My Y Combinator experience

I think you may be walking away with the wrong impression; it's your business and marketing talents they were concerned about.

Just because you're not on the market doesn't mean that you can't have users, whether friends, family, or trusted third parties; you must be testing with someone who isn't a core team member?

If you're not, I'd take this as a huge signal that you should do so ASAP.

Likewise, what are the apps that have been built with your system?

I'm sure you'll have various test apps, but have none of you built anything more in-depth? Or, again, have no family, friends, or trusted third parties built anything with it?

I think the Y combinator interviewers were worried about what sounds like a lack of market research.

It's not too late to fix that - if the market's after a solution like yours, and you can fix the "we built this without doing any research" red flag - just make sure that you start right this very second!

If you want to impress people with the difference between your tech and something that you believe isn't as good you need to show off the differentiating factor as much as possible.

Your landing page (http://creolabs.com/) doesn't care about me (the user) at all. There is a big difference between being proud of your product and being self-aggrandizing, and you're on the latter end of that scale.

To quote Henry Ford, you can't build a reputation on what you're going to do. Apple can get away with saying "something big is going to happen" because they've already proved (over and over and over again) that they can deliver. They've earned our trust. You haven't (yet).

The landing page talks about rewriting things from scratch, and a custom compiler, and language influences, but it doesn't tell me what the product does, how it does it, how it fits into my life, and what it will enable me to do that I can't do right now. To put it differently, you're placing a demand on my time (by asking me to get social, or share my e-mail address, or even read the page), but you haven't thought through how to make me feel like I've spent my time on your site wisely.

Your product is important to you, I'm not. That's actually perfectly fine (I get the appeal of building beautiful systems more than anyone), but that's not a company (yet). It's somewhere between a hobby and a research project.

Your video demo has the same problem -- you show off random features of the environment, but you don't show me how I can build a real app. Again, you don't care about me, the user.

Based on what I could get from the demo, the system is actually ridiculously impressive, which is great; but you need to learn to look at the world through other people's eyes. That's way harder than building the most sophisticated of optimizing compilers.

What's the market size? Compatibility? Pricing? What apps have been built? How advanced? How long to learn a new language? What about the surrounding ecosystem (storage, analytics, notifications, etc)? Do you offer support? Training? What if you disappear in a year, what then?

There are already plenty of tools (as mentioned by the interviewers) for making mobile app development easier but there's a limit to how far you can go with non-developers. I think you're building into a niche of people who might be interested enough to dabble and but not enough to become serious, and that just doesn't sound like something you can build a company on.

Btw, maybe I'm alone in this but being someone in their 20s, it felt strange to read "3 young boys in their early twenties" as if they couldn't handle an interview. I strongly suggest reviewing everything you've done so far and asking more fundamental questions about the viability of the business, because at the end of the day, that's what matters.

> YC: How many apps has been developed with your software?

> Creo: As I already said and as I clearly written in our apply, we are currently in pre-beta so we just developed apps for internal usage, nothing is on the market yet.

So that means that after all those efforts, you haven't even tried yourself to create an app with the beta you have?