is gradually becoming a niche thing used only where absolutely necessary. As evidence for that claim I submit this chart (you need to scroll down a page): [https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/c++.do](https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/c++.do)

C++ used to be required for over 30% of all permanent programming jobs in the UK back in 2005. Now it's down to 8.5% and falling. That's in stark contrast with all the enthusiasm created by the features added since C++11, features that I very much welcome.

<comment><USER9> C++ has been getting a lot safer though. Modern C++ generally has you using shared_ptr and unique_ptr and references, which cut down on a lot of common pointer mistakes. There's also a lot of const mixed in, which I think helps. Debuggers have also gotten a lot more reliable (I remember one crash bug that I couldn't find after like three days of looking in an old visual studio version, whereas newer visual studio caught it immediately). Not that the language isn't a minefield, but if you walk in the modern part there's a lot less mines buried in the ground.

As much as I complain about C++, I just don't think there's a viable alternative, and I somewhat reject the notion that writing performant code is a niche thing. Like, sure, there are common contexts where you can get away with wasting CPU, but IMO part of being a skilled professional programmer is getting the most out of the machine, and you just can't do that with most other languages.

<comment><USER10> > I just don't think there's a viable alternative

If C++ is your only hammer then every problem looks like a nail to you. Of course, there are viable alternatives. At least Ada which is still used in avionics and other safety critical systems.

<comment><USER11> > At least Ada which is still used in avionics and other safety critical > systems.

Like Ariane 5? :->

The crash was caused in part by failing to catch an exception in Ada.

[http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5accidentreport.html](http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5accidentreport.html)

<comment><USER10> This was not Ada's fault but the developer team's fault since it used a working Ariane 4 software for Ariane 5 without exhaustive testing. They made the mistake, and blamed Ada for that. The Ada software worked perfectly for which it was written for.

[http://compgroups.net/comp.lang.ada/ariane5-faq/1406823](http://compgroups.net/comp.lang.ada/ariane5-faq/1406823)

And yes, Ada is still used today.

[http://www.ada2012.org](http://www.ada2012.org)

<comment><USER11> So how many crashes that happen in programs written in C++ are the development teams fault rather than the C++'s?

Ada is an interesting language (we were taught it as our first language at uni), but it's not free from safety issues.

<comment><USER10> Crashes due to the language implementation's fault are much more likely in C++ than in Ada. Ada compilers are 100% verified, otherwise they are not allowed to call themselves "Ada compiler". There is no such thing for C++. The safety gap between C++ and Ada is actually so big that we don't even need to talk about that.

The flaws C++ were the reasons why Rust was invented. Mozilla wanted a safe language for the next generation of browsers, and they realized that C++ is not a good choice for safe programming.

Quote: "Mozilla intends to use Rust as a platform for prototyping experimental browser architectures. Specifically, the hope is to develop a browser that is more amenable to parallelization than existing ones, while also being less prone to common C++ coding errors."

Source: [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Mozilla-developing-the-Rust- lan...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Mozilla-developing-the-Rust-language-and- what-are-the-problem-areas-for-which-it-is-better-suited-than-conventional- languages-How-does-it-compare-to-other-system-languages)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Every time there's something that comes up for C++ I get excited, I've always wanted to use the language, but it's like tap dancing in a mine field.

C++ needs a linter that rejects code that doesn't meet a certain standard ala Rubocop.

<comment><USER13> ?? Compilers do reject code that doesn't meet a certain standard. C++ does come with a "linter". You might want to check out what -Wall does in gcc & clang.

I've never met a linter I liked more than a real compiler, not even close. Linters for scripting languages only exist because the scripting languages aren't compiled, and they are only lightweight second rate optional type checkers. Linters' attraction and usefulness is that you aren't required to use them, so you can iterate quickly and run code without having to wait for the compiler every single time you save your file. Linters are not better at keeping you within good style and safety bounds, generally speaking.

<comment><USER14> This is way too low a bar. I already use this plus:

        -Wcast-align -Wcast-qual -Wctor-dtor-privacy -Wextra -Wformat=2 -Wimplicit-atomic-properties -Wmissing-declarations -Wno-long-long -Wnon-virtual-dtor -Woverlength-strings -Woverloaded-virtual -Wredundant-decls -Wreorder -Wswitch-default -Wunused-variable -Wwrite-strings -Wno-variadic-macros -Wno-unused-local-typedef -Wno-language-extension-token -fstrict-aliasing

and optionally:

        -Wconversion -Wdocumentation -Wfloat-equal -Wmissing-prototypes -Wold-style-cast -Wunreachable-code

and this is still insufficient. Why? Because this is only checking syntactical and semantic correctness. It can't check for violation of local policy, such as:

no use of new/delete (use make_unique or make_shared)

correct and consistent use of virtual inheritance across the entire codebase

rule of three and rule of five usage

etc.

These are mostly higher-level concerns. Stuff which other people on my team might introduce, and/or miss in review.

I don't yet have anything automated in place for this, but clang-tidy is on my todo list for investigation.

<comment><USER13> So, then you feel that @codebeaker should wait to learn C++ until tools that fulfill your wishlist are available? You agree that C++ is a minefield compared to Ruby, only because Ruby has Rubocop and C++ doesn't?

Have you used any linters? Because linters are even worse than what you're describing with the C++ compiler. What they do is complain about style issues that some people believe are likely to lead to syntactical and semantic errors, without actually checking for the syntactical and semantic errors like a compiler does. Linters also don't check for violation of local policy, unless you extend them yourself. (And feel free to extend clang's warnings to suit your needs... it is open source.)

I fully 100% completely agree that C++ tooling could be way better, and I wish it was too. But that's not the issue we're talking about here at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm annoyed that the migration to "byte is uint8_t" from the "is a byte char or unsigned char?" mess is disrupted with std::byte.

</comment><comment><USER16> Congratulations to everyone involved, pity we still haven't got concepts and modules into it, but there is still hope for the next round. :)

Until of one the more secure alternatives gets more mainstream adoption, thus starting to be requested by our customers, C++ is going to be the tool to go to, when I need to step out of JVM and .NET languages to something more low level.

<comment><USER17> Is there an overview of what kind of challenges prevent the inclusion of modules? I don't do much C++ anymore, but I've done a fair bit of work on module systems, and they've never seemed that complicated to me. (I worry that the answer will mention the preprocessor...)

<comment><USER18> TL;DR: It has a lot to do with the preprocessor, macros specifically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any plan, anywhere, to try to provide a standard, modern subset of C++? Sort of like Perl and Javascript have strict mode.

Something that could be enforced by all the compilers.

<comment><USER16> Yes, C++ Core Guidelines.

Many of the suggestions are supported in VC++ and clang-tidy.

Other commercial vendors are slowly adopting them on their linters.

Strangely, gcc seems absent from this effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Perhaps the most exciting thing was that we decided to add the std::byte type"

So "std::byte" is not a character ("std::char") nor arithmetic ("std::int8_t/uint8_t"), but allows bitwise operations. It was really necessary? Anyone knows if that type allows defining the byte size in bits per instance?

<comment><USER21> Nope, the spec seems to suggest it's unsigned char. This is also what gcc has done. [https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/737032/](https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/737032/)

<comment><USER22> Can anyone express plainly what is the point of the std::byte circle jerk when we already have uint8_t?

<comment><USER23> std::uint8_t is not required to exist on a particular implementation, for example, if the machine byte is not 8-bit.

std::byte still seems pretty useless, though. There already is a built-in type for designating bytes: unsigned char.

<comment><USER24> It's for clarity about fixed size bitwise operations. Here's how the spec doc describes it's motivation:

([http://open- std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2017/p0298r3....](http://open- std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2017/p0298r3.pdf))

Motivation and Scope:

Many programs require byte-oriented access to memory. Today, such programs must use either the char, signed char, or unsigned char types for this purpose. However, these types perform a "triple duty". Not only are they used for byte addressing, but also as arithmetic types, and as character types. This multiplicity of roles opens the door for programmer error – such as accidentally performing arithmetic on memory that should be treated as a byte value – and confusion for both programmers and tools.

Having a distinct byte type improves type-safety, by distinguishing byte- oriented access to memory from accessing memory as a character or integral value. It improves readability. Having the type would also make the intent of code clearer to readers (as well as tooling for understanding and transforming programs). It increases type-safety by removing ambiguities in expression of programmer's intent, thereby increasing the accuracy of analysis tools.

<comment><USER25> _such as accidentally performing arithmetic on memory that should be treated as a byte value_

My reaction to that can be summed up succinctly as "WTF!?" The whole point of uint8_t or (signed/unsigned) char is an 8-bit quantity that you can do arithmetic and bitwise operations on. To put it more bluntly, "have C++ programmers forgotten how computers work?"

