Here is my YC application. No interview | Hacker News Reader

Here is my YC application. No interview

blog.truffle.io

29 pointspacifi3043 comments

Feedback:

1) I feel like including in your limited app space/pitch "finding people of your class" is a poor indicator of your ability to market the product. While there is some way to spin the whole "find people with similar intellectual interests/career aspirations/etc.), referring to "class" specifically seems elitist, and would be poor marketing IMO.

2) In the "impressive things," Nishant wrote "getting scholarship" though it should've said "getting a scholarship."

3) The tone of the app seems childish at points (references to "fat little boy," "I want to spread love"). While it's good to not take yourself too seriously, it might've been a little too much perhaps?

4) I don't think you explained/framed very well what exactly is the problem that people are facing that you are solving. If you can draw upon some references to people really preferring to date others with similar educational/professional background or something, that would've probably helped.

Just wanted to give some constructive (but conjectural) feedback. Good luck guys! :)

-> class thing specifically backfired for us but the intent was as you said "people with similar intellectual interests/career aspirations/"

Thanks for the feedback, I guess this is going on our next one.

I think you've hit the nail on the head with all of these. Regarding 2) there were several other grammatical errors, the second sentence for example. "It simple".

I'll say this, I feel for the YC partners reading through submission after submission. After reading the few that have been posted on HN the past few days, I'm exhausted. It's hard to give a lot of attention to each of these without skimming through and just saying "meh, next".

Much like an English teacher reading through 30 essays.

>It's hard to give a lot of attention to each of these without skimming through and just saying "meh, next".

>Much like an English teacher reading through 30 essays.

An English teacher gets it worse as s/he forced to actually read and comment through "meh" content (i pity ones who read my essays back then in Russian and here in English)

For this application I read only first couple phrases until "3 matches every 3 days", and just being an HN reader for 4 years, i see that this startup isn't YC-material (that isn't saying that they aren't A+/brilliant grade material in general as i didn't read further)

>For this application I read only first couple phrases until "3 matches every 3 days", and just being an HN reader for 4 years, i see that this startup isn't YC-material

Please elaborate on this so we can circle back on our marketing pitch.

Boring, sounds like something that has been done before. 3 by 3 and bonus 4th on fish taco Thurdays. To put it in the terms of your business area, [my impression that] YC is looking to be swept from their feet.

there were 2 other similar sites on the frontpage today as well

Deleted comment

I think when you say "dating app" you better come with it hard.

Also, your numbers could use some improvement. You said you only did 63 dates but project 10 dates per user per month. I'm an ultra extrovert and I don't think I could deal with going on 10 dates per month. Further, if that were the case and people could do 10 dates per month on average, you should already be proving that statement. The market size is huge if you win the whole thing. But, the way you calculated it seemed off.

If I were to apply with a dating site or any other common app idea, my first sentence would be something I have learned that is profound. Without a profound insight, or major traction, a dating website probably looks like a low expected value.

One thing is certain, there will be killer dating apps that continue to come out over time and I doubt that tinder will be the last one.

[ADDED] I was responding to the applicant's point which is now deleted.

I have got to digest all these points. If nothing I have got amazing points for marketing Truffle as well as improving our vision. For now all of our focus is on getting traction. Thank you for your feedback :)

Yeah man, my comment was kind of negative, but its definitely worth trying to see what people think. I think you need to work on your market sizing though. If you had talked to a few people about it, they should have caught it.

No of course, that's what they do - but that doesn't mean it's easy. I was merely commenting (and not on your specific application, which seemed fine to me) on the general task of reading about ideas from a vast array of industries & niches. You have to do this context switch constantly and in a short amount of time make a yay or nay decision. It's tough. And again, it's not exactly reading for pleasure, like a novel. It's reading dense copy from developers. It's tough.

Yes, I agree I think couple of people pointed out the grammatical errors in our application so that might have been a red flag too.

I would use Truffle if it were in my locale (British Columbia).

I like how you wrote the application answers. You come across as smart (but not cocky), engaged, and enthusiastic.

Ah thanks, I guess writing YC application answers helped me in defining my vision and pitch better.

BC is not far from Seattle, should be there by end of this year :)

I think if you want to get into YC you have to fulfill one of the three criteria:

1. You are hugely changing the world

2. You can completely disrupt an existing industry

3. You can be a billion dollar company

Good apps do fulfill all the three, however I think yours wouldn't be able to fulfill one of these unfortunately.

