One Response to Rejection
daniellefong.com
daniellefong.com
1) How to embrace rejection ... not just accept it but embrace it. Most smart engineers prefer to avoid rejection by spending more time on developing technology or products and they want to get it as perfect as possible before presenting it to a potential user or customer for critique. This is wrong. Get over rejection. Embrace it. Do it early. Any chance you can, get in front of people who are not your family or your friends and get real feedback. You don't learn anything from positive feedback. Your learn a whole lot more from negative feedback.
2) How to develop a sensitivity to other people's inconvenience. For everything that is new, there will always be early adopters. It is easy to let initial success gets to your head. But to going beyond the initial veneer, your product or services have to simplify people's life, not just the smart or motivated people, but the normal and lazy people.
As my base jumping friend told me once, after about 500 jumps, you will start to realize how cold it is up there. This is just the beginning. Suck it up.
Negative feedback can be more honest. In every criticism (especially if it's someone who you don't have an existing relationship with), there is usually a nugget of truth.
"If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig"
I finally got a job at Roy Rogers after a year of searching, and the rest is history. I got over the rejections, and you can too. Of course it's pretty funny looking back, but only given the proper perspective. You have to look at things for what they are.
And did you remember to test against 0x5943, rather than 5943?
And did you take Endianness into account? ;-)
How 'bout:
$echo -n "YC" > foo
$hd foo
00000000 59 43 |YC|
00000002
(UPDATE: fixed code spacing)
printf("%hx", *(unsigned short *)"YC");
printf("%hx", htons(*(unsigned short *)"YC"));Despite the hyperbole, I'd argue that a lot of HN users and YC alums express similar sentiments.
Because he has a sense of irony?
if your code isn't quite ready, build a screencast, then submit it to news.yc. doing this was probably instrumental in our eventual YC acceptance. (this lets you convey the cool parts of your idea in a way you can control even if there are a lot of missing pieces.)
otherwise, if you've only got a team and a hunch, you're in this _giant_ pile of "eh who knows if it'll work, who knows if they're good, but maybe" applications (many of which ultimately fail), and it's basically a crapshoot. yc gets enough apps w/ 1) amazing people 2) amazing products or 3) amazing traction to avoid having to place these kinds of shaky bets.
the more risk (product risk, people risk, market risk) you can eliminate on your own, the better you'll look to _any_ investor (and the more equity you'll keep for yourselves.)
obviously, there's a catch-22 that to prove some of these things you need initial capital, but for most software startups it just means locking yourself up and hacking out a prototype and letting it rip to a few people.
then just apply next cycle -- mercifully, it's not like college admissions where you (generally) only get one shot. (my first yc app was rejected a year before ultimately getting in.)
"But none will succeed as YCombinator does, winning successes from strange ideas with unproven players, unless like YCombinator, they cultivate a personality of their own, and call upon their imagination to see as the bright minds applying dream."
"Upon rejection, it couldn’t feel like a group in Mountain View had overlooked our ideas in favor of ideas more compelling to them."
All the reading, obsessing, thinking that we as Hacker News participants do, build up hopes and expectations in an unhealthy way. But then again who can drink the YC kool-aid and not get drawn in?
Anyhow, cheers to you for being brave and making a go at it.
Take that, Harvard! ;-)
But you're absolutely right. We need to pitch more. And we'll need to listen, and ponder, and most of all, build.
We have in fact located to SV (or, Berkeley, rather). If you have any tips as to which angel groups would be most suitable to approach, we'd love to hear from you.
when do we get to see a preview?
We'll be able to show a preview when it's ready for everyone else, though earlier private showings remain possible. I hope not to jinx myself, but I think it will be fairly soon, within the month, or by early summer.
Ah, local social software. A chat room that you can only access if you are close enough to start a conversation in real life. A forum that you can only post to if you are sitting in the same coffee shop.
I hear that they are working on such things for the iPhone.
I can't wait until the world realizes that social software is not social unless you actually meet people through it.
Humans are able to have significant interaction through more than physical means. It is incredible, I know.
People, please stop obsessing over this stuff. It's nice. It's great. But imagine this: Instead of spending your time raising money, spend your time making money. If your product isn't ready then take on some part time consulting.
It's not hard to earn enough to pay the rent.
For me the holy grail would be 100% in control of my destiny. Taking early seed money is actually being rejected from the world of 100% ownership.
So rewind. Do some part time work to pay the bills. Launch and make a ton of money, and keep it all for yourself (and your cofounders).
How much fun would that be?
What see on news.yc is black text over a beige background (except for posts' metadata, which is grey over beige).
The schools I attended aren't worth mentioning, and I couldn't remember what school my co-founder attended when I filled out the application (and it was within a couple of hours of the deadline, so I didn't wait to find out--it turns out to be among the best in Australia, but YC didn't know that when we were accepted, or even now, for that matter). So, while I get the feeling graduating from a good school is one currency with which you can show you're capable of doing something hard and completing it, I believe the YC folks are very amenable to accepting many other forms of payment.
There are certainly plenty of Stanford and MIT grads that make it in...but it's definitely not a requirement. (Seriously, I attended community colleges, and for crazy crap like audio recording and Jazz performance. You can't get much less impressive than my post-high school educational record.)
Later on I think he toned that down a bit.
1) Your product needs to be an order of magnitude better than your competitors in order to get users to switch. There is a reason craigslist, despite its obvious flaws, has not had a serious competitor.
2) If your product is not an order of magnitude better, design will not make much of a difference. Usability can, but not as much as you'd think. Many companies have produced a better evite, but none have gained the traction they deserve.
3) Right now, if you count on local merchants to purchase advertising, you might as well wait until hell freezes over. There's a whole set of entrepreneurs in the world who don't understand the internet and took their hard earned money to open up small bricks-and-mortar stores. Go to a website like Yelp or Menupages (both have substantial local market page views). You'll find almost no local ads, despite the fact that local businesses stand to benefit enormously from purchasing them.
I hope you figure it out. Someone has to rescue us from the mediocrity of most local websites. Might as well be you. :-)
In our opinion none of the existing players have really thought deeply about the problem, and most attempts are similar to what's out there. A good service will require a substantial rethinking.
It's a hard problem, but one we're prepared to try to solve. We want to help people get out more.
That being said, you should consider starting with a specific community you know, getting it in the hands of real users, and iterating like crazy. These things can't be developed in an intellectual vacuum.
Best of luck!