The proposed solution is to add yet another same-yet-subtly-different type, with its own set of same-yet-subtly-different rules? If anything that would cause even more confusion due to the complexity it causes in interactions with all the other parts of the language.

IMHO this "let's do everything we can to stop people from even the very slightest change of _possibly_ doing something wrong" line of thinking is ultimately unproductive... and actually rather dystopian. The end-result is quite scary to contemplate.

(The fact that an 11-page, text-only PDF somehow turns out to be over 800KB is somewhat less disturbing, but still notable.)

<comment><USER26> It's just a bit of type safety. Calm down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Still no concepts unfortunately (or reflection). Bit disappointed really, I'm far from a guru but to me this seems like another 'tick' upgrade where c++11 was a big 'tock', c++14 was mostly polish to c++11.

<comment><USER28> If you don't think of it as building a specific version and more just as a snapshot of what is currently 100% ready-to-go, you'll maybe feel differently.

They did much of the work needed to get modules, concepts, ranges, reflection, parallelism, etc ready to go, but this snapshot doesn't include them.

Nonetheless, many of those features will be finished soon and may be available by compilers before c++20

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Dumb question: How popular is C++ as a systems programming language in 2017? Does anyone have data on the popularity of various languages (C, Rust, Go, etc.) when web and application development are excluded?

<comment><USER30> C and C++ are the most popular "systems programming languages", C is king in embedded, kernels, C++ is a king in everything else. Go is not strictly "systems programming language", as to Rust popularity this is the most pragmatic answer I've seen lately:

 _"... Let's see Rust for what it is: the latest attempt at a C++ replacement. These have come and gone over the years, and it's by no means clear that Rust will succeed. As an example, Rust is currently 43rd of the 50 languages monitored in the Tiobe index. For comparison with languages of a similar vintage, Swift and Go are 10th and 17th respectively. C++ is 3rd. To put it bluntly: almost nobody is using Rust in the real world yet.

So please, ease up on the hype, Rust users. Have a little humility. You've got a nice little language with some really good ideas, and having a static analyser built into your compiler is cool. But there's a long way to go yet."_[1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/611811/have_you_used_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/611811/have_you_used_rust_do_you_prefer_it_over_modern_c/dfb924w/)

<comment><USER31> i recall there being some whining over go and "systems programming", but this seemed to hinge on definitions. go may not be the right option for a kernel but it's great for servers, infrastructure, platforms and various related things.

<comment><USER32> Systems programming is a vague term but it usually refers to low latency software (e.g. kernels, browsers, OS's, embedded, databases, etc) which means anything with a garbage collector is out of the question.

<comment><USER31> that's just the thing: "anything with a garbage collector is out of the question" seems limited to a particular camp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Lovely! But the real champagne opener is when certain mainstream compilers completely support all features.

PS. Please don't forget to show some love for C2x now. :D

<comment><USER34> GCC [0] is pretty much done.

Clang [1] needs a couple more things.

MSVC [2] hasn't done as much, but shouldn't be too far away. [3].

Considering how long C++11 took before it was fully implemented, this seems so fast!

[0] [https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx- status.html#cxx1z](https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html#cxx1z)

[1] [http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html](http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html)

[2] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/hh567368.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/hh567368.aspx)

[3] [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/01/22/vs-2015-u...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/01/22/vs-2015-update-2s-stl- is-c17-so-far-feature-complete/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm just glad to see languages as old* as C++ evolve and continue to have improvements made. It's a good time to be a programmer: our tools just keep getting better.

*Old but close to metal and fast and versatile.

</comment><comment><USER36> I feel like we need some c+ not c++...

<comment><USER8> I agree. C + RAII.

<comment><USER37> If that's all you want, you might take a look at the `cleanup` attribute for C. It's non-standard, but it is supported by `gcc` and `clang` and is fairly effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> C++ is becoming Java.

<comment><USER38> This is one of the nicer things one could say about C++. Indeed, it is possible now to write C++ almost as if it was Java and still produce a reasonably efficient code!

<comment><USER20> Sure. That was my point, no pun intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's too late for C++ to regain popularity. C++17 features will become widespread in next 3-4 years (C++14 isn't a common standard yet). Moreover, the language has become incredibly complicated and sadly doesn't provide anything that would reflect modern needs.

<comment><USER40> First, all the compilers already implement pretty much all of it. I'm not sure if by widespread you mean "included in a distribution" but you can use these features today, if you want to install a compiler.

Second, C++ is popular by pretty much every measure I could think of. Whether you want to measure lines of code, or number of projects, or number of developers - it is very high on the list.

It is true that is not popular with web developers and gets shouted down in those echo chambers, but the web entirely runs on C++ because all browsers are written in C++.

<comment><USER39> > First, all the compilers already implement pretty much all of it. I'm not > sure if by widespread you mean "included in a distribution" but you can use > these features today, if you want to install a compiler.

Of course, I can install any compiler, but my employer might not allow me to use it. Porting to a new compiler is not an easy task when a code base is large; we postponed porting due to lack of time.

> Second, C++ is popular by pretty much every measure I could think of. > Whether you want to measure lines of code, or number of projects, or number > of developers - it is very high on the list.

More interesting measure would be the number of new projects.

> It is true that is not popular with web developers and gets shouted down in > those echo chambers, but the web entirely runs on C++ because all browsers > are written in C++.

In web backend C++ is not used. You find there C#, Java, PHP, Python, maybe Go.

<comment><USER22> If you have to "port" your code from one C++ compiler to a new C++ compiler, then they are not both true C++ compilers per standards, or your code is not pure standard C++.

<comment><USER39> Sometimes compilers have bugs or are not fully-compliant. For example MSVC two or three versions ago didn't understand =delete. Standard library also might have errors. Moreover, we use third-part libs that are not always up to date (for various reasons), we have some legacy parts, and so on and so forth. I wish switching compiler required only setting another CXX. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessons learned from 10 failed startup ideas - <AUTHOR> http://kristapsmors.com/2014/11/25/lessons-learned-from-10-failed-startup-ideas/ <comment><USER2> By now, everyone is aware that cloud computing (among other recent developments) has drastically reduced the cost of starting a new business, both in time and money. What's not so well known is that this has changed not only how cheaply and quickly businesses can be started, but also _how_ they're started. Rather than draw up an executive summary and business plan, talk to advisors and research the market, it seems like nowadays folks just say "fuck it" and put their foot on the accelerator from day one.

Even those who form a team and raise money are doing this. It's not just the bootstrappers. For instance, I can name 3-4 people in my admittedly tiny sphere who had an idea, raised significant amounts of money, built a product, promptly failed, then pivoted multiple times before running out of cash.

It's as if starting a business has become _so_ easy, that it's easier to just do it and see what happens rather than invest any kind of time and effort in researching the market first. This shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude is spurred along by stories of huge multi-billion-dollar companies being born out of half-assed "so what now?" pivots. (See Twitter.)

In my experience, it's ok to do this once or twice because in your first at- bat, you don't know what you're doing anyway, so stopping to assess a market is just a waste of time. Put a year or two into something, get a feel for how it's done, and if you don't turn into Mark Zuckerberg (home run on first shot), you'll be better prepared to assess the validity of future projects. (That said, the best of my 4 businesses was the first, so there are exceptions.)

While I admire his entrepreneurial spirit, the author of this article (and his partners?) seem to have taken the "shoot first" philosophy a bit too far. 10 startups in 7 years seems extreme to me. The optics of it, from a potential investor's perspective, seem negative, too.

<comment><USER3> The best advice I've heard for "shoot first" people is to sell your product before it exists. If you can't convince anybody to give you money on the pitch, then chances are that you won't be able to sell it after it's built either.

Unfortunately this advice doesn't apply well to a lot of consumer, ad- supported startups , but it would apply well to this guy's "modest"(nobody's ever given me $250k for anything) success (GroupScript).

More of argument against consumer startups than against this principle.

<comment><USER2> "Shoot first" is definitely more widespread (and probably has a better chance of working) on the consumer side.

