Show HN: Started.in Seattle – 60+ Video Profiles of startups in Seattle

Thanks for the feedback winslow!

Firstly, once someone closes the window, they don't see the pop-up for at least another 2 months. We hope this cuts down on the annoyance factor.

We are seeing pretty good engagement and tracking the numbers. Our bounce rate for July 3rd (the day we hit HN front page) was <0.3%. I mention this day specifically for a couple reasons: 1. We had significant traffic and sample size for that day 2. 92+% of our traffic was from new users (the only ones who would see the pop-up)

We've only been using the box for a couple of weeks and will keep monitoring the numbers and the comments.

Thanks for your kind words!

I thought I would throw out a counter-example using my own startup. We're a 4 year old profitable company with a handful of full-time engineers and sales employees. We're located in Utah. We're based on .NET and host everything using Windows Azure. We leveraged the BizSpark program a few years ago which gave us access to a lot of free software and services.

It helps that we're a B2B company with decent and predictable revenue. I imagine it's a bit harder to afford things if your company is some new free photo sharing mobile app. I have no problems investing money in technology and tools if it accelerates our development and has a good ROI.

I also personally love the C# language.

I think you may be generalizing from your experience. Just looking at some of the openings for these companies they are looking for MongoDB, HTML5, Rails, etc. I didn't see any mention C# or other MS specific things.

I've worked both in the Valley and in Seattle, and in my experience the startup mentalities have been pretty much the same. There may be a lot of former MS people working at the startup, but they don't seem to have any attachment to it. If iOS or Android are where the numbers are, that's where they go. I've also never met a startup in Seattle solely focused on developing something for MS, although there probably are some that exist. Whatever trend you saw in the northwest previously must have changed, from my limited perspective.

The "added expense of MS software" is largely a myth. Windows is about 30% more expensive on AWS than Linux, and most startup expenses are dominated by payroll, not hosting. Choosing a platform on price in this situation is counterproductive - you should chose whatever allows you to iterate faster until your product idea sticks with your customers. As a rule that's a platform you know the best, can find help for most readily, and can hire new team members the fastest. Hiring for Microsoft stack in Seattle is easier than in most other places.

I say "largely" because occasional startup will be maxing out their hardware trying to build next Google or next Netflix. If hosting can become comparable to payroll in your startup, then it becomes a factor in the platform choice.

If that wasn't enough, Microsoft has Bizspark program where the give you a ton of stuff for free for startups.

Blake, you're right that the vast majority of PNW _vendors_ (i.e. technology service providers) are MS shops. That's because almost all (at least 95%) of the vendor ecosystem here is supporting Microsoft or clients Microsoft directly connects vendors with. (We're primarily a non-Microsoft vendor - we'll do MS-based development if required, but we don't choose it for new projects, and 95%+ of our work is on Linux - but we are one of a very few exceptions at any scale.)

As noted by others, _startups_ - being created from scratch by people choosing their tools - absolutely use a wide variety of platforms. I expect that the numbers would bear out a higher percentage of Microsoft-based startups than in other locations (and there are a number of successful startups in the Seattle area with Microsoft-based platforms), but it's certainly not a significant majority.

I was expressly hired at my current gig (re-startup) in Pioneer Square to migrate from an existing .NET solution to JVM on AWS with a heavy Cassandra component (all on Linux). I started a company up here some years ago and we opted for the Windows platform due to the availability of talent. I think that has changed in recent years, and I feel like the Seattle startup scene these days has a really healthy balance of a lot of different technologies.

Living in Seattle and having worked with numerous companies I'm going to happily contest this: Your statement is simply not true, all the way around.

This is simply not true. Most of the startups here (including mine) run on linux and all the engineers have macs.

The logos and names bit was pretty confusing for me too.

A good logo and name should, in some way, hint at what the product or service is. Not necessarily all that directly, but some correspondence should be there.

Excellent feedback! We'll take this into consideration.

Any time! Many, if not most, of the startups we profile are hiring. Check them out!

there's a zillion meetups, user groups, SIGs, etc, here's one place to start

http://seattlehacks.com/

We profile startups that apply to be profiled. We reach out to others, but the majority are from our queue of applications. If you know anyone at Qumulo, we'd love for them to apply at seattle.started.in/apply/.

Also, our site is not meant to be a repository, but more of an in depth look at each startup. We only profile 1 startup each week, so you are seeing the work of only 13 months.

Thanks for the kind words! Our goal is to profile every startup in the area (and world).

We're always looking for more. :)

seattle.started.in/apply/

Thanks!