The Y Combinator Experience – Remote Edition
magicbell.io
magicbell.io
Before COVID when you have to relocate to Bay Area this is just a living fee for a low quality house + personal spendings.
Now, 125k is almost a lot for pretty much any place on the planet. Therefore, many remote entrepreneurs can be more relaxed on raising capital. I'd say you even can decide to "bootstrap" with this money + GCP/AWS credits.
I'm not sure the first stages of a startup is the right time to start handholding offshored devs. You typically want talented folks with you because change will happen fast. No time to draft new requirements and make sure via lengthy meetings that the offshored devs really understands them.
FTFY ;) Too many unprofitable / "pre-profit" companies have five figure monthly office rents for this to be untrue.
Maybe I am biased but having heard and seen horror stories of founders losing their companies because of _having_ to raise money: no thanks.
Bootstrap and if it doesn't hit ramen profitable, no biggie. If it does, go raise at favorable terms because you don't need their money.
To answer a sibling comment since we can’t nest any deeper: so long as you’re not on the west coast with its decades long housing undersupply, small towns almost anywhere in the country are pretty affordable. This even includes parts of the otherwise expensive northeast.
In particular a lot of college towns offer a great mix of good quality of life with very affordable living.
HN has an anti-flamewar system which kicks in when there's too many comments too fast in one chain.
It's a little more complicated than that, but mostly, away from the coasts and famous cities (Chicago, Austin, etc.), most of middle America is pretty cheap -- by American standards. It's still a lot more expensive than most of the world, obviously. But there are lots of places you could live reasonably comfortably for 2-3 years on $125k. Hell, there are a lot of places you could buy a house for $80k, and $45k buys a lot of food and internet. ;-)
My salary could support a much looser budget, but we find our life very fulfilling as-is and don't see a compelling reason to spend more. Different way of seeing the world I guess.
Just a 2BR and food for 3 years = close to impossible on $125K gross.
But it is very much possible on $125K net.
NB: you're right, in the sense that if you're living off of savings it's net (and then some). But I can see why parent is... more than a little confused :)
In general, the more rural an area is, the lower the cost of living. Rural college towns are more likely to have an abundance of cheap apartments than the average rural area.
However, it's all highly relative. San Francisco and NYC are the two most expensive locations in the United States. By comparison, everywhere else is cheaper. Lots of major US metro areas are extremely affordable by comparison, and $120k could probably last a frugal person for 2 or 3 years near those locations especially if living with roommates... so you don't have to live in the middle of nowhere to be somewhere affordable. Compared to a lot of places outside the US, even the affordable parts of the US probably seem expensive, but my limited understanding is that most of Western Europe is relatively expensive... so probably not too different from the US in many places, but definitely outside my area of expertise.
To be less snarky, about 80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas. Those tend to be more expensive due to the higher demand. The other 20% live in rural or exurban areas where land is extremely cheap.
However, access to education and healthcare outside the urban/suburban regions can be very bad.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
"Median household income was $68,703 in 2019, an increase of 6.8 percent from the 2018 median of $64,324 (Figure 1 and Table A-1)."
35K is closer to the poverty line in much of the USA for a family than the median income.
Dual income households are pretty common these days, so a median household income of $65K with a median income of $35K makes sense.
For a startup founder, or in fact any single person, median personal income is a more relevant number.
Spain is increasing taxes and they already were pretty hefty for Limited Liability companies.
Portugal is similar on paper but it's easier to start, and their tax agency is not nearly as punitive and arbitrary as the Spanish one.
And you'll have sun (in the south), contained prices and polite Portuguese, which tend to speak decent English, in case you need hiring.
Portuguese infrastructures and utilities are still far below Spain, specially roads and highways, but Portugal is slowly improving while Spain has been declining for a while and it's basically walking to a cliff.
Goin on a Travel to Spain is pretty easy too.
I'm Spanish, if anyone thought I was advertising my country.
If you go to neighborhoods where the locals live or outside the city limits you'll see the price drop considerably. A friend is living one hour away from here and paying 600 EUR for a nice house that's four times the size of my apartment.
And although I wouldn't worry too much about language too much if your focus is primarily on work, Spanish is perhaps the easiest language to learn as an English speaker. You can achieve professional level fluency in 600 hours of study. Certainly with 80-100 hours of concentrated study and continued practice after that you can learn more than enough to get by in daily life.
