YC W21 Remote Batch
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P0IzDEwKQ7C8kXKdSm1WQmQ_...
I'm applying with NanaGram (https://nanagram.co). NanaGram is a service that helps you send regular printed photos to your grandparents in the mail. All you have to do is text your photos. What makes it different is you can add siblings and cousins to curate photos as a group. It's bootstrapped, solo, and profitable. I've been on-and-off full time. There's so much room to grow. I'm doing the Startup School build sprint (https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-yc-build-sprint-and-...). It's been so helpful to have somewhere to report to each week. I'm planning to focus on NanaGram exclusively the next 6 months with continued weekly reporting cadence.
EDIT: Absolutely brilliant. Your service is the top result on Google for "send photos to grandparent" and you snuck an ad into the featured result listicle. Not to mention this very "informative post" that doubles as an ad.
How did you develop your marketing skills?
* Within the geographic area that you plan to serve, e.g. USA and potentially Canada, West Europe
My siblings and I tried to set my grandparents up with devices which never worked. People often tell me the same when signing up for NanaGram. Products like digital photo frames are great but require set up and internet. An envelope of 10 prints can be mailed in a couple minutes and provide joy in several places throughout the home; after delivering the first set of photos to my grandparents, I came back the next week and my grandmother taped photos across her entire kitchen. :)
There's also something about printed photos that a glowing pixel can't beat. The closest analogy is vinyl records.
You took a real-world impedance mismatch, and you serve as the interface between people so that all of them can interact in the way they most want to interact. There are a lot of potential businesses there, and I'm sure you'd be well positioned to grow into future such adaptation layers; I can imagine a brand built around a family of such inter-generational adaptations, in both directions.
These people aren't luddites. It's just easier to do this stuff with physical photos. The tech-obsessed might forget about that sometimes.
If they have already solved the harder problem, a future potential pivot to digital delivery hardly feels like a roadblock to me.
You actually need more marketing chops if you're doing something absolutely novel.
I applied with my roomba/robot outdoor trashcan (Trashie).. never have to wheel that stupid thing down to the curb again; automatic and it texts you reminders that tomorrow is trash day. Please fill me!
However, after a few minutes checking your website, I noticed that all the old people I know (my partner grandmother, my friends' grandparents, etc), they all use Facebook or Whatsapp in one way or another, so it is really easy to send them digital photos. And considering I am from 3rd world country, I wonder how that is not the case in the United States.
Still great idea!
Yes, the Bill Atkinson from the original Macintosh team. He’s also been a photographer for decades and presumably used his printing knowledge to get the meatspace logistics set up.
I've dabbled with releasing a text-to-postcard service but standard 4x6 prints have kept me pretty busy. I'm doing a postcard experiment of sorts: I commissioned my brother-in-law to create unique monthly art and we're adding a free blank postcard in each shipment. My dog Yoda was the subject in July: https://www.instagram.com/p/CE9qMA-FMVo/
If anyone is applying and is looking for someone to review their application or has questions about the remote batch, feel free to email me (email is in my profile). I was helped by many people over the past few months and would love to pay it forward.
Edit: And for anyone wondering about it being remote vs. in person - YC was an overwhelmingly positive experience for me and I would encourage you to apply.
Great idea btw!
With few exceptions, I would recommend YC to anyone on the fence.
- Pro: The YC partners and staff went out of their way to make the remote experience as good as the in-person experience. We're in Singapore and the partners would make time whenever we needed it on our schedule/timezone - even though it was late/early for them
- Pro: The tooling is awesome. I didn't know this before the batch, but YC has a whole software team building tooling. They have some amazing systems in place, and as this article points out they are constantly improving it.
- Pro: Fundraising was better/easier (at least for us). This isn't particular to YC I guess, but because everything is on Zoom you can line up the meetings back-to-back, instead of commuting around the Bay instead of in-person meetings. This may be personal preference, but I find commuting exhausting and don't mind pitching over zoom.
- Pro: even though it's remote, you still get many of the things that make YC great - the brand, the network, the internal forums, the knowledge base, accelerator deals, advisors etc
- Con: Timezones. This is only relevant if you're living in a timezone that isn't handy to ET. Since we're in Singapore at the moment, most of the batch talks ("YC dinners") were midnight-2am. This is understandable - they chose a timezone which is best for the majority of the batch, and it would be tough to cater for everyone
- Con: It's harder to make connections with your batchmates.
Overall it's a strong recommendation from me - definitely worth doing.
There is so much money around courtesy of rolling funds, micro-VCs etc that it's almost certain that you will raise a decent sized seed round. But that money seems to be concentrated in the early stages so the competition for a Series A is significantly higher. Which means unless you hit product market fit, have incredible unit economics and lots of traction within the first 18 months you are going to die. Or you will just keep raising Seed+, Seed++ etc until you have no equity left.
