Our five failed YC applications and one successful one
relate.so
relate.so
43% of the batch were accepted with only an idea
71% of the batch had zero revenue before YC
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-summer-2022-bat...
Is it about how you behave during the interview and/or your past record (ex. successful serial entrepreneurs)? Otherwise, I do not see any reason why this startup was rejected 5 times and many other startups are accepted presumably first time itself with just an idea or no revenue/customers.
Maybe they are just better with b2b SaaS and other verticals, with crypto being exceptionally bad.
Once you actually start, the bar for getting in seems to get much higher, because there's suddenly a lot more concrete data points to benchmark your startup against. Before that all they have is basically an idea and a bunch of resumes. This is of course contingent on the fact that you have impressive looking resumes and at least a plausible idea.
It's a bit of a catch 22 for B2B startups hoping to use the YC startup network as a source of early customers, but didn't apply early enough. If you're thinking of starting a B2B startup that could make good use of YC's network, my recommendation would be to apply as early as possible, before you even start working on it. Worst case scenario is you get rejected and end up having to apply again in 6 months (which is fine because you applied 6+ months earlier than you might have otherwise, and now have feedback from their rejection to make your next application better).
I started in late 2013 and was rejected by YC in 2016. Haven't applied to anything since, with the exception of Apollo. Certainly was very aware of that dynamic at the time.
As a solo founder who lacks the aforementioned impressive resume, and who's nearly a decade in, I no longer have much hope for accelerators.
This was written less than a month before COVID inflicted a great deal of pain and delayed things by a little more than a year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22429827
But hey, at least I'm at step one now.
I used to think in those terms. Thing is, it's a multi-dimensional problem.
Dimension one is a human resource limitation. One person pitted against a rapidly evolving technology landscape with very high technical bar. What that equates to is making one demo/MVP after another and eventually burning out. Or, compromising quality. Early on, it was possible to do it the traditional way. Things are now moving too fast.
Regardless, the reward in either scenario is funding based on whatever "product market fit," and users that require tending to. Best case, you might end up a multi-billion dollar company if you make it. One not all that different from pile after pile of technical debts that routinely waddle to their respective exits, then exist in some hellish afterlife post-exit. That's typically defined as success. I imagine one loses their soul in the process of even creating such a thing.
Point being, I view user acquisition and product market fit as poison pills. Not just for the company optimizing for it, but for society as a whole. They are a large part of what is wrong in the world.
Dimension two is expansion of scope. The more you think, the more beautiful things get. It's really hard to go back and limit scope once you've woven ideas together over the span of years in a kind of tapestry where individual concepts end up almost symbiotic. Fortunately, I inadvertently dedicated my time to this type of thinking rather than grinding out demos.
So, what you're left with is selling a vision. Absent any track record, it still necessitates a demo—but the nature of that demo becomes fundamentally different—as does its target audience. More of a living design document built to help convey that vision.
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>Unless you are planning to create a spacex style capital intensive company, I don't see why you need so much funding for.
Well, the goal is for people to wake up one day and find out that the way they interact with computing as a whole has fundamentally changed forever.
On HN, you see people grasping with regularity at individual threads which constitute pieces of this puzzle, with no clear consensus on what should be done. There's an almost morose acceptance that pervades the current technological hellscape in which we live. Now people are looking back at dreams of what once could have been as a way out of this mess, but that alone isn't sufficient.
In any case, things get expensive at that level. I'm in my mid thirties and the core team I want to hire is probably twenty years my senior on average. Some of them probably don't even care about the money.
In all likelihood it'll go nowhere and I'll remain a nobody, but it's already been a wild ride, and hopefully I'll at least have fun and be spared the stereotypical startup/accelerator/VC grind.
Hey, perhaps somewhere along the way I'll even figure out how to not sound delusional.
Co-founders can't work since I've been at it nearly a decade, but that's more for control/singular vision reasons and not equity.
In the mean time, I'm just thankful to be alive and working a full-time job to get there.
Ofc if an applicant made it past the "Trough of Sorrow" and reached PMF on their own, it's a no brainer, any decent VC would be throwing money their way at that point. For the rest of the applicants though, it just feels a bit backwards to me how YC seems to rather bet on founders with impressive resumes who have built nothing over similarly impressive founders who have proven that they can build something tangible, but need some help getting it past this infamous "Trough of Sorrow" that most successful startups are known to have gone through.
