Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you?

68 pointsdmvaldman100 comments

I applied as a solo founder with my project http://www.quipvideo.com, but alas I didn't get an offer for an interview. I think a big part of that is the fact that I don't have a team behind me. I don't know too many other awesome hacker types, but maybe you - failed YC applicant - are such a person, or suffer from the same problem. Perhaps we should get to know each other better?

Let's turn this unfortunate news into an opportunity to share ideas, brainstorm and meet like-minded folk. Share your thoughts in the comments.

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I'm not sure this is the right question. pg repeats time and time again that the product doesn't matter, the team does. So really, the title ought to be:

Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you?

2 PhD's of quantitative fields (lots of coding experience)

2 MS's in CS that were already in a startup (<20 ppl) that sold for several $M's (as early engineers)

we are all 30-32 yo. (no family/kids yet) but maybe the age? seems like a good team (and a good idea), but oh well...

I recall pg mentioning that he would consider four founders to be too many (although, I am not sure it's a "hard" rule).

pg says in the application page: "The ideal company would have two or three founders. We'll consider those with four or five. We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple." so I hope that wasn't the reason why we got discarded. But if it really is a hard rule it'd be a strange rule, any 4 person team would pretend to be a 3 person team and include the "extra person" immediately after getting in...

Just saw this: would like to know more about what you guys are up to, send me an email: dannyjhaber@gmail.com , also you can check out my blog: www.legendarymoves.com

thanks, will do...

I agree :-)

Previous title was "Ask HN: Rejected from YC? What did you build?"

we are two 22 years old guys from Moscow: 1) me, currently one of the first engineers at vc-backed startup. prior that worked in russian space corporation on GLONASS programme. Graduated Moscow Aviation Institute with speciality in navigation systems. 2) my buddy, who co-founded executive photo company mnmf.ru which profitable from day zero. Prior that was responsible for marketing at real-estate company.

We're building mall app with indoor positioning.

My partner and I are Ph.D. psychologists who have developed a unique roadmap to permanent behavior change based on our personal experiences (we each lost 40+ lbs. 5 years ago and have kept it off) and professional knowledge. We are longtime friends and business partners so other than being non-hackers we fit the preferred criteria for teams pretty well.

We were rejected as well (www.readysteadychange.com) and as I read these comments several things that have been stated seem abundantly clear:

1. The YC team is telling the truth when they say the number of high quality applications keeps increasing while the limited spots for interviews/funded teams remains more or less constant;

2. The process of thoughtfully completing the application is an incredibly valuable idea stage experience in and for itself;

3. Getting to market and crossing the chasm are the real objectives for all of us, not getting into YC;

4. There really is no guarantee that getting into YC is the best thing for many of us. As someone wrote they seem to favor particular types of teams and ideas which they know a lot about and are able to mentor well. The rest of us should take rejection as a sign to keep moving forward on our own terms and capture any and all "data" from this experience as valuable learning.

As a colleague once said, "the only way out is through," to which I would add, "the only real direction is forward."

Applied in 2010 as solo founder of http://www.breezy.com.

Didn't get in, didn't sweat it, tried other things. We haven't yet built a mammoth company or had a successful exit so I have yet to be able to take pg up on his offer to go to lunch sometime to discuss what they missed when evaluating my application, but I think it's fair to say we're doing reasonably well so far, all things considered.

YC is overrated as a gate. (I don't know whether it's overrated in general and I kind of doubt it, but too many people think "I didn't get into YC, oh no, maybe I'm not cut out for this".)

Frankly, as others have said in this thread, if a YC rejection stops you then something else would have stopped you anyway. YC is a very good first step in the right direction, but it is only a step - and there are many other good steps you can take in the same direction anyway, so failing to get into YC means very little in itself, imho, about whether you have what it takes to succeed more generally.

http://viewlo.com/ Crowdfunded internet television and movies. We were super stoked when we came up with the idea a few months back, and even more overjoyed when we learned Ycombinator's focus this round of funding as we fit the criteria exactly. We are comprised of 3 college level engineers and still have a future ahead of us so no big deal. Really thought they we would seal the deal with our alternate ideas like Instagram for video(that doesn't suck) http://i.imgur.com/QbS7o.jpg

In viewlo OUR GOAL page you have several mistakes:

If you are a talented yet underground film artist there is<--- not many options for you

The boarder<--- between producer and viewer

So if your<--- an artist

This looks great. I'm also surprised you didn't make it through the first round. Where are you located? Who is your team?

