OK, so now I'm really confused. Previous times Taplytics has come up, it has been asked (the first time by me, the second time by someone else) how this company differs from Apptimize. The second time, the answer came back that the focus was on "ease of use", requiring only a single line of code for setup. This is even mentioned in this TechCrunch article as their key differentiator. However, Apptimize also only requires an almost identical single line of code for setup.

Now, Apptimize additionally documents using a line of code to define a test, but that seems to be only if you choose to use their programmatic API: they also have their own similar visual editor that lets you make these changes, and it even works for Android as well. The one difference on this front seems to be that Taplytics also lets you define goals from the visual editor (Apptimize currently requires a line of code for each goal). This is an important difference to the user (primarily because it means the goals can be defined "on the fly"), yet is frankly a pretty minor difference to the implementation.

To be clear: I mean to say that from the perspective of the people who implement these two products, if you already have the complex visual interface setup to make arbitrary changes to the view hierarchy, detecting a button click is a no-brainer: it isn't a massively different "focus". (Also, I always want to underscore that if you have a different "focus", it needs to be something your competitor wouldn't also claim: I doubt anyone would claim not to focus on "ease of use" ;P).

So, part of the reason that I was curious about these differences is that multiple of my friends either do currently or have in the near past worked for Apptimize (and they have some options or equity or something in that company). When I first saw Taplytics show up on HN, I pasted a link to them, and they seemed to have not heard about this company before: they, like me, learned about it from these recent couple "Show HN" posts that were made.

Today, however, I see that Taplytics is a company backed by Y Combinator, apparently W14. Apptimize is also a company backed by Y Combinator, but S13. Taplytics has a much better website (sorry Apptimize ;P), and has the aforementioned "define goals from visual editor" feature. Apptimize supports Android in addition to iOS. Their pricing is described differently, but actually seems to be based on similar fundamentals (Apptimize is trying to get more money out of larger companies, being a key difference).

My confusion is thereby: if Y Combinator is backing both of these, why are they competitors (I'd almost even argue to the point of being slightly deceptive about benefits), and seemingly somewhat unknown to each other? While there is some overlap, there is probably a lot of stuff that doesn't overlap (if nothing else, Android support and the website): why does Y Combinator have them separate? If Y Combinator were "just" an investor, then I could see it as "hedging bets", but I've been under the impression that Y Combinator is more "hands on" with its companies, which to me makes this seem more awkward.

Of course, I know that in the past, Y Combinator has backed multiple companies in the same overall space. A great example of this is "travel search". However, the tools provided by these companies actually were very different: Hipmunk had a gantt chart and agony calculations, Flightfox was about crowd-optimized pricing optimization, Adioso was about flexible destinations and only really supported leisure travel... these were all very different companies with very different markets and very different interfaces. That is not the case here.

I can see a couple reasons, but I don't really like either of them. 1) Y Combinator wants to aim for multiple buyouts (which seems like a potential conflict of interest with its founders, who might have hoped to be more unique in their space to command a larger end sum). 2) In an uncharted market, it is more important to educate the user that they want this kind of product at all than to want a specific offering, and brand diversity is valuable (but you can simulate that with multiple brands over the same product, the same way that real product companies have always done).

Clearly, however, I don't know much about Y Combinator's internals, while I've invested in a couple companies I don't understand the details of being a VC or an incubator, and I only sort of know what is going on even at Apptimize as I've kind of purposely avoided knowing too much (maybe my read on everything going on there is poor, for example). I thereby would be fascinated if someone who knew more about these kinds of issues, or how this kind of situation plays out at Y Combinator, would be willing to provide some insight into these kinds of competitive incubations.