And unfortunately there just isn't enough accurate data on what the conversion rate is going from Seed to Series A so it's hard for startups to make educated risk decisions.
More and more I think the smart path is to try to bootstrap your way for the first few years and then go for the Series A at which point you will have all of the leverage since you can simply say no since you are profitable.
Dieing after 18 months is a winning scenario for many founders, especially those who already came from privileged career positions such as former positions at Google. They get to raise their ~500k-2m and pay themselves pretty solid salaries while building industry connections. Then they either return to their old job, take a long vacation with their FANNG + founder savings, or jump into their next startup.
I don't have any statistics, I can only speak anecdotally.
VCs want you to hit it big or burn out within 5-10 years. Remember they are using investors money, and investors want their money back.
If your plan is to bootstrap (which I think is wise and the path I took with my current startup) , look into angels and Friends and family Rounds. Most family rounds are totally OK with a longer horizon. That said, not all people have the friends and family to do such a raise, in which case what do you do?
Not every company can do that (i.e., Boom, which is building supersonic airplanes) but if you can, you should.
Assuming what I'm saying above is correct, that means that YC is advising founders to take the slow road to profitability? (Nothing wrong with that!)
Just because you don't have to raise money doesn't mean you never do. Sometimes founders who are running a profitable business and don't need investors will nonetheless choose to raise money because someone offers it on very good terms and they believe they can use it to grow faster.
https://earnestcapital.com/what-we-invest-in/ is one such "not vc" VC (?)
"We are not the best fit investors for founders who have a business plan of raising millions more in capital every 12 to 18 months. We’re not opposed to our founders raising more capital later on, but we have a strong preference for opportunities where the Plan A after raising from us is to get to break-even and grow the business through cashflows. Typically founders raising more than $2m will not be a fit for us."
It’s a shame there isn’t exit interviews for seed companies once they run out of money or go onto Series A. Because it would hugely benefit the ecosystem.
The # of Series A's hasn't grown as quickly as the number of seed rounds, but strong companies still have good chances of getting Series A funding. One way to think about this is that years ago maybe there were 5k seed rounds/year and 1500 Series A's. And today maybe it's 20k seed rounds and 2000 Series A's. But those 1500-2000 Series A's are still mostly distributed among the 5k top seed companies, not the 15k additional ones that wouldn't have been funded years ago. So if you have a company that you think could've been funded 5 years ago then you probably have similar odds of a Series A as you did 5 years ago. I don't have data to back this up, but this has been my anecdotal experience.
FWIW, the seed fund I'm at has had a consistent 65-70% seed-to-Series-A graduation rate for our entire 8-year lifetime, even though the number of seed rounds during that period has grown dramatically.
Note that my perspective in saying this is hardware. I've done hybrid (hardware + software) companies my entire adult life. It's all I know. And, so far, 100% of everything I've done has been self funded. I've had some success and lots of "experiences". Such is life.
While today hardware can be far less capital intensive than a decade or two ago, there is no escaping the fact that it is much, much harder than pure software businesses. I spend more money on tooling and specialized engineering design software than the best computers a pure software startup would typically buy. Heck, I have a drawer full of specialized crimpers and tools that is probably worth as much as a nice BMW.
It's the old bits vs. atoms game. Iterations and pivots cost real money and a minimum viable product can cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And mistakes can clean out your bank account and take months to iterate or pivot out of.
This paragraph in the YC deal page (https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/) definitely does not ring true for anything but what I would call the most trivial of hardware startups:
"We think that $125k is currently the right amount for founders to be able to run their company and pay expenses for around 5-6 months, and sometimes even longer."
Yeah. No. I have been working on a self-funded startup since approximately March. It has taken somewhere in the range of $250K to $350K and a lot of man-hours to get to the point where we are about to start showing the MVP to prospective customers. With some products you only get so far with Powerpoints and hand-waving.
And so, while I think I would be quite interested in participating in the YC program, I can't see my way to handing over 7% for $125K. The next phase of this startup could consume that in a month. Hardware startups run on blood in the form of cash. If you can't pump it through the veins you starve and die.
Maybe YC needs to have two kinds of deals: One for guys-with-laptops companies and another for non-trivial hardware startups.
What I mean by "non trivial hardware startups" is anything you can't do with a good looking video and an interesting story on Kickstarter.
I am doing yet another startup that is being done in an entirely different way. In this case we've been talking to a prospective customer for over a year. He finally got funding for his project and it looks like we are going to get the contract we were looking for to launch the business. Once again, the work and investment it took to get to the point where this customer is willing to issue a (possibly) million dollar+ purchase order for this transaction is well above a $125K seed investment.
Anyhow, I do understand that this perspective is likely well outside what a typical YC company might be like. Let's face it, hardware startups don't unicorn at a rate even remotely close to software startups. I think I can say most never do. They can be amazing and super-interesting companies but moving molecules is much harder and slower to scale than moving bits.
So I believe it's roughly 28,000 -> 280 (1%).