Ask HN: Got rejected by YC 6-12 months ago? Where are you now?
I'd like to see where those people who got rejected by YC ended up. Did you finish your product? Abandoned the idea? Still working on it?
Cobbling together prototype, teaching myself the NLP and plan on combining it with some techniques I learned in vision research. Figure that I can better pitch it to my risk-averse fwenz once I can wow them with something...
I don't understand why everyone sees a rejection or acceptance to YCombinator or TechStars as such a big deal. It's like college admissions. They are only two shops, with fairly limited resources, and limited means of assessing candidates. If you didn't make it, and you think that your idea really has some serious long-term stock, then keep at it.
Oddly enough, we're close friends with a lot of the YC companies. The honest truth that every YC company (and LaunchBox, Techstars, etc.) will tell you is that you still have 95% of the work to do, YC helps you get started, but afterwards you sink and swim with the rest of the startups out there.
Because we did not get into YC, we were able to iterate freely on a big idea and get to where we are right now. But we took longer than expected in a much more painful way.
My sense is that if we did get into YC, we would have a much easier time, but probably would have settled on a smaller goal.
Worth pondering over.
What an alternative to ponder.
was their constructive criticism to relax?
If Steve Jobs didn't have Woz, he would be a used-car salesman right now. Woz essentially invented the PC. He could find a thousand people like Jobs in any MBA program. Sure marketing is important, but it's frosting on the technology cake. If you get the technology right, the marketing will follow.
I have no particular love for YC, but let's be fair. They are interested in things people can use, especially web apps. Things it might be possible to make money off, one day. While I love CouchDB and use it every day now - it's not an end user kind of thing. I'm not really sure what it is. Apache is a pretty good home for it, IMO.
In fact, all the great, innovative startups were a Woz or Woz/Woz combination. Ok, except for Apple, but again, Jobs really only added value later by playing VC. The seed level was a pure Woz play.
of course you are right there aren't a thousand people like jobs, you'd be lucky to find 1, but the point of it is that there are plenty of people to fill his position, you just want to find half his brilliance. however, if your product is abysmal crap nothing will save it, not even Jobs. In fact part of the reason Jobs is so good is he'll cut your product, and you, for doing a crappy job.
My job was steadily taking about 14 hours a day and some of the weekends so in December I eventually quit in order to keep my sanity, then started learning PHP, MySQL, nginx, etc. and by now I've came close to releasing alpha (a couple of weeks, I think).
We were invited down for an YC interview last November, and it was wicked fun talking with them. But our 10 minutes was quickly consumed with their excitement with our existing sites (and not on our new initiatives). Our existing site http://bug.gd is a long-term play, not a quick growth play, and, given the 8% drop in Dow the afternoon before our interview, it was understandable that YC would be looking for something more aggressive. We just had a bit too much to discuss in only 10 minutes and I'm pleased to see the new video interviews giving YC'ers an opportunity to demonstrate more of their plans.
We continue to grow bug.gd with the launch of our error database for companies projects, errorhelp.com, but it remains a project of constant (but not explosive) growth. We have some exciting features planned, though, that I can't wait to get finished.
But the service we wanted to pitch to YC was our other crowd-sourced dating site, Yumbunny.com. Two months ago we launched to public beta and were covered on TechCrunch and other news. The site continues to grow and we're super excited about it.
As a publicity project for YB, our team also squeezed in time to put together Tinyarro.ws -- a URL shrinking hack that relies on unicode/IDN to create the shortest URLs possible. It's been getting great traffic due to its oddity and the inherent viral nature of url shrinkers. (All the silly discussion about URL shrinkers being evil lately has helped that, too.)
All in all, we're having a great time and are plowing ahead. Best of luck to the teams who got invites to go interview. Use your time wisely!
I applied to YC with a friend last year, we were rejected.
It was a very difficult idea to pitch.
We thought our idea was the best thing since sliced bread and all of our friends told us so (this should have been a warning sign... false positives)
We went on to building it anyway.
We got a version built, up and running in a couple months after initially dragging our feet. It basically worked, but poorly - we never took into account that battery life would be an issue on the phone app.
We got a little disheartened, started bickering and eventually the thing failed - before we even launched.
Somehow we had gotten the idea in our head that we needed YC to be successful. No, we needed a good idea and our idea was, at the time, not so good.
Not being accepted isn't the worst thing in the world. Everyone thinks their idea is the best idea EVER... We sure did.
The partnership broke down as a result of us forging ahead anyway without really looking at our product and only talking to people who only gave us positive answers.
Anyway, moral of the story for us? Being rejected was the best thing that could have happened for us.
I learned a lot about the other person during this process and also a lot about myself. I'm not bulletproof.
On reflection, I also learned that being unwilling to discuss my idea openly with others for fear of it being stolen was stupid. We would have discovered flaws early on and saved us a lot of trouble.
I openly discuss my new idea with others now.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502164
Some people tell me it's stupid, I ask them why and we discuss it. Some others tell me it's interesting, and we discuss it. Some tell me it's great and we discuss it.
I refuse to accept simple answers now and discuss as many different aspects as I can think up. I also appreciate other's perspectives on it.
This has also helped cement the idea in my head and I can pitch it relatively easily now. I've come up with a solution to a problem, rather than having a solution and looking for a problem.
Will I apply to YC again? Probably, I'm not sure. I've got a clearer head now - not so caught up in the hype.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502705
But essentially I believe that there is a real disconnect between the cost of production and the amount of entertainment that a viewer can get, especially since things are approaching a free pricepoint (impact of filesharing) and TV and the Internet converging (like PG has written about recently) along with major upgrades in bandwidth.
