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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Life skill for you: putting a message into a bottle and then flinging it onto the Internet could get it read, but that isn't the way to bet.

Here's a hypothetical for you: how many people do you think have social permission to contact a YC partner and say "X is awesome and deserves a look." I'd ballpark that in the hundreds to low thousand range. Many of them are accessible on the Internets and less overwhelmed with suitors than the YC partners are. How about solving a meaningful problem for one of them and having the next application say "We built a $WHATEVER for $SOMEONE which increased their customer base by 10%, like they told you over email earlier."

P.S. This advice had wide application beyond YC and beyond "applications." Indeed, part of me thinks that applications (in general) are a backup filtering mechanism for people who haven't figured out a more effective way to get what they want yet.

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> applications (in general) are a backup filtering mechanism for people who haven't figured out a more effective way to get what they want yet.

It blows me away how many people don't get this.

The flipside is that there are a surprising number of organizations with lots of money that haven't figured out a better way of distributing it, so applications can still be a good way of getting funds. One of my acquaintances, for example, just got $100k in seed funding (with no equity in return) entirely based on a 15-page application sent to a funding body, having had no previous contact with the funder.

Having painstakingly gone through the process of writing 35 page Grant Proposals for a hospital and getting funding from the government on all three occasions, I can assure you that the application process was just a formality and legal requirement.

The funding came through because the grantor had a relationship with the department heads that received the funds.

Obviously, you need to meet the required criteria, and a perfectly crafted application is a requirement, but all things being equal it boils down to relationships.

I've also done that several times; it really depends on the funder. In a surprising number of cases, the funder has wound up with a pile of money and not enough contacts with relevant people, so they really do choose people out of the applicant pool. It can also vary by country. In Europe, for example, how much relationships matter seems to vary north-to-south. In southern Europe it is pretty much 100% about relationships.

Perhaps in reaction to what's perceived as southern-European corruption, in Scandinavia there is substantial pressure on funders to make their decisions based on the official application process. There's a worry that "contacts" means your old grad-school buddy, someone you know from a sports club or weekly board-game get-together, etc., as opposed to scientific merit. There's also (what seems to me, as a foreigner) a strong worry that the process shouldn't be perceived as a sham, which means that at least some proportion of the funds have to be doled out according to the official application route, to prove to everyone that the system works like it says it does. In practice that ethos is upheld at some places more than others, of course, but in some circumstances you really can just apply and get money.

The only difference between north and south in this case is that they are more open about it south.

Not sure what you guys mean.

For example, I don't think of YC as a way of getting funding, but as a way of getting things done well, thank to the possibly unbeatable amount of white board advice from so many good people that it's very hard to get otherwise.

You can have a great idea, have a great team and even have good money, but you could still make a mistake in choosing one of the key strategies of your product.

I, for example, think that YC is perfect at trying to avoid making this kind of mistakes and helping you make your idea stronger.

Dear lord, I'd love to know who this funder is.

In the case of my country's government (or Chile's), you can get a grant for your startup without having prior contact.

However, in my country at least, I do know they give more weight to applications from people they know (I don't know how, the others might get processed later or whatever, or they skew in their favor).

So, you might get funded without contacts, but it's less likely (I guess you have to be outstanding in some sense, either killer business plan or credentials).

The government most likely. There are several places in this world where startups, and businesses in general, almost drown in free money like this. The downside to this is that in order to get this free money, you first have to go through a senseless amount of paperwork, bureaucracy and bullshit. But, to be honest, it's a small price to pay for what you get.

Northern Ireland for example is a startup paradise. InvestNI, the government body in charge of giving away free money, recently had to give back a whooping £39m (that's $62m!) because it couldn't find enough businesses to give the money to quickly enough.

Sadly, many entrepreneurs in these places have never experienced what doing a startup in the "real-world" is like and they don't realise what an incredibly competitive advantage these grants give them. So instead of leveraging this opportunity, many spend most of their time whining and complaining about the paperwork and bureaucracy involved.

Northern Ireland for example is a startup paradise.

I can confirm this. One of the guys on my team has contacts in InvestNI and I'm told that they want and need to give money away or else they won't get as much for their budget next year, so its really easy to get free money off them.

