Mattermark Index: Y Combinator Summer 2013 Companies

The index and score from Mattermark are great for consumer facing companies and mobile app companies but are pretty useless for most other industries. I checked some companies that are making making millions in revenue and they had a double&#x2F;triple digit mattermark score. I am pretty sure that isn&#x27;t a good representation.<p>Also, a note for those signing up for the trial, there is neither an option to cancel your subscription directly nor information about billing inside the application. You have to email them to cancel the account and i got a response after 5 days(3 working days) when i sent an email asking them to cancel my trial account. While it is totally acceptable for an early stage startup to not have those features and i am sure they have it in their backlog, just make sure you don&#x27;t send that cancelation email the day before your trial ends.

<i>We&#x27;ve ranked the current Y Combinator Summer 2013 batch by Mattermark Score – which awards points to each company on a weekly basis for increasing their website traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and LinkedIn followers.</i><p>It&#x27;s hard for me to understand how this formula could be a valuable measure of growth of a startup, since most of these things can be easily purchased. I&#x27;d guess that growth of Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, LinkedIn followers and website traffic are more accurately a measure of a company&#x27;s ad spend than their actual growth in revenue and users.

Based off of Danielle Morrill&#x27;s previous blog posts ranking startups and this Mattermark post, I get the sense that a lot of this ranking is putting certain companies &quot;against&quot; each other even though it&#x27;s like comparing apples and oranges. For example, does it makes sense to compare a SaaS company with a $10K ACV that makes Google Adwords work against a company that gets 10 tweets a second because it&#x27;s viral?

Not only are these Mattermark posts becoming quite boring and repetitive, but for the company&#x27;s sake it&#x27;s time to move on. Readers of HN aren&#x27;t going to make a purchase. And if entrepreneurs&#x2F;hackers are the target market, then it&#x27;s time to rethink that strategy a bit.

Seems like there are an awful lot of programming tools, restaurants, and delivery. The programming tools I get - these are hackers developing for hackers. Is delivery a wave because of Amazon and others trying to provide convenience, or is it the softwarization of our industry? And the food - is that on the back of the GrubHub and SeemlessWeb success?

Interesting index. One funny note: <a href="http://www.hackermeter.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackermeter.com&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https://onemonthrails.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onemonthrails.com&#x2F;</a> use the same photo. Found that kind of funny

This is a great tool for other startups, funds, and companies. Just clone these companies in that order, they&#x27;re already pre-vetted by good VC&#x27;s like PG and also somewhat market tested.<p>A smart VC could just send of them as a spec to dev team in Russia&#x2F;India, and hire mechanical turkers to blitz forums. Even hire a few good writers to create blogs and post to HN.