I have done it on the enterprise side, though, and the experience wasn't all bad. I built a face recognition system to spot TV reporters on the air and auto-tweet. It was a "neat"-enough idea that I was able to get 3 TV stations to run pilot programs. In the end, even though it doubled traffic to the TV stations' live streams, it turns out they barely make any money that way and unflattering screen shots irritated the reporters. You can argue that I should have researched harder up front, but if 3 different top-15 TV groups representing 125+ stations were willing to try it out, it wasn't far off. It was close enough to a big score and took so little time (1 year) to iterate, it was worth the try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like after the first startup, you realized that Lativa is not a good market for startups. And then you went and created 9 more in Lativa and learned the same lesson over and over.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment! My favorite so far :) And partly true as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> all this work seems to span 7 years, and your only significant success was $250k (split ~7 ways) - ouch.

definitely some interesting stories and some ballsy attempts - albeit that there was probably too much focus on opportunistic copy / pasta ideas and capitalising on Latvia's lack of search competition, rather than meaningful value creation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess this is a matter of perspective, couple of years ago $250k looked like success to me if you take into account that salary for a developer in Latvia was about 1,5k usd per month, and the profit was split 3 ways. And actually I see getgamers.eu (ad network for gaming sites, profitable since Jan 2013) and maxtraffic.com (1.2 years old, will be profitable next month) as my success, both are still active and growing, but did not mention these in the blog post because they have not failed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why are (were?) you so concentrated on Latvia? That's like starting an online business limited only to the inhabitants of a middle-sized city.

Given your energy, I'm certain you will create something big someday.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! In the beginning I had no experience and ambitions, and did not even think that Latvia could be too small, but since 2012 all new ideas/projects are built with larger markets in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main conclusion you can draw from this story is that you should read, learn, research and think more before doing something, not after.

<comment><USER8> I think this entrepreneur should be given a little bit more credit than your post suggests:

1) He is willing to share his experiences which I think is brave and should be applauded.

2) He is obviously learning hard won lessons which I think are the best kind. I certainly learnt more from my business failures than successes.

3) Based on his HN comments he seems to have had two successes out of 12 tries (assuming 10 failures mentioned in the blog plus the 2 other tries that are still alive). I think this isn't too bad.

4) He has a location disadvantage. Sure you can argue that the Internet levels the playing field but I don't quite buy it. I don't know for sure but I suspect that Latvia's tech start-up community is nascent compared to other geographic locations. I argue that start-up culture and knowledge are highly valuable and while the Internet can help to transmit this I believe that, "being there is everything".

If I would throw in my two cents in I would kindly suggest to this entrepreneur to:

1\. Keep going and maintain momentum

2\. Build up a network and start finding complementary team members, and

3\. Focus on hard/valuable problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right about Latvia tech start-up community - before 2012 we had only 1 monthly meetup group, and only later TechHub Riga - a co-working space for start-ups was launched, and now it is expanding, and other places are being opened as well. So basically the start-up community is active here for about 3 years.

Thank you for the tips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I sent this article to a few entrepreneurial-minded developer friends who tend to build first, research/think/plan/market later. And to be fair, that's how I used to be too. Startups need builders, but researchers/thinkers/planners/marketers are just as important, if not more so.

<comment><USER10> How do you research a market from the outside? Especially in digital/saas products where the barrier to entry is already low, it seems to me that the successful people don't want to give up their competitive advantage by telling the world how to reproduce their business model (for good reason).

<comment><USER8> Hi pault,

The way I would go about it is:

Start talking to potential customers. Find out how painful and valuable the problem is. Find out if they are currently using some other solution to the problem (your competitors).

Approach an industry organisation, if there is one, and talk to them about the problem, who has any existing or new solutions and find out if they have market research from their members.

Just a comment about the above two points, you don't have to pitch your specific solution to the problem but I would still leave the door open when you are talking to people and say something like, "if I were to come up with a solution that would do (insert features and benefits) would you be interested in talking further?" If the problem just isn't perceived by your customers to be painful or valuable then I would move on.

Now assuming the pain is sufficient and a solution is valuable then start looking at the economics of the business and start 'building the market.' What I mean by that is start with some assumptions about customer characteristics, for example demographics, and start putting some numbers together in terms of total market size. Try to do this from different angles and use different assumptions.

Then start playing around with what you think your cost and profit structure would look like with different business models. Think about what your cash burn rate will be and what sort of adoption you will need to hit a 'cash neutral' and break even scenario.

Then start applying this to your 'whole of market' model that you did before and start thinking if it makes sense. Do you need 1% or 0.0001% of the market to start adopting your solution? What might it cost to acquire those customers in terms of time and money? Start thinking about how that relates to hitting your 'cash neutral' and break even scenario.

Take a step back. Does this make sense? How much work is involved? How much capital are you going to need to achieve this? Then multiply that by say 4-5 times to give you a margin for error.

Now start thinking about post 'cash neutral' scenarios where you are capturing different rates of the market. How much do your costs ramp up? What is your marginal profitability? What does this equate to in terms of return on capital? If the returns are low then forget it. Investors want you to return their capital plus a big fat profit. If you don't think you can grow a big enough pie so you can get a slice of it that will satisfy you then forget it and find another opportunity.

If things look like they are stacking up well and you got a good story to sell to investors then good luck. Raising money is a bitch. Assuming you manage to get enough then things get harder because you will now have to execute within the cash 'runway' you have been given and well the rest at that point is up to you, your team and luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for sharing! Can you tell us more about MaxTraffic.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a service for e-commerce sites that helps increase conversion rates by showing engaging messages/banners when visitors are about to leave.</comment></comment>


Launch HN: Satchel (YC S18) – Guides to the Best SaaS Tools - <AUTHOR> Hey HN! I'm Andrew, one of the makers of Satchel. (https://satchel.com). We write SaaS buying guides. We vigorously test products in different SaaS categories, write reports about our findings, and then try to identify the best product for a typical early-stage startup. Along the way, we uncover and share info that should be obvious (but isn't), and point out any caveats and pitfalls you might encounter.
We're like The Wirecutter / Consumer Reports for SaaS, minus the affiliate links / paywall (more on this later).
There's a real information problem in B2B software. Without prior experience, it's hard to know how to evaluate a product, figure out what differentiates it, learn all relevant background, and compare against alternatives. Many times, it's difficult even to decipher what exactly a product does. As a buyer, you're often in the position of having to make a high-quality decision on something you're far from being an expert on. If you're anything like me, you often don't even know what you don't know.
There are plenty of crowd-sourced review sites out there, but they usually all end up filled with 5-star reviews that boil down to "I used X [and only X] and it was good." There is also an abundance of startup tool lists and directories, yet the problem is less about seeing what tools are out there and more about figuring out which one to use.
We're taking a different path, one that others have tended to avoid. We do hands-on testing and write in-depth long-form for each category of tools (with plenty of summaries to make it useful even when skimming), which can't be replaced with code (even though we, as engineers, sincerely wish that weren't the case). We're not reliant on vendors, so we can say what we actually think about a product, both upsides and downsides, instead of being pressured to normalize everything we say around "pretty good."
I see us as fundamentally helping you do something akin to time/information arbitrage. If lots of startups are each spending, say, ten hours doing the exact same research and testing, why doesn't someone spend 100 hours doing that research and then freely distribute the results? Everyone would save time yet get higher quality information.
Right now, we have three longform guides geared towards startups just starting out: store of money (https://satchel.com/store-of-money), incorporation service (https://satchel.com/incorporation), and web analytics (https://satchel.com/web-analytics). We have preliminary results (but not full writeups) for a lot more categories at https://satchel.com/handbook.
We don't expect to support ourselves financially in the same way as The Wirecutter (affiliate program) or Consumer Reports (paywall). Affiliate programs are mostly conflict-of-interest-free when rates are standardized across products (e.g. via Amazon for consumer goods), but are a lot harder to execute properly in a fragmented market like B2B software's. I'm also personally opposed to paywalling our work (I spent a lot of my formative years as a bio researcher, and I'd sincerely claim that open-access was a saving grace). Instead, we think there are ways we can increase the efficiency of the SaaS procurement/purchasing process, and intend to monetize there based on value-add.
We would love to hear your feedback and your experiences with B2B software. I'm personally excited to be sharing this with HN, and I'll be here to answer any and all questions you want to throw my way! <comment><USER3> I like the concept. Yet it feels like an echo chamber when the YC saas review company only reviews other YC based web analytics products after leading off with talk from YC parter about how everyone is doing it wrong... Do you think your audience won't notice the heavy YC bias?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I totally agree with you. This is something that we thought hard about, because our initial three guides are dominated by YC companies.

I think the main explanation is that YC companies, to a much greater extent than other companies, tend to focus on early-stage startups. As our guides are currently focused on early-stage startups, we naturally see more YC companies represented in the guides.

If anything, I'd argue that we're so aware of this that we need to consciously avoid overcorrecting in the other direction.

<comment><USER4> Have you thought about collecting reviews from "real" users of the products to supplement your analysis?

