Honestly, I wouldn't take it seriously at all. Find a paying customer. Make them happy. Find another. If you can't find any, try something else.<p>We got rejected from YC several times and we are doing quite well despite it.<p>It really means little, unless you make it a big deal. Just move on. The magic you need to succeed is inside of you, not anyone else.
Explicit demand and no competition (cancer treatment) — demonstrate feasibility<p>Explicit demand and existing competition (fashion ecommerce) — differentiate and show competitive advantages<p>Implicit demand (farmville-like games) — demonstrate early traction and prove that your product is delivering high-order values (entertainment, happiness, inspiration, meaning...)<p>No demand — delusion
How is it better than Octave (<a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/</a>), which runs most M-files and is free?<p>EDIT: Okay, someone posted the website, and it IS Octave (<a href="http://www.vectera.com/howitworks" rel="nofollow">http://www.vectera.com/howitworks</a>). So, all the advantages are from the cloud part. I guess it might be nice for people who have to use multiple machines or want to check a simulation's progress on their phone?
My main experience of MATLAB is fixing pathetic spaghetti code from non-programmers (think of complex "scientific models" with no concept of DRY principles), and wasting hours trying to adjust their MATLAB scripts to do things that are trivial in just about any other high-level language out there. The "Abandon MATLAB" [1] blog has several articles that really resonate with me; it's a great read if you enjoy a good rant.<p>That said, the problem with MATLAB is not a lack of learning resources. On the contrary, in my experience the MATLAB docs are nearly unsurpassed; all that money pays for something! The problem with MATLAB is that it is primarily used by those with no general programming knowledge or broader experience, who are therefore tolerant of insane defects and defaults out of ignorance that there is a better way to do things. If it were any other way, they would not have added a gigantic Microsoft-esque ribbon interface to the latest iteration of MATLAB 2013.<p>If I were a Christian, I would thank God daily that MATLAB has a ridiculously high price. The expensive enterprise licensing means its use is limited mainly to a few demographics of deep-pocketed non-programmers (e.g. scientists at large universities), and I can continue to rely on the choice of MATLAB as a major code smell.<p>[1]: <a href="http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/</a><p>Also amusing: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBeungEnx4" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBeungEnx4</a>
"A solution is a something. But a something isn’t always a solution."<p>I like this quote a lot: you failed to get into YC but I think you passed on this. You can build a better mouse trap, but its only helpful in places where there are mice.<p>Take it as a learning experiance, either adjust what you are doing or now you can approach your next idea with improved perspective and experiance. From what I recall the acceptance rate of companies offered an interview is still only about 25%. I expect there are a few viable companies that don't make it in each batch.<p>(From someone who interviewed in S12, was rejected, and took considerably longer that you to reach similar conclusions to those you have).<p>Some unsolicited thoughts:<p>I do use MATLAB a fair bit in my work (PhD student now). I like it quite a bit and to be honest I haven't really had any big pain points with it, at least compared to some other packages that cost even more than MATLAB does (but probably have fewer users).<p>I think you'll have to find a new swing on what matlab does. Academics get discounted licenses and seem to be fine to pay for them, and I'm not sure if a $2K license is a big deal for corporate users. Without those two groups, I'm not sure how many people are left. Likewise, I don't think a service to learn how to use MATLAB would have that big of market.<p>Maybe an interesting and disruptive swing would be to enable the power of matlab-functionality to be abstracted to allow less sophisticated users to use it? Wolfram Alpha is in some ways this, but it could be tied into other services better.
Ehhh, I am not sure that this is truly the issue with your presentation.<p>If it is truly "we can do X just like FamousApplication(tm), except we are in the browser and we can be profitable charging 10% as much as FamousApplication(tm)", that is pretty compelling. That is not something that is really difficult to sell if you can truly deliver and be profitable at that price point.<p>I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud, without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential investors about.
For what it's worth, I need your product and know other people that do too. I would pay for it, providing I didn't have to pay much.<p>Increasingly, we have big data sets, and want to work with them collaboratively. Because they are so big, the problem of how to proccess the data is added to the old problem of what to do with it. I think that centralizing the 'how' would be a great selling point too.<p>Maybe I explained that badly - in Amazon AWS are a bunch of datasets.If I want to play with them, I have to create an AWS instance, with the right tools, go find the data, and spend time figuring out how to read it. If your online Matlab also helped me handle data, then for opensource data someone would only need to solve that problem once (ingest), and for closed source data, at least I'd have a common platform with my team.<p>Anyway, my imagination of what your product could be, and all the problems it could solve, has me excited. I encourage you not to give up or lose faith in the concept.<p>This is entirely putting aside that yes, Matlab is expensive, and for occasional / home users, it would be nice to have something subscription based rather than couching up for a perpetual license.
