
From YC Rejection to 10,000 Users in 1 Month (with stats) - yesimahuman
http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/03/from-yc-rejection-to-10000-users-in-1-month/
======
pg
Believe it or not I like this being the top story. We know there are lots of
bugs in our process and we want to hear the bug reports.

I went back to look at the application. It fell immediately below the
threshold for invitation to interviews. I.e. if even one of us had given them
a grade one step better, they would have made it to interviews.

When we make mistakes, it's usually in this phase. Most of the time when we
screw up it's by not inviting a group to interviews, rather than by
interviewing them and turning them down. So this startup is exactly where a
mistake would be most likely to occur: in the applications that fell just
short of the cutoff for interviews.

The good news is, we'd already decided to fix this problem. We're going to do
3 interview tracks for s2012, which will let us interview 270 groups instead
of the 180 we did last time.

If we'd done that last time, we would have interviewed these guys. But last
batch was the first time we did parallel interview tracks at all, and we
needed to test whether it worked for 2 before we went to 3.

~~~
bambax
I don't know if I'm going to be able to express what I feel but I'll try.

YC "bugs" are

\- startups that are accepted and fail

\- startups that are rejected and fail, _but would have thrived had they been
accepted_

(Of course this last kind of bug is extremely difficult to track down.)

But if a startup makes a killing after being rejected by YC it means they
didn't need you.

If you consider this a bug, there's some kind of moral problem because it
means YC is trying to siphon every promising team in order to maximize YC's
success, independently of who YC is likely to help more.

You're not just betting on horses, you're also training them: it seems what
you should want to maximize is YC's impact...?

~~~
jwb119
You're considering success or failure as a binary outcome. It's possible that
a startup is accepted and wouldn't have failed anyways, but that being in YC
makes it a bigger success than it otherwise would have been (through mentoring
or other intervention by YC). My understanding is that is the sweetspot for YC
anyways - everyone is a winner there.

~~~
bambax
> _You're considering success or failure as a binary outcome_

I think that's how it is, yes, and PG seems to have stated as much; in
essence, you either die or don't die; if you don't die, the scale of your
success depends on a lot of things that are beyond your control.

(Actual quote from PG: " _The formula for the success of a startup includes a
random multiplier of roughly zero to a thousand._ " —
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3050280> )

If one subscribes to this point of view then the purpose of YC is to help
startups not die, and the purpose of the YC admission process is to

1\. select all startups that have a chance of not dying if admitted (eg,
refuse startups that don't stand a chance in hell of not dying)

2\. if the sample from #1 is too large, reduce it at the low end first
(startups that are not very likely to not die) but maybe also at the high end
(startups that seem certain to not die no matter what)

Maybe reducing the selection from the high end is just plain stupid / counter
productive, but if you don't do that, it's not very clear why one would be in
this business in the first place (as opposed to other lucrative businesses).

~~~
vibrunazo
I think you're both right. Success can be understood as binary, depending on
how you interpret it. You either fail or you don't. But YC can help you find
that faster than without YC. So there's room for improvement even if success
is binary.

These guys got 10k users in a month. But maybe they'd get 100k in 3 if they
had YC. Even if you understand that either way it would be a success anyway.
It's still reasonable to assume that it would be a worthwhile deal for them.
If YC missed the opportunity to help them get even better, even faster. It's
reasonable for both sides to treat that as a bug.

------
csomar
I just want to add one thing: The quality of the presentation, design, and
execution is better than many Ycombinator start-ups (at launch day/ first
couple of months). I haven't tried the actual product, but from outside it
looks neat and well presented.

Now there are lots of pretty damn good sites that YC alumni are making from
launch day; but the fact that a good number isn't, suggests that PG might want
to improve his filter process a bit.

~~~
alagu
> suggests that PG might want to improve his filter process a bit.

I'm not sure how this is related. From what I've observed, PG selects
promising founders, not great site-builders. Is it fair to expect all of them
to create beautiful sites?

~~~
__abc
yes. If you in theory pick the "best of the best" you expect .... the "best".
that include the visual packaging and presentation of the companies products /
services.

~~~
janlukacs
I agree. Having a great website is very important and these guys look
professional on day one.

~~~
Estragon
The pressure on them to have a good website is stronger than for most
startups, because they are selling a web development tool.