There's potentially a misaligned-incentives problem with review sites which themselves do the reviews. The latest episode of the FYI podcast[0] goes through this problem with the founder of Capiche[1] (looks like a competitor of yours) and the founder was explaining how firms like Gartner basically have two sets of customers: The software buys and the software sellers. The software sellers can actually pay Gartner to get in front of an analyst and sell them on their product.

I don't know to what extent this makes Gartner's recommendations less useful, but it seems like it would make it hard for smaller companies to get on the radar. I think the fundamental problem is that the analysts are not actual users of the software.

So I like Capiche's direction, but I dislike the fact that they're a "closed" invite-only website.

[0] [https://twitter.com/ARKInvest/status/1261421627717218305](https://twitter.com/ARKInvest/status/1261421627717218305)

[1] [https://capiche.com](https://capiche.com)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for mentioning Capiche! I think there's so much opportunity in this space so I'm stoked to see anyone else joining in.

At the very start, I wanted Capiche to be essentially Wirecutter for SaaS. We ended up going in a different direction, but I'm super impressed with Satchel's execution here, and as someone who spends a crazy amount of time on this stuff, I learned a bunch of new things reading through the site today.

I really don't want to hijack @fission's launch discussion, but thought I'd just reply to your comment on the invite-only thing: our site will be wide open soon-ish. Just taking our time building a community around high quality discussion (most of which has little to do with comparisons/reviews), but eventually will open it all up. Think of it like Stack Overflow's private beta...just a step in the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Austin, I appreciate the thoughtfulness and the kind words.

I think even though we're working in different directions, we share a lot of the same values and see similar issues with the status quo. When (I hope not if) quarantine's over, let's grab a coffee :) — my email's in my profile

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _> There's a real information problem in B2B software. Without prior experience, it's hard to know how to evaluate a product, figure out what differentiates it, learn all relevant background, and compare against alternatives. Many times, it's difficult even to decipher what exactly a product does. As a buyer, you're often in the position of having to make a high-quality decision on something you're far from being an expert on. If you're anything like me, you often don't even know what you don't know._

Amazing copywriting here. I'm sure this deeply resonates with many people in tech. I'll be looking forward to your service expanding its coverage on many more SaaS providers and their offerings.

Edit: I had a quick look at your site. I wonder if targeting a smaller range of reading duration could help. Right now it's all the way from a shorter 12 minutes to a really lengthy 38 minutes, which seems like a huge variation to me. I get that some services will need far fewer words than others. I like that the summaries are all short enough, and help decide whether to read the full article or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the kind comment! To be honest, I didn't really think about that paragraph too much — I just wrote down my own qualms/experiences in a list, and eventually decided to consolidate it into a paragraph. It was just something that I felt strongly about.

> I had a quick look at your site. I wonder if targeting a smaller range of > reading duration could help.

This is something that we tried to deal with through the overall summaries, the rating matrices, product summaries, etc. I completely agree that it'd be overkill for everyone to read a super long guide, which is why we added those components. However, we also wanted to ensure that if a reader wanted to go in-depth into the reasoning/background/justification behind something, we would have the information right there.

Granted, it's not perfect yet (I've spent a lot of time responding to emailed questions with "actually, we discuss that in this paragraph/section/sidenote/etc.", so there's clearly room for improvement on our end), but we're working on it! Any suggestions on this front would be super helpful, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very excited! One of the most common questions within the YC community is which product should I use for X. As an avid user of Wirecutter for consumer items I think this approach is very interesting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh, and I'd like to add — one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this launch is because it's been a crazy journey so far. I entered YC as a solo founder fresh out of college, working on a near-polar-opposite product (mobile 3D reconstruction; highly-technical). We worked hard on that for nearly two years, and only recently made the decision to change directions. If it's interesting, I'd be happy to give perspective on this decision and my experiences so far.

<comment><USER8> Congrats on the launch, Andrew! I'm curious to learn more about your experience in mobile 3D reconstruction. Did you publish anything? I'm curious because I'm working in the 3D reconstruction space as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't publish anything. Mainly, we focused on making 3D reconstruction practical for B2B use cases.

It's interesting, because I personally see the idea of commercializing academic research to be well-intentioned, but a bit more difficult than it sounds.

Some more thoughts from a previous HN thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753553)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What missing is how these services are integrating and interconnecting with each other. I.e. "SaaS legos". + do they allow easy automation using various nocode/lowcode tools (i.e. Zapier, etc.).

For example, I want to incorporate a C-Corp, get a linked bank account, a business credit card, get an intro to a startup law firm and accounting service, be able to use invoicing, accounting and payroll software integrating with above services, etc.

Same with the analytics, CRM and project management software - they should all play well together.

I would gladly pay a premium for this kind of integration.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love this. Every company I've worked for (mostly startups) have made at least a few terrible decisions when selecting b2b software because founders / decision makers have to make decisions quickly to get up and running and can't necessarily spend a lot of time exploring different services and thinking about future needs. Those tools become so integrated into business processes that it's hard to switch away when you come across another, better tool. Seems like this would be a big help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, startups are in the position of having to make high-velocity yet high- quality decisions, yet without too many resources to accomplish either. A bunch of our own decisions in the early-days mostly came down to asking some founder friends, throwing our hands up, and mentally flipping a coin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks super useful. I can't count the number of times I've ended up on one of those ranking sites that feels like an affiliate scam.

One suggestion: for your "ratings matrix" it would be easier to parse if you kept the "our take" section out of it so all of the ranking icons appear close to each other. [https://imgur.com/a/PmX1TLu](https://imgur.com/a/PmX1TLu)

<comment><AUTHOR> > I can't count the number of times I've ended up on one of those ranking > sites that feels like an affiliate scam.

Totally agree. We took a close look to figure out what made some review sites slimy (and frankly not very useful). It mostly came down to what you'd expect: all reviews are normalized to be generally positive, lots and lots of recommended products, etc. That's why we made a deliberate decision to not go down that route.

> One suggestion: for your "ratings matrix" it would be easier to parse if you > kept the "our take" section out of it so all of the ranking icons appear > close to each other.

Appreciate the suggestion, I see what you're getting at. Most design issues come back to me, so I'll take a look at it and see if we can't make it easier to compare all ratings at once.

<comment><USER12> It might be outside the purview of your product, but it would be useful if it borrowed some from rtings.com and became an interactive rfp/selection tool.

Allow weighting of whats important and whats not, to re-sort the results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally! It's something we've considered, and it wouldn't be too hard to implement. The reason why we've deferred it is because we've found that most early-stage startups are pretty homogeneous in their requirements, so a self- weighing system like you suggested is a little excessive. That said, I think it's very much something that we'll revisit when we start delving into later- stage-startup topics.

Thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER12> Even moreso than just a one person ranking, being able to have a team sign in, and different divisions and functional groups rank and prioritize their needs, and having it roll up into an organizational score. That is a place where you could monetize. [https://www.scoutrfp.com/](https://www.scoutrfp.com/) and [https://www.loopio.com/](https://www.loopio.com/) play in this space.

There's also the side of vendor management once you do make a selection. Even a service that manages and negotiates for you. [https://www.vendr.com/](https://www.vendr.com/)

Do you have a page planned for [https://carta.com/](https://carta.com/) and the like?

Or talent sourcing? [https://gocatalant.com/](https://gocatalant.com/) [https://www.hellogustav.com/](https://www.hellogustav.com/) [https://www.lever.co/](https://www.lever.co/) [https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance- websites](https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-websites)

Smaller tools as well - [https://www.privacytools.io/](https://www.privacytools.io/)

Once you get bigger, a single page playbook of all the best choices would be great [https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance- tools](https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-tools)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looking at your "The Best Store of Money" – I'm baffled that First Republic Bank even made the list. We're in the process of switching away from them because of how broken their web interfaces are, and how hard it is to connect them to other tools which makes it hard for our accounting team to automated their work.

I think you really need to do a lot more interviews with people that have been users of these products.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the datapoint! I'd like to break your comment down into what I believe are the two main points, and address them independently.

1\. On whether or not FRB should be in the list — we certainly think they should. Based on the founder surveys we sent out, we found that FRB was quite- well represented across the startup community (and I think that your datapoint adds to that finding). Our inclusion of a company/product is not an endorsement, but rather a result of what we think would be useful to test for the community. In this case, we evaluated FRB because we know a lot of founders (including yourself) have considered/are using them.

2\. On whether our evaluation reflects your experience — this is the more interesting point for us. We have data from ~15 founders re: FRB, ranging from full-blown interviews to anecdotes. In general, we didn't hear anything substantially negative about their core banking service, but we aren't going to conclude that they're perfect from that data alone. That said, the founder data was informative enough to draw some directionally-accurate conclusions from, although additional data points help us both realign as well as shrink or expand our confidence interval.