> One of my acquaintances, for example, just got $100k in seed funding (with no equity in return)

One of my distant relatives won the lottery.

http://b.qr.ae/Hktlyv

This explains our dilemma. Frankly, we are a bunch of "nobodies" in the middle of Iowa. We don't know any Y Combinator Alums, and even if we were to reach out the best we could hope for is a lukewarm they seemed "nice". We have a lot of drive and are trying to prove ourselves any way possible. That's what we're trying to do with this post.

A good way to stop being a "nobody" is to get your names on your online properties. Twitter handles on your blog posts would be a good thing.

It took way too much effort to track you guys down on angel.co, and even then I don't have twitter handles.

( ps: I'm also hanging out in Iowa, hacking on a startup. Hit me up @collintmiller, maybe we can cook up some ways to remind people this is the state that brought you the computer. )

Yes, please add it to your website. Or even better to your HN profile page.

I'm in Iowa too and I wanted to give you some non-public, very specific (and hopefully helpful) feedback.

jeromy@seedlauncher.com I look forward to hearing from you. :)

Getting into YC isn't the goal here... having a successful company/product is. I would try to just build something that solves a pain point for you. If you want to prove yourself based on what you can build in 72 hours, then pick something and do it[1]. That will get you more consideration than something like this.

[1] But, I'm not a fan of "look what we built in 72 hours" types of projects, so you may want to just try to build your product.

This is really the key here. It doesn't matter where you are from. What matters is what you can do (or, in the case of proving to people that you are competent, what you have done).

Do some small thing well to show that you have a chance at doing something bigger just as well.

This is how life works, not just startups.

Regardless whether you get a response from YC or not, I think that what you did is more creative than chasing down a bunch of YC alumni you don't know and getting reluctant recommendations that carry no weight. Good luck!

Step back from this conversation for a second and reread this, pretending it was from someone you don't know. Does this person who wrote this post sound like a winner who is going to make the next Dropbox? That's who YC wants in their next class. Be the winner who is going to make the next Dropbox.

There is nothing wrong with making affirmative efforts to sound like a winner. This is a skill which will take you far in life. I suggest working on it.

With specific reference to you being in Iowa: howdy! I live in a rice field in Central Japan. I work that into speeches frequently, often as part of a self-deprecating joke. I probably overuse self-deprecating jokes if I'm being totally honest with myself, but when I use them, the idea is not to convey "I'm not as competent as all you cool kids from the Valley who paid good money to hear me talk today", it is close to exactly the opposite of that.

You say you don't know any YCombinator alums. Is knowing YCombinator alums a priority to you? Winners routinely achieve their priorities by taking the basic, obvious steps for achieving them. There's a series of tubes between central Iowa and every YCombinator alum. There's also planes which regularly fly between Iowa and Silicon Valley. (I am totally serious.)

You may be inclined to state reasons why YC alums (or anybody else whose cooperation would be valuable) would not want to talk to you. How about you just don't state those reasons and instead wait to hear them from the horses' mouths instead? Better still, how about instead coming with reasons why they would of course want to talk to you, because you're building things that will solve identifiable problems for them?

Better still, how about instead coming with reasons why they would of course want to talk to you, because you're building things that will solve identifiable problems for them?

Bingo.

I just wanted to say you've brought up some good points and given us some things to consider. That being said, I would think that someone who had the guts to throw themselves out there and say let us prove that we're worth your time is the kind of guy who could make the next Dropbox. This may seem like a cheap stunt to a lot of the people on here, but we're just trying to prove that we're more than our credentials and we're worth a shot.

I think it takes more guts to do what patio11 says.

If you look at business as if it was dating, this just makes you seem needy; while getting an introduction through a mutual contact is always a better way to go...

"I would think that someone who had the guts to throw themselves out there and say let us prove that we're worth your time"

The problem is what you are trying to do lacks creativity and originality. And without that I would question whether you could in fact build the next "dropbox".

This made me chuckle. Dropbox was one of the least creative or original startups I know. But it was born out an immediate unfulfilled need and a subsequent deep fury, and then executed and refined insanely. Before and since Dropbox there have been many, many attempts to fill this space, but their execution has been phenomenal.

