We got rejected after [YC W23] interview

We applied to YC W23 this cycle and managed to get to the interview stage. We were rejected. The insight from the YC partners were generous, insightful and absolutely fair. They were nice to us, entertaining our thesis when none of our friends and family did. That's all we can ask for.

From the partners' POV, it's a lack of social proof and traction. This is true. In our post-mortem we think the root cause is not being authentic and honest to ourselves, our instincts and our domain expertise. We applied with a product for a concrete "burning painpoint". We had atleast one set of users: ourselves. In the interview, we pitched our pivot to a better, grander, idea that we ourselves didn't need. As pragmatic programmers, we should know better: good in theory is not necessarily good in practice and vice versa. For example, sometimes copy-and-pasting a block of code is the cleanest solution.

We got carried away with the ceremony of doing a startup for startup sake and not actually building the business. We should have spent our cycles on sales and marketing, engaging customers and product designing to actual needs. Instead, we hypnotized ourselves with strawman product design for a pitch deck and a hypothetical user. It was a helpful exercise but there was no actual value creation going on here. We still think there is something there, but it will be far too capital intensive to realize this vision right now.

We are un-pivoting and doubling down on our original product. We think we've built a product that along some dimensions is 10x better than what's out there, but we need to sell. We'll still probably get turned down by YC but at least we'd have an actual business platform. We also made the decision to open source our solution (alternative UI for GCP and more, with a focus on a search engine) as it might create value for others.