I'm in a similar boat, and every time we've learned a lot from the rejections. We have thousands of recurring, paying customers, a unique product, great engagement, but yet we still can't seem to get to the interview stage. Hoping that changes this time around. I'm not a traditional founder - I am a medical doctor and full stack programmer/designer, so if anyone has any insights or tips that would be greatly appreciated! The YC pedigree and more importantly, the rapid learning and network is something I am definitely aiming for.
Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#72I cannot reconcile this article with this year's YCombinator stats.. 43% of the batch were accepted with only an idea 71% of the batch had zero revenue before YC https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-summer-2022-bat... Is it about how you behave during the interview and/or your past record (ex. successful serial entrepreneurs)? Otherwise, I do not see any reason why this startup was rejected 5 times and many o…
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#73>But for the past three years, we've struggled to find the right problem to solve and gain even a small traction. Each time we pivoted and applied to YC (and were rejected), we learned something new. Respectfully, I’ve never particularly understood this approach to business. It seems like a lot of VC-funded or VC-hopeful companies take the approach of “I know I should be in business, I just don’t know in what” which…
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#74>But for the past three years, we've struggled to find the right problem to solve and gain even a small traction. Each time we pivoted and applied to YC (and were rejected), we learned something new. Respectfully, I’ve never particularly understood this approach to business. It seems like a lot of VC-funded or VC-hopeful companies take the approach of “I know I should be in business, I just don’t know in what” which…
I have rarely seen an entrepreneur execute the same plan that the person had since the inception of the idea. That's the nature of the startup, you have to keep pivoting to avoid a crowded space, discover new markets when you have an insight. If you haven't pivoted then you probably haven't discovered an untapped market. Building a startup is all about testing hypothesis and running experiments. More often, these exp…
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#75Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Once you actually start, the bar for getting in seems to get much higher, because there's suddenly a lot more concrete data points to benchmark your startup against. I started in late 2013 and was rejected by YC in 2016. Haven't applied to anything since, with the exception of Apollo. Certainly was very aware of that dynamic at the time. As a solo founder who lacks the aforementioned impressive resume, and who's ne…
Would it not make sense for you to get user validation with a smaller scale poc than the herculean plan you outlined. Also your plan seem to focus too much on funding goals than user acquisition or product market fit. Unless you are planning to create a spacex style capital intensive company, I don't see why you need so much funding for.
I used to think in those terms. Thing is, it's a multi-dimensional problem.
Dimension one is a human resource limitation. One person pitted against a rapidly evolving technology landscape with very high technical bar. What that equates to is making one demo/MVP after another and eventually burning out. Or, compromising quality. Early on, it was possible to do it the traditional way. Things are now moving too fast.
Regardless, the reward in either scenario is funding based on whatever "product market fit," and users that require tending to. Best case, you might end up a multi-billion dollar company if you make it. One not all that different from pile after pile of technical debts that routinely waddle to their respective exits, then exist in some hellish afterlife post-exit. That's typically defined as success. I imagine one loses their soul in the process of even creating such a thing.
Point being, I view user acquisition and product market fit as poison pills. Not just for the company optimizing for it, but for society as a whole. They are a large part of what is wrong in the world.
Dimension two is expansion of scope. The more you think, the more beautiful things get. It's really hard to go back and limit scope once you've woven ideas together over the span of years in a kind of tapestry where individual concepts end up almost symbiotic. Fortunately, I inadvertently dedicated my time to this type of thinking rather than grinding out demos.
So, what you're left with is selling a vision. Absent any track record, it still necessitates a demo—but the nature of that demo becomes fundamentally different—as does its target audience. More of a living design document built to help convey that vision.
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>Unless you are planning to create a spacex style capital intensive company, I don't see why you need so much funding for.
Well, the goal is for people to wake up one day and find out that the way they interact with computing as a whole has fundamentally changed forever.
On HN, you see people grasping with regularity at individual threads which constitute pieces of this puzzle, with no clear consensus on what should be done. There's an almost morose acceptance that pervades the current technological hellscape in which we live. Now people are looking back at dreams of what once could have been as a way out of this mess, but that alone isn't sufficient.
In any case, things get expensive at that level. I'm in my mid thirties and the core team I want to hire is probably twenty years my senior on average. Some of them probably don't even care about the money.
In all likelihood it'll go nowhere and I'll remain a nobody, but it's already been a wild ride, and hopefully I'll at least have fun and be spared the stereotypical startup/accelerator/VC grind.
Hey, perhaps somewhere along the way I'll even figure out how to not sound delusional.
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#77Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would avoid all of the two-letter domain names. I suffered 8 hours of excruciating downtime back in 2012 when the .st nic went down: https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Beware-cutesy-two-l... I learned my lesson, I'll take the .com every time, even if I have to get creative with the name.
What about longer ones like .voyage? Do you know if they suffer from the same issues?
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#79Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#80>But for the past three years, we've struggled to find the right problem to solve and gain even a small traction. Each time we pivoted and applied to YC (and were rejected), we learned something new. Respectfully, I’ve never particularly understood this approach to business. It seems like a lot of VC-funded or VC-hopeful companies take the approach of “I know I should be in business, I just don’t know in what” which…
Say you have ten business ideas you really like, that you think could be successful. You realize there is some luck involved, and that you aren’t going to be as good enough at each idea as you’d like to be, or that you simply won’t figure out how to interest enough people even if you’re really good at making the product. So you keep trying your ideas until one works out.