Show HN: Started.in Seattle – 60+ Video Profiles of startups in Seattle

Show HN: Started.in Seattle – 60+ Video Profiles of startups in Seattle(seattle.started.in)

58 points by smedawar 12 years ago | 49 comments

winslow 12 years ago |

I realize that the popup survey/newsletter box is the rage on literally every website (though I don't understand it as I find them annoying). It immediately turned me off to your website. I was watching your embeded youtube video and then all of the sudden your popup takes up my screen and interrupts my viewing of your about us video. Are you seeing a big engagement of this popup survey/newsletter? Are you keeping track of how many people immediately close it compared to filling it out?

If you are seeing a great amount of engagement from your visitors with the popup then please disregard me as I may be an outlier.

With that said, I think your website is a great idea and you executed well. I love the overall idea and the community is definitely there for this.

smedawar 11 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback winslow!

Firstly, once someone closes the window, they don't see the pop-up for at least another 2 months. We hope this cuts down on the annoyance factor.

We are seeing pretty good engagement and tracking the numbers. Our bounce rate for July 3rd (the day we hit HN front page) was <0.3%. I mention this day specifically for a couple reasons: 1. We had significant traffic and sample size for that day 2. 92+% of our traffic was from new users (the only ones who would see the pop-up)

We've only been using the box for a couple of weeks and will keep monitoring the numbers and the comments.

Thanks for your kind words!

BlakePetersen 12 years ago |

From my experience, working with any vendors from the pacific northwest, they're all MS shops. Is this trend changing considering the added expense of working with any MS Licensed software (where an OSS solution with little or no cost could suffice)? Does MS offer incentives to local startups to build their platform on existing licensed MS products? Or is it more of a Seattle Pride thing? I personally don't feel the MS Business model is one the works well for scrappy young start-ups, yet pretty much every company in the Pac Nor Dub I've worked is completely MS'd out.

I didn't even know there was a MS service called Lync until we did a training with Mercent (FYI, Lync doesn't work on Linux, I was shocked too).

vyrotek 12 years ago | |

I thought I would throw out a counter-example using my own startup. We're a 4 year old profitable company with a handful of full-time engineers and sales employees. We're located in Utah. We're based on .NET and host everything using Windows Azure. We leveraged the BizSpark program a few years ago which gave us access to a lot of free software and services.

It helps that we're a B2B company with decent and predictable revenue. I imagine it's a bit harder to afford things if your company is some new free photo sharing mobile app. I have no problems investing money in technology and tools if it accelerates our development and has a good ROI.

I also personally love the C# language.

BlakePetersen 12 years ago | | |

Great feedback. Thank you!

kkamperschroer 12 years ago | |

I think you may be generalizing from your experience. Just looking at some of the openings for these companies they are looking for MongoDB, HTML5, Rails, etc. I didn't see any mention C# or other MS specific things.

BlakePetersen 12 years ago | | |

Yea, my specific instances may be speaking to too narrow of a sampling of Seattle Start-up scene, and it may be that the vendors we do business with are a bit more mature than what is featured here.

Mainly, I was wondering if there is any sort of outreach by MS to any of these small companies. I know they have a presence in the Valley and have MS Ventures to nurture fledgling companies with start-up capital, but as far as strategizing to keep new companies in their ecosystem long-term, I was curious to see what sort of efforts they are putting forth to address this.

koji 12 years ago | |

I've worked both in the Valley and in Seattle, and in my experience the startup mentalities have been pretty much the same. There may be a lot of former MS people working at the startup, but they don't seem to have any attachment to it. If iOS or Android are where the numbers are, that's where they go. I've also never met a startup in Seattle solely focused on developing something for MS, although there probably are some that exist. Whatever trend you saw in the northwest previously must have changed, from my limited perspective.

BlakePetersen 12 years ago | | |

You are probably correct in that the trend has changed. My feeling is that it may be that the companies we do business with are a bit more established and they may still be subject to the decisions made during a trend-phase that doesn't really make financial sense to step away from and build again from scratch, but if those decisions were made now, it may be taken in a different direction.

But the fact that they no longer have such a strong foothold in their home turf is a bit concerning for MS I'm sure. That's why I was curious to see whether there was any effort on MS's part to change their approach and invest more in grassroot business building that will establish those long lasting relationships with brands that will be both valuable and recognizable in the future.

DenisM 12 years ago | |

The "added expense of MS software" is largely a myth. Windows is about 30% more expensive on AWS than Linux, and most startup expenses are dominated by payroll, not hosting. Choosing a platform on price in this situation is counterproductive - you should chose whatever allows you to iterate faster until your product idea sticks with your customers. As a rule that's a platform you know the best, can find help for most readily, and can hire new team members the fastest. Hiring for Microsoft stack in Seattle is easier than in most other places.

I say "largely" because occasional startup will be maxing out their hardware trying to build next Google or next Netflix. If hosting can become comparable to payroll in your startup, then it becomes a factor in the platform choice.

