was the IG campaign pre or post acceptance into YC?

When we sent the YC application we hadn't launch the campaign yet. By the time we had the interview with the partners the campaign had been live for some days and was starting to take off. It definetly helped there to show that we were "making something people want".

This is a really solid looking app for parents. Curious, how do you differentiate against guys like Netflix doing something similar?

Techstars should see some other big exits over time with SendGrid (couldn't find actual current valuation) and DigitalOcean ($153M Valuation in 3 years) to name a few

Also Localytics (TS Boston 2009) is well positioned for a big exit or IPO: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/localytics

(Disclosure: Hackstar in 2009, Founder in 2010)

yclist has a few errors, so not sure if it's all 100% accurate.

To name a few: xobni - bought by yahoo and now shut down (listed as active) like.fm - dead, but listed as active Exec - listed as active, but was bought by Handybook Bump - listed active, but dead

I think this video by Chamath Palihapitiya about FB growth strategy is super interesting (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIUQP71SBU).

Relentless focus on building the thing the customer wanted vs focus on viral marketing strategies. That said, they had an inherent viral growth strategy by targeting their initial user base to a very sociable/vocal college crowd. That wasn't a growth hack, it was merely solving a problem that most college kids had.

consulting

yeah it was that all along :-)

It's true...can you imagine if the adults have their chance of showing the true valuation of SC in the public markets

I'm pretty sure a lot of smart adults at Facebook thought the true valuation was $3B. I don't see why an IPO right now would look so different.

You're assuming people outside Facebook would perceive value the same way. This isn't necessarily the case.

Looks like Spiegel didn't pay attention at the bullish attitude Andrew Mason had this early on turning down crazy acquisition offers with Groupon, and we know how that ended.

were you able to get any other early market or customer validation beyond your co-founder's personal problem? Awesome concept!

I'm the co-founder with the family restaurant…

We showed it off to a number of marketing managers of local restaurants in Boulder, CO and have since sold subscriptions to a number of restaurants in the area. Since the launch, we've gone through a number of tweaks and actually end up removing "features" fairly often. We know that restaurant owners are busy, but we continue to understand what they care about and what information we should drop to make their days easier.

I added the article here because that is exactly how I felt after someone forwarded it to me. There was no value in the comments on VentureBeat (and the author was commenting at all there anyway) so I figured there would be some worthwhile discussions here on the topic and potential someone with data to backup Michael if they agreed with him.