Let look at the points:

1. It looks like you have a cool app, but it's not much different to other dating sites. You will probably be a good dating website, but not "change the world"

2. You are not specifically in an industry like taxis, golf or cars. You are in the dating industry, which has 1000s of established competitors

3. I'm confident you probably can be a $50M company, but not "billion-dollar" company. There are 1000s of established competitors already in the market and it will be very hard to be 10x better than everyone else. It's also hard, because dating websites were competitive 10 years ago. Nowadays you might get a market share in the super competitive Dating-space as a viral mobile app like Tinder, however as a website it is just impossible.

Didn't want to shoot you guys down, but hope I could give you useful feedback so that you know what is important to focus on.

I love your feedback, I do agree that there is a lot of competition in the online dating market but still I believe that the way it is done currently will be disrupted. People are just used to the current way of browsing a catalogue of images and brute forcing their way to get some one reply to their messages.

Hey thanks!

I think you can monetize pretty early with your model, so once you rake a few thousand dollars in per month and show that it will be in the ten thousands in three months, you can easily get Angel investment.

Once you have decent traction, nobody cares about the "billion-dollar" startup anymore and everybody invests ;)

I met my girlfriend on an online dating site and being able to send messages was essential. I know it's a drag for guys to constantly send messages without a response, but for women it's a critical safety filter. Tinder strikes a good balance where you get to message only of there is a match, but if there were no chat, then I'm positive no one would use it for dating.

Seems like the quality of application really is sky high if something like this didn't even get an interview.

The team sounds smart and accomplished, and objectively interesting. You guys have done a lot of data driven user research as well, which shows maturity when compared to a lot of the other startups out there.

I wish you guys the best of luck, don't give up and keep working on that :)

Please keep your chins up on this one. I think this is a great concept and it could legitimately solve the one major beef I've always had with dating sites like OkCupid (for long-term relationships, I'm only interested in working professionals, and it's quite a hassle to filter out the right profiles sometimes; I also generally find the messaging phase to be worthless, as most people decide whether they want to meet someone based only on the profile).

Yes, YC rejection has made us even stronger to improve our product further.

Given that the YC partners have a ton of applications to read, and given that your second sentence ("It simple.") suggests you didn't proofread your application, it's possible they didn't continue reading it.

"...people using traditional online dating loose hope..."

It is nitpicking, but when you're in ultra-intense competition with lots of other good applications, I'm sure these things matter at least on a subconscious level. If I were to apply, I'd proof-read my application until it was perfect.

Oh, and is it just me, or was this one very long? If this is the hundredth application you're reading, you might look at this and be scared off by its length. Not saying anything about the quality of the applicants -- I'm sure they're talented and motivated -- but this little text they're submitting is what gets them either in or out. It's important.

OP here. This is great, YC doesn't give you feedback on the rejection but the HN community does. Thank you guys so much for reading through our application and giving us some very useful feedback.

The grammar was atrocious. There were too many grammatical errors to list here, but for God's sake please use a grammar check. Paul Graham's grammar is perfect and yours should be, too.

You only have 57 users? That's not enough traction for a dating site with a lot of assumptions regarding what users want to garner any attention from the likes of YC.

We have 315 users now(still not much, I totally agree in terms of YC numbers). "57" is the number that we converted from the likes of okCupid and match on to truffle

Dating meets Groupon meet Uber.

Guy and Girl both pay for a date

Site matches Guy, Girl selects 1 activity and 1 dinner a driver and autopays for everything. The two people just show up and enjoy there date.

1) Can you elaborate on the 'no messaging' logic?

2) I hope you have a rockstar marketing/leadgen guru.

OP here. On dating websites like okCupid and match.com, you have to write a message to the other person to start a conversation. On Truffle, there is no online messaging. You are presented with 3 users every 3 days, if you like them, you send them a coffee invitation at one of our Truffle meet up cafes.

Why this? Why no messages?

OP here, would love to get comments from the HN community.

It offers to match you with people in the same "class". Class is verboten in Canada/US unless it's "the middle class". There's probably a nicer way to say that.

This isn't one of the apps that I read, but that would definitely be a negative for me. The world doesn't need more class divisions.

OP here, I agree. I guess @mlyang put that in better words than us "people with similar intellectual interests/career aspirations"

Right, the word "class". Of course people still look to date in similar... circles?

This is the first thing that stuck out to me also. It's a very polarizing topic and needs to be said differently.

+ The application is riddled with typos and grammatical oddities that are distracting and occasionally affect the meaning. You may have better luck if you have a second pair of eyes look over your written work.

+ When describing the potential size of your user base, why do you only include people who are already on eHarmony or okCupid? What about all the single who aren't on either?

Off the bat, 1)too many founders 2)Application too wordy

I know the sweet spot is 3 but we are 4 cofounders.

Maybe because this isn't an original idea at all.

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