We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected • Hacker News Board

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#31

Post by belenos46 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

davefp wrote: post #21

plehoux wrote: post #8

missiveapp.com and conferenceBadge.com, my two startups, have both been rejected at the interview phase. Our yearly revenue for both now stands in the 7 digits. We are still just a team of 3 + 1 employee, 100% bootstrapped. Life is good. My advice, keep pushing! https://missiveapp.com/ https://www.conferencebadge.com

FYI visiting https://conferencebadge.com doesn't work, only the insecure or www does.

They must have excellent responsiveness; https://www.conferencebadge.com/ works fine for me.

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#32

Post by stOneskull » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

camjohnson26 wrote: post #20

jvagner wrote: post #3

"venerable" should be "vulnerable", and Mountain View is mis-capitalized in a few places... :-)

There’s a “where” that should be a “were”

a "the" instead of a "their"

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#33

Post by autotune » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

davefp wrote: post #21

plehoux wrote: post #8

missiveapp.com and conferenceBadge.com, my two startups, have both been rejected at the interview phase. Our yearly revenue for both now stands in the 7 digits. We are still just a team of 3 + 1 employee, 100% bootstrapped. Life is good. My advice, keep pushing! https://missiveapp.com/ https://www.conferencebadge.com

FYI visiting https://conferencebadge.com doesn't work, only the insecure or www does.

Little Terraform and ACME/LetsEncrypt provider with a build pipeline or basic cron job and this is an easy permanent fix.

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#34

Post by jamestimmins » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:12 PM UTC

camjohnson26 wrote: post #19

These founders haphazardly threw a new paid feature into their app just to try to impress the YC team? They should have taken the time to do market research and do it right rather than risk alienating their user base. I wonder if getting rejected was a big enough blow to their ego that they couldn’t see clearly, just like college applicants will go to top ranked colleges with no concern for the price or the risk/rewa…

The article doesn't indicate the amount of planning or research they already completed prior to this phase. It's pretty reasonable to assume that they knew what they wanted to charge for, but that it just hadn't been prioritized yet. If they were able to quickly get existing users to pay then they clearly had some idea what their users wanted.

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#35

Post by sithlord » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

cdubzzz wrote: post #16

plehoux wrote: post #8

missiveapp.com and conferenceBadge.com, my two startups, have both been rejected at the interview phase. Our yearly revenue for both now stands in the 7 digits. We are still just a team of 3 + 1 employee, 100% bootstrapped. Life is good. My advice, keep pushing! https://missiveapp.com/ https://www.conferencebadge.com

Apropos of nothing, this little marketing page is pretty great -- https://www.conferencebadge.com/why-use-conference-badge

so, it took anna 10 hours, and lets assume anna gets paid 25 dollars an hour, so a cost of 250 dollars. Shelley, used the conference badge, and at 1.79 for the fully shipped version of the badge, it will cost 582 dollars. So, essentially, Shelley paid 332 dollars for QR codes and convenience.

Is it worth it? probably. but maybe not.

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#36

Post by cbetti » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #11

paulsutter wrote: post #2

They should put this much hustle into the business for the sake of the business, every week. Not just one weekend for YC.

Besides the point that the article doesn't indicate they don't, that amount of hustle might not be maintainable in the long run.

Starting a business gives you a broad enough diversity of things to do that you can sustain 90 hours per week dedicated to the effort for a long, long time.

Coding burnout? Refine your pitch deck and cold call materials. Designing burnout? Pick up the phone and sell. Isolation burnout? Go pitch at a local pitch event or find advisors at a business plan competition.

When you switch focus like this, you free up exhausted parts of your brain and body to give them a chance to recover without disconnecting from your startup, and you get a cross-pollination effect, where each of these activities informs one another very nicely.

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#37

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

cdubzzz wrote: post #16

plehoux wrote: post #8

missiveapp.com and conferenceBadge.com, my two startups, have both been rejected at the interview phase. Our yearly revenue for both now stands in the 7 digits. We are still just a team of 3 + 1 employee, 100% bootstrapped. Life is good. My advice, keep pushing! https://missiveapp.com/ https://www.conferencebadge.com

Apropos of nothing, this little marketing page is pretty great -- https://www.conferencebadge.com/why-use-conference-badge

This really is pretty great.

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#38

Post by joshyeager » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

plehoux wrote: post #8

missiveapp.com and conferenceBadge.com, my two startups, have both been rejected at the interview phase. Our yearly revenue for both now stands in the 7 digits. We are still just a team of 3 + 1 employee, 100% bootstrapped. Life is good. My advice, keep pushing! https://missiveapp.com/ https://www.conferencebadge.com

I have a suggestion: add support for dual-clip lanyards[1]. I've always found the single-clip lanyards annoying: they flop around and get twisted. I went to a conference this spring that had lanyards that clipped to both top corners of the badge, and it was significantly less annoying.

[1] For example: https://www.marcopromos.com/product/3-4-cotton-no-flip-lanya...

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#39

Post by rococode » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

I wonder if the results thus far actually validate the concerns raised by YC ("hard to know whether people are willing to pay")? $250 MRR strikes me as rather low for 35K MAU - assuming that's 50 users it's just over a 0.1% conversion rate, and a little over 2 weeks in I'd expect most of those monthly users to have come across the option to pay at some point by now. Nonetheless, wish you guys the best of luck in figuring out the monetization!

Re: We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected

#40

Post by myblake » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #24

prickledpear wrote: post #7

It's great that YC provides feedback on why they don't accept (some) companies. However, it's a bit disappointing to see that not having MRR is a reason to reject a company. It seems like a lot of the successful YC companies were accepted way before they were anywhere to close to revenue -- and some were even working on a completely different product when accepted. My hope is that MRR is sufficient, but not necessary…

Maybe I just don't get the Silicon Valley culture, or perhaps I'm missing something fundamental, but let me just get this straight: 1. Startup has no revenue whatsoever, but ostensibly have good product. They go pitch to investors and get rejected, likely because they have no revenue. 2. They hack around for 1 (!) weekend and get their MRR to $500. Five hundred bucks. They now go back to investors and say: hey look,…

It’s proof they can actually make money on the thing, which matters because it sounds it’s soemthing people like enough to pay for so as they grow the user base, they’ll grow revenue. However, keep in mind they still didn’t get in to YC after changing it, so it may not have chances things that much.