Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluelightning2k | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations!

Unfortunately I do not think this is typical. I've bootstrapped to a team of 6, built an incredibly sophisticated product with tonnes of customer interest including some of the best known startups in the world, and not even got an interview. Updated them with traction and didn't get a response.

Team includes a PhD in machine learning, and someone who was CMO of a 180m company by age of 23.

Product is not something you would expect to possibly build without millions in investment.

Pretty sure they didn't look at us.

NOT complaining. Simply providing some balance to help temper people's expectations to avoid a reporting bias.

View on HN

I want to emphasize - OP has done brilliantly and is likely being modest about how well they did.

Indeed 1000 waitlist signups is already very impressive.

It's just good to maintain a sense of perspective. (Seeing posts like this can feel crushing to those of us who have put more work in and don't hear back. Remember you never hear about the rejections.)

I totally agree with you. I think it's also a matter of 'stars align', maybe our application at the time (around the data engineering space) resonated with the specific partners who looked at the application, and it could have been different with other partners.

I also want to emphasize that there are: - Incredible companies that got rejected from YC (and even if it must have felt crushing at the time, in hindsight, they saved the 7% of equity that YC would have taken) - Incredible founders who had to apply several times: the founders of Algolia did - Incredible founders who got in but then shut down

So it's not an end in itself. When we got in, we thought we 'had made it', in reality, we pivoted after the batch, and this step definitely failed like a failure at the time.

I noticed the pivot! Wasn't going to bring it up (sometimes it's a sore subject or noone else's business) but it did indeed raise an eyebrow. Glad you mentioned it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com