First, some housekeeping, the day off tomorrow thanks to our new corporate overlords, so consider this the final chapter of The Exchange for this week. (As usual, the newsletter will send out on Saturday.) In addition, Alex is on vacation the next week. Anna will be handling next week’s newsletter and may contribute a piece or two.
However, before we take a break for a few days, let us take a closer look at the most recent Y Combinator Demo Day. Some of this may be familiar if you have seen the previous several Equity episodes, but we wanted to leave a marker in the ground for future reference as we cover startups throughout the remainder of the year.
The following is a rundown of Y Combinator startup patterns, how they compared to our predictions. Thank you to the TechCrunch team for live-blogging the startup flood, and to Natasha and Christine for helping us flesh out our notes over our recent Twitter Spaces. Let us speak about the latest fashion trends!
You would think it would be difficult to discover a category that seemed overrepresented in a group of roughly 400 companies, but we did it. To begin with, we were taken aback by a large number of firms in the cohort pursuing software models based on no-code and low-code methodologies. We expected a few, but not quite as many as we came up with this morning.
No-code and low-code solutions to enable developers to construct quicker internal workflows (Tantl) establish branded real estate portals (Noloco), sync data between no-code tools (Whalesync), automate HR (Zazos), and more are being developed by startups in the YC batch. BrightReps, Beau, Alchemy, Hyperseed, Enso, HitPay, Whaly, Muse, Abstra, Lago, Inai, and Breadcrumbs.io were also in the mix.
In their pitches, at least 18 of the startups mentioned no- and low-code. They are tackling everything from finance and real estate to sales and human resources. Briefly, no- and low-code technologies are popping up in seemingly every industry. It appears that the startup industry has determined that assisting non-developers in developing their own tools, procedures, and systems is a worthwhile endeavor.
