When submitting your idea to YC, is it better to select something which has great potential but is almost certainly too large for the scope of 3 months, or to select a subset (ie one feature) and just submit that?
Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
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Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#2We like big ideas. Just say what the end goal is and what you currently expect to do first. There's always some core you can get done in 3 months, and we are now quite good at figuring out what it should be.
Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#3We like big ideas. Just say what the end goal is and what you currently expect to do first. There's always some core you can get done in 3 months, and we are now quite good at figuring out what it should be.
Sounds good, that's the answer we were hoping for.
Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#4What I'd like to accomplish: Become Master of Space and Time
What I expect to do first: Apply to YC
For some reason, I'm having some trouble with some of the steps in between. (grin)
Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#5What I'd like to accomplish: Become Master of Space and Time What I expect to do first: Apply to YC For some reason, I'm having some trouble with some of the steps in between. (grin)
Consider a tag cloud.
Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#6What I'd like to accomplish: Become Master of Space and Time What I expect to do first: Apply to YC For some reason, I'm having some trouble with some of the steps in between. (grin)
So you're trying to be a mashup of Sky in Google Earth and the Wayback machine? That's going to be tough...
(I'd vote for whoever is the first to do it and post it on news.yc!)
Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#7Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#8What I'd like to accomplish: Become Master of Space and Time What I expect to do first: Apply to YC For some reason, I'm having some trouble with some of the steps in between. (grin)
Consider a tag cloud.
So 2006. What he needs is an iphone app with facebook plugin & twitter integration. Which is also a platform.
Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#9Re: Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea?
#10We (Virtualmin) got in and the problems we solve are big and take a huge volume of code (though we had a 9 year jump on the problem when we applied, in our Open Source projects).
Parakey got in, and their problem set sounded really big...but I didn't understand what they were talking about most of the time, so I may have misunderstood. They also had a leg up, by being Blake Fucking Ross and Joe Fucking Hewitt.
Versionate is a big project, but they were well-started by the time of application.
Octopart is a big project. They faked it until they made it, and did so beautifully (their presentation was among the best on Demo Day for WFP07).
Loopt is a big set of problems, most of them non-technical, and pg considers it the best thing out of YC to date (and I see why...Sam's kicking ass).
Zenter was hard. But they broke the rules and pretended like it was easy and actually produced something that mostly worked in a few months.
So, yeah, while the majority of YC companies are pretty small ideas that can be executed by a very small team, many success stories (or success stories in the making) out of YC have been big ideas.