If you're willing to email me about your experience with FRB, we'd very much like to look it over and take it into account when we update the guide.

<comment><USER13> On 1: this is because they've done a great job with partnerships. Cerkly's corporation set-up becomes free if you sign up with FRB – this was a YC deal we used. So this doesn't mean much.

2\. I recognize that this is generally a hard job. Our original product/company was along the same lines as Wirecutter ([https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ask-suto- launch/](https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ask-suto-launch/)) and it's an extremely tough path to take. I do feel that it's easier for businesses since the value-props/features are a lot more distinct in how businesses make decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very interested in seeing how you try to make a business out of this!

I spent ~3-4 hours a few weeks ago deciding what analytics products to buy and I ended up creating a cost/benefit sheet on each option. If you guys existed back then I could have just linked to you instead.

</comment><comment><USER15> Disclosure: a self-promoting plug. Have you heard about [https://www.saashub.com](https://www.saashub.com). That's the product I'm working on. I'm trying to solve the same problem - a marketplace with as objective as possible software alternatives. The lists are based on an aggregation of articles and directory mentions from everywhere around the web. That makes it more difficult to skew the results. For example, one product might be subjectively promoted in one list; however, when you take the average of 10 lists, the best options will end up at the top.

</comment><comment><USER16> If this is done right, this would be a fantastic asset. I read two of the articles and they seem quite well done and seemingly more objective than I'd expect on similar sites. I'm in the process of launching my own product, so all of the existing comparisons are relevant and appreciated.

One small problem: on my 10.5" iPad the table of contents are cut off and I can't even horizontal scroll them into view (despite the fact that the page does horizontal scroll). Even in landscape, the layout isn't quite right. The content itself is viewed no problem, though.

Kudos!

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the feedback. Our goal is really only to be useful, which naturally ends up with us covering a lot of background (e.g. for store of money: what is a cash sweep, how is yield determined, what are the underlying incentives for various startups, etc.). Plus, by holding ourselves to a standardized set of criteria, it's a lot easier to stay objective.

I'll take a look to see if we can't address formatting in the mid-range of window sizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is your business model? I see the value in what you're doing, but struggling with how you'll make money and scale enough for YC to justify funding you.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is going to be a bit of a roundabout answer, so please bear with me.

Our first task is to prove we there we can provide sufficient value through objective info, and in helping people figure out which tools to invest in.

This is a bit of a convoluted way to say that we aren't 100% sure on long-term monetization, but we do know it probably won't be wirecutter-type affiliate nor paywall. We fully subscribe to the pg thought process behind this: [http://paulgraham.com/good.html](http://paulgraham.com/good.html). That said, if we can accomplish our goal, we believe we can make money somehow, whether by offering value-added services or something else. Keep in mind that we're software developers ourselves, so we're in a position to build something once it becomes clear where the opportunity is; we're not just review-writers. For now, we're focused on producing as much value as we can by writing useful reviews. Speaking of which, we'd really like to hear what would be most useful to you in evaluating SaaS products!

<comment><USER17> Got it. Thanks for the detailed answer. I formed a company early this year and using - ZenBusiness for incorporation, Gusto for Payroll, Bill.com for invoicing, Radius Bank for online banking, Stripe for payments, Shopify for storefront, etc. You may want to start segmenting reviews for the needs for types or applications, types of businesses, stages of endeavors (eg. early stage vs. growth), etc. One of the areas I see is for helping tech startups evaluate their cloud provider (AWS vs. Azure Vs. GCP Vs. other) options based on the product they are building. Just my 2c. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This could be very cool, but I'm interested in your business model. I'm sure you're unbiased now, but ultimately you'll need to make money, which has a tendency to bias things. One of the reasons I've trusted The Wirecutter in the past is because they're pretty up-front about how they support themselves. Being vague about that seems like it'd make it hard for Satchel to build that same kind of trust.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I shared some thoughts on this earlier ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237147)), but I also wanted to take some time to discuss the points you made.

Completely agree that The Wirecutter's up-front-ness and monetization is well- aligned with the end customer. Wirecutter's affiliate model works well with consumer goods b/c affiliate rates are mostly standardized (mainly by Amazon), which mostly mitigates conflicts of interest. This doesn't work as well in SaaS because vendors are so fragmented. This means that there would need to be a lot of checks and balances to avoid bias in B2B software. That's why any eventual monetization likely won't look like Wirecutter's.

Once we settle on a way to make money, we'll make it transparent. I'm just being vague right now because we don't know what exactly that is, so we're being... transparently vague :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the idea for this is great, as it has the potential to save a lot of time and effort researching tools.

Some minor quibbles though.

I'm not getting any younger, and I find that the non-white background combined with the light weight of the font hard to read (Windows/Edge Chromium). I can't put my finger on it, I can't tell if it's the readability of the font itself or simply the weight. Text is a little easier to read on the purple background for the Summary section for some reason.

As a sanity check, I hopped onto the Wirecutter, which I frequent a lot, and they have a non-white background, but the serif font they use for the body text is a little heavier and much easier to read for my aging eyes.

For the Analytics article, I think adding screen grabs would help break up the monotony of long streams of text, and give people an idea of what the UI looks like for the product(s). One of the first things I look for on any SAAS landing page are screenshots, so I can see what the UI looks like. Adding screen grabs in your reviews would save some time for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comment — feedback like yours helps us continuously find ways to improve!

I'm really interested in digging in a bit deeper, as you've expressed some thoughts we haven't heard before, and I'm hoping to improve the site more.

> I'm not getting any younger, and I find that the non-white background > combined with the light weight of the font hard to read

This is interesting. The text color is #000, and the background color is #fafafa. This is a higher contrast ratio than the wirecutter, hn, etc. Since the purple background is easier to read on, it might be that the text is actually too high-contrast. It probably doesn't help that our font is a bit on the narrow side. I have a couple of ideas on how to fix it, but don't have a great idea on how to test it.

> I think adding screen grabs would help break up the monotony of long streams > of text, and give people an idea of what the UI looks like for the > product(s). One of the first things I look for on any SAAS landing page are > screenshots, so I can see what the UI looks like. Adding screen grabs in > your reviews would save some time for me.

This is particularly interesting for me to hear. Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on how exactly you use screengrabs in your decisions? In my personal experience (emphasis on personal), screengrabs don't provide much value because they're mainly used as feature demonstrations.

We try to take an approach where we don't focus on the features, but rather the overall impact in aggregate (e.g. we won't focus on who has the best funnel analysis, but will ask who has the best core analytics functionality). We strongly believe that this synthesis approach is more useful, but it also means that features overviews are lower priority.

However, I'd be curious to know how you use them, as it sounds like you get value from them beyond just feature understanding. With a better understanding of how you use them, we can go back and get screenshots that best fit the kind of value that you get from them.

<comment><USER19> For the fonts:

I think the stroke of the font is just too thin, or maybe it's the font's letterspacing as well. As far as sites go in general, my eyes struggle with reading the text on Satchel in particular. It could also be Windows' rendering of the font. I see that you're using Avenir Next? For what it's worth, it looks a little bit better on Firefox for Windows. Edge Chromium and Chrome look the same. I opened up the inspector and changed the body color to #fff and it is an improvement.

The contrast in numbers might be better than HN or the Wirecutter, but I find that HN's font and the Wirecutter's font easier to read. In short spurts, the font is somewhat fine, but because reviews are so text heavy, it becomes harder to read.

Keep in mind that all of this is highly subjective and based on my personal vision.

For the screenshots:

It's hard to explain, but I want to see how stuff is organized on the screen, etc. And while I would like to say looks aren't important, I'd be lying if I said that stuff didn't matter. If you are reviewing multiple products, I definitely want to see comparative screenshots for the same function. What would be even better would be short animated gifs showing how navigation work between apps.

Oh, another thing I noticed. Your Consumer Reports style icons in the Ratings Matrix are great, but when I hover over them, I don't get a tip as to what they mean. IIRC, CR puts a legend for the icon on top of the pages that use those icons.

<comment><AUTHOR> re: fonts — I booted up my windows machine, and you're right, it renders abnormally narrow and is hard to see. No CSS rendering options could fix it, so I think it just comes down to how Windows handles the font. We'll try to swap it out for something more legible, but big thanks to you for bringing this up either way.

re: screenshots — I think I see the point you're trying to make. We'll get something up and running and see how it works.

re: tooltips — just pushed something to add them

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ethical considerations are a significant factor in my SaaS (and stack) selections, and seem to have been entirely omitted from these analyses. If it helps guide your content direction any, I give a great many shits about a) user privacy (super relevant to analytics), and b) socially responsible investment (again, but for capital holding) and so forth.

