[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Satchel (YC S18) - Guides to the Best Saa...
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Launch HN: Satchel (YC S18) - Guides to the Best SaaS Tools
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!
Author : Fission
Score : 94 points
Date : 2020-05-19 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
| fishtoaster wrote:
| 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.
| saadalem wrote:
| 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.
| goleary wrote:
| 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
| Fission wrote:
| > 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.
| basch wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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!
| basch wrote:
| 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/
| and 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/
|
| Do you have a page planned for https://carta.com/ and the
| like?
|
| Or talent sourcing? https://gocatalant.com/
| https://www.hellogustav.com/ https://www.lever.co/
| https://www.hellobonsai.com/best-freelance-websites
|
| Smaller tools as well - 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
| chuckcode wrote:
| 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?
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| caseyf7 wrote:
| This really comes across in the choice of Brex for storing
| cash. I don't think most VCs would be comfortable with
| portfolio companies storing their millions with Brex (unless
| they are investors in Brex). Startup CFOs are not chasing yield
| with investor's money and really want the safest, most
| convenient option, that builds a relationship for the future if
| the company is successful.
| Fission wrote:
| This is actually a really interesting comment, because it
| reminds me of a meta-observation that I've made over the past
| few weeks.
|
| First off though, I want to clarify that the money market
| fund is typically not operated by the org. The GMMF choices
| for SVB are managed by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, etc., for
| Brex it is BNY Mellon, etc. You really only get self-operated
| funds for larger financial institutions, e.g. Wells Fargo or
| Fidelity. Therefore, many of these products act as a software
| layer over some existing bank/fund/etc. I believe we explain
| this distinction in the article. There are some caveats, but
| this is the general gist.
|
| But onto the meta-observation: given the current economic
| climate w/ depressed treasury rates, we've recently received
| a lot of questions about higher-yield options, specifically
| re: CDs which are currently hovering around 1.5%. These are
| from well-known, well-respected startups who presumably don't
| need the cash and don't need to deal with the high overhead
| and illiquidity of CDs. I think that this really demonstrates
| the survival instincts of later-stage founders being carried
| forward from their early days, and the fact that startups are
| functionally live optimization machines, not just at a
| product-level, but as an entire organization. It seems to us
| that the best startups eke out every advantage they can --
| with all respect to the nature of the power law, these small
| differences, in aggregate, might make or break the entire
| company.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| A few random thoughts to take with a grain of salt...
|
| You're aiming to be different from the crowdsourced reviews where
| people are like, "I used X [and only X] and it was good." But,
| how is "We tested X with a bunch of rather non-industry specific
| criteria, didn't use it in a real world application, and think
| the best choice should be ____" any better?
|
| When it comes to the whole time/information arbitrage issue, if I
| am faced with a major decision on choosing an SaaS solution, am I
| going to be comfortable spending a shorter period of time making
| the decision while getting information from one source (your
| guide)? If I am looking for the best web analytics tool, I am not
| going to spend 25 minutes reading a guide and make a decision I
| am confident in...this guide could contain all the information I
| will need to make the decision, but I am not going to be
| personally comfortable making the decision in that short period
| of time. I am going to look for other sources of information,
| Youtube videos, talk to some people who have done something the
| same or similar to what I am trying to do and see if they have
| any recommendations, etc
|
| In simple terms, people say they don't like spending all of this
| time doing this research, but if they were able to spend only 30
| minutes on solving their problem, would they feel comfortable and
| confident they are making the right decision?
|
| Not to sound negative, but this just looks like a review blog for
| SaaS solutions where you are not taking compensation from vendors
| or charging money for access to the information...
| 0az wrote:
| Feedback on the tables: the vertical table headers are hard to
| read. Consider tilting them at an angle, or just switching to
| horizontal.
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| jorde wrote:
| 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)
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| Done, thanks again for the suggestion. It'll break the links
| in the main post temporarily, but hopefully dang can rescue
| it.
|
| Edit: decided to throw in some redirects instead, should work
| well.
| basch wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| Pushed! Thank you for the suggestion -- completely forgot
| about some meta tags.
| jayparth wrote:
| 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.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| 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.
| kkotak wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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. 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!
| kkotak wrote:
| 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!
| tinyhouse wrote:
| They can monetize similarly to NerdWallet and the like. YC can
| benefit even if they don't since a lot of the products they
| recommend are from YC companies (can create a conflict of
| interest though).
| Axsuul wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Are you specifically focusing on startup
| software or will you be eventually expanding to other verticals
| like e-commerce?
| Fission wrote:
| Thanks. Focused on info for the earliest stages of a startup
| for now, but we're continuously progressing towards later-stage
| topics.
| slantyyz wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| slantyyz wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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
| tomhallett wrote:
| 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?
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| jakaroo wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| jakaroo wrote:
| Well if you was actually aware of that, you've purposefully
| put out repeated mis-information in what's supposed to be a
| trustworthy, reliable guide.
|
| How do I now trust your analysis on the "big three" tools
| when you haven't nailed the basics of the OG Google
| Analytics?
| hanezz wrote:
| Also, there's no mention at all of GA App+Web (launched
| August 2019) - which is clearly the future of Google
| Analytics and uses an event-based model.
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| doorman wrote:
| 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).
| Fission wrote:
| 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!
| welearnednothng wrote:
| 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!
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| AnonC wrote:
| _> 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| mwseibel wrote:
| 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.
| soozzoos wrote:
| Hey! Love this idea, how can we get Blook.io added to the
| incorporation services? We are a stripe atlas / gust alternative
| :)
| Fission wrote:
| We'll take a look.
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| 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!
| Fission wrote:
| 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?
| ianwalter wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| d0m wrote:
| Yeah, please do share. Congrats on the pivot and Satchel looks
| pretty cool, good luck (Even though I'm not sure I understand
| the business model, I see a lot of value in the product)
| Fission wrote:
| Will do. It might be a bit lengthy and take a bit of time to
| write, so I'll post this placeholder for now and update it
| throughout the day.
| pjam15 wrote:
| Would love to hear!
| stev3 wrote:
| 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.
| Fission wrote:
| 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
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