Ask HN: What's best way to show YC Your Idea Is Worth Funding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's best way to show YC Your Idea Is Worth Funding?

14 pointscitizenkeys9 comments

What's best way to show YC your idea is worth funding? You ever read a news article that totally proves your idea is worth funding? If so, how do you properly convey that to YCombinator?

While I'm thinking about it, I have a suggestion for a revision to the YCombinator application. Add a field asking "Have you read any technical news that proves your industry is headed in this direction? If so, please paste the url's to the articles in the box below."

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Find a customer that wants your product.

Even better - get them pay for it, scan the receipt and use it instead of the application video.

Even better - get enough receipts so you won't need to prove anything to anyone.

Explain how you know people want what you're building.

35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Several start-ups all trying to do online video curation. But they all think people want CollegeHumor.com or "skateboarding dogs" (to quote Sal Khan of Khan Academy). http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/video-curation-is-growing-u...

I think he meant in the application rather than here...

(Also, I'd be careful about using news articles as market validation. When I was doing my startup, casual games were all the rage, and a bunch of articles had just appeared on how casual game creation [the space we were in] would be huge. It never panned out. Not only did we fail, but all of our competitors failed too, and the market just didn't develop. If you look hard enough - and as a startup founder, you look pretty hard - you can find an article to support just about any position. It doesn't mean that position is right, it just means that somebody bothered to write about it.)

I don't think "because Techcrunch said so" is good enough.

The best way? To show that you are worth funding. Their interest is in funding people before ideas. In fact, they are willing to invest in good people with bad ideas because it's easier to change the idea than to change the people. Most good ideas worth funding are discovered not planned.

Journalists are no better at predicting the future then you are.

You need to use the underlying data used in the article such as market growth data, etc.

To be honest, I think your question should be "how to convey to YC that your TEAM is worth funding"

First of all, stop tailoring all your efforts to a single funding source. If you're going to invest the effort of putting together a pitch, make sure it is generic enough to be used on N other funding sources.

You have limited time to bring a product to market. I suggest spending this time developing the product and pursuing funding sources that have far less bubblicious attention than YC.

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