But hey what do I know. Surely they have the data internally to back that up right?
"I don't want to make a little bit of money each day. I want to make a fuckton of money all at once. ROI."
Russ Hanneman is one of the funniest characters on this really funny show.
Does YC really help you get customers? Just wondering--in my experience VCs can help with intros but getting real customers requires legwork.
> We had practically zero proof that we could execute our plans successfully.
> And as a result, our interview with YC went terribly.
If they were doing so badly, how did they even get an interview in the first place?
I advise you to avoid the .so TLD - there’s a lot of institutional bias against Somalia’s TLD, like blanket blocks in many corporate firewalls. This problem will be worse if you serve public user-generated content from that TLD because the chain of communication from you to SomaliNIC might have a bunch of unknown third party intermediaries where an abuse report can get lost. Today Notion is large & successful enough to be resilient to these issues, but in the 2019-2020 years the use of .so was responsible for a few long outages. To this day, we have many requests to move our service to .com. I’m always a little worried when I see other startups using this TLD.
Additionally, registration financially goes to the government of Somalia (see the controversies with .io TLD).
https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Beware-cutesy-two-l...
I learned my lesson, I'll take the .com every time, even if I have to get creative with the name.
Here in Europe all of the national TLDs for countries I can think of off the top of my head are two letter TLDs, and will be regarded as trustworthy in their respective countries.
.no .se .dk .fi .fr .it .de .ch .at .pl .es .sk and so on and so forth
Looking at the ample existential evidence, both startups and VCs love these two TLDs.
I always think of .so shared object files, which is a cool nerdy association.. but that can’t be it right?
> We chose .so when we were starting out (lots of other companies named Notion, and .so was available).
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...
Why lose any of these "free" users at all?
I often wonder if this might be why why certain corp environments seem to log me out of notion a few times a month.
Also wish Notion was a first class offline first software so it wouldn’t leave me in the lurch so often.
I'm in a similar boat, and every time we've learned a lot from the rejections. We have thousands of recurring, paying customers, a unique product, great engagement, but yet we still can't seem to get to the interview stage. Hoping that changes this time around. I'm not a traditional founder - I am a medical doctor and full stack programmer/designer, so if anyone has any insights or tips that would be greatly appreciated! The YC pedigree and more importantly, the rapid learning and network is something I am definitely aiming for.
I looked at relate.so, and I already use a CRM that does everything listed on your website. What are the new features that relate provides compared to other CRMs?
(I too am inclined, when someone is making a new thing, to wonder… But a quick search finds 10 existing things that appear to do a pretty great job of everything you are thinking of, why would someone not use one of them? Why make the new, similar thing? I think being able to suppress this thought might be helpful to startup success.)
I would like to make a suggestion, if you that's possible... Your landing page has way too much text. There's the copy from the landing page + the text on screenshots. I found it overwhelming and could not really grasp the benefits of your product. If possible, please consider changing the real screenshots to mockups where the text is not real text but placeholder bars (except for action buttons/text that's necessary to show functionality you're featuring).
Wish you guys the best.
I've been thinking about this a bit, even for a company as renowned as YC, I don't like how the power balance is, and the sort of "we made it!" vibe as if you finally impressed some diety enough to grace you with good fortune. I see the same kind of posts (oddly) about people who tried n times to get a job at google and finally they "made it". Like what are we doing?
I think that once an institution has this kind of getting in as the goal, rather than the actual hard work of making an objectively successful company, incentive structures get all screwed up. This is in no way specific to YC, the same happens in universities, in investment banking, whatever. But it signals the beginning of a hollowing out where the credential is everything and what underlies it doesn't matter. There are definitely areas where the culture is skewed very much in this direction, and it isn't somewhere I'd want to be
My read of the post wasn't that they so desperately needed YC's approval to think that their business could be a success, it's that they just wanted to be in YC.