It tends to be a binary consideration. For example, I said no to React; not because viable alternatives exist, but ruled out of contention entirely because the vendor is the Philip Morris of tech.

Just as the rag trade can get by with excluding sweatshops from their supply chain, I think it's incumbent on those of us privileged enough to be able to start/run a tech company to navigate our preferences as much by a moral compass as any other. So I'd value the opportunity to make better informed decisions in that dimension.

<comment><USER20> _Note to self, for future reference: the comment above was upvoted during European daytime and downvoted during US daytime._

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love this, I've spent time researching a lot of these topics before and I'm looking forward to saving time in the future.

One small feedback is to visually highlight the top pick more. My workflow with reviewers like The Wirecutter is to scroll straight to the "our pick" section. This assumes I have some level of trust in the reputation of the reviewer as being thoughtful.

Caveats:

\- The top pick is noted in the summary but it's always one of many bullet points.

\- It's also the first row of the summary matrix, but that wasn't immediately obvious to me.

\- I may be more of a skimmer than your target user.

</comment><comment><USER22> Really like this idea. As a consultant I often get asked "what is the best payment processor/analytics/hosting/etc". I often feel a little dirty saying "Stripe/Google/Azure or AwS" because I haven't _really_ evaluated them all and determined which is "best" by any measure other than "it's what I know". Googling "best payment provider" just reveals sales pitches. Definitely a market for exhaustive analysis on this stuff. One thought: it changes by the month. Keep it current testing new features and services.

</comment><comment><USER23> I know someone who reviews website builders and do 44k $ /m with affiliates, I'm curious on these business models ! You did a very good job guys ! Good luck and I'm sure it will succeed.

</comment><comment><USER24> Feedback.

1\. I like the idea and like people have said, it would be good to go beyond the YC "echo chamber".

2\. It is important to have some fairly establish (boring) players but there are good reasons why. Longevity amongst others. See:([https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23244624](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=23244624))

3\. It would be a good idea to have an open source option in each category.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a fan of Wirecutter, this looks really useful.

Small nit: dashes over underscores on URLs and looks like you don't have metatags properly set (Facebook, Twitter etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the suggestions. You're right about dashes, will look to fix. Lack of metatags comes down to the lack of any social media accounts.

<comment><USER12> Another nit: Page titles are all just Satchel. The tab name (or when I hover over a tab, the tooltip) should tell me what page I have open.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pushed! Thank you for the suggestion — completely forgot about some meta tags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Super confused (YC S20) is about to start, Satchel posted three reviews for all YC companies, and were part of (YC S18) — how is this company related to YC? Maybe it's me, but if the company you pitch on demo day does not make it, appending YC batch to the startup regardless of if the founders were part of a prior batch to me feels like well I don't know, but at the very least am curious what is going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> It definitely is a bit confusing, I'd agree with you there — I'll try to explain it:

Put shortly, this is the exact same company that YC invested in back in S18. The product may be different, but the underlying company (in the legal sense) is the same.

When a startup pivots, they usually have two options: 1. shut down the company, return money to investors, and start afresh; or 2. continue with the same company, just with a different product. You'll hear varying opinions on the "right" way to approach it, but in general, YC startups usually take the latter option as YC is generally of the mindset of investing in the founders rather than the idea.

This is why Retool, Brex, Segment, GOAT, etc. are considered YC companies, despite completely changing what they were working on (the latter two substantially after demo day).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Congrats on the launch! Are you specifically focusing on startup software or will you be eventually expanding to other verticals like e-commerce?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Focused on info for the earliest stages of a startup for now, but we're continuously progressing towards later-stage topics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's missing for me is your business model. If I don't know how you (plan to) make money, how can I trust your judgement?

</comment><comment><USER29> Hey! Love this idea, how can we get Blook.io added to the incorporation services? We are a stripe atlas / gust alternative :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll take a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> On a side note, and no pun intended, I find it interesting that you find the need to mention that you are a ex-YC company to draw attention towards your offering. I'm curious to know how many upvotes this launch would have have gathered once you take that out. Just saying.

<comment><USER31> We're on HN. Mentioning your company's YC class is less like "free attention" and more like "full disclosure".

<comment><USER30> Not sure I agree. I've seen many repeat founders showcase their product without mentioning their credentials. Here are the D3js founders showcasing ObservableHQ, and commenters discovering the team post a background check, no mention of their background anywhere: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16274686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16274686)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is super well done! One thought: big companies that make a lot of purchasing decisions would probably pay for a special tier of access, perhaps one that includes phone calls with your team that have actually done the reviews (reminds me of what GLG does).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks, appreciate the kind words! It's definitely something that we thought about (and are continuing to think through). There is also the question of service vs. product businesses, although there are certainly a lot of comparables for the former.

For now, however, we're mainly focused on making ourselves useful for early- stage companies. Certainly something we're thinking about however!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is really awesome! I've personally experienced optional paralysis multiple times when trying to evaluate different SaaS products. I will be keeping an eye on all of your recommendations!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, appreciate the feedback! Would you be willing to go into some more detail into how these decisions played out for you in the past?

<comment><USER33> Sure! I've mainly struggled with decisions for live chat, project management, product analytics, and bookkeeping.

For live chat, I started on Drift, and then I got really tired of their buggy iOS app. I saw that you also mentioned their history of engineering issues in the handbook, and I've personally experienced a lot of these issues. I switched to Intercom, and they've been much better. However, I'm still very disappointed in the iOS app, because I can't tag any messages. This is a critical part of my workflow, because I use a new tool called Savio ([http://savio.io](http://savio.io)) for tracking feature requests and customer feedback, and they have an integration with Intercom that relies on message tagging. Otherwise, Intercom has been great on desktop. (Except for a really annoying issue with Turbolinks, because the Intercom widget "bounces" on each page load. I've reached out to their customer support about this.)

For project management, I was originally using Trello. Then I briefly tried to use Airtable, but that didn't work very well after a while. Then I had a great product management consultation with the founder of Savio (Kareem Mayan - highly recommended by the way! [https://www.reemer.com/](https://www.reemer.com/)). He helped me get set up on Clubhouse.io, which has been awesome. I've also really enjoyed having a "feedback triage" layer in Savio, so that I'm not just adding every idea directly into my todo list. My only issue with Clubhouse is that I wish there was an easier way to add a new task directly from each column in the kanban view, similar to Trello's "\+ Add another card" button.

For product analytics - This is a bit embarrassing, but the option paralysis has been so bad so that I just didn't make any decision at all. I was just using Google Analytics on every page and tracking a few events, but "Evaluate Heap vs Mixpanel vs Amplitude" has been on my roadmap forever, and I would read Quora answers and try to figure out which one I should be using, but then I would just give up. Also everything is extremely expensive! But anyway, thanks to your article, I finally set up Heap analytics! But here's one thing I couldn't find any answers for - should I be adding Heap to all of my pages (including landing page, documentation site, blog, etc.). Or should I just add it inside the application, only for signed-in users? I was thinking that it would be nice to get more visibility into how people are reading the docs, because I'm working on a developer tool where the documentation is a critical part of the onboarding process. And I definitely want to know if someone signs up after reading through the docs. But on the other hand, maybe I don't want to track all anonymous users, because if I blow past their free plan limit then $500/mo is extremely expensive. Oh, so maybe I actually want to use Amplitude!

I already ran into a free plan limit with FullStory recently. I wanted to start tracking a page that was getting a lot of traffic, because there was a bug that was really hard to reproduce. I accidentally blew past the free plan limit and couldn't use them for the rest of the month, because their paid plan started at 5 figures per year.

I started on Bench.co for bookkeeping, and they were great for a year, but I could start to tell that they weren't the best choice for a SaaS business. They also referred me to an accounting service that hasn't been very good. (It's been very hard to get a response from them, and I actually still have no idea if they've even filed my taxes for 2019. I think I might need to sue them soon if I don't hear anything.)

So I moved to Pilot.com this year, and they've been awesome! It's so much nicer to have my books in Quickbooks Online. I'm planning to start using Flightpath Finance at some point ([https://www.flightpathfinance.com](https://www.flightpathfinance.com)). I had an initial call with them, and they talked about all the reasons why Bench.co wasn't a great choice, I should be using accrual accounting vs cash accounting, and having my books in Quickbooks makes it much easier to work with accountants and other services, etc. I think I might even fire my current accountant and just use Pilot's tax services this year.

I think that's about it for now, and would be happy to answer any questions!

