Y Combinator Fellowship 2015 Application Videos | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator Fellowship 2015 Application Videos

topchart.io

114 pointswebhat55 comments

Great resource, though I've noticed 2 issues:

* New entries start with a vote of 0, the poster has to actually up-vote their own submission to get it to 1 (as opposed to automatically making it 1 like on reddit).

* The ranking appears to be a sum of up votes, only. Links that are added later (like now), show up at the very bottom and it's unlikely will reach the top. In a situation like this, to get attention, you're creating a race to post first. Consider some type of rank deterioration similar to reddit/HN.

Basic implementation of Reddit's Hot Order or something similar is pretty straightforward :)

http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588

But what about people who arrive at the site next week, and want to see the best of what they missed?

This is why the ability to downvote is so often worth the you-hurt-my-feelings tradeoff.

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

I think there is a "secret" ability to downvote... see this https://www.dropbox.com/s/u012v405bka4fas/Screenshot%202015-... I hope it's just a huge bug

I fixed it for you.

Many Thanks. We really appreciate it. Unfortunately our score is still lower than the real upvotes we got - but at least is better than -20 ;)

Or is this just a way to keep topchart at the top?

The second part really is irritating, given that new products are at the bottom of the pit and hidden under multiple 'Load More' with the slightest chance of anyone resurrecting it.

It's definitely not a way to keep TopChart at the top. Since people in our network are already familiar with us, we were getting more upvotes. Any errors in upvotes will be corrected today. We even considered removing ourselves from the list, but that wouldn't be very fun :P

Wouldn't a subreddit be better for this type of voting platform?

Thanks for the feedback. All of this is right on and will be solved pretty soon. As for starting with 0, I might be wrong, but building lists is a bit different than other lists. It is possible that I'm adding lists items and I don't care to upvote them. Ultimately you are right though, and I plan to change that.

As for ranking, I'm thinking of a good way to solve that problem. I'm sure I'll come up with something good. Rank deterioration is a good idea, will look into it more and weigh options.

It baffles me that some people put so much into the video but don't actually put effort to read or adhere to the guidelines [1] for it. They clearly ask - no script, no background music, no postproduction.

Good luck to everybody though!

[1] http://www.ycombinator.com/video

Maybe the are just trying to be disruptive! ba dum tss

Agree with this. The best videos I've seen, and the ones listed on the page, are just the founders chatting naturally.

We found out about this at the last minute, already had the video, and didn't have enough time to make new demos and videos. So, YC got the same video we submitted for TC Disrupt.

Note that startups apply for a _lot_ of stuff, and we have seen a pattern that teams that look more professional are more likely to be selected (regardless of stated criteria). We're also based in Hollywood, so the kind of video stuff we just make ourselves in a weekend project tends to end up looking reasonably professional.

At the end of the day, startups are rarely successful based on careful adherence to all guidelines, and we think our business is a lot more exciting than our demo and founder videos. Hopefully the YC reviewers think the same.

Not true of YC, in my experience. A 1 minute video, done with ~5 minutes of preparation, is much better than a video from something else with high production values.

Spending hours on the video is probably worse, too. The peak is maybe around 15-30 minutes, from the videos I've seen of YC teams. Talking points, decent lighting, decent audio (phone headset is fine), not a memorized script, maybe a couple takes if you really fuck up.

I admit that we didn't follow the rules totally, but there are so many others that completed missed all the parameters. Yeah good luck to you too.

I tried it doing it a couple of different ways and in the end the one I did with talking points felt the best to me, it wasn't scripted but it definitely was hard to have a natural one-way conversation (solo founder).

I wish I could've covered everything I wanted to cover naturally but in the end I felt a disconnect between what I wanted to say and what I was able to say. Then again maybe that makes me a worse candidate, but I hope I get a chance to show I'm not in interviews.

Throwaway account here. I saw this on twitter and almost got a heart attack thinking for a second that YC made all the founder videos public.

What would be so bad about it? Founders already committed to other projects? Leakage of "Ideas"?

it's one thing to present to an audience of a few partners and completely different thing to broadcast to the entire world

One potential issue is one we're very cognizant of here in Hollywood: being typecast. We considered this carefully before deciding to make our video public.

Keep in mind, we're a very early stage company. Our video reflects that, and our product video reflects the early product we have shipped (although we do hope you download and try Cuddli instead of just watching the video!). With the wide distribution and high profile that anything linked to YC is likely to attract, we may well be creating an impression with potential future partners, investors, and employees. This is likely the reason why most of the startups in this competition haven't chosen to make their video public.

