

Ask YC: 120 Words or more? - nextmoveone

I'd like to know, what happens if your answers are over 120 words, are they cut off? less likely to be read? not read for not following directions?<p>We've got a very long answer to one question but the rest are all under 120 words.
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jey
If it's the "What is your company going to make?" question, you have a problem
on your hands. If you can't reformulate your pitch to be convincing and
succinct, I would bet that your idea is just not a compelling idea. So try to
come up with a short and sweet pitch, and if you can't, you should really
rethink whether your idea makes sense. Compressibility of the pitch is
probably a good first-order heuristic for judging the worth of an idea.

If it's a different question, just delete stuff until you get it under 120
words. We just wrote too much stuff for all of the questions, then deleted the
least important stuff to get it under 120 words.

These are just my talking-out-my-ass, non-expert and non-YC-partner-
mindreading two cents.

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buss
I think jey is right, if it's the answer to "What is your company going to
make?" then you're in trouble. You need to be able to refine your idea into
something easily expressible and understandable.

Our only long answer is to "What might go wrong?" Our list is a little
humorous, so hopefully YC won't mind the length. Even so, it's only 150 words,
so it's not too much longer than their suggested length.

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nextmoveone
It's down to 156 from 798 (I included a real life example).

The last 24 words are just links to: -the real life example -a chart showing
the application process

What do you guys think?

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buss
That sounds like a good compromise. The real life example and a detailed
description of the application process really shouldn't be part of the
description, so I think adding them as extra resources at the end is ok. I
wouldn't expect the links to be followed, though, unless you description is
really good (there's just too many applications and not enough time to venture
outside of the application, I would think).

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chengmi
I'm actually kind of surprised so many people are asking this question.
There's really no reason to cut off your response after 120 words (we're
talking words, not characters). To implement something like that would require
splitting the response by a ' ' delim, and then dropping everything after 120
words. Talk about a waste of resources on the server. Storage is much cheaper
than time in this case. Plus, if I were reading the applications, I would get
annoyed really quick if the last few words of every long answer got cut off.

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alaskamiller
That's some really smart thinking. You should like... apply to YC with an idea
or something.

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ALee
Check out this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61901>, it has
PG's response to the 120 words and verbosity along with others.

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dcurtis
Not really. Paul simply says, "If your answers are less than 120 words that's
fine." And that's it.

There's still no real consensus on what happens when you go over 120 words.

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Xichekolas
Obviously YC hires some verbosity thugs to come beat you senseless with
dictionaries until you apologize in less than 120 words for wasting their
time.

I'm sure it's just a way to keep the task of reading all those applications
under control, and not a hard and fast rule. Of course, the standard response
about defining your idea succinctly stands!

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palish
Don't worry about it.

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nextmoveone
Thanks!

