
Ask HN: What's best way to show YC Your Idea Is Worth Funding? - citizenkeys
What's best way to show YC your idea is worth funding? You ever read a news article that totally proves your idea is worth funding? If so, how do you properly convey that to YCombinator?<p>While I'm thinking about it, I have a suggestion for a revision to the YCombinator application.  Add a field asking "Have you read any technical news that proves your industry is headed in this direction?  If so, please paste the url's to the articles in the box below."
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helwr
Find a customer that wants your product.

Even better - get them pay for it, scan the receipt and use it instead of the
application video.

Even better - get enough receipts so you won't need to prove anything to
anyone.

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pg
Explain how you know people want what you're building.

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citizenkeys
35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Several start-ups all
trying to do online video curation. But they all think people want
CollegeHumor.com or "skateboarding dogs" (to quote Sal Khan of Khan Academy).
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/video-curation-is-
growing-u...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/video-curation-is-growing-up-
shortform-hits-one-million-visitors/)

~~~
nostrademons
I think he meant in the application rather than here...

(Also, I'd be careful about using news articles as market validation. When I
was doing my startup, casual games were all the rage, and a bunch of articles
had just appeared on how casual game _creation_ [the space we were in] would
be huge. It never panned out. Not only did we fail, but all of our competitors
failed too, and the market just didn't develop. If you look hard enough - and
as a startup founder, you look pretty hard - you can find an article to
support just about any position. It doesn't mean that position is right, it
just means that somebody bothered to write about it.)

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malandrew
The best way? To show that you are worth funding. Their interest is in funding
people before ideas. In fact, they are willing to invest in good people with
bad ideas because it's easier to change the idea than to change the people.
Most good ideas worth funding are discovered not planned.

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ig1
Journalists are no better at predicting the future then you are.

You need to use the underlying data used in the article such as market growth
data, etc.

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humj
To be honest, I think your question should be "how to convey to YC that your
TEAM is worth funding"

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haploid
First of all, stop tailoring all your efforts to a single funding source. If
you're going to invest the effort of putting together a pitch, make sure it is
generic enough to be used on N other funding sources.

You have limited time to bring a product to market. I suggest spending this
time developing the product and pursuing funding sources that have far less
bubblicious attention than YC.