Dropbox's success is in their creativity in solving a problem. (the execution). Here the issue is getting into YC (which by the way I question the entire idea of thinking that is an end in itself - but that's a separate issue). If that is the goal though, someone can put more effort into simply saying "I'm good look at me and let me prove it". How they say that isn't relevant either (putting up a billboard for example..)

Effort doesn't mean doing obvious things either. Simply doing the things that anyone can think of don't count and show creative initiative. Part of the problem is of course that newbies don't know what is "obvious" and tried before in varying degrees.

A business, startup or not, is not a solution to a problem (that's called a product). It is a series of solutions to a series of problems. As some of these problems are caused by the aforementioned solutions, it's important to be able to spot problems, and select the problems to solve, to continue the series. When the series stops, the business stops, even if the solutions live on.

What you're saying here is that you want someone to believe you can maintain such a series of problems and solutions, _without_ the ability to spot or select problems.

Exactly, "come at me bro" is a position of ridicule for good reason

I am going to go against the grain here and say I like what you did. Whether it works or not depends on the personalities and mood of the targets, of course, but it's different and counts for something in my book.

Of course, you should be mindful of the pressures from YCombinator. If they accept your challenge, they will have to either (1) do it in such a way that there aren't a lot of copycats; or (2) if it is wildly successful (they discover you, the group that builds, not the next dropbox, and not the next facebook, but the first dropface), they'll try to find a way to incorporate it into their business waters.

YCombinator is breaking new ground and trying different things. I think this was worth a shot. Maybe a "team challenge" will become part of the interview process eventually.

Patrick is right: networking your way in can be better. But it can also fail. Having a network connection can sometimes get you a courtesy audience, but it may do so in a way that is done as a favor to someone rather than someone who is actually excited about meeting you. It also can take a lot of time to build that network, at least if you do it organically. Indeed, most of us are on the lookout for the sniveling idiots whose only function in life seems to be to network. In the early part of the century a lot of folks thought that was a good idea. However, we quickly learned that most of the good people were working, not networking.

Besides, if this doesn't work you can always try networking.

Let me share my experience. Last year I decided to apply to YC with a project I had been working on for a while with a couple of friends. We were nobodies (from Colombia (South America)) and knew no one related to YC. We decided to get a decent demo of our product, wrote to 15-20 YC alumni to try and get some feedback. About 8 replied back and from those we got one to write a recommendation to the YC crew. We still don't know if that helped or not but we ended up getting an interview with the partners (who showed some interest in our idea). We totally blew the pre-interview talk with Harj on Skype.

Sadly, we were told that due to legal issues they had decided not to fund us (and we had to close shop a couple of months later due to these specific problems). If a group of three colombians with a not-so-great demo could make it, I don't see why you guys wouldn't be able to!

'''We don't know any Y Combinator Alums, and even if we were to reach out the best we could hope for is a lukewarm they seemed "nice".'''

'''We have a lot of drive'''

Somehow these statements seem contradictory... and I'd be taking a hard look at your "business guy" right now if he can't even start by at least attempting a little networking...

That would be me. :) The thing is I'm finding cold emails aren't generally well received, if they are even answered at all. We'd go to more networking events and the like but most are on the coast and plane tickets are expensive. We're building up a strong network here in Iowa. What I was referring too was Y Combinator specific people. So we do what we can with where we're at. Not that I'm complaining because im really not, all I'm saying is from our current position, it's difficult (but definitely not impossible) to build strong relationships with Y Combinator alums.

Keep trying. This post raises all sorts of questions from my end.

How many of these cold emails have you sent? To what extent have you varied the copy in those emails? Are you just asking for something, or are you offering something as well? Have you gotten advice from other successful hustlers (concretely, talk to some seed stage founders for hustle ideation; abstractly, read How to Win Friends & Influence People at least once per year) on what you might want to put in the email?

What about non-email channels? Have you gone through Twitter (This is how I've met multiple investors and advisors, totally cold, with no friendly introduction.)? How about crawling toward them meticulously through LinkedIn? How about networking via HN? Have you tried hanging out on relevant IRC channels? Have you contributed to their questions & answers on Quora?