Wow thank you! We are located around the Sacramento area and were looking forward to calling sf our home this summer. We are a team of 3 best friends, two of which are coders, and myself, the designer and somewhat of an inventor. Here's two of our portfolio pages. http://kennygibbs.com/

http://seenazandipour.com/#/about

Thanks for the kind words. Its always nice to hear positive feedback on a project after receiving a letter like ycomb's today.

Don't know I applied as a team and still got rejected, ummm passed over. Should I take that more personally :-). Actually they have quite a tough job to do in reviewing so many applications. I the e-mail was actually almost too nice. It would have been helpful if it had some quantitative data as in what each person thought of it as in. As in a score or something even such as, we liked you but your idea really stunk, or no technical co-founder, or don't give up your day job.

Actually open call here. I am very interested in hearing any ideas that didn't get accepted. I hope to modify my site in the next day to allow a discussion on this and to talk to others. Y-combinator is a great way it seems to develop concepts, but not the only way. If other rejected ones are like us then we should really talk to each other. Feel free to e-mail me at joshua.smith@i4edge.com. Better yet here post on this page http://www.i4edge.com/ycombinator-apply-list/ ‎

While it would be great for founders to get quantitative and qualitative feedback from PG & team, it would be a pretty daunting task for YC partners to give a well thought out answer to the 1000+ groups.

While 1-2 sentence answer from YC could help out your company, it could open up a whole new can of worms that causes some groups to say, "but wait.." or "good idea, we can pivot...".

Their nice rejection letter is probably the best result the non-interviewees can get.

I thought the same thing, except when they are reviewing it they must be taking brief notes like, hey my pet peeve no co-founder, or what ever. All I am saying is if they structured it to say a scale of 1-10 (as in 5 of the reviewer thought you needed a co-founder) or 5 out of 10 think the idea isn't good enough, or 7 of 10 thought the you didn't stand out, etc.

Didn't apply but here's my thoughts. I know a number of YC founders and YC rejections. Don't quit, I see too many people not continuing without YC which essentially tells YC that you wouldn't have been a fit as YC is the first hurdle, not the destination. There are many alternatives and funding isn't in short supply.

Saying that, it's very positive to listen to any feedback. If you continue then you have to decide do you apply for an alternative accelerator (Many great ones), bootstrap or try to raise some seed money to get you off the grond. YC is incredible but in some circles overhyped.

It's supposedly as good as people say but many of the alternatives (not referring to accelerators) are as good or proven further.

Be positive. Stay determined. Keep Hustling.

It sucks to be rejected with anything in life, but you only truly fail if you give up. You all seem smart and there are some great ideas here; don't give up and I am sure I'll be hearing about you all in the future. :)

We received our rejection letter as well.

We are building a centralized platform as a service which allows vacation rental home owners and property agents to launch and create their own marketing website which they can manage from a single location. Property owners can also receive marketing and exposure on any number of sites. (We're placing more emphasis on enterprise rather than the social side that AirBnB went down). ie Agents can launch their own marketing website, manage their own property portfolio and run their own branding. Kind of like how you can launch your own Desk.com website and create your own knowledge base... on our platform you can do the same by managing your own catalogue of properties and revenue share with other advertisers who might make a booking on your behalf.

The enquiry management, booking tools and payment facilities are all built in. We haven't launched yet. Which was why this cycle would of been the best fit for YC.

http://rentivo.com/how-it-works

We will be launching soon (so no demo is available), but in case anyone knows a designer send them to the post on Baby Unicorns and Rockstar Designers I wrote this morning.

http://rentivo.com/blog/baby-unicorns-and-rockstar-designers

I'd consider shortening that description a bit.

I applied as a solo founder with no idea, so I knew a rejection letter was inevitable. In all fairness I am not quite ready to build a company, I just hope my application was read once or twice.

So who am I? Just a guy who started as the online banking help desk at $1B bank. I took the position just to get my foot in the door, and promptly proved my awesomeness with jack-of-all-trades problem solving that revamped their IT department from the ground up. My accomplishments drew c-level attention (walking into the CEO's office and telling him how much money I save him helped) so I'm now the lead sysadmin and further promotions are in sight.

But like many here on HN, developing software is my passion and what I really want to do is start my own tech company.