P.S. I searched everywhere to see if I could find Satchel on Twitter. I think Twitter would be a perfect marketing channel for Satchel, because I would definitely follow an account that regularly tweeted about this topic and shared links to your reviews.

<comment><USER34> Nathan, did you check Countly? (which is at the top 10 analytics platforms on Google Play, according to Appfigures), and is not prohibitely expensive. Thought you may give it a try. (shameless plug: I am one of the cofounders).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What is your process/disclosure when signing up for these services? When they look at onboarding you as marketing instead of sales, does that affect things?

<comment><AUTHOR> Insofar we haven't outed ourselves as doing reviews, so we mainly used our own accounts or some burner accounts (we've got a few email addresses that will remain private). This allows us to get the actual customer experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is very interesting! Tiny issue report: the link for Amplitude in the handbook, under the web analytics section, is broken (it points to Mercury).

</comment><comment><USER37> Feedback on the tables: the vertical table headers are hard to read. Consider tilting them at an angle, or just switching to horizontal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the suggestions. To be honest, we spent a decent amount of time on table formatting, but we'll take another look. We think horizontal headings are out of the question though, b/c we don't see a way to preserve the table format going that route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Actually really like this. Those other review sites are too heavily gamed but this is a great approach.

</comment><comment><USER39> I view this as more akin to a Gartner/Forrester style analyst service coming "down" to the general SAAS market than coming "up" from the Wirecutter B2C arena.

Gartner, etc are all very much the paywalled exclusive access and strict control of reports that OP mentions.

What's not mentioned is that even with their incredible amounts of funding how difficult it is to do an evenhanded analysis of these truly complicated systems.

It's honestly just tough categorizing these things properly so you can get decent comparisons. Case in point Notion is on the front page today, their big selling point is that they can more or less do what would take half a dozen other more specialized SAAS to do. How do you slot them in against those?

Edit: case in point about categorization being hard: the 'web analytics' list is really about 'event analytics' (per the article) - which is fine but you still need web analytics services as well.

</comment><comment><USER40> The web analytics guide is questionable as the author/s repeatedly state in the preface that Google Analytics can only be used for page views not even tracking, which is false.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually have a sidenote that mentions that GA can be used for event-based tracking, but we've decided to skip over it in v1 of the guide because it's missing some critical analytics functionality. We're focused on the big three event-based analytics tools for now, but are going to add more info on tools that can be used for event-based analytics, but aren't primarily designed for that purpose, e.g. Pendo, GA, etc.

<comment><USER41> Also, there's no mention at all of GA App+Web (launched August 2019) - <USER2> is clearly the future of Google Analytics and uses an event-based model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for bringing this up. Just to clarify, the base version of GA provides an event-based model. GA App+Web is a feature of GA that's aimed at sharing/consolidating info between websites and mobile devices. We're focused on the web side of things, as we've insofar only written a web analytics article. We suspect GA becomes a bigger player when we take a look at mobile analytics, but we haven't fully delved into that yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I love it!</comment>


YC's new guide to raising a Series A - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-series-a-guide/ <comment><AUTHOR> We started YC's Series A Program two years ago to fix a problem faced by every startup raising an A: VCs understand how Series As work and founders do not. This asymmetry of information puts founders at a significant disadvantage. Much as YC had done for seed stage financings - we decided to resolve that asymmetry in order to help founders.

We learned some interesting things, for instance:

\- Founders on average have to meet with 30 investors to produce a single term sheet. ([https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/the-series-a- fundraisi...](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/the-series-a-fundraising- process))

\- Founders who take pre-emptive offers take 1.4% more dilution for less money than those who run processes. ([https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/pre- emptive-offers](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/pre-emptive-offers))

\- Benchmarks are almost meaningless. We've seen As for SaaS companies with 200k in ARR and with $9m in ARR. ([https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/benchmarks](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/benchmarks))

While we can't work directly with every company in the world trying to raise an A, we think that publicly distributing our learnings would help all founders. Our hope is that the Guide will remove information asymmetry from the Series A process, and help level the playing field between founders and VCs.

<comment><USER2> I don't know how data driven it was, but an accelerator I was in a few years ago said that they found that their seed stage startups with early revenue actually had a harder time raising a series A in many cases. Presumably due to the fact that VCs would try to extrapolate future market from that revenue or would wonder why the revenue wasn't higher already.

But if you were "pre-revenue" then they just accepted that you were pre- revenue by choice and everyone's imagination was the limit for future revenues.

<comment><USER3> This concept was literally parodied in Silicon Valley: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo)

Quite funny too.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I was quite amused when that came out because we had been told that a few years before that show even aired.

<comment><USER4> As a founder of an SF tech company that now makes tens of millions of dollars a year, our revenue was never enough (or made fast enough) for the investors we talked to when we were raising our early rounds. Sometimes, if we made $X in 6 months, the VC's "no" was "We would have liked to see you make that in 3 months". It's why I have a tough time watching Silicon Valley -- it's _too_ accurate and painful to watch.

<comment><USER5> I find it mind blowing that making robots to tap screens is such a lucrative business.

Who's buying all of these up?

<comment><USER4> The robot business isn't bad... Story for another day. But it's my first startup, the test automation SaaS business that's currently making the big $$. Literally any company with a web site or mobile app needs to test their stuff. It's a huge market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pachyderm had the good fortune to go through YC's first Series A program, I'm pretty sure we couldn't have raised without them, we'd tried and failed before. As with everything YC does, over time they've gathered more data, refined the methodology, and I think they've probably affected some change on VC's side as well as they're giving companies a better way to communicate with each other while they're raising, and sort of collectively bargain. This should be your go to guide for raising an A.

<comment><AUTHOR> And we had the good fortune to work with the two of you. I learned, and continue to learn, quite a lot watching you build Pachyderm!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the guide, although as a founder I'd say I have mostly given up on the idea of raising money from VCs. VCs care too much about vanity, and I don't fit the mold most VCs are looking for, thus they'd never invest in someone like me despite my track record of success.

These days I'm bootstrapping a couple small businesses (don't put all your eggs in one basket) and things are going well. It's tough as a solo founder, but I have a good set of friends who are cheering me on from the sidelines, and I make progress every day. I'm pretty skilled at most things, and for the areas I'm weak there's always Craigslist or Upwork.

I will say that the big advantage of not taking outside investment is that I don't feel any pressure to meet other people's expectations, I really enjoy the work I'm doing, and I get to reap 100% of the rewards.

Just to be clear, I intend to apply to YC again, and if a great funding opportunity came along I wouldn't say no, but I've also decided not to actively pursue VC funding anymore. For me, right now, the most sensible thing is to stay focused on building product and acquiring customers.

<comment><USER8> If you're not doing a business that can plausibly generate billions of dollars in the lifespan of a VC investment, you're probably not a good fit, because most of the returns in VC portfolios come from success on that scale. That's not vanity; it's just mathematics.

I'm with you, in that I'd much rather finance a business on revenue than on speculative investments. But I think too many people blame VC for something that's kind of intrinsic to their business model.

If you want to blame VCs for something, blame them for never giving a straight "no" answer when they know that's what their answer is, thus necessitating the dance described by the first half of this guide. _That 's_ not intrinsic to the model; that's just them being dicks.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, I'm only interested in building businesses that could potentially be very large.

VCs do indeed place massive emphasis on vanity because they live and die by reputation and perception. Twitter sentiment matters a lot when you're a VC. Additionally, markets care a lot about perception of success rather than 'real' success (though you could argue they're one in the same). There are plenty of examples of companies who raise massive amounts of investor capital strictly based on hype, without necessarily having the economics to support it. The early investors can win bigly merely by cashing out before the laggards jump on the bandwagon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is exceptionally well-written. And it looks like YC's design has stepped up quite a notch too :)

Quick question: how to reconcile these two almost-conflicting views:

1) Raising money is the CEO's job. If you are the CEO, you should plan for it to be your sole, full-time focus.[...] Do what you can to avoid distracting others with fundraising. Co-founders or other executives are typically only brought in to answer specific questions (e.g. CTOs handle technical diligence), and usually only at the full partnership stage.

Even in the rare case of co-CEOs, it's best to have a single point of contact. Investors want to see a clear decision-making process, which generally requires a final decision-maker. ([https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/prepare-your- company](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/prepare-your-company))

2) Signing on with a Series A lead is the beginning of a 10 year relationship. If all goes well, that's how long your board member will have a say in your company. As such, optimize for your board member, not vanity metrics, like valuation. ([https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/how-to-choose-an- inves...](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/how-to-choose-an-investor))

Given point 2), shouldn't non-CEO founders also be involved in at least some meetings with investors to weigh in on who they want to have as board members?