------
j45
It's great to see bootstrappers getting some well deserved love. Lots of
attention goes to the startup lottery winners and it's good to have a reminder
that you really can do it without funding just as well.

~~~
tomgallard
Not only that, but the longer you can delay taking funding, the less of your
business you'll have to give away.

I hate the thought that getting funded is like winning the lottery. Yes, it is
absolutely necessary for some startups, but far too many seem to treat it as
an end in itself (presumably there are bragging points associated with being
able to say you've been funded to the tune of X million)

Bootstrapping encourages you to keep your costs tight, focus on profit and
revenue, ship early, quickly and often, and build something people want.

~~~
j45
Bootstrapping profitable companies also have more leverage when ready for
funding.

My use of the term startup lottery was meant to describe the communual
celebration and veneration of quite often earning some runway.

The businesses that need it are ones that have to find a product-market fit
and a repeatable business model. I just think you're better equipped to find
validated scalable business models once you've done it without money.

There's nothing quite like having to find and build what people are willing to
pay for out of the gate instead of putting it off. From where I see it, I
don't see enough technologically complex startups that need a runway, and in
hindsight could have been built without funding.

The startups that would, tremendously benefit from the coaching,
introductions, and business model development are rare, and special, and maybe
that reflects in the small number of startups accepted to Y!. The rest
shouldn't consider themselves a failure either... this startup certainly fit
the mantra build something people want (and will pay for)

------
MattBearman
I'd never heard of Codiqa until I read this post, but I'm glad I did. Really
impressive app, I'll definitely be using this to build mobile apps in the near
future.

------
Nowyouknow
Congrats guys! I wholeheartedly believe in bootstrapping over funding. Keep
that company to yourselves. I played around with Codiqa on the jquerymobile
site and what you've put together is truly impressive. I've worked with
startups in the past and I haven't seen any as well put together.

Need a marketing person? Give me a call.

------
sachingulaya
I've been putting off developing a mobile app for my startup. With codiqa it
looks like I can get a decent one going in a weekend. I'm pretty stoked.

------
mirsadm
Well done guys! Your web site looks pretty great and I'll be trying it out in
a sec. I wondered myself if submitting early is a wise decision. I submitted
our application a month before the due date but then we changed our idea
entirely. I would hope the guys didn't read the original one and moved on.

Edit: I also think that YC should not be what decides whether you create your
startup or not. It is great to see you guys kept going. The people that decide
to change ideas or abandon their startup because of not getting into YC tell
me that they are pretty good at picking people that aren't serious about
creating a successful business.

~~~
dlf
I like the edit. Anyone that would stop working on their startup because they
didn't get funded by YC or TechStars probably shouldn't be doing a startup in
the first place.

------
cinquemb
This is what i like to hear! In the future, more and more start ups will be
the ones choosing who to get funding from. Power always lies with those who
create. Congrats, and keep up the good work!

------
kgosser
Max & Ben are some of the best developers in the midwest. Very excited for
this project and for them!