I'm taking small steps. I've completed 2 bonus projects to build custom web-apps for the bank intranet. Semi-formal contracts between myself and the CIO for the bank to purchase software I built on my own time and maintain my own IP. Yes it is awesome that they let me do this.

From that point of view, I'm already developing and selling software to a small business, I just need to expand. If I had explained myself this way in the application I may have generated some more interest.

Instead I mentioned that the timing wasn't very good and I want to learn some things from gauntlet of challenges ahead in my current job.

Applying to YC was another small step to help push myself in the startup direction. My main goal was just to get my name in front of someone at YC. If my video was watched then I consider it a smashing success.

We are building http://listypedia.com

Listypedia is like Wikipedia for lists. It is a place for the users to find precise and concise information about the things they are looking for. It allows users to create and share lists with their social network. Few examples of the lists could be most scenic places on earth, things to carry for a camping trip, must have productivity apps for iphone, etc. The items added to the lists will be character limited precise answers. The users will be able to create protected lists that will be visible only to authorized users. Users will be able to create new lists or use existing lists and share it with their network to keep track of what they want or things that should be done as a group by using the list as a checklist.

There will also be curating features where in the list creators and also the curators will be able to control what goes in to only allow relevant content. It will also allow users to vote and comment on individual items.

Listypedia will bring in all the good features of yahoo answers, wikianswers and stackoverflow. It aims at organizing the unorganized content on the web in the form of social comments, blog posts, etc.

We are planning to launch soon in a month.

This looks great -- I applied with my co-founder with a social list site as well and didn't get an interview either.

Are you all in the Bay area? We'd love to grab coffee if you're interested -- it sounds like we have a slightly different twist on lists than you do and would love to meet if you're up for it. My email is trippp at gmail.

Sure. Check your email :)

That's a cool idea. Unfortunately...I find the name rather awkward. Your site looks quite nice, though, best of luck :) Simply applying to YC is an achievement in itself.

Thanks for the positive comment. I have heard not so good things about the name from multiple folks. We are thinking to change it, but until we find a better one we are just going to keep it :)

Rejected. We build mobile mall app with indoor positioning based on wifi fingerprinting. App allows user to find what he wants inside of mall, and retailers get ability to analyze user's routes and push location aware ads. Think of point inside with better accuracy. Yc is awesome opportunity but not the only one so rejection is not painful at all.

This one actually sounds pretty awesome.

We built http://embark.at - the easiest way to buy and sell cruises online. We're a marketplace that connects people that like to cruise with travel agents who have awesome unadvertised deals. We have a demo video at http://embark.at

BTW, there is already a YCombinator company called Embark: http://ycombinator.posterous.com/embark-s11-is-now-plotting-...

Yeah. We noticed that a few weeks ago.

We are PayGuard and we're building a payments platform that would specialize in long-distance/cross-border transactions. http://stark-river-6968.herokuapp.com/ We do this by combining your normal payments gateway with the global network of an international money transfer company (Western Union) with the twist of "escrow". We got our rejection letter too but we are forging ahead with launching our beta late this May. We believe eCommerce will globalize and payments will be at the forefront to make this happen. We want to create a world where anyone can buy or sell anything anywhere. We would appreciate any candid feedback on our idea....intellectual honesty is the best weapon against self delusion.

I always thought the main barrier with international money transfers was the cost. If your backbone is something like WU, how do you reduce costs?...and can't Western Union roll out of bed one day and decide to make it even easier to send money?

No we're not planning to link with WU directly, no need for that. You can actually build that network yourself by designing your system to be accessible to those involved in the distribution. Xoom.com built their own network from the ground up, and they only charge $5.99 per transfer. I had dealt with these distributors before when I launched moneytran back in 2005, too bad the state of CA didn't approve my license to transfer money because I didn't have the 500K minimum asset to qualify so I had to shut down. I tried to bootstrap it and I was just a one man team. Now I'm working with a brilliant team and we're trying to raise funding. Last time it was just all my savings. Because of regulations it is virtually impossible to bootstrap a payments or money transfer service.

We got rejected also. We're a designer & developer in Ireland, both early 30s (one American, one Irish). We've built a platform for designing/building magazines & newspapers once and publishing them everywhere (epub, .mobi, html, ipad, pdf, etc.)

