You asked about Creator Economy
16 people built something like it. 7 are gone.
That is 47% of the ones whose fate we could settle, against 23% across the whole register. 1 were acquired.
| Launched | What it was | Today |
|---|---|---|
| 2021-01-01 | YCTrendpop Discover trends as they happen · trendpop.com | acquired |
| 2021-06-01 | YCDots 💸 Developer friendly drop in payouts infrastructure · usedots.com | still up |
| 2021-06-01 | Tiktok for fashion - where designers show their work + build traction · revery.ai | gone |
| 2021-06-01 | YCWabi We are Shopify for the $15B creator economy in LATAM · wabi.build | gone |
| 2021-06-01 | YCFlowbo Pipe for online businesses · flowbo.co | gone |
| 2021-05-12 | build.mmm.page | still up |
| 2021-08-27 | metameme.app | still up |
| 2021-03-25 | themes.vscode.one | still up |
| 2021-06-01 | YCJABU B2B payments, transforming Africa's cash economy · gojabu.com | still up |
| 2021-08-05 | creator.nightcafe.studio | unverified |
| 2021-10-13 | serverless.com | still up |
| 2021-06-01 | YCAppX AppX helps social media creators launch their own mobile apps. · appx.co.in | still up |
| 2021-01-24 | cvservant.com | unverified |
| 2021-06-01 | YCStipop Monetization platform for character creators · studio.stipop.io | still up |
| 2021-01-15 | builtinpublic.dev | gone~11mo |
| 2021-01-01 | Accelerating the shift to a more transparent economy · purposefinance.com | gone |
| 2021-01-01 | Video publishing and monetization platform for creators and artists · gigs.live | gone |
| 2021-06-01 | A video subscription platform serving black viewers and creators. · blackoak.tv | gone |
How this compares
Y Combinator reports its own outcomes, including acquisitions. The other two are judged by asking the domain, so they are not measured the same way and are never averaged together.
The register re-probes every domain it holds. Some that answered last month stop answering. We send that list — what went quiet, and what it was — once a month. Nothing else.
How this was made. Show HN entries are every post from 2021 to 2023 with at least five points that linked to its own domain; code hosts and free hosting are excluded, because a repository outlives the effort behind it. Product Hunt entries needed 100 votes — a far higher bar, so they are the promoted top slice rather than a like-for-like sample. Both are judged by asking the domain whether it still answers: gone means it no longer resolves, refuses the connection, serves a parking page, or says plainly that it shut down. An HTTP error is not counted as gone — a server answering 404 is one somebody still pays for, and an audit of 25 gone-calls found two such sites alive with only a moved homepage. Y Combinator entries use the status YC publishes itself, which is why only those can say acquired. Squatted domains — a lapsed name now serving somebody else's site — are not detected, so these figures run slightly low.