~~~
danvoell
Agreed, Great product and Great write up. Keep up the amazing work!

~~~
yesimahuman
Thanks guys!

------
patio11
Congrats on the success here. You asked for some suggestions in the blog post.
I'm going to make them publicly for the benefit of other HNers but if you want
rationales and don't want the followup public just find my email.

1) Strongly, strongly consider capturing CCs at signup. Yes, this takes a bit
more work. Yes, this will decrease your conversion rate. However, you're going
to get more people successfully charged than you do currently.

2) There exist things you can do to increase user engagement with the app
which will increase conversion rate from "user" to "signup", even if you don't
take advice #1. I have a video coming out in a little while about this. Short
version: go take the free trial of Balsamiq Mockups and take copious notes
about what they do. In particular, note how Balsamiq doesn't start you out
with a blank screen and note the timing and frequency of prompts for you to
signup. Implement both of those things. Your conversion rate will increase.

3) You captured my email address for a "paid" signup. Good! I got no email
from you. Bad! You should, bare minimum, hit my inbox with "Thanks for signing
up for Codiqa. Your free trial lasts until XX/YY." followed by the best three
bullet point sales copy you can come up with, linking back to your site
extensively. Why? Because I already forgot your domain name (literally true)
and statistically speaking I already forgot I signed up for Codiqa. Hitting my
inbox is a free chance at recapturing my attention tomorrow when I do my
morning email pass.

4) But wait, if one email is good, isn't five emails better? YES! Put a wee
little checkbox on your signup form saying "Can we email you a free course
about JQuery mobile? Five emails, absolutely no spam, opt out any time."
You'll get 40%+ signups. If they sign up, you hit them on day 0, day 6, day
15, day 20, and day 28 with emails of approximately the following format.

 _Thanks for signing up for a free month-long course on JQuery Mobile by
Codiqa, the jQuery mobile design app you used recently. (You asked for this
when you signed up. Don't want it? No problem, click here.) This is your 2nd
email out of 5. Today's topic is how jQuery mobile cuts app development costs
while increasing revenue.

(h2) jQuery Mobile Cuts Development Costs by 50% (/h2)

Paragraph of copy. (~300 words) Link to codiqa docs or blog in here somewhere.

(h2) Another bullet point (/h2)

Another paragraph.

(h2) Another bullet point (/h2)

Another paragraph

Conclusion paragraph goes here. Early in the email sequence the conclusion
paragraph just mentions your service, establishes expectations for the next
email, and invites them to email you at any time. Later in the sequence you
get salesy as heck._

What does salesy as heck mean? By the fifth email you should, if you're good
at writing and jQuery Mobile, have your most engaged customers eating out of
your virtual hands. The fifth email is less about education and more about one
focused case delivered by their favorite jQuery Mobile expert on why buying
the $30 a month plan, specifically, today, is the best possible thing they can
do to improve their life today.

Execute correctly on this and you will _print money_. How much money? Just a
comparable: for BCC, which is _far_ less sophisticated on the email than this
trick is and which has _terrible_ unit economics, I make about twenty cents
per email I send. If I tell you how many orders of magnitude that number can
be improved by, four different consulting clients are going to demand my
spleen sauteed with a glass of chianti.

5) Charge more! Or at least give an option for charging more. $30 a month is
rat droppings to a business doing mobile development. (You will not get that
feedback from some HNers. That's OK. Five hundred HNers refusing to buy your
product plus one business charged $500 a month = $6,000 of revenue a year.)
Put a $250 a month plan in there. You _will_ sell it, to someone who a) does
not need to pay $250 of his own money to buy it and b) receives well in excess
of that much value from your service.

~~~
karterk
_Strongly, strongly consider capturing CCs at signup. Yes, this takes a bit
more work. Yes, this will decrease your conversion rate. However, you're going
to get more people successfully charged than you do currently._

Does anyone else have any other opinion on this? I am currently trying to
decide whether CC should be a mandatory field or not for my app (which will
have a 30-day free trial). What kind of impact on conversion are we talking
about?

~~~
patio11
You'll lose a _lot_ of signups. On the other hand, your signup-to-actually-
pays conversion gets _dramatically higher_. (Appointment Reminder captures CCs
at signup and will successfully charge north of 50% of those accounts at least
once.)

~~~
bambax
It would be ok to lose signups from people who would not ever buy your
product, but I don't think that's the case.

I for one, subscribe to a lot of SaaS but would never put in my CC number just
for a trial.

And what about corporate customers? I think many subscribers can come from
corporations where someone somewhere tried the product and liked it, and then
made sure his company paid for it. If he had to enter his CC# before he could
even try he would probably not do it.

~~~
tptacek
#1 _least useful insight_ to be gleaned from HN for people selling software:

Data points of HN readers who would never do X or would be annoyed by Y in the
process of evaluating your software.

 _Fixed typo_.

~~~
bambax
"cleaned"?

I think the target population matters. If you're selling to teachers or
dentists, then you should speak to teachers or dentists to learn what they
will do or not do.

If you're offering a jQuery framework, then HN seems pretty relevant as far as
the people susceptible to subscribe to your services.

~~~
tptacek
Don't sell software development tools to HN'ers.

------
highace
Great idea and it does look very slick and well executed, but from the little
playing around I did it just didn't feel as fluid as a desktop app would. I'd
definitely prefer a native desktop application to html and js, perhaps with an
option to view and tweak my creations with the web interface when I'm off
site.

------
EREFUNDO
Y combinator should only be one of the avenues to be explored by an
entrepreneur. My team (PayGuard) submitted an early application hoping that
they would have more time to look at it, we still plan to update it before the
March 28 deadline. We will apply again in the winter if we don't get in this
summer since we're already quitting our jobs anyway. Getting accepted in the
program will certainly jump us in the fast lane but we will not even slow down
if we don't get in. My team have debated and made improvements to the idea for
the past 6 months then we realized that the time for theorizing has ended and
the time for building a product is now. We can't wait to test this out in the
real world because we think there is a serious need for a payment system
specializing in long distance and cross-border transactions.

------
rokhayakebe
Any chance you have screenshots for Gobuzz, or a more thorough explanation of
product, or feature list?