What we've found is that most people really want their video to be seen and aren't super worried about getting their ideas stolen. I think YC could get mad about this, but it's a great way to meet others who made videos and to encourage them, give feedback.

I've just understood that you submitted TopChart for the Fellowship. Great idea to post it here on HN ;)

Yeah, a nice hack :) Best of luck to you from your fellow applicants, team Q4U!

I think some of the votes are fake. Look at the names on some submissions. You should implement a way to verify each vote, right now the scores can be easily manipulated.

It's in the works. We are in a super early beta and haven't seen this much traffic and been through all of the use cases yet. This is a pretty good learning experience for us.

It's interesting to see what kind of groups applied for this. I'm working on a product at the moment and was thinking of applying but without co-founders I didn't think it was a good idea. Also from the application form I get the feeling you would be "encouraged" to move to the Bay area if not during the 2 months at least after it, which I can't do.

Right now I'm also unable to move to Bay Area, but I think if your idea/prototype/product is decent and you'll make great progress during Fellowship program you're chances for being accepted into YC W2015 will be much higher :)

I'm confused - I've watched the top two videos and neither really talk about the product at all. CauseSignals is more of a video resume for the team and doesn't even mention the product. I never really read the instructions but was the video to introduce the team and not the product?

Yeah, exactly. This was part of a larger application (the rest of which was very focused on the product) so the video was just meant to be a short (<1 minute) intro.

I added a new list for the websites of the projects rather than the videos of the founder http://www.topchart.io/lists/ycombinator-fellowship-2015-web...

The content of the video is left to the founders, they could reasonably talk about whatever they want. Restricting the video to a minute forces concentration.

Is it possible to downvote? I uploaded my video (lacerba.io) and it dropped from 14 votes to -21 votes in 10 seconds... https://www.dropbox.com/s/u8s3tdqqjy7x4bn/topchart.mp4?dl=0

They don't have server side validation, it seems. you can give yourself a 1000 boats. I just gave 3 votes to topchart.

UI bug: https://www.dropbox.com/s/duue3q8brs7d467/Screenshot%202015-... chrome 44 on os x

There's currently a post that has '-19' votes (as of this writing) that appears at the bottom. Since there are only up votes, I assume this is a bug. That's really too bad because it looks like that chart item would be second from the top but because it's negative it's sunk to the bottom.

It would probably be a good idea to have an email displayed somewhere, a 'contact us' section and, ideally, a way to leave feedback easily (without logging in, etc.).

TopChart looks good! It took me a second to realize the chart wasn't a Y-Combinator site.

I really hope that in years to come we have a great, goofy video of a guy jumping on a bed pitching for funding that eventually went on to create a billion dollar company.

What's up with requiring a Facebook account for upvoting?

So that people don't easily game the system. Would you prefer Twitter or just not logging in at all?

I'd prefer twitter, and a tweet button. Twitter is less personal and reach is bigger than on facebook.

Agreed - I hesitated to sign up. Twitter is better.

Not logging in. Twitter accounts are dime a dozen, so that doesn't give you anything. You can limit by cookie/IP/browser fingerprint [1] if you'd like. That'd be as good as 3rd party authentication and far less intrusive.

[1] https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs

As of 10:30 EST, there's no server-side validation, so it's possible to vote multiple times.

I guess this is an allegory of the modern financial system, huh?

Agree, great hack guys, but you need to work on your votes. Some votes disappear after refresh, then again I can submit 2-3 votes if clicking quickly...

I created an alternative list where you can link your project website rather than your videos since I thought that could be more interesting http://www.topchart.io/lists/ycombinator-fellowship-2015-web...

Alright! This is just what I was looking for when I submitted my video to YCF2015: What other applications sounded like.

Looks like cool product! I hope to be part of your cohort! ;)

Just a heads up- your signup/login forms are unencrypted.

It's fine for a demo, but if you're going to put it out there like this, you should really throw some SSL on there.

Nice hack OP, reminds me of http://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000

Heh, well that's pretty good validation for my idea; another startup is doing it; CauseSignal, hope they do well!

Thanks everyone for comments bugs have been fixed we really appreciate your tips and envolvement you guys are awesome

Cool hack you TopChart guys! Btw do they say how many teams will be accepted in YCF?

20 teams.

Nice idea!

Cool

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