It's called Woop.ie (Write Only Once, Publish It Everywhere), and we have a small number of customers at the moment. We just have a holding page here: http://woop.ie but our demo page was live and allowed magazine creation, issue building, previewing, etc. It got some visitors from yc. Unfortunately guess it wasn't enough this time around.

We'll keep working on it obviously. Considering applying to Brooklyn Beta summer camp, actually, anyone else?

Hey guys have you considered applying to the Knight News Challenge? http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/

No, but that sounds like a great fit, thanks! Have signed up so I know when the next round opens up for applications. Thanks, great pointer.

Well, rejection letter is just a part of the game. Now we will have to learn things on our own instead of having guidance from YC, which is kind of more work on our part. But hey, we love to work and learn, don't we? After creating drawmics.com & findero.us, I started working on a new idea, however, I applied to YC with no idea in particular as I was not sure whether to pursue it or not. In the last few weeks, my gut feeling on the success of this idea has become stronger by the day and I am actively pursuing it with my co-founder (yeah, now I have a co-founder). I hope, by the next demo day at YC, we would have already gone live.

We got rejected too. We are building http://www.pajap.com . A DIY service that allows you to build 100% native mobile applications with a drag n drop designer without a single line of code. Apps made with pajap don't have to bee installed on the phone or updated.

Videos http://goo.gl/WkVZ8 (sample app) http://goo.gl/Fhmbl (making of)

Enough with the promotion...

The rejection means we don't get to lean back and watch the magic show. We have to try , run , try again and create magic ourselves. We'll do that.

Best of luck to all YC2012ors accepted_or_not.

Didn't apply to YC but interesting idea. I thought of the same idea but there was one fundamental problem I couldn't solve. That is, the text on the side is too distracting. I hope you can think of some ways to solve that problem!

That is one of the top problems! And I have many ideas. One of which is limit the number of comments by building a social networking feature where you only see the comments of people in your network. This could be Facebook, or it could be "Hacker News people" or IBM employees.

There's also user interface ways to make things less jarring.

Even if you limit the comment, it is still there on the side, which means you are still distracted. I would attack the problem from an UI and UX standpoint. I know there is a website or app (can't remember the name of the website) that shows the comment ON the video as the video plays, kinda like subtitles (you can turn it off). Nonetheless, it's still too distracting for me.

Here is an idea you can play with: wikipedia for videos. So sometimes after you watched a video, you want to know EVERYTHING about it, and usually the comment are crap for factual information about the video. What you can do with that technology is allow users to learn more about the video when he or she pauses or when the video ends. Lots of possibilities here =).

I'm the author of this post, and I'm building a way for people to annotate online video. Hopefully in a way that isn't annoying! The grand ambition is to be able to search inside video based on annotations. Check it out: http://www.quipvideo.com

Who am I: I'm getting my PhD in 2 months in applied math at UCSB. I'm always looking to meet interesting people. I think I'm interesting myself. As proof, I can show you some of my fire sculptures :-)

Check out my blog: http://www.davidvaldman.com

We're building http://HuntersDB.com - a big-game hunting database with search, data and maps.

This process forced me to ask myself the tough questions and for that we are better.

And also forced us to make videos that make us cringe :)

Rejected 2 years ago for what some other guys in Cali launched as Gigwalk last May. I had a PhD and a CS guy on my team (albeit none of us were in the same city). I'm an information professional with a background in media production and ed tech. So since GW launched I've been watching closely and thinking about pivoting only slightly to something aimed at professional journalists, photographers and videographers, worldwide, who want to be able to charge their regular rates and have the option of being completely anonymous.

I'm building http://moodstir.com and http://kothpoker.com. If the idea's shortcomings weren't the reason I was rejected, it was likely because I'm currently a solo founder. It seems like there are a lot of awesome teams applying and that alone is hard to compete with.

I would be happy to meet up in SF with fellow failed YC S12'ers.

I applied as a single founder and was rejected as well. The project I am working on is https://codetique.com

The goal being to make code reviewing easier. Think pastebin but with inline commenting and comment karma. Click any line in a code review to leave a comment for that line. You don't need an account to create a review or comment on one.

Hey-o. My co-founder and I got rejected.

We're making an iOS universal app (we call it Cook) that uses grocery lists and recipes to keep a current record of all the food in your kitchen. With said current record, you can do cool things like reccommend recipes you have all the ingredients for, or tell them to use an ingredient before it spoils :)

You might want to checkout ziplist. Most of the apps in the recipe/grocery space are pretty horrible but that site does a reasonable job, has a solid team as well as Martha Stuart as an investor. Not an immediate competitor to what you're doing but worth being aware of. I applied to YC with something close to what they've built although I wasn't aware of them when I applied.

