

Ask HN: What are you YC S10 applicants doing now? - follower

March 13th is just around the corner, what have you other YC S10 applicants been doing since you applied?<p>Refreshing HN looking for messages from pg? Searching your spam folder for anything from ycombinator.com? Continuing your search for a co-founder? Putting together a blooper reel from the outtakes of your video? <i>cough</i> Awesomizing your demo/MVP?<p>Past successful applicants: what did you do while you waited? Would you recommend it?
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icey
You should be building your software. No reason to wait on the answer from YC;
if it was good enough to try to get them to invest in it, it should be good
enough for you to keep building with or without them.

~~~
jacquesm
Absolutely. No matter what you do while you're out there scouting for funding
and applying to places like YC, your work on your product is top priority.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst, even if you don't get funding you might
find yourself with a winner, and your chances of finding funding go up with
every hour you put in to your product.

Nothing better than being able to show your product in use by actual customers
and a nice start of a growth curve.

It also gives you some real world numbers that you can plug in to your
business plan.

~~~
python123
Lots of YC applicants these days view YC as the starting step. If they get in,
they will "do a startup". If they don't, they won't. They are really more in
love with the idea of being part of the startup community than the idea of
actually building a company. They're outsiders peering into the walls of
Silicon Valley and thinking there's some magical formula for success waiting
there for them. Of course, they won't tell YC this.

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bandhunt
Don't worry so much about getting into YC. I'm surprised at the amount of
people who see this as make or break. If you're committed to building a great
product you should just be building and iterating all the time.

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char
I'm a S10 applicant, and the only thing I've been doing since submitting the
application is working my ass off to make my product better and increase my
user base. It would be amazing to get into YC, but being reliant on it would
be foolish.

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benologist
In the technical sense I've done but not shipped a major API update, I'm still
re-tooling some components of the interface to better suit the new API
capabilities. I also scaled out to a second server to help accommodate the 50
million events being logged a day. But really I haven't worked so much on the
systems side of it this last month.

Mostly I've been working on traction, trying to get the big guys on board
using my system ... and somehow it's actually working! I came up to SF (still
here now) for the Flash Gaming Summit and I've had amazing opportunities to
meet and pitch to the owners and reps of major portals like Kongregate, King,
Armor Games, Crazy Monkey Games etc to get them on board. And loads of amazing
developers ... this last week I've networked more than I even imagined was
possible, hanging out with some of the top-tier developers and studios in
Flash casual gaming.

I also shipped a game and am in the final stages of shipping another one, just
waiting on the translations to come back to me now.

So I've been pretty busy... heh.

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atiw
Working on finding out newer ways my technology could be used. Already know
and have tested 4 applications. Thought of another silly use while replying to
rtm thus sunday. I actually have been trying to get back to coding, but things
are not so good. Hoping to kick off some of the 8-10 hour streaks of coding
sometime tomorrow and all over the weekend.

Do you guys know, when we might get emails ??

Also, I am really kinda hoping to get my product out there and get some
preliminary customers.

Any good ways to get some university people interested and try out our web
app? How does someone contact university people?

Anyone a university department head/ faculty here by any chance?? If yes, do
you guys HATE emails as way to introduction to products ??

My first focus (without funding way) is to sell a service to universities.

~~~
danielzarick
I'm a student and work for Columbia College Chicago's Online Student
Communications office. We handle most of the school's web projects. What are
you working on? (Feel free to email me = daniel.zarick at gmail)

~~~
atiw
Sorry, I got late in replying. I really wanted to make a good video and/or
write a good concise description to tell you about my product.

Well, I just got too busy. So, here it is.

In short, my software solves the "university course scheduling" problem. This
problem is one that occurs on a department level. Basically, department heads/
registrar's office need to decide every semester which class room assignments
for various courses. Now, there are rules about which courses can be scheduled
together, and then there are preferences for each professor and then there are
only so many number of classrooms available at any given time. My software
takes in all those constraints /rules, number of rooms available and also
serves as a collaboration tool to collect time slot preferences from
professors and solves the problem. Currently, among the departments we have
surveyed, it takes anywhere from 50-100 hours every semester, for each
department head to solve this problem, since there is no tool for this.

Also, this is a NP-Complete problem. So, there are good chances of errors,
and/or unhappy professors. There is no flexibility in hard coded tools. This
tool confirms to your rules. There is a lot of things that you could change
and the tool solves the problem for you then.

I only have a crappy demo right now, since the tool is only 99% complete
still. But it does the job.

www.skejulers.com/demoing

So, please let department heads in your college have a look. I think they will
be able to make sense about what i going on here.

Or, I can make the demo better, and the tool a little better and introduce
some description as to what is going on there.

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matrixownsyou
keep working on the day job to pay the bills and fighting the girlfriend for
spare time to work on the beta

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sgacka
I took a week off from working on our app bc of a client project (we're a for-
hire firm trying to create an app). We had hits on our demo from the SF Bay
area and some hits on the video. maybe a good sign?

Either way, we'll be building our app and launching this summer. We applied to
YC for the advice and mentoring opportunities - we don't absolutely need the
money to launch (it would definitely be nice, but we can manage without it).

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coryl
Been checking the posterous account for new views, also checking the log for
hits on the demo from Mountain View IPs lol.

So far I think they've hit the video twice, but no hits on the demo which kind
of makes me paranoid/anxious.

Otherwise, just trying to not think too much about it and hack together some
more stuff for the project.

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Roridge
I have been head down looking at the server technology I want to use in order
to help scalability of the application. If it is a powder keg I want to be
ready.

I have also been working on use case and domain models, and layout design.
(and checking HN obviously)

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hikari17
Yeah, I've checked the posterous video for new views (alas, none so far). But
mostly I'm working on improving the existing app, dealing with a recent influx
of users, and filling out applications to other programs with later deadlines.

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Dav3xor
Mostly working on the Awesomization Process.

Out of curiosity; if you applied early, did you get some preliminary contact
from Y-C?

~~~
Dav3xor
(And to get things started -- we got a Skype interview with Harj, who is a
super nice guy.)

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amazonfx
I'm giving our servers their nightly bath. It's important to keep them clean.

