Ask HN: What startups were refused from YC but became successful?
Alternatively, what startups did the YC partners failed to see become successful, but did so?
What? I never would have thought that firms did this.
And the fact that it's the first of two reasons listed sends the message that it's something they do more than just once in a while.
> In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet.
Oh well, was a fun experience and we've been successful w/o it.
(for reference: http://ionicframework.com/)
I'm kind of glad that the interview wasn't even an option, since we're based out of San Diego and it simplifies the logistics of our operations for not having to move to SF for a period. Having no idea of how NMX/NAB was going to go, YC seemed like the best way to get our idea out there whilst getting their great support system. Now, we can just go heads-down in development and prepare for our June release.
It's always extremely discouraging to get rejections -- we got rejected from EvoNexus[3], TechCrunch Disrupt NY, and YCombinator (twice). This pretty much tells me that I'm horrible at filling out applications. I'd like to think that if the YC partners had walked up and talked to us at our booth, we would have definitely gotten the interview.
This Vegas trip was the most amazing thing that has happened since I came up with the idea of pleenq[4], because we barely had to sell the product -- people were so excited by the possibilities it would bring, and about all the monetization opportunities it opens up. Most of our customers were referrals from others who had seen our booth, and were told to "make sure they saw pleenq before they left the show". I closed every single person I talked to at our booth over the 4 days of the show, which was basically the highest form of encouragement I could have hoped for.
[1] https://facebook.com/pleenq and http://pleenq.com
[2] Demo of PLEENQ that we showed at NAB/NMX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wu4gaiaA7I
[3] A San Diego-based incubator that takes 0% equity and is really great for startups with a little bit of traction
[4] Pleenq lets you tag items in any image on the internet and link them to where they can be purchased
As you said, though, it turns out it was just much easier to bootstrap the entire thing since it starts paying off really quickly.
It made my amateur design hackles stand up.
If you have Arvo, the design looks sort-of-okay. I have more of a problem with the ad copy.
"Easily tag items to where they can be purchased" is non-standard English and doesn't do a great job of communicating what's going on.
I had to chew through it a couple of times to work out what it meant.
The eventual website will be more of a web application akin to twitter, instead of a signup landing page. We've just prioritized releasing the actual extension ahead of getting the website done, since the probability of an organic signup was next to nothing.
I think that there are more founders that were rejected by YC that became successful, not startups.
Even though just existing 9 years after the interview would have been a failure condition for our build to flip mindset at the time - but today it’s paying the founders salaries and still providing intersting challenges - so a success as we define it.
And it must be said that the advice we got in our interview (that we rejected - no doubt one of the reasons we were turned down) was dead on - not just for what it would take to make the company a successful startup, but also for seeing some of the challenges in the road ahead. Just the interview was a fantastically useful.
And the fact that we rejected the advice was probably a good indicator that what we really wanted out of our company was not a startup, but rather a platform to play with interesting technology and business problems and make money doing it. Startups really aren’t for everyone. YC was part of us discovering that.
As for the advice even if it was shocking at the time it doesn't seem that scary these days. It does seem a little prescient. The big one was to ditch our largest supplier, Amazon Mechanical Turk, build it ourselves and compete with them, as our success would be limited by them. This wasn't something we were willing to do at the time, we viewed them handling those problems as a major leg up for us. However in the end much of this was correct and building our own (more limited version) was part of us being financially successful as a company.
Most of the advice consisted of start up tropes, applied to our particular business. They basically told us to dream audacious dreams, do difficult things that don't scale to boot strap and build relationships while doing it. But they didn't use any of those words and did apply them specifically to our problems which was pretty helpful.
But the real value was as a touchstone, and illustrating how far ahead people who are good at this can see
Yeah, the more I read about startups, the less I can imagine taking something I love to YC or some other accelerator. An idea I'm halfway enthusiastic on that will make some money, sure. Something good for the world where the technical work is not my favorite thing, definitely. But if I'm passionate about the work, I want to keep doing it, not pivot, manage, hockey-stick, and sell.
Our software has been live since September with a Florida Ticket Defense Firm we have seen great traction and growth (400 clients in the last 90 days), and we appear to be on schedule to offer our software to law firms nationwide starting next month. I am not sure to date this could be defined as a success in the YC sense, we have had no funding, we have had no media coverage, no VCs on the board...but there has been local market adoption of our product and the potential to scale this seems attainable even if boot-strapping.
Edit: To be clear I am not saying YC defines success as funding, or media coverage...but show me a YC company that has achieved anyones definition of success without getting Funding and media coverage as a step along the way.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking-...
In terms of traction, you got 400 people in a quarter (and how many of those routinely get tickets?) vs. Fixed's waiting list of 25000 signups from more than a year ago.
On the business side Fixed's 25k waiting list...none of them are paying customers, of those who are not on the waiting list and using the app, Fixed gets nothing when they challenge a ticket and lose (which appears to be 80% [1]), but when Fixed wins I think they get 25% of the original fine. I think more generally Fixed wants to offer "Justice as a Service" and start challenging all kinds of quasi-legal problems that do not require a licensed lawyer, which is a tremendous space and I look forward to seeing them grow. Of our 400 in the last 90 days, they are paying clients of our partner law firm, and the relationship is between the client and law firm, not us and the client.
[1] http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/fixed-parking-ticket-ap...
(More than Sprig, despite Sprig receiving significantly more tech press coverage.)
[1] https://medium.com/@munchery/pitch-your-life-2f170eab933b
[2] They raised a $28 million Series B round this time last year.
Well, aren't we a lovely bunch. Good for him he didn't give up.
I think he did a great job of explaining it. I don't fault PG for locking onto the wrong concept-- it's gotta be hard to be up on stage like that and figure out what people are really doing with so little info and on a rushed time scale, and then do it again and again 10 times in an hour.
I think the most important lesson from that is, whatever the first words out of your mouth are, they are going to flavor the entire rest of the conversation because they set the context, and it's really easy to get the investor locked into the wrong context.
However I have feeling success for YC is having a company become a Unicorn. The question to ask is which startups that didn't get into YC are now Unicorns.
Edit: removed name of my startup to avoid "click-bait"
That's not to say I'm in favor of blatant self promotion, but I think people on HN are more shy about their projects than they ought to be.
If you had a cure for cancer, would you promote it?
Saving others an extra click to your profile page: "Co-founder @ rmotr.com. Ex-CTO @ Athlete.com"
They've been developing tons of new features and seem to be getting more and more major positive press every week.
But if nothing else, this is definitely one of those 'invest in the founders' situations... Larry and CS are crazy smart and are now at that solid experienced-but-not-too-old age.
I think the early-to-mid 30s is a perfect age for most. "Old enough to do it right, but young enough to do it all night long"