<comment><USER10> I don't think these are in contention. It's the CEOs job to focus on fundraising, it's other founders (and key hires) job to focus on doing the thing they are raising money for.

But that doesn't mean it's the CEOs decision alone when it comes to choosing - there is a lot of legwork to be done before you get there though. I'd absolutely expect other founders to be in later meetings, and a sounding board before then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazing guide. Everything I read makes sense. Also cool to see YC taking bio- tech so seriously [https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/for-hardtech- biotech-a...](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/for-hardtech-biotech-and- international-founders)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That means a lot.

And yeah, biotech is an important focus for us. Jared and Uri have been incredible at building that program and our knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a feeling that good portion of startups put emphasis on satisfying investors rather than customers, developing for the investors. One might say it is the same (good investor knows and follows what the paying customers want), but I think it is not. Customers of a product has very different mindset than an investor and the latter may not 'know' (more like guess) better than any one of us involved or affected. Investors do what they have to do, trying to find the future big deal (and money cow) or at least protecting their money but when startups adjust approaches for the admiration of investors then I get skeptical. And worry for the investor too a little bit if the path chosen will lead to customer appreciation as well... Don't mind me, I just ran into several startup entrepreneurs recently who emit the atmosphere of subsistence level actors with sole focus on the money source being the closest. They do not emit an inventor vibe which is ironic as what they speak of and sell is always very inventive or revolutionary, the best so far of course. I asked one of them how he imagines the product in 5 year time for which the answer was: 'sold to someone'. Seems like their heart and proud is somewhere else. I may have met the wrong crowd.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has YC come out with any guides on how companies can make employee equity more reasonable?

Things like allowing 10 years to exercise options, not allowing founders to own preferred shares, informing employees if any following rounds include liquidation preferences or guaranteed returns.

Right now I have a hard time trusting employee equity and I'd love to see someone create a checklist companies can either say they follow or specify where they don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> A few of us have written on this in the past, though we haven't written a specific guide for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it common for Series A term sheets to state valuation in post-money? I know the YC SAFE docs are [now] post-money. I wonder if that is driving the post- money valuation term in the Series A template, or is it just that this is typical? I've no idea what really happens but from the little I've picked up in casual browsing it seems that you typically raise on pre-money valuation

<comment><USER15> We were duped by a corporate accelerator on this. We negotiated the valuation of the company, and then when the docs came through, they portrayed that valuation as being inclusive of the money to be invested.

At the time, I investigated this and learned that most valuations are done on pre-money terms. It was just one of several scuzzy things that said corporate VC would do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/yc-standard-series- a-t...](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/yc-standard-series-a-term-sheet) has a wrong link to the term sheet. It links to [https://www.ycombinator.com/docs/Standard_Series_A_TS.docx](https://www.ycombinator.com/docs/Standard_Series_A_TS.docx) which is a 404. The actual link is [https://d1l6icgp8w0hse.cloudfront.net/assets/ycdc/Standard_S...](https://d1l6icgp8w0hse.cloudfront.net/assets/ycdc/Standard_Series_A_TS- aea3e3fec698645a5180351b59bddc11b21862954a7bfdc63c4f80cb7c7c1e21.docx)

</comment><comment><USER16> It's so helpful to see this all written down - nothing quite like this out there at all

</comment><comment><USER17> Great guide! Overall, agree with the thoughts on leverage and running an efficient process. However, speaking from experience and having spent time as a principal and associate, I would disagree with the advice that only pitching partners is worthwhile. Depending on the space(my experience is solely in hard tech), associates and principals generally make up the technical core of the team, so getting them excited is a key step in making overall progress. A good rule of thumb is to check LinkedIn. If the person has been there more than a year, assume even lower level folks have an ability to make go/no-go decisions.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting point. You're right that, for hard tech deals, the non- partners are often the relied upon experts.

To refine this point a bit - I don't think it's a bad idea to spend time with non-partners, but they're not the ones that you want to pitch in the standard sense. If you're trying to win a technical subject matter expert, your approach and dialogue are tailored for that specific conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Off topic: are $1M/$2M seed rounds realistic during YC demo day?

Even with some traction/users/conversion/revenue, and a grand long-term vision, a suggested 15%-25% dilution [1] gives $4-10M valuation. Outside SV, this is already Series A valuation. Any thoughts ?

[1] [https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-raise-a-seed- round/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-raise-a-seed-round/)

<comment><USER19> Yes getting $1M to $2M raised because of demo day is reasonable. Yet closing $2M on demo day without subsequent follow up meetings would be very impressive!

<comment><USER20> $1 million doesn't get you very far these days.

That only pays for the salaries of 5 engineers. And what about rent? That takes one salary itself. Which only leaves you with enough money for 4 engineers.

<comment><USER21> Give me 5 engineers and I will change the world.

<comment><USER20> Well, if you can encourage them to work 70 hours a week, and you work for free, then you'd get the equivalent of 10 engineers.

<comment><USER21> I will never encourage anyone to work 70 hours a week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is shockingly comprehensive and valuable; thank you. One minor suggestion is to generate a single-page or PDF version. I manually created one although of course this will go stale:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jKepii1hL9e-gkAsz906nRtgssz...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jKepii1hL9e-gkAsz906nRtgsszRXjWN/view?usp=sharing)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

A well laid out, single page version is high on our list. We simply didn't have a chance to put it together yet, but are working on it. Stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How much of this is relevant for companies based in locations that are NOT particularly venture capital heavy? Is this heavily slanted towards SV / SF investors that are well ahead of the pack?

<comment><USER24> I've raised money (not series A though) and I've got friends who have raised series A outside the Valley.

Expect the process to be slower but all the advice is very relevant.

Also I suspect most people raising series A outside of China/HK today probably at least consider a trip to SV when raising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is brilliant. Thanks for doing this - it's something we will most certainly be studying.

One thing that would be great to have in much more detail is how to do a dataroom. There's a lot of investor hate around docsend,etc. Not sure what's the socially acceptable way to do data rooms now - time bound, downloadable?, Etc

<comment><AUTHOR> Will add it to the list for the future. Unfortunately, there's a required balance here between what makes sense for you and what makes sense for the investor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Having just gone through this process, having a clear doc to point to is invaluable. Thank you YC!

</comment><comment><USER27> Bravo. This is essentially the most important stuff YC produces.

</comment><comment><USER28> I always assumed that raising money is akin to dating.

I.e. if you have the right product with tractions from dozen of customers, then the VC will find you?

Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> As with dating, you don't get what you want if you sit around at home hoping someone will find you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Dang, mind changing the title here? "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

Feels important for YC's submissions to follow the guidelines, otherwise it tells everyone else - hey why bother following them yourself when the people associated with the site don't follow them.

<comment><USER30> When the submitter is clearly the author of an article or project, we give some leeway about how they present their work to HN. You can see that most clearly at [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show). The exception, of course, would be if the title is misleading or baity, but "YC's new guide to Raising a Series A" isn't.

The way to understand the site guidelines is in a 'spirit of the law' way, not a 'letter of the law' way. If you watch closely you'll notice plenty of little deviations, but they should be in keeping with the underlying principles. In the case of the title guideline, the principles are (1) titles should be accurate and neutral (i.e. not misleading or linkbait) and (2) the content should get to speak for itself, and not be replaced by something that the submitter imposes over the author. When the submitter _is_ the author, #2 shifts a bit.

I appreciate your point, though, about needing a higher degree of visible consistency when the content is from YC. I'm happy to change the submission title, but I suggested to Aaron to change the article title instead and I think that's what they are going to do. Will check back in a bit. Thanks! Edit: looks like that's done now.

<comment><USER29> Thanks dang, that makes sense! Thanks for including the thought behind it as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Do you want to introduce kids to coding? This CANVAS playground is perfect - <AUTHOR> https://codeguppy.com <comment><USER2> Love the Magnetic Needles, Micro Spirograph, Pop Balloons, LavaLamp: they are very cool.

Visual sort is also impressive.

It reminds me all those little programs I used to do in my 10-18 yo days. (I was programming mostly on a Mac with Hypercard, Think Pascal, Resedit back then).

I used to reproduce all the small games I could program (Snake, Tetris, Solitary, Pacman, Breakout...) plus some educational projects (vocabulary quizz, irregular verbs, math plot, fractal drawing)

</comment><comment><USER3> In the tutorials, it would be nice if you can _not_ press the next button if you didn't run the code at least once.

In the landing page, when I click the image of a tutorial perhaps it must send me to the tutorial. (I can click the start tutorial button, but ...)</comment>