Thanks for the heads up!

Downloaded the app. You're right, I should know about them, even if they don't relate groceries and recipes in a meaningful way :)

One thing I will so though is that the syncing devices is something we entirely aim for, as well as adding family members. Their iPhone app could use some serious help though...

We applied with our app Spotter last fall. We wanted to be the app to find mobile video of places. Sad to be rejected, but we loved what we had so we kept going. We recently added twitter integration and were excited about our upcoming version (much better UI).

http://www.spotterinc.com.

I coded Streamenizer.com to learn Flash. Its a video chat with 4 people and a queue of waiting to stream, but never got around chicken-and-egg problem. Planning or redesigning it to one streamer plus users willing to ask questions. If anyone is interested in participating anyhow, drop me a line via HN profile email.

We applied with http://www.musicfilmcomedy.com :).

I'd jump to the schedule more quickly lest people think it's just another gig index. I was pretty unimpressed until I got to playing around with selecting acts in the schedule.

I like the "similar to last selected" bit though I wasn't sure if it always worked very quickly.

Also, on a typical screen, it required a bit of scrolling around to see the day plus the "next day" nav. I wonder if you could tighten things up a bit for fairly busy schedules?

Showing promise though. Don't give up.

This is very well done. I've gone to Coachella the last three years (before this one) and I wish I had this. Your interface is already better than theirs.

Clearly YC applicants are getting much better for them not to even give you an interview.

Where are you located, and who is your team?

Thanks for the kind feedback! Unfortunately the time that (I think) they looked at the web site we didn't have the scheduler implemented!

We're located in Melbourne, Australia. I was a senior software engineer before and so was my co-founder. We are in our late 20s and have both quit our jobs few months ago and could relocate. I think the applicants this time round were very strong!

I'm building http://www.iwaat.com, a search engine for web applications that I'm working to turn into a Yelp for apps. Also a solo founder looking for others to join me on this project.

If you're building a web app feel free to add it to the site.

Also sounds similar to Chomp (http://chomp.com) which focuses on mobil. Apple recently bought them (http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/apple-chomp/)

Very nice interface. Where are you located?

Thanks. There's a number of app discovery services focused on mobile(chomp and crosswa.lk), which is why I chose to focus on webapps first.

Located in San Mateo, CA.

Sounds similar to Quixey: https://www.quixey.com/

Yup. They'd be the closest competitor. Although, they seem to be focused more on the technology than building a community which is my next focus.

Any mobile app developers get rejected? I'm involved with a new VC co standing up a soon-to-launch fund called WeHeartApps Fund that is focusing on early-stage mobile app/game developers. Feel free to email me at dane@villainhq.com (still getting our @glidecapital email set up).

Also a solo founder building http://comics-headquarters.com/, a place to publish your comics online. :)

I am currently looking for artists who can help either write stories or/and draw. You can contact me using the web form in the site.

Cool, nice project. I am also a solo founder who founded drawmics.com (a social one page comics platform). However, I didn't apply for this project, but the similarity of our projects prompted me to comment.

Thanks! You have an interesting project yourself.

What: Built a social network for shoppers; Who: A solo founder outside US; Rant: I think I've done a job at least on par with another YC11 company http://jerryji.posterous.com/on-yc-demo-day-40956

I don't know what exactly you are doing but it seems like you don't understand what pricenomics are doing. They tell you how much your stuff is worth if you are trying to sell it. It is not a social shopping site.

I think I understand what pricenomics does, which you can find similar information (actually more transparent and detailed) on Bizspeaking -- http://bizspeaking.com/item/c2145006f10a4b06ba71856e49e06e02 , then on top of that, Bizspeaking does a whole lot more. (The site is a bit slow now, there seems to be some Redis issue that I'm trying to resolve).

The whole lot more is sometimes the problem. Pricenomics does one thing well.

On your site, the main call to action is to post something I've bought. Why would I want to do that? I also couldn't actually figure out how to search for an item (I entered "Macbook Pro" into the filter but didn't find what I was looking for.)

Thank you for your valuable feedback, the search is actually at the top right corner, which I thought is the web convention, but will make it more prominent now. And you are right that the full-text search requires more tweaking.