If that wasn't enough, Microsoft has Bizspark program where the give you a ton of stuff for free for startups.

scottru 12 years ago | |

Blake, you're right that the vast majority of PNW _vendors_ (i.e. technology service providers) are MS shops. That's because almost all (at least 95%) of the vendor ecosystem here is supporting Microsoft or clients Microsoft directly connects vendors with. (We're primarily a non-Microsoft vendor - we'll do MS-based development if required, but we don't choose it for new projects, and 95%+ of our work is on Linux - but we are one of a very few exceptions at any scale.)

As noted by others, _startups_ - being created from scratch by people choosing their tools - absolutely use a wide variety of platforms. I expect that the numbers would bear out a higher percentage of Microsoft-based startups than in other locations (and there are a number of successful startups in the Seattle area with Microsoft-based platforms), but it's certainly not a significant majority.

firemanx 12 years ago | |

I was expressly hired at my current gig (re-startup) in Pioneer Square to migrate from an existing .NET solution to JVM on AWS with a heavy Cassandra component (all on Linux). I started a company up here some years ago and we opted for the Windows platform due to the availability of talent. I think that has changed in recent years, and I feel like the Seattle startup scene these days has a really healthy balance of a lot of different technologies.

cnp 12 years ago | |

Living in Seattle and having worked with numerous companies I'm going to happily contest this: Your statement is simply not true, all the way around.

BlakePetersen 12 years ago | | |

As someone who seems to have a lot of insight into this, to the best of your knowledge, could you speak to what factors would most heavily influence this decision (in the context of being made by a founder in Seattle)?

Was MS never even in the running or could it possibly boil down to the cost issue I touched on or perhaps that founders or early engineers chose a different route due to past personal exposure (and would you feel that the financial barrier of entry is a factor in limiting these engineers to this MS software exposure)?

Would have a bit of incentives from MS like reduced license costs steered those early conversations in a different direction or is it simply that the software they offer isn't up to snuff with your particular use cases?

BlakePetersen 12 years ago | | |

Thanks for the feedback, that definitely seems like the consensus.

gurgeous 12 years ago | |

This is simply not true. Most of the startups here (including mine) run on linux and all the engineers have macs.

BlakePetersen 12 years ago | | |

Thanks, I think my initial comment was a bit misguided and the feedback here has definitely made me reconsider my preconceptions.

However, it should be noted that Macs make for amazing Windows machines.

bcbrown 12 years ago |

I'd love to see a page that just had the "What is $STARTUP_NAME" responses for all the startups. Some way to easily browse and discover. A grid of logos and names really doesn't allow me to anything other than jump around randomly.

zhte415 12 years ago | |

The logos and names bit was pretty confusing for me too.

A good logo and name should, in some way, hint at what the product or service is. Not necessarily all that directly, but some correspondence should be there.

smedawar 11 years ago | |

Excellent feedback! We'll take this into consideration.

canadaj 12 years ago |

Thanks! I'm moving to Western Washington later this year and I've been trying to find info on startups!

Thanks again!

smedawar 12 years ago | |

Any time! Many, if not most, of the startups we profile are hiring. Check them out!

canadaj 12 years ago | | |

Already am!

What would be really cool is a map that shows the location of these startups, so that I can easily find ones that are close to where I will be moving!

This is really awesome, thanks again!

gtani 12 years ago | |

there's a zillion meetups, user groups, SIGs, etc, here's one place to start

http://seattlehacks.com/

akg_67 12 years ago |

You are missing quite a few local startups such as Qumulo. How are you collecting your list of startups? You may want to consider extracting startups from Greekwire and FormD to build your list.

smedawar 11 years ago | |

We profile startups that apply to be profiled. We reach out to others, but the majority are from our queue of applications. If you know anyone at Qumulo, we'd love for them to apply at seattle.started.in/apply/.

Also, our site is not meant to be a repository, but more of an in depth look at each startup. We only profile 1 startup each week, so you are seeing the work of only 13 months.

kkamperschroer 12 years ago |

This is so fantastic. I'll definitely use this resource when looking around at startups in the area. Thanks for your work!

smedawar 12 years ago | |

Thanks for the kind words! Our goal is to profile every startup in the area (and world).

smedawar 12 years ago |

Thank you all for the amazing support! I'd love any feedback you have, both positive and constructively negative. :)

knykadar 11 years ago |

Fantastic idea and great insights from leaders of the tech world!

ladybro 12 years ago |

No Capitol Hill startups? ._.

smedawar 12 years ago | |

We're always looking for more. :)

seattle.started.in/apply/

sebular 12 years ago | | |

Also isn't CyanogenMod in Pioneer Square? Or is it too big to count as a startup?

sebular 12 years ago | | |

I'm not affiliated with these guys, but they're a Capitol Hill startup that's reasonably well known: http://hark.com/

davmar 12 years ago | | |

cap hill startup here:

www.trakstar.com.

also, we're hiring! rails devs please apply: trakstar.com/jobs

cmedawar 12 years ago |

Keep up the great work, guys!

smedawar 12 years ago | |

Thanks!