If it's one thing that constantly surprises me with technology startups, it's how 'niche' targeted startups can be and still be profitable. I would never have thought that 'pick five colours' was a model that would be sustainable/profitable enough to warrant starting a business around.

I suspect the Net played a bit part in enabling this to happen and the continued rise of smartphones and apps is furthering this capability.

Had you asked me 6 years ago I wouldn't have thought there was a business in palettes either. But I built COLOURlovers to solve simple problems for creative folks? What color should I use for this? Does this color look good with that one? ...It was just a small idea for some creative folks I knew to play with... and it organically grew into the site it is today.

Had we raised money out of the gate on the premise that there was a business in palettes... we probably would have executed differently and killed what we were growing.

Instead it grew naturally and we took guidance from our users, creating new products and services for them. We're profitable because we're lean and don't need a lot of the large expenses some other founders have to deal with. This has been our greatest asset as we built COLOURlovers.

Now, we have a thriving community of people, a solid amount of traffic and a business model that doesn't take anything away from the experience our users love and use.

And another point about niche... when the whole world is your audience, even the most obscure interests can find a sizable market.

"Had we raised money out of the gate on the premise that there was a business in palettes... we probably would have executed differently and killed what we were growing."

What was your reasoning for joining YC after you already had momentum?

Darius actually wrote a blog post about our reasoning: http://whoabubs.com/should-we-do-ycombinator-were-further-al...

Wait till you see my startup: pick a number!

--

Actually, the ability to pick a color out of a picture is quite cool - but would be better if you could pivot that selection to do further searching, such as "Pick a color, then show me all the pictures in my phone that contain that color" "Show me all the pictures that match this new palette I made" "tint selected picture with the color/palette I choose"

I think COLOURlovers is the only YC company that I can say I had heard of / often visited before they were part of YC.

Are there any other companies that were reasonably successful before starting in YC?

Brushes was pretty big e.g they demoed on stage at WWDC, were used by the new Horner for cover art, and were a top rated app before YC.

Just in the S10 batch: Brushes, Rapportive, Simplenote all were reasonably successful before YC began.

Dailybooth, Simperium & PagerDuty were pretty well known before YC.

Why did any of them take YC money? Seems silly.

This is why: http://whoabubs.com/should-we-do-ycombinator-were-further-al...

I didn't know ColorSchemer was their product. I love that app.

Great job, fellas.

Thanks Daniel, much appreciated.

We (COLOURlovers & ColorSchemer) actually merged up in summer '09 before doing YC last winter.

How do you reconcile the different spellings? :)

It's a battle every day :)

I had no idea colourlovers is a YC startup.

I love the site and show it to designer friends all the time for colour inspiration.

Wow great job Guys, in business since 2004 wow that is quite some time. Let me guess without the YC seal there would have been a NO from Techcrunch, good move Colourlovers!

We've been covered on TC before we did YC... but what is one of the most valuable things about the YC experience is the connections you make and the network you leave with. We actually met Jason at StartupSchool this year and told him about what we were working on... It was that meeting and that set this article up.

YC is just an experience, it's up to the founders to make it a great one.

I recently released a similar Android app called Color Scheme Magic. Its mainly a suggestion tool for colour schemes and there's no social element. Admittedly its features are somewhat lacking in comparison, but then there are few, if any, Android alternatives (and mobile apps are more of a hobby for me than a revenue stream).

Its interesting to know that with more resources at hand, a simple idea like this can scale well.

While I understand that ChromaOm can be profitable and even make its founders a tidy sum, I wonder why YC invested. In what way does this company have the potential to become huge? Colour schemes are always going to be a very narrow niche, and I can't quite see how this would turn into even a $10m company, let alone a $100m one...

Then again if YC invested, pg and the rest of the panel must see something I'm not seeing...

Hah I just used this for colors on a graph. Excellent little app.