Got my rejection letter as well. Beta not quite ready, but if you are interested, my landing page http://www.cardzeum.com will give an idea of what I am developing.

Feedback welcome

3 founders 1 idea. The idea to aggregate notes, textbooks, internships, housing, course/professor ratings, online tutoring, and take a fat dump on them so you don't have to. Check us out at www.coursegain.com

A realtime collaboration application, check it out at tutor.nodester.com

I don't know why you're on the bottom. I think this is neat!

One big problem is that drawing anything details is hard without a tablet.

I'm also using Node.JS on Quip. Configuring it on EC2 wasn't that difficult if you've considered it.

Yeah, I've tried EC2, but I had a bad experience with their free tier(they started charging me for an elatic IP even when my instance was off) and their customer support was awful. If we ever need to scale, I think we will host on rackspace. However, currently nodester is an awesome free host. I highly recommend them.

Yup, we were rejected. We tell you which model of anything to buy by crunching owner ratings. Would much appreciate any comments on the beta:

http://daring.is

Congrats to YC S12.

Agreed. And there's no time to start like the present: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850511

I have not got anything yet be it rejection or acceptance for interview. Checked all my mailboxs (spam & inbox).

Is it all over and out? Any one who haven't got anything yet?

We also did not get the reply yet. Don't know what it means, but since we're not rejected yet, it could be good ;)

Patience is a virtue.

I just figured out that we got an e-mail, but to a different e-mail account. I have one e-mail address in my HN profile, and I gave a different e-mail in the application.

However, the rejection e-mail was sent to e-mail from HN profile. So, make sure you check that one. It looks like the e-mail address in your application is not used.

yes I have checked the one that's shared in the HN profile. But still no email to me.

+1 the not yet rejected part

Boom. Roasted. Co-founder of TechTalks.tv. Congrats to those who didn't get in either, sometimes a little rejection is all you need.

Hi guys,

Keep building!

I'm a founder located in Seattle looking for co-founders. If you're around here and interested please ping me on: elkhourygeorges@hotmail.com

We are building a realtime digital signage solution mainly powered by nodejs. Maybe we got rejected because we are from germany?

Not sure why you got down voted, seemed like valid info.

Of course being twisted in the way that I am twisted, it also generated a thought about 'real time digital signage.'

There are lots of trucks on the freeway, they drive along at night from point A to point B, so how cost effective would it be to put a very high mileage car to drive along behind them and optically stabilize the projection of signage on the back of the truck? (I saw the building projections and thought, those are pretty cool) Imagine you're driving down the freeway and you see a billboard for a restaurant which is available in a couple of miles.

Trucks could do this on themselves, perhaps it would offset the cost of gas. Imagine a unit that used GPS to know where it was and an arm that extended out the back and projected on the truck a location sensitive billboard. Either way it would be a fun hack.

On the application instructions page, the original 'how to make a YC application video' is the pitch video for Directed Edge -- both of whom were out of Berlin.

That shouldn't be a problem being from out of the US.

I'm not so sure - historically only people from the US , UK, Canada & Australia seem to have made it in. I don't blame them - being from one of these places significantly simplifies the whole visa stuff.

Depending on how your company is formed could make a big difference. Keep in mind that YC is investing $10-20K in your company, so it may not be appealing if there are $40K in legal costs to create an entity that they could invest in.

Qbix, Inc. http://qbix.com

Who we are is answered by a giant link there :)

Hi Greg, it's Dave from NYU. I wrote this post. Funny to see you comment on it :-) Let's catch up, my email is in my profile.

Does YC gives you any kind of explanation for the rejection? Or is it just a no?

They give you the best reason for the rejection, which is quite frankly that there were a tremendous amount of outstanding applications.

While YC represents the cream of the crop, it's probably most attractive to aspiring founders who want to carve the path of least resistance to success.

The hard truth is that YC's format makes it the most useful for teams that have the best ability to leverage the strengths of its networks and advice. Technically savvy, with obsessive work ethic and the ability to iterate quickly and constantly.

The response was apt, others were a better fit. None of their reasoning should be interpreted as your team, demo, or product won't be successful.

Best of luck to all of you!

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

It just says "sorry".

Applied as no-idea, single founder => no cigar.

Social augmented reality to let anyone add video, images, or models to any item they want then share it with others.

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