Saturday, February 21, 2015

More Evidence Of Startup Bubble: Metastartups

This is hilarious:

"Mattermark is great for filtering — for example, a friend I met up with for coffee last week told me his dream startup is less than 10 people and focused on Bitcoin. Ideally, they’d be in San Francisco rather than the Peninsula since he’s really sick of commuting after the past 5 years at Facebook.

A quick filter reveals 614 Bitcoin startups in the Mattermark database, 574 of which are 10 or fewer people. But when we filter down to San Francisco for the location preference, just 29 remain"
There's so many startups now that there's a startup that's a startup database with a screening tool ($4,799 a year). I would call this a "metastartup".

There's 40 bitcoin startups with more than 10 people. I wonder what is the collective valuation of all 614 bitcoin startups? I think it's great you can have fussy preferences and still have 29 bitcoin jobs to choose from.

Mattermark had a 27 person team in December, just keeping track of startups I guess. They raised money in Q4 last year at an $18.5 million valuation. (Medium post about it is hilarious must read.) Sounded like less than $1mm annualized revenue at the time, but of course they have a hockey stick growth projection.

The Mattermark founder is the one who was getting razzed on twitter for her burn rate.

7 comments:

CP said...

More on metastartups:

"if you don’t have to spend hours doing multiple interviews of every founding team, you can dramatically streamline the process. In fact, we have a demo version of our software that can produce a pre-money valuation from an online application in a few seconds"
http://possibleinsight.com/2011/10/11/meta-startups-for-meta-innovation/

LaunchRock, The Most Meta Startup Ever, Builds Viral Launch Pages
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/launchrock-rocks-launches/

ADL said...

Whoa. I doubt it will go on long enough for this, but it would be great if the mania lasts through an IPO wave...

bjdubbs said...

Mattermark looks like a good business. Database businesses can be huge cash cows.

Unknown said...

Database businesses can be huge cash cows.

Only if there's a stable/growing market for the things they're databasing.

Anonymous said...

Crunchbase.com, Angel.co, etc. are free, so you could say there's even a meta-startup database bubble.

CP said...

http://www.creditbubblestocks.com/2015/10/startup-idea-metastartup-servicing-uber.html

CP said...

Wow - this just sold for $1mm with the anchor VC having to invest $500k back into the acquirer:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/21/mattermark-to-shut-down-after-selling-to-full-contact/

They raised a total of $17 million, most recently a $7.3 million Series B at $42 million valuation.