~~~
yesimahuman
Gobuzz was basically google alerts for people and companies that matter to
you. We would send you an email each day (or more) with news about these
people and companies. Near the end we also supported NLP stuff to find new
people mentioned alongside your important contacts.

I still think it's a missing piece of the news world, but we lacked experience
and did not dig in and focus.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I am working on what could be considered an MVP for GoBuzz. Did you guys use
Google Alerts and souped it?

~~~
yesimahuman
No, we did the indexing and searching ourselves utilizing Solr and using a
document service (can't remember the name, starts with an S, which was pricy).
This let us take out a lot of "fuzzy" tokenization requirements and rely on
pretty exact matches in content. I'd love to talk more about it with you. My
email is in my profile.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Definitely will do. Thanks.

------
kappaknight
Am I reading this right? 10,000 users - 1,400 on free trial = 8,600 paying
subscribers.

If so, congratulations! =)

~~~
MattBearman
The blog has a graph showing around 1500 paying customers, which is still
amazing (nearly $15k / month revenue!). I'm guessing the missing 6000 odd are
staying on the free plan.

~~~
yesimahuman
Sorry, that's misleading (though I do wish :)) There are about 1500 customers
in a trial plan that hasn't expired and doesn't require a credit card, so we
will only convert some percentage of them to paying customers.

However, we just pushed an update last night that has dramatically increased
our conversion rate from free to paid trials. Only time will tell by how much!

~~~
lusr
I'm surprised the potential here wasn't recognized; seems like a no brainer
given the target market (one that's growing ridiculously fast with no signs of
slowing down) and the obvious level of quality! Of course what doesn't look
like a no brainer with the benefit of hindsight ;) Out of curiosity what
change did you make that led to your conversion rate increasing so
dramatically? You mentioned something in your post too, but didn't elucidate.

~~~
yesimahuman
For the free builder we added a feature to immediately upgrade and save your
work in progress in your dashboard, instead of just telling you to upgrade,
forcing you to decide between losing your work or doing it all over again.

------
lordlicorice
I played with your app on the jquerymobile site... what immediately frustrated
me is that it doesn't seem to be possible to align elements to the bottom of
the frame. At least have an option for Footer elements!

------
fam
Checked out the homepage on FF 11.0 and the gray text under "Pure jQuery
Mobile" shows up as an unreadable light gray (vs. Chrome where it shows up
fine). Might want to check that out.

~~~
yesimahuman
Hmm. Thanks for pointing that out, we'll look into it!

------
jordhy
Compliments on the execution of your site, platform and branding. This is well
deserved success. Keep pushing and reapply to YC, I you want to, you'll make
it!

------
shyknee
Congrats guys - very interested to see what happens when the free trial period
ends for the users who joined after Codiqa showed up on the jQuery Mobile
site.

------
debacle
Really cool. Something that I'm going to look into in the future - one of the
very few online tools that I might actually use!

------
NameNickHN
It just goes to show that even though others don't share your vision, you
shouldn't necessarily give up on it.

------
dustin
Well done and looks quite useful - bookmarked for the future. However, I have
a really hard time reading some of the copy (contrast) on my laptop:
<http://i.imgur.com/fRzAe.png>

~~~
yesimahuman
What browser are you on? Thanks!

------
aiof
Somewhat off topic, but what do you Codiqa guys think about Sencha Touch 2?

------
serbrech
Codiqa seems really awesome. I bookmark it for this week end : There is
StartupWeekend in Oslo. I will advertise it there and I'm sure you will get
many subscription from Norway this weekend.

------
suhastech
Interesting aside? <http://maxlynch.com/a-website-design-trend-that-needs-to-
die>

~~~
damoncali
I disagree with that. A lot. The Pricing page is one of the most viewed pages
on a typical app sales site (in my experience, at least), and the one that
does the lion's share of the selling. People head to it straight away for a
reason, and they need to be able to find it without effort - hence the obvious
title. It's too important to not be bold and explicit.

~~~
yesimahuman
Which is why I didn't take my own advice this time around :)

------
Hitchhiker
users , revenue beats everything else. well done.

------
tstegart
Congrats guys! And way to represent Wisconsin!

------
apsurd
Gotta admit,

I was blown away by the builder interface design.

Well done, guys.

------
monsterix
Since you guys are at it, may be I can ask.

Is there a little something extracted from jQueryMobile, which lets me use
only 'form-styling' of their otherwise huge piece of work? I want only the
relevant css and javascript out of the entire thing.

Any help would get a huge hug from me. And thanks, in advance.

BTW nice work with Codiqa, I am in. [Edited for grammar]

