It’s important to listen to user feedback when you launch your products, but it’s also important to know which sort of feedback to ignore.
Several top companies had received less-than-rave reviews when they were launched on Hacker News, the popular online forum created by Y Combinator. The criticisms of these products ranged from the ideas being infeasible, to regulatory concerns, and to whether the ideas added any value at all. But these companies and their founders persevered, and turned their startups into big businesses.
1. Dropbox
Dropbox founder Drew Houston had launched Dropbox on Hacker News on 4th April 2007. “My YC app: Dropbox – Throw away your USB drive,” his post was titled. But while the post had received some positive comments, there were some who thought the idea — of cloud storage — wasn’t viable. “I have a few qualms with this app,” user BrandonM had written. “1. for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftps, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software,” the comment added.
The comment basically said that it was possible for someone sufficiently technical to build a Dropbox-like solution themselves. But Dropbox catered to everyday people who couldn’t have been bother with FTP, and was a massive success. Dropbox has since gone public, and now has a market cap of over $8 billion.
2. Airbnb
Airbnb had launched several times as it had looked to find product-market fit. When it had rebranded as Airbnb from Airbed&Breakfast, and looked to pursue the housing rentals market, a user on Hacker News had dismissed the entire business model, calling it “severely flawed”. “I’ve said this before,” said user callmeed. “Renting a room/bed out of your home like a hotel most likely violates multiple tax and business laws in just about every US city..let alone the severe liability someone faces should a guest in in your home slip in the shower and break their collar bone,” they added.
“I’ve worked at a resort hotel. Cities have specific bed taxes. Hotels have to be inspected. They have liability insurance. Vacation rental owners pay taxes. Some cities don’t even allow short-term vacation rentals,” the comment continued.
“We’ve already seen the ride-sharing website ruled illegal in some cities. I predict the same thing will happen here..If i was a VC, I wouldn’t touch this site,” it added.
The comment had raised some important issues, but Airbnb managed to circumvent them as it grew into a massive company. The comment also was wrong about Uber — in spite of having been initially been illegal, Uber too managed to get the laws changed in many cities, and grew into a ride-hailing behemoth. And Airbnb too shrugged off its early troubles and skepticism on Hacker News and grew into one of Y-Combinator’s most successful startups, and is now valued at over $80 billion.
3. Bitcoin
Bitcoin had faced similar skepticism when it was introduced. “Bitcoin: peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency”, a post on Hacker News had said on 8th May 2009. “Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency,” user jdoliner had then said. And while their comment did prove somewhat correct — bitcoin isn’t actively used as a currency for transactions, but its use as a store of value has zoomed, and a single bitcoin — from being worth a few cents in 2009 — is now worth over $100,000.
4. Instacart
Grocery delivery service Instacart too had faced some doubters on Hacker News when it had launched. Founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta had posted on Hacker News about the company saying “Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery”. “I can’t help but wonder whether the company will find a business model with sustainable economics,” user cs702 had said. “A lot of really smart people have tried and failed to accomplish this sort of thing before. For example, Amazon invested $60 million in Kozmo.com back in the late 90’s, and they couldn’t make it work. (Kozmo.com ended up raising a quarter billion dollars before shutting down). The main challenge is that same-day, point-to-point delivery is very expensive — a complex problem. (Most delivery systems in use today rely on some kind of hub-and-spoke design.) Perhaps the wide adoption of smart phones will make point-to-point delivery economically viable for Instacart — e.g., by giving the company cost-effective access to underused delivery vehicles as needed to satisfy the ebbs and flows of consumer demand. I’m curious to see if and how Instacart can pull it off,” the comment added.
Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta gave a thoughtful response to the comment. “While I agree that a lot of smart people have tried this before (Kozmo.com, WebVan, etc), I believe that there are significant differences in the approach that we are taking. Specifically, Kozmo.com was founded in an era where you could IPO without having profits. Having that mentality from day one allowed them to make huge concessions to users such as give them free delivery on everything, and not have a minimum order. For example, you could pay $1.50 for a gum on Kozmo and get it delivered to you within an hour. WebVan, on the other hand spend $1B on building it’s own warehouses and fulfillment infrastructure. Learning from those companies, we have done a lot of things differently. For starters, there is a minimum order of $10. There is a delivery fee of $3.99 for 3 hours and $9.99 for 1 hour (Would you not pay $4 for someone to do all your groceries?) And, we do not hold any inventory – all of it is sourced directly from local retailers. It is also important to mention that the time that we live in is very different. People are a lot more comfortable adding their credit card information on web/mobile. Not to mention, the access to smart phones that people have gives customers the ability to shop from anywhere – office, couch, next to the fridge. We believe we are different from the companies that have tried this in the past. And, we hope we are live in your hometown very soon,” he had said.
It turned out that Apoorva Mehta’s optimism was warranted. Smartphone penetration did indeed take off, and Instacart ended up being a massive success. It debuted on the stock markets in 2023, and currently is worth over $12 billion.
5. Cursor
Cursor is one of the hottest coding products of the AI era, but there had been some skepticism over its launch on Hacker News. “Cursor: A code editor built for programming with AI,” Cursor CEO Michael Truell had posted on 24th March 2023. A commentor on Hacker News thought the launch was a joke. “There’s nothing on the official website or GitHub that indicates that this software is, other than a cropped screenshot that looks like vscode with a prompt pop up over it,” wrote user yakaccount4. “Edit: I still can’t figure out if this is some sarcastic joke software or something.”
Cursor was no joke. By April 2025, 1 billion lines of code were being written on Cursor every day. Cursor has become the most successful AI-coding tool around, and was last valued at $10 billion.
6. Windsurf
Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan had launched Codeium, later renamed as Windsurf, on Hacker News. “Show HN: Codeium — a free, fast AI codegen extension,” his post had said. “We just released Codeium to open up access of generative AI to all developers for free. In the spirit of Show HN, we created a playground version for anyone to try this tech in the browser (click Try in Browser)! We have built scalable, low-latency ML infra for many top AI companies in the past, and we are excited to leverage that tech into a product that we, as developers, would love. We hope that you do too, and we would appreciate any feedback that this community has for us!” he said.
But the reaction from some users wasn’t enthusiastic. “I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question,” wrote user micoloth. “What’s the difference with Copilot? In my exactly 3 minutes test, it did worse, even if only slightly. Right now it is free, but that won’t last, right? Do i have to expect any shady data collection practices? More interestingly, how is this trained? Have you guys done your own finetuning of gpt3 or it’s something completely different?” they added.
As it turned out, Windsurf ended up being quite successful. It had nearly been acquired by OpenAI, but the deal fell through because of disagreements with Microsoft, and Mohan and other key employees ended up joining Google in a deal worth $2.4 billion. The remaining company was acquired by Cognition Labs, makers of Devin, ensuring a solid outcome for all employees.