Non-Obvious Tips for Your YC Application | Hacker News Reader

Non-Obvious Tips for Your YC Application

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You could possibly simplify this into two tips:

- Be concise

- Don't bury the lede

It's actually one tip: Be concise

irony

Thanks Yuri. If there's one piece of advice to give, it's that.

What I'm attempting to get at in this piece is a bit more tactical. The applications I reviewed all knew they should "be concise." But, they kept running into situations where they became more verbose while believing they were still concise.

My hope was to point out a few of the mental traps that would add clauses to sentences and sentences to paragraphs.

Great tl;dr summary. The example of the robot that drinks beer was a pretty good illustration of how much better being concise it, though.

This is terrific all-around advice.

The last tidbit I would add is that if you don't get in this round, apply again. And then again. And again (don't use the same application / idea/ company each time). A single application is not going to 'make' your company. Perseverance and applied intelligence will.

I think that's great. And, it's ok to have the same idea if you're showing that you're "making something people want" (showing growth and that you're learning and adapting with the market).

>And again (don't use the same application / idea/ company each time)

Is it not a red flag that someone applies consistently applies with a new idea and/or company each time? In my opinion that doesn't really show commitment to something.

Showing improvement in traction over time might be a better way.

I've reviewed a good number of applications this go around (last day to submit is Friday!). So I put together a quick write up that's hopefully helpful to the broader community.

Any other tips you'd suggest?

It would be great to see examples of successful applications, and why they stood out. Seeing how the initial presentation of the idea is different than the company today would help applicants be bolder. There's the Dropbox application which is used as an example, but are there more examples?

There are a few links to applications on this Quora thread: http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-some-sample-YCombinato...

I'll see if I can dig up a few more.

The Dropbox one is a fine example though and you'd still be served well by it even though it was originally submitted years ago.

Thanks, will check out quora links. Follow up question: is it advisable to get application feedback from other YC companies? In my head this only makes sense if the product made by applicant can be used by the startup you want feedback from, but not sure if this is the best kind of feedback.

It's very advisable to get feedback from other YC companies. Regardless of whether they could be a customer. Almost all the applications I reviewed would fall into that bucket.

we've had our application reviewed by a YC company that would probably derive zero value from our product. the advice was cogent and helpful, both with respect to getting into YC and the company generally.

Thanks!

If you don't mind sharing, may I ask how you knew/ approached these other YC Companies? Perhaps I'm naive, but I suspect a cold-email/ contact won't get me very far, especially since I'm not based in the Bay Area.

We approached a YC founder in our city via cold email.

I think that if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to get comfortable with writing cold-emails and getting lots of rejection. It's just part of the game. Plus, it's not that cold of an email: you want to do YC and the founder has done YC. You already have a shared interest.

I appreciate the response. I've done my fair share of cold emails, however I find that there's a threshold that I cross above often in which I won't receive a response.

It's tough to build credibility in a few short lines, but I appreciate the "shared interest" suggestion. I hadn't considered that this even counted. Thanks!

I had a personal connection to most, but did a couple out of cold outreach. Be bold, reach out, if you don't get a response, you're still in the same position you were before...and no worse.

This page has some links: http://yourstory.com/2014/10/guide-list-y-combinator/

Wow...that's comprehensive. Great find!

stopped reading at 'be awesomer'

You should have seen the YC hackathon, it was pretty clear they took the youngest applicants. Speaking like that is appealing to high school and college kids rather than using more formal language. He wasn't addressing journalists and CEOs, he was addressing kids. I think "be awesomer" is a fun way to phrase it for that target audience that is less likely to come across as dry or put them to sleep compared to alternatives like don't bury the lede.

very true, although the writing style and angle taken towards the included multimedia content could suffice right? rather than just making up words

yup -- you pretty much nailed it :)

I do like fun, goofy language but I hard a hard time with it in this context. ..probably because I went into reading the article with a certain attitude that didn't match "awesomer".

oh well.. :)

that's the first thing i noticed but i kept reading. I went to a career fair (i'm still a college student) at my uni. An agency printed, as on of the subheadings of their one sheet flyer, that they were a team that is dedicated to being remarkable. A large portion of the rest of that flyer spoke of the agency's values. I moved on to the next booth pretty quickly.

