Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
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Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#2[deleted]
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#3I work at Notion.
I advise you to avoid the .so TLD - there’s a lot of institutional bias against Somalia’s TLD, like blanket blocks in many corporate firewalls. This problem will be worse if you serve public user-generated content from that TLD because the chain of communication from you to SomaliNIC might have a bunch of unknown third party intermediaries where an abuse report can get lost. Today Notion is large & successful enough to be resilient to these issues, but in the 2019-2020 years the use of .so was responsible for a few long outages. To this day, we have many requests to move our service to .com. I’m always a little worried when I see other startups using this TLD.
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#4Well, what can one say ? congratulations. That really shows some level of persistence.
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#5> Our ideas were long and vague.
> We had practically zero proof that we could execute our plans successfully.
> And as a result, our interview with YC went terribly.
If they were doing so badly, how did they even get an interview in the first place?
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#6> Our ideas were long and vague. > We had practically zero proof that we could execute our plans successfully. > And as a result, our interview with YC went terribly. If they were doing so badly, how did they even get an interview in the first place?
Article says first three times they didn't
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#7> Our ideas were long and vague. > We had practically zero proof that we could execute our plans successfully. > And as a result, our interview with YC went terribly. If they were doing so badly, how did they even get an interview in the first place?
Article says first three times they didn't
Yup, that's why I wrote "interview" in the singular. Still wondering how they got even one if they were doing so badly.
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#8I work at Notion. I advise you to avoid the .so TLD - there’s a lot of institutional bias against Somalia’s TLD, like blanket blocks in many corporate firewalls. This problem will be worse if you serve public user-generated content from that TLD because the chain of communication from you to SomaliNIC might have a bunch of unknown third party intermediaries where an abuse report can get lost. Today Notion is large &…
I like the .so TLD. If enough people keep using it I don't see how that would still make people nervous. It's a nice sounding TLD and if people have a problem with Somalia they shouldn't take it out on an innocent suffix.
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#9I work at Notion. I advise you to avoid the .so TLD - there’s a lot of institutional bias against Somalia’s TLD, like blanket blocks in many corporate firewalls. This problem will be worse if you serve public user-generated content from that TLD because the chain of communication from you to SomaliNIC might have a bunch of unknown third party intermediaries where an abuse report can get lost. Today Notion is large &…
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.
Re: Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
#10This is obviously based on anecdata, take it with a healthy helping of salt, but from what I've heard from a bunch of founder friends who have applied to YC with varying results, I get the sense that if you want to get in, you might be better off applying before you even start working on your startup.
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. Before that all they have is basically an idea and a bunch of resumes. This is of course contingent on the fact that you have impressive looking resumes and at least a plausible idea.
It's a bit of a catch 22 for B2B startups hoping to use the YC startup network as a source of early customers, but didn't apply early enough. If you're thinking of starting a B2B startup that could make good use of YC's network, my recommendation would be to apply as early as possible, before you even start working on it. Worst case scenario is you get rejected and end up having to apply again in 6 months (which is fine because you applied 6+ months earlier than you might have otherwise, and now have feedback from their rejection to make your next application better).