Or, does "founder" mean something different? Does it mean that you start a company AND bring a company to $100 million revenue minimum or something? If that's the case, that's kinda weird to me, but ok boomers, er, sorry, millenials. But, if it means that anyone is a founder by signing a piece of paper and paying $25 at the county office, then color me unimpressed.
So can anyone enlighten me about what the specific definition of a founder is? Is it something different, some other nuance or definition? I don't know, I'm confused. Someone, help a brother out.
(I don't personally put a ton of stock in this credential, but the reality is the tech world does.)
If someone goes through some other incubator or program, it doesn't count? Like, you could get an MBA from Harvard, PhD is astrophysics from MIT, win the Nobel Prize at 18 years old, start a company and make $800 billion dollars, and you still won't be a "credible tech founder®"? I'm just trying to understand this here. YC is the only font of "credible tech founderhood®"?
Totally. It might be more fun to look at it as “we finally suckered them” (choose a less controversial word than suckered).
A similar dynamic shows up in the way startup founders are so eager to say “we’ve been acquired” rather than saying they sold a company
Not saying that YC is bad, but it would be nice if getting in was easier. Maybe they should make half their seats competitive and the other half as paid ($500K) just like private schools do. Then leave it up to people's imagination how someone got in. Or maybe they should just let everyone in.
They also presumably have finite money, so giving money to everyone is clearly untenable.
YC is a brand, letting everyone in would dilute that brand. Letting people pay to get in would dilute that brand.
They act as a first-level-filter. Having made it into YC goes on your resume Because you passed that filter. The VC network values you more Because you passed that filter.
In other words YC as they are, are specifically working as designed. Changing that removes their value.
Respectfully, I’ve never particularly understood this approach to business. It seems like a lot of VC-funded or VC-hopeful companies take the approach of “I know I should be in business, I just don’t know in what” which feels entirely backwards to me. I understand the company that starts out selling one service (renting DVDs for instance) and then shifts to an adjacent business (streaming movies) because one falls out or there’s opportunities to expand. But the hunting around for a market seems bizarre.
If you want to work for yourself, you look for opportunities to do so.
VC look for opportunities to invest.
Everybody is simply searching for a way to make money the way they want to.
Yikes.
My takeaway from this is that the founders wanted to get into YC. The business doesn't matter, they just wanted to be in YC.
The business morphed around what they thought would get into YC, not what would actually make a good business. I have a ton of respect for YCombinator, but they are not all knowing oracles who get it right 100% of the time. The fact that the immediate response to each rejection was "pivot" I think speaks volumes to the founder's goals here.
I would go so far as to say this is validation that YC made the right decision in rejecting them. If even the founder’s dons believe in their own idea, why should YC?
It's not like they're excited they get to help people do better CRM, they're just excited they got in, and (not uniquely) appear to have crafted an optimized offering designed to get into YC, which I don't think is YCs (at least initial) intention nor do I think it's desirable. It's a signal that it's "jumped the shark" and it's time to move on to a new construct
> But for the past three years, we've struggled to find the right problem to solve and gain even a small traction.
So why was this time (another CRM) the right problem? Is the team actually leveraging industry experience and unique skills in this new pivot? Looks like no, they just found the combination that YC likes. And this:
> If your users don’t pay for your B2B product, you don’t have a product –– yet.
Do you really need YC judges to tell you this? Reading Lean Startup and maybe The Mom Test should be basically mandatory for would-be founders at this point, right?
Regardless, good writeup here with some helpful advice to younger founders who want to know what YC actually values in its judging criteria for batches.
I think the answer is that YC is a significant success factor, and if your company is a member of YC then many future objectives and challenges will become easier.
People who have attended certain universities gain many ongoing benefits from the recognition of the university. "Oh, you went to Harvard/Standford/Melbourne University? Yes please come talk to us."
People who have worked at certain companies many ongoing benefits from the recognition of the company. "Oh, you worked at Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Netflix/Apple? Yes please come talk to us."
"Oh, you're a YC company? Yes please come talk to us."
It's instant credibility and that really helps open alot of doors.
Dress well, be kind to people, go to a recognised elite university, start your career working at one or two of the top tech companies, get your startup into YC and you're likely to be able to pay your bills into the future.
I should say I did not go to an elite university, did not work at a top tier tech company and have not been through YC :-)