I don't mean to be overly critical here. The OP is a great example of inbound marketing hustle, and I commend you guys for it. Two of the key ingredients in startup success are determination and resourcefulness. Clearly you're resourceful, now crank up the determination a notch. Right now it sounds a bit like you've found good excuses not to keep trying. If you can't land a Skype call with someone who might be able to help you get noticed by YC, what evidence do we have that you're going to land a Skype call with a key distribution partner in six months?

Keep trying. Keep swinging and striking out. You'll see patterns. You'll improve. Eventually, you'll start making contact.

If I were you, I'd be hoping that YC didn't take me up on the offer. The stakes are just too high. You need to work your way up the food chain.

You know what takes savvy and elbow grease? Creating a customer acquisition channel! There are just so many amazing technologies these days for finding people and getting their attention. You could pick a YC company and find a way to generate credible leads or affiliate customers. You could do this with a completely automated, partially automated, or manual solution (like a series of great blog posts). There are all these YC companies who are making new products that replace existing ones. Take a special look at the B2B products. They have limited ability to directly target more than the few most lucrative verticals, but you and your friends are probably intimately familiar with at least one industry that could benefit from a new technology.

Here is where the most critical attribute of a YC-worthy person come in: hustle. It's all out there waiting for you: pick a technology that can help an industry that you understand, and sell that technology to them. Increase their bottom line demonstrably. After you've done this, you'll probably find you're a lot less interested in getting into YC, but they'll be more interested in you.

The thing is I'm finding cold emails aren't generally well received, if they are even answered at all.

I'm confident there is at least one YC alum who would respond to your cold email. Stop assuming you can't solve this problem, and solve it.

I see people are giving you lots of grief but I commend you for trying something new to get the attention of YC. In terms of networking, are you sure you're not connected to any YC alum? I live in New Zealand but was able to get introduced by email to 4 via LinkedIn. One YC alum was a college buddy of a friend I made at a rock climbing gym 2 years ago in Virginia. It's a small world. All the YC alum I was introduced to were happy to chat. Get your LI updated with everyone you know and see what second and third connections you have with the keyword YC.

To clarify, I don't mean this as a knock to Iowa. I love it here, I just wanted to emphasize that connections to Y Combinator alums are hard to come by out here.

Leave Iowa.

I was born in Idaho. I've since lived in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco; have built a great network and resume and recently raised a round for my startup.

... but I didn't do it from Idaho and you won't from Iowa.

One word, Dwolla.

It depends on your startup and what it does if iowa is a good choice. Funding isnt easy no matter where you live,congrats!

Have you reached out to the folks at http://www.startupcitydsm.com/ that's a local resource you could tap. Feel free to contact me directly through my profile for an introduction.

re: "Frankly, we are a bunch of 'nobodies' in the middle of Iowa"

"Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true." Brian Tracy

I have. They're awesome guys. The thing is what I said was not at all a knock against Iowa. I love it here and the people are amazingly helpful and nice. It was more self depreciating humor to the fact that we're realitivley unknown college students.

If you don't live here, and/or have social contacts here, well... do we have to spell it out for you?

Welcome to the snobbery of Silicon Valley.

You sound a bit like my co-founder: determined, but ultimately thinks very little of themselves.

Stop it.

As that beat-up old Twitter account "ShitMyDadSays" once said: "...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them."

In other words, focus on your problems, hell, list them out. Then make a plan to address each one, and get going. Between the sense of accomplishment you'll get by actually doing something, and the self-confidence of becoming what you think you should be, you create a field of competence around yourself that makes you hard to ignore.

When your life goes from one where you're focusing on your shortcomings to one where you're focusing on your successes, you go from liability to asset, even in your own mind (arguably the most important place).

There is an article on HN frontpage about "Be Specific (especially during PG's office hours)."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795517

This blog article has virtually no specifics or concreteness, with the exception of "we're from Iowa."

As Patrick mentioned elsewhere, your location is relatively immaterial. Evan Williams (of Blogger / Twitter fame) made it out of Nebraska (my home state, fwiw), so I'm sure you can too.

Agreed. Figuring out a way around the admissions process is the admissions process.

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