JustSpotted YC Application

Summer 2008Acquired

JustSpotted went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2008 batch as a Consumer company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Summer 2008
Industry: ConsumerContent
Team size: 2
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2012

Founders

AJ Asver

What JustSpotted does

The artist-formerly-known-as Scoopler is a real-time search engine. It aggregates and organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. It does this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When users search for a topic on Scoopler, they get the most relevant results, updated in real-time. Scoopler has now become JustSpotted, a celebrity-tracking tool, meant to give fans an idea of what their favorite celebrities are up to at any given moment. JustSpotted, like Scoopler, is a data-aggregator, yet JustSpotted collects from Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare -- alongside their own data theyâ€™ll be collecting from users who actual spot celebrities in the wild. All the information we aggregate is publicly available and you can even do a search on Twitter yourself and find sightings of celebrities. We're just the first people to organize it on a map and in such a way that it's easy to consume and ENJOY.â€ JustSpotted is about connecting with celebs. All the sightings on our website are naturally occurring events where an everyday person bumps into a celebrity as a chance occurrence. Back in the day, when you saw a celebrity while you were out and about the first thing you would have done was phone or text a friend. In the new age of social media, the first thing you do is share it on Facebook or Twitter. This phenomena is already happening. The service, which launches the week of October 11, 2010, is the latest creation by AJ Asver, Dilan Jarawardane and Benjamin Tauber.

JustSpotted's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

JustSpotted, Summer 2008 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

JustSpotted

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Celebrity sightings organized on a map

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built JustSpotted, a tool that aggregates publicly shared sightings of celebrities from Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, combined with reports from users who spot celebrities in real life. It organizes this data in real-time on a map so fans can easily see what their favorite celebs are up to right now. This is different from general search engines because we focus on real-time, geolocated, celebrity-specific content, making it simple and fun.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We are split between San Francisco, CA and Copenhagen, Denmark. After YC, we plan to base the company in San Francisco.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where investors and tech talent are concentrated and where YC is based. This will help us scale faster and connect more easily with the startup ecosystem and potential partners.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real JustSpotted YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from JustSpotted's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like JustSpotted would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.