To Applicants: Has Y Combinator looked at your demo? | Hacker News Reader

To Applicants: Has Y Combinator looked at your demo?

9 pointspalish24 comments

For your #'s game, which I think is a fun one... No one from Ycombinator has looked at our demo yet.

It was a wonderful deadline, no? We worked three straight days at the end that we'd have spread out otherwise. I imagine YCombinator often jumpstarts even the companies it doesn't fund. That would be interesting to see numbers on. How many companies YCombinator has played a role in helping indirectly. We've certainly been inspired by this process.

Doesn't look like it, unless they're coming from a home (i.e. not-resolvable-to-hostname) address. Actually, I think all the visits in our logs can be traced back to a cofounder. Which makes sense, as we haven't given out our URL to anyone but yCombinator.

I'd actually be a little disappointed if they had looked at our demo, because it's rather disappointing. We've been doing a bunch of cleanup work so far this Good Friday, and will likely be replacing our mockup layout with an approximation of the real thing over the weekend. So I'd be grateful for a few extra days...

Shhhhh, patience is a virtue.

Once they have identified the promising ideas, they might look at the demos to narrow it down....

No. (It's not really a demo, just a fun, unrelated little thing. But it has an URL which hasn't been hit yet from Mountain View or Cambridge.)

I can't even tell because I am not tracking anything at the moment....to keep things simple, the database is not even in the picture right now!

sheeessshhh its rather bad to check on this one. We have done our best and given links to demo, we need to have patience to wait till the results are out. When u give u r exams you wait for results, not break into prof's room and check on the stack and see if he has corrected u r papers :D...this is real bad habit ;-)

While it may have been better to wait another few days, the application process is nearly over. I'm trying to determine how much an online demo actually matters in the process.

In the case of Zenter, things they'd previously built helped them get accepted. They didn't actually have an online demo of what they were proposing.

Well online demo may be just a rain-check to show that you know the technology you are using, you know what you are doing and in short to show you are on right track. Sometimes describing how you would go about doing stuff will also go a long way too

Right. So this experiment is to determine if online demos matter at all. Perhaps all Paul, Jessica, RTM and Trevor care about is a good idea (or not so good idea) with a solid team. In fact, they probably only care about a solid team. Reddit's idea was entirely changed after they applied.

I'll be interested to see if by tomorrow anyone's actually confirmed that they've looked. Then next cycle we can refocus our efforts on areas that matter more.

Gaming the applications process already? ;-)

The big advantage to working on the online demo is it gets you working on the product. Ultimately, that's what'll make you succeed or fail, not whether you get YC funding. I can't imagine anything else in the application process that matters more.

My team isn't really focusing on the app demo for YC's sake. It actually looks kinda ugly, since layout and design is one of the last things we're working on. But we were planning to launch on the weekend of the 20-21st, and still probably will if we aren't invited to Mountain View. So in order to hit the launch date, we need to work on it anyway.

Gaming the applications process already? ;-)

Nope. I didn't apply to YC because I feel it'll increase my chances of success. I know I'm going to succeed; how 'bout you? ;)

I applied because that's where I want to be. Out of all the places I could go in life, I can't imagine a better place than with a bunch of smart and motivated people working on businesses.

So let's assume we're all going to succeed, and we all want in. Knowing which things matter more than other things is invaluable.

Of course, they wouldn't tell us to focus on question X. If they did, it would skew the results. So the only way to determine what matters is to run experiments like this one.

you working on the product.

Not if you rushed a demo out the door just to have a demo..

Oh yes, we'll be launching something around the same time.

I recall it was specifically mentioned not to rely on an online demo. It's only a part of the overall process.

I suspect many of those questions reveal aspects of the applicants that aren't necessarily obvious. The questions on the app were all stimulating and I wouldn't recommend trying to second-guess any of it.

a demo is important -- we (weebly) had a launched product when we interviewed, and it was very helpful in a "we can focus the conversation" type of way.

I haven't seen any account signups that seem to be from YC, judging from logs and signup email addresses.

I'm also looking for "No"'s as well as "Yes"'s. So if they haven't, please speak up! :)

And how would we know if they have?

Check your web server logs (or whatever traffic measurement tool you have) to see if the links you sent have been requested.

I have sent my links to several people.

Check your hosts and referers for domains that look like yCombinator. You are using a traffic-analysis tool like Webalizer or AWStats, right?

(Even if you aren't, you can still get them by grepping the access log. It's just harder to compile statistics.)

what fields should I grep for, that will tell me they were pleased with my demo?

Timestamps and total page views.

I was joking!

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