I also think that as home entertainment systems become more widespread and advanced, people will prefer the convenience of watching from home instead of cinemas, especially if it is significantly cheaper and the experience can be a little more interactive (internet overlays)
Anyway, throwing down some numbers, doing some quick back of the envelope math, The Dark Knight cost $180 million to make and it has a runtime of 152 minutes. So an approximate cost of $1.1 mil/minute for the production.
Conversely, Season 1 of Lost (which is known in the TV industry as being notoriously expensive to produce) cost $44 million for 22 episodes of 44 minutes approx running time each, or 0.045 mil/minute.
Yet in terms of entertainment for the home viewer, 1 minute of entertainment is 1 minute and tastes vary - so why the big difference in price of production? The major costs are salaries of large numbers of people involved and technology (sets/effects etc) [1].
This is why we start seeing ludicrous distribution agreements in place to maximise profits so that the economics of this weird system can work [2], eg - regions on DVD's
A little anecdote about what I tried to do the other month. I live in Australia, and I jumped onto itunes because I was curious about what shows were available. A lot of the shows I enjoy were not on there, but even more surprising was that some shows that did exist were missing seasons. The worst case of this was a certain show only having seasons 1, 3 and 5 available on itunes - this is a result of stupid distribution agreements and simply being unable to put it up on itunes yet.
However, I could jump onto any torrent tracker and download everything for free, including the seasons that were not available through legal online systems. There is something wrong when the path of least resistance is unlawful.
So my idea is that you could produce content for the online market using a process fairly similar to a digital animation studio [3], just limiting yourself with digital assets and working it a bit like a sitcom. Limited pre-made sets, characters, story driven and episodic content.
Your production pipeline then essentially becomes a case of an asynchronous digital puppet show and if you keep most of your talent inhouse, you could work it using a team about the size of a small to medium sized startup.
Anyway that's the basics, I haven't detailed much about my monetisation strategies (there's more that can be done than just advertising) and there's a little bit of secret sauce I can't reveal, but that's the general gist.
[1] - Marketing costs don't usually get taken into account in the cost of production of a film, instead the company distributing the film takes a percentage. For example, in Pixar's early days, Disney was taking an approximate 50% cut. Internet distribution reduces these costs and so the total amount of income required is less to break even, so easier to attain profitability on any production.
[2] - When you see people saying that you can't make money with online video, I personally think it's because they're still wasting money unnecessarily on production costs. If you use online advertising as a benchmark for monetisation, the way it is now, you really need to reduce the cost of production to be able to make a profit and when/if online advertising recovers, you will only stand to make more money.
[3] - Another thought is to produce content like Uwe Boll is notorious for. I'm not sure what the situation is now since there has been a few enquiries about his practises, but in the past a film produced "in Germany" (basically by a German production company) was able to have 100% of the money invested into it written off due to German Tax law. So investors were investing say, $10 million into a film, which would only net a $3 million return, yet it essentially cost them nothing due to the tax loophole, so the return was all profit. Uwe Boll would pick up video game licenses (which are why all his films are based of video games) cheaply and produce "films" (I use the term loosely) at an alarming rate.
I now having a working product in private alpha. Everyone who has seen the demo says it rocks. It's a tool for commenting online videos, geared towards sports analysis. There's nothing out there like it to the best of my knowledge.
I'm now looking for a co-founder. I need a developer. I have done all the development so far, but I now need to focus more on the business, so I need someone to keep the development momentum. The front end is mainly Flash/Flex, (which I can continue to handle myself). The back end is in GAE today, so my co-founder needs to either know that, or be capable of convincing me to port it. Knowledge of Red5 / FMIS / FFMPEG / JavaScript / Flash/Flex would all be a bonus.
If you're interested, email me: tango charlie sierra two two zero one (7 characters)@gmail
That said. Would still love some mentors to figure out how to scale my company faster.
I'm working on http://stylous.com/. Making sales but not profitable yet ...
This is almost equivalent to when I got a letter from my high school saying Mr. Reese will be coming back as Mrs. Reese after the summer.
We are funded and launched (http://www.archivd.com) and, yes, it is "addictively useful". :)
What have you learned?
You basically pitch their stuff, by buying adwords and other advertising methods and hoping to drive paying customers.
Basically the people I know who do this big time, start out small, then when they find something that works, they scale their campaigns by putting more money into it.
Of course there is a huge risk, since a campaign might suck and you might lose money. The guy I know who did this, lost something like $15,000 before he learned how to do it properly. Now he makes something like 3K/day in profit on average. His record was something like 25K in one day.
Then we had an idea for a new webapp we wanted to build, so we switched to that. Got funding in December through fbFund and we're still working on it today.
I think the YC application really made me think of making the leap in earnest. While acceptance is always more desirable than rejection I think being rejected by YC has still been a very good thing. As others have said if you're willing throw your idea(s) away because YC said "not this time" you probably don't have what it takes or your idea just isn't what they're looking for. It doesn't mean you should just abandon or that you can never have a good idea again.
That said I certainly would have loved to have the experience and to meet Paul. Oh well, maybe one day.
We were rejected after an interview this time last year, but received some great feedback in our rejection mail. We've taken it to heart and evolved our plan of attack accordingly. We're inching closer to launching a product worth using.
We've been working together remotely on Sundays for 4 to 6 hours and individually a few hours a week. As you can imagine, that is sloooow going. Especially considering we took a few months off to settle into full-time jobs, re-imagined our product based on feedback, and missed a quite few Sundays. The funny thing is, that if you call it an average 10 hours per week since August, it looks a lot like the length of a YC round... so we should project that trend linearly and set our own "demo day" :-)
The reason for choosing this route was the pressure to be cash-flow positive as an individual through whatever means necessary.