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Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

Even if we don't get an interview, going through the application process was a good exercise for us (https://www.morphmail.com/). From the analytics report, it looks like 4 people from YC viewed our demo (YC-specific URL) and 1 actually sent a test message. YouTube says that the 1 minute video was viewed 8 times for 8 minutes total. So far good signs, but the real question is how many great applicants were at the top of the list. We'll keep our fingers crossed!

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UPDATE: We just got an email at 3:49pm, and we were not invited to interview. Not a complete surprise, given the estimated 3% acceptance rate for YC I've seen floating around. We'll keep working on our product and hopefully we can show some progress in the next few months and apply again for the S15 cycle!

Sorry to hear that. Its surprising, given how many times your video was viewed and usage of your demo, I'd have thought they were interested.

Well by the math applying and getting accepted is a long shot. If they review thousands of applications (say 5000), and they hope to have a class of 80, then they probably have to interview a few hundred. So if they want to get 500 to 1000 into an interview out of 5000, they're turning away 80 to 90%.

I'm just curious to know whether we were number 501 on the list when they accepted 500, or if we were the last one on the list of 5000.

Considering you got 8 views on your video, and they went far enough with your demo to make an account, I would say you were probably high on their list.

For me, my video was viewed two times, and my protoype was only viewed once, no other action was taken on it. This probably means you got higher than average interaction by them.

You might want to reconsider your current idea though - Have you looked into google Inbox? They are coming out with a lot of email improving functionality.

You might want to reconsider your current idea though - Have you looked into google Inbox? They are coming out with a lot of email improving functionality.

I got my invite for Google Inbox today, and it's pretty to look at, but not something I'll use long term. In the end any pretty interface you put on email will suffer from the same flaw - it's built on a protocol that is just blobs of text. Inbox does make it easier to visualize what's in my inbox right now but the search is still just a plain text search.

I'm getting a head start on Christmas shopping, so I have a lot of orders being shipped to me. Can I search for all packages that are currently "in transit"? No. Can I search for every Techcrunch article I've sent to my cofounder that mentions YC? No. The reason I can't do these searches in email is because the messages are just blobs of text, when they should be JSON. That's the problem we're trying to solve with MorphMail.

Wow! Your app looks impressive.. I think your team stands a good chance of being invited for an interview. How long have you been hacking on it?

Thanks! I came up with the idea back in January, but we started working on the prototype around August. We had a rough demo put together for our YC app, and a more polished demo we're hoping to beta test in the next few weeks. Join our beta list to be one of the first to try it out!

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