To the people who say this is an online Matlab replacement, I do not think the website, <a href="http://www.vectera.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vectera.com/</a>, presents itself that way. First it says "Learn Matlab", to me this presents itself as another online programming class. I am not saying this is a bad thing, I personally use Matlab every day and see the value. However, I could not find anywhere it talked about online Matlab collaboration.<p>Also even though the word Matlab is all over the front page, when I went to the about section it said it was powered by Octave. Again, this is not an inherently bad thing. However, I thought this was an online time-sharing license of genuine Matlab. I would pay $9/month for that; I would not pay $9/month for Octave which I have installed on my notebook.<p>Also you can generally get a student version of Matlab for around $100 so if the only purpose is learning and not "production" Matlab, I do not think it is fair to compare to the $2,000 version.
trying to improve matlab by building something on top of octave is putting lipstick on a pig. matlab/octave is a great language for writing quick algorithms but it's biggest flaw is it is not designed for productization of those algorithms.<p>in other words, focus on the real problem with matlab, it's poor interoperability, deployability, and overall ignorance of good programming language design patterns, not it's lack of being in the cloud or having good tutorials. If you really need matlab, you will suffer through whatever god awful things you need to in order to get it to work because it's the only tool that will accomplish your goal. .m files have the tendency to be both the worst and best code you've ever written: algorithmically brilliant, stylistically abhorrent. The fact that I feel dirty after writing one is a sign there is something missing, and it's not tutorials.
As a recently graduated student... ohmygod I wish I had this in college (only because I don't use matlab daily). The tutorials are lovely and I don't have to haul myself to a lab to run it.<p>I would have paid out of my own pocket in college to have that convenience.
Why is it hard to see the value in making a product that competes in an existing profitable and developed market space, but does so better/cheaper/more conveniently? Isn't that a significant portion of the startups in YC? E.G. Hipmunk - simply a more user friendly flight search and hotel booking? Mariusz shouldn't have to spell it out for YC in this case.<p>If the issue is as Mariusz describes, he shouldn't be blaming himself, but rather YC instead for not seeing the obvious market potential in fairer pricing. Either YC missed something obvious or the reason YC turned Mariusz down was for a different reason than stated.
"MATLAB in the cloud" sounds a lot like IPython + PiCloud:
<a href="http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud-notebook/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud-n...</a>
What gets me annoyed is that we also submitted, didn't get an interview and could have answered those questions easily. We've got some good early validation of the fact that we are filling a need (or would once releasing a V1)...
Hah, I was actually trying to pitch a friend on a Matlab-as-a-Service concept a month or two ago--to say that they were skeptical would be an understatement. Good luck!
Well, Adobe offering their toolkit as a cheaper, monthly cloud offering. That is because lots of people cannot shell out $2k upfront for their tools.
You are doing similar thing with Matlab.
How does it and why do you think you failed?<p>YC failed to see the future potential of your business because they are looking for the quickest and best bang for the buck obviously.<p>If you're passionate about your business model, keep going and ignore naysayers who cannot assist you.
I think there is something to be done with an online mat lab product. Google has it right with Chrome OS, computer software won't be around in a few more decades. Everything will be in the cloud. So will matlab, but maybe it won't be matlab, maybe it will be you guys.<p>There are plenty of examples of companies that didn't get into YC and still succeeded. Kingmaking can only get you so far.
today, same failure happened to my team. we created a solution about cloud gis which takes geomatics engineering concerns into account. some of the investors asked us "what is the difference between google earth and our project". before the presentation, we were joking about what if they ask us about google earth. it wasn't funny.
Fred Wilson wrote a similar experience with Airbnb [1], he's more sincere about it, detail is very thorough. Regard to this article, I only find personal remorse and popular startup names.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html</a>
Whenever I hear someone talk about having a "solution," I want to ask "what is the <i>problem</i> you are solving"?<p>Too often people cannot describe the problem, or who has the problem. This does not inspire confidence in their solution.