Two big advantages with learning Spanish: 1) pronunciation is easy to learn and is the same for both written and spoken Spanish; 2) there are lots of cognates, so if your English vocabulary is good then you already know lots of Spanish words.
Spain is great, but for the purposes of picking a country for working remotely and having a longer runway, I would argue heavily for Mexico over Spain if you're picking a Spanish speaking country. The overall cost of living is low, internet access can be great depending on the area, you'll be on a similar timezone as the US, and services (cooking, laundry, babysitting, etc) are very inexpensive - leaving you with much more time to work (or to use your downtime more effectively than running errands/etc).
Both are pretty easy, though, and Spanish opens up a lot more of the world. But Italian is just so darn fun :)
Your impressions are correct. While some violence is greatly exagerated to paint a picture (For instance, Chicago, St Louis, Baltimore, Washington are more violent than São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro), it still is MUCH safer in Europe or Sillicon Valley/New York.
Barcelona is awesome and it's cheap (spent a total of $800 for the whole month on food, living, etc.). Highly recommend for someone on a budget who wants to hack away.
On the other hand, living in Spain and speaking fluent English can be almost like a superpower in some circumstances.
(And for the record, my native language is Spanish)
Presumably you go to large cities for the social interaction.
It basically makes us "ramen profitable"
TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.
> Tips on applying successfully
And the next subheaders are
>> Talking about my idea only from a customer's perspective
>> Writing to sound impressive
>> Stopping to apply after a couple of rejections
Things were confusing, I had to go back and read the small print after the first header, which says "do NOT do these things". Maybe the first headers should read something like "pitfalls to avoid when applying"? Or rephrasing the sub-headers?
This must have changed. I went through YCF #2 and we were essentially laughed at each time we mentioned staying local or becoming profitable. Literally the only thing our advisor talked about was raising.
We're on the same W21 cohort as OP. I remember when we started, they hammered home frugality as a key trait of successful founders. One founder talk stood out - "If they have office snacks before product market fit, you know they're going to fail". W21 wanted to put that on a T-shirt.
This advice seems to be repeated all over YC's manuals, partner office hours and culture generally.
If you have snarky shirts before you have a product...
How much do you think you get distracted by talking and listening with others in your YC network vs actually focusing on your product?
As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people
I've built things solo with my PhD (dropped out), and collaboratively in a startup.
The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing. We need to talk to people, whether it's customers, co-founders or colleagues to correct all the incorrect assumptions we've made, but can't see.
If you're building something new, there's likely to be many, many incorrect assumptions...
I don't think talking to users can fix that. If you have the wrong vision about the product, you probably will talk to the 'wrong users' too. You’re not in the market the users think you’re in — you’re in the market you believe you’re in.
That approach will also lead you to very incremental solutions or even make you run around in circles achieving nothing. It lowers the cost of failure (downside), but also the potential impact of success (upside).
I'm writing an essay about this topic, feel free to take a look the draft if your are interested :)
https://ab0ve.substack.com/p/ec282c2c-95fa-4914-820f-7463cb5...
Likewise, Elon Musk has been a big personality for years. Now he can start a company drilling holes and attract big partnerships and investments. When he started, he was just a nobody making maps software, then still nearly a nobody making internet money transmission software. Both relied on the massive wave of internet popularity in the 90s, with PayPal riding eBays wave. In hindsight, victory seems obvious, it looks like they created their markets. In their time, they rode a market wave. Markets are people, and you can’t make people want something they don’t want.
Looks good btw.
With that being said, I think a live demo is a great idea and would go a long way!
This is just one datapoint, but I'm sure there are many others like me. How many businesses never launched, because our society has insisted that startups must happen in a single, extremely unlivable part of the country.
Note to the author: please for the love of god increase body font weight to 400.
And for people from Europe, is it a net positive that the batch is remote, or is the on-site still better?
That's how we built our HN Chrome extension that never asks for your email - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...
Cool extension. A Firefox version would be great!
YC also gives you a lot credibility. If you don't have a pedigree (previous exit, FAANG network), it's your buy-in in the big league.
Besides they invest 125k, which may not sound like a lot but is a good first cheque in that can get you pretty far on it's own.
I'm very glad MagicBell is tackling this — I never want to build another notification system myself, I'd much rather pay them to solve this problem for me!
I am glad that something like magicbell exists.