What is the relationship between what we see and our expectations regarding startup focus?
First, some housekeeping. TechCrunch, thanks to its new corporate parents, has tomorrow off. This is the final chapter of The Exchange this week. (The newsletter will be sent out on Saturday, as usual. Alex will be absent next week. Anna will be handling next week's newsletter. She may also have a column or two.
Let's talk about the most recent Y Combinator Demo Day, in thematic detail, before we slow down for a while.
Some of the Equity episodes will be familiar to viewers who have seen them. However, we wanted to place a flag so that we can refer back later as we continue covering startups throughout the year.
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Below is a list of trends among Y Combinator startup companies and how they compared to our expectations.
We are grateful to the TechCrunch crew for covering the startup deluge live and Natasha & Christine for helping us build our notes during our last Twitter Spaces. Let's talk about trends!
More than you expected
You might think it would be difficult to find a category with overrepresentation in a group of almost 400 startups. But we have succeeded.
We were shocked at the number of startups that pursued software models with low-code or no-code technologies. We had expected to find some, but not nearly as many as we found this morning.
The YC batch of startups is building low-code and no-code tools that help developers create faster internal workflows (Tantl), build branded portals for real estate (Noloco), sync data with other no-code tools and automate HR (Zazos), among others. BrightReps and Beau were also included in the mix.
Minimum 18 companies from the group named no-code and low-code in pitches. They have taken on many industries, including finance, real estate, sales, and HR. It seems like all sectors are seeing low- and no-code tools. The trend in the startup industry is to help non-developers create their own tools, workflows, and apps.
