1) Reduce your burn rate. 2) Save up enough money to live off of for a year. 3) Bootstrap your startup off your savings.
I am going to make a guess that many of the strongest startups will be produced from this procedure.
Getting funding, from YC or elsewhere, has a way of changing your startup in a way that makes it much less likely to succeed. They have said so in fact -- they want you to fail quickly.
My advice, if you can do it, would be to start now rather than saving up to give yourself a year of cash in the bank. It's harder but that's not always a bad thing.
There are two ways of thinking about a problem. And they both are important:
1) Why wouldn't this work? 2) How can we make it work?
When you get funding, it's mostly about 1 and not so much about 2.
I am not sure that Instagram would have survived receiving funding.
https://backchannel.com/why-instagram-worked-45dbfeaa37c8#.1...
Another aspect of it that I don't really want to go into right now... when an outsider looks at your company, they don't really understand what's going on. But they do have a bunch of rules of thumb that they like. They may or may not apply to your company. But in their minds, you're a bad company if you do not adhere to them.
VCs admit to thinking this way. They call it "pattern matching."
Some modification to my earlier statement is accurate. :-) Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to iterate on it. If you're interested, you'll have to discover it yourself.
That doesn't make you more likely to fail though. Quite the opposite on the long run.
You aren't in the business of solving problems and making money anymore but how to inflate share price as quickly as possible by focusing on KPI that will get other suckers wet.
Actually, it does. They want you to fail quickly so they can (in)validate your initial business plan. But business plans for start ups that don't fail quickly often evolve through one or more pivots.
For example, see slack and twitter.
What's your definition of "strongest"? In terms of success measured by exit size, it's empirically untrue. Perhaps if you are measuring by failure rate, but even then, I doubt it.
FWIW, it can't be empirically true either. :-)
What I am saying is that starting off one's journey by taking money or going through an accelerator enters you into an efficient machine for building a startup in a specific way.
From what I have observed, entering this path often traps founders into thinking this is the one true way to build a startup. In reality, the paths to product-market fit are unknown. You often discover them through serendipity. Being rigid can cause you to miss them.
I am not saying a startup should never take money. Once a startup has discovered their magic, i.e. achieved product-market fit, then taking money and using it to scale is the right way to go.