2cool4school high school semantics aside, "be awesomer" is sound advice. Consider the second word "awesomer" (I assume this is the word you don't like, since I can't see anyone with a qualm against "be"), what is "awesomer"?

Or, more to the point, what is "awesome"? Well, something that fills one with awe. But what is "awe"? According to Dr. Dacher Keltner (Born to be Good), "awe" is a feeling of uplifting that one gets when he is looking on things from up high. It's a feeling we get when we suddenly see our world and ourselves in a much larger scope; when we come to some understanding of our place, our path, and our purpose in our universe. Since time immemorial, it's a feeling we've associated with divinity.

It's hard to say what fills others with awe, but to be awesome from your own perspective is to do something that would fill you with awe. To "be awesomer" then is to be do more of that thing which fills you with purpose and meaning and (since your time and resources are finite) to do it at the cost of all the other things that just grind away at your life yet you feel no purpose, meaning, or self-actualization from.

So, what does "be awesomer" mean when translated out of uncool-high-school-faggotnese (and, incidentally, into cult-of-TEDnish)? It means to take a risk, abandon the beaten and grinding path, and to live a life that feels meaningful to you. If you ask me, that's sound advice; possibly irresponsible if you're a parent with kids depending on you, but definitely solid otherwise.

The implication of 'be awesomer' is of course that what was written in the applicaiton is already 'awesome', at least in the mind of the applicant.

However awesome you think you are you need to appear more awesome than that to get into Y.C. :-)

Thanks bbcbasic! You nailed it. I debated using the term "awesomer" prior to posting. Mainly because it's not a real word :-). But, the whole point of the post is to knock people out of their current mindset. "Awesomer" makes you pause for a second and take notice. "Be even more awesome" didn't have the same effect. From the comments, it rubbed some people the wrong way. But, the fact it's even being debated means it accomplished much of what I intended to accomplish with it (cause you to take notice).

I did a stint of selling stuff online. When I wrote the sales copy I thought it was awesome until I got someone else to review it. They pointed out lots of things that were weak or didn't make sense. This was bad for the ego but good for the copy because I improved it.

I think the same approach would be useful for a YC application. Get other people to critique it, and iterate and improve. The trick is picking good reviewers. Probably more people can review copy than a YC application but I hear YC founders are generally friendly and like to help.

I recently made the mistake of doing a rush application for my local TedX and didn't get picked for the audience. I should have applied the "awesomer" philosophy to that.

Now I am going off to work on that robot...

The beer-drinking robot is an example of an "Elevator Pitch". You definitely want an elevator pitch, also a tagline. The two while conceptually related are different.

Elevator pitch comes from the notion that you've just stepped onto an elevator along with some obviously wealthy person. Just to be polite she says "So what do you do?"

You have until she steps off at her floor to obtain financing for your company.

A tagline is typically used in written marketing materials - direct mail in my case, back in the day. Working Software's marketing director Mark Galvin and I were discussing taglines for QuickLetter 2.0. Mark is a brilliant marketing professional, rather shy, quiet and thoughtful, leading to my surprise when he emailed me:

"QuickLetter, only $49.95. C'mon - you'd spend more than that on dinner for two and a bottle of wine."

I'm working on some of my own projects right now. My complete inability to come up with appealing taglines and elevator pitches is definitely holding me back.

For reasons of Search Engine Optimization, it is advisable to compose an appealing tagline, then to place that tagline as the very first paragraph after your page's H1 element, also as the meta description element in the page's head element. Most of my own pages do that, with the result that I get a lot more search engine referrals. I discuss this in your detail at:

http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/search-engine-optimiz...

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