Got rejected. In a painful process to figure out why. It will be fine if YC didn't carefully read our application. It won't be if they did. We will continue carry on, toward our roadmap, try to prove ourselves by product performance as soon as possible, and meanwhile think through what we might be missed and how can we do better.
The first reason why you think they rejected you is because you think they didn't read your application?
Not gonna lie but i am going to give my honest advice here.
There is nothing wrong with your idea, I think there is some kind of need out there for photo organization because people takes so many pictures nowadays that they dont even remember they have taken them.
But when I see your team is when I went, WTF? You have 8 people working on a pre-alpha photo app and you don't even KNOW if people want to use it.
AND you are hiring? What are you hiring for? More people to argue with whenever someone think of a idea? You need speed and focus at the beginning stage of a startup and having 8 person on the team is game over for you already.
Instagram is built with 2 person only all the way from original idea to pivoting to launch, and they STILL only have around 10 people on the team.
In fact there hasn't been a software startup I have seen in YC that has that many people. Most startups had 2-3 person for the first 2-3 years.
You should really consider about the size of your team especially at mvp stage.
Hi, thanks for your honest feedbacks. No, I didn't mean that they didn't read my application. That's a joke. You misunderstood.
We have 8 persons is because we have a seed round already and we want to run fast. I am learning how to balance the cost with the speed of development. But I don't think the amount of people directly equal to the cost you have. :)
Thanks for your information about the team size you have seen in YC. But I don't think that's the reason we got rejected. Will consider how to match the development speed with the size though.
By the way, we love team discussion and each member is valuable to our team. We only have 2 co-founders though. More people means more help to us, not necessary more trouble as you think. At the end of day, even our product fail, we still have a great team to start the next chapter. :)
Thank you! Very helpful. Sorry that we were mostly focusing on the product building, didn't spend enough time craft these marketing materials. I am kind of realizing that this is what blocked us now. I need to balance a bit. Thanks for pointing this out.
It's solving overwhelming amount of photos problem. Many people think it's a very competitive market, some even said "saturated", but look at users and current players, no solid solution yet. We don't want to avoid competition, instead, we want to provide a really working solution. It doesn't sound fancy, but it could be useful to many people. The user pain point might also not so obvious at this stage, but it will be more obvious along the time. Also, this is a "Vitamin" type of product (Refer to the "The Hook Model"). That's my thinking process. Please tell me where could be wrong. Thanks!
Hi! I like the concept but by looking at your website I don't know (1) what problem you're solving and (2) how you do it.
How does the "Intelligence" work? Why should I auto-generate a collage when it's more fun to create one by myself?
At the moment it seems like it would be a nice automated addition to other apps (e.g. Instagram generates "moments" from last week automatically and lets me share them with others, etc..)
Thank you for the feedbacks! Sorry if the website didn't explain clearly. The problem we are solving is the overwhelming amount of photos people took vs limited time to organize, create content from them, and share the the creation on time. Our solution, in one sentence is to automate the whole process. You only need to take photos and you see creations done right after you launch the app. We can almost do it in real time. So, in terms of "Intelligence", our app can understand your photos, detect when you take them, and make them into creations by event so that you can immediately share or further edit.
You might want it for: 1)all photos organized by moments/events instantly, an effortless while fresh way to consume your own photos and digest your past experience; 2) with our app, you take 10 second to share a collage instead of 10mins, while you are still in the moment. 3) For those who enjoy the editing process, you still can get inspiration from what we recommend to you as a creation. Plus, we are fully editable and you can just further customize based on what we drafted for you. -- Let me know if that is not convincing. :)
That sounds awesome! As you said, it's definitely some kind of vitamin/aspirational thing but there is lots of potential. Can't wait to try it out someday.
I've used everything from Picasa to iPhoto to some of the Linux-based solutions like F-Spot.
I have no idea what your product does. It reminded me a lot of the paragraph at http://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/ that starts with, "The best answers are the most matter of fact. It’s a mistake to use marketing-speak to make your idea sound more exciting. "
Yes, I know. Paul was talking about the application. Our website is a marketing platform and mean to talk in marketing ways. I am sorry it's not clear enough for you. Anyway, we thought we were not launched yet and therefore didn't work much on crafting the wording here. Probably a mistake here.
