alt Hacker Newsthat's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it.
Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...
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The valuation must be outside of the tech. Are there relationships or contracts Accenture is getting access to?
thefacebook.com was developed in a few days, too. The value was never in the code.
the best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too
dont miss it, its almost all about users and revenue not how complex or simple product is.
Ookla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network.
https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website
The fact that you think that the code is all that material here is exactly why you aren’t the person to be doing this. Go right ahead.
ZIR SV culture has built multiple generations of nerds that think that they can just effortlessly become billionaires. Ridiculous brain rot.
You’re not paying for the tech, you’re paying for the name and the users. Speedyest claims 40m unique users per month.
speedtest has a lot of volunteers hosting local servers, which you need to do a good last mile speed test.
that capilarity is not something you can achieve overnight.
That's a lot of money just for network topography, but may someone let them in and it has a whole map of an otherwise hidden or inaccessible network.
The valuation is the name recognition and that that’s where people go to do those things
Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network)
If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it