Dream11: Awesome idea for a startup in the Indian setting. I tried it out during a IPL but found it tough to make money. Realized it is a zero-sum game, and one needs to have better strategies to make money. Quite fun, though, when competing with friends. (Also lead to a string of other startups in fantasy gaming)

Shopify: Great interfaces and features for building your own branded web market-place and standout opposing the get listed on Amazon as a seller. Web-commerce competing with Social Commerce.

Meesho : An FB backed startup. People recommend products on the site to their circle and earn commissions for products sold. (I thought of Lularoe when I read about this)

Enabling free SaaS and making value out of that has been Google And FB’s golden strategy. (Read about Whatsapp’s merger with FB at a high price and Whatsapp’s founders deal that Whatsapp would never have ads)

Substack: A platform where you can start your own blog/journal and gain subscribers and monetize it via subscribe and view model without ads. As a reader, you can subscribe to your favorite writers and get updates via email. One might feel going back to mails instead of some web feed as a negative. More like Medium + writer’s monetizing channel - medium feeds.

Buffer: Schedule your social media updates and keep track of reach, impact.

Cloudflare: Imagine the extra efforts needed to write an API with rate-limits. And then consider additional efforts needed trying to write code to mitigate DDOS attacks, bots. Cloudflare helps in avoiding DDOS attacks and CDN support.

Authentication and IAM as service: Okta and Auth0 (On Google, I saw an Auth0 vs. Okta ad redirecting to Okta. Just crazy marketing. These days when I search for small business sites on Google, I consciously avoid clicking on the promoted ad link of the website to save the business some tiny cents ☺️)

Drift: Conversations on site for queries/sales as a service

Palantir: Data Monitoring for National Security, Fraud prevention (surprised seeing the idea of this highly valued startup)

Some of these are high-level opinions and not so highly researched.