

Y Combinator applicant advice - MIT_Hacker
https://medium.com/on-startups/289c58a2ca89

======
TheMakeA
Thousands of groups applied for S13. Only 255 groups were selected for
interviews. Only 53 companies ended up getting funded.

My advice: Stop worrying about perfecting your application or trying to game
it. Stop worrying about trying to get into YC. Submit it, forget it. Go build
a company. You don't need their validation, and you certainly don't need their
permission.

Just go freaking make something people want.

~~~
ojr
As a 21 year old, "stopout/dropout" computer programmer that is living in
Boston, competing with new grads with cs degrees and such, this advice is my
exact mentality. Im not going to try to game my resume and cover letter, Im
going to submit the application and make myself a better engineer day by day,
I dont need a company's validation or permission to do so.

~~~
bennyg
Don't worry about a thing. I have an Art/Advertising degree, and I'm an iOS
engineer right now. I got here by programming my ass off.

------
throwthrowthrow
I'm so tired of the billion dollar bullshit. No one believes it. No one can
predict it. But everyone seems to have to say it.

Spare me.

YC is investing $18k. If you build a $10 or $25 million business off that
springboard, even with an angel round, that's awesome for all.

As software fills out the niches of the world, that's where the real wins are
going to be.

So in short, saying your company will be worth a billion dollars isn't cool.
It's just douchey.

------
Darmani
> don’t say “if we capture 10% of this 100 billion dollar market, we’ll be
> making 10 billion dollars!”

> From this, based on the volume of repairs in San Francisco...we could be
> operating at about $70k per day in just SF.

A bottom-up story can just be a top-down one in disguise. Capturing 10% of a
market doesn't sound too hard until the word "billion" appears. Instead, we
can capture 114% of one region. And $20 million per year is too big, so let's
give it per day.

Just saying "the average dishwasher needs a $200 repair once every two years"
tells me more than that entire paragraph.

------
beambot
Personally, I think one of the best ways to prepare is to look for common
trends in other successful applications. I helped write a VentureBeat article
on this very subject [1]. As part of that article, we (Lollipuff, YC W13)
released our entire application [2], and of course YC provides plenty of
application advice too [3].

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-
y-c...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-y-combinator-
application/)

[2] [https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-
ex...](https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-experience)

[3]
[http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html](http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html)

~~~
austinl
I thoroughly enjoyed reading through some of the old applications. Here's Drew
Houston's app for Dropbox back in 2007 - everything is plain and concise.

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html)

------
chaitanyapandit
There should be a question in there "Did you continue building your company
after getting rejected by YC? Which?"

------
physcab
> Although, they also want to see how quickly you can execute. 2 years to
> build an iPhone app is too long.

Why would they care about how quickly you can build something? If you took 2
years to build an iPhone app in your spare time, but that iPhone app ended up
being Candy Crush, wouldn't that make that metric pretty meaningless?

~~~
jemka
Apps like candy crush are edge cases that make general comparisons
meaningless.

Given most successful apps aren't anywhere near as popular as candy crush
you're not comparing apples to apples.

The chances of building a successful anything are low. Even lower for the
first attempt. So if you take 2 years to build something...you've stacked the
odds so high against yourself you might as well not even try. And if you're
the one paying the bills, 2 years is a long time to wait for a failure.

~~~
physcab
But we also know overnight successes don't really happen overnight. So I
imagine you also don't want to be the person creating new apps every month
because you're misguided about how hard it is to achieve success. So again, it
doesn't seem like a useful metric.

~~~
vecter
You're overthinking it. The faster you can build, the more of a competitive
advantage you have. It's that simple.

If it takes person A 1 month to build the same thing as person B in 2 months,
all else being equal, person A has a better shot at succeeding.

~~~
bennyg
It's never that simple - and making the product awesome and launching at 95%
can introduce way more rewards than launching at 75 or 80%. I think the
concept of an MVP is regarded as the word of law around here, and sometimes an
MVP looks like shit and nobody will use it afterwards, so spend the extra two
weeks making it absolutely awesome. I know that's not really what you were
talking about, but I think people shouldn't shy away from taking a step back
and just thinking about what you're building without being stupid-productive
all of the time. It's all about balance.

~~~
philwelch
> sometimes an MVP looks like shit and nobody will use it afterwards

Then it's not _viable_ , which is what the V stands for. So it's not an MVP at
all, it's just shit.

------
finkin1
It seems like lots of YC app advice posts think it's super important to have a
.com. I always thought a .com wasn't that important, especially if you have to
pay money for it that you could use towards development. Am I missing
something?

------
chegra
//This function has a 96% accuracy

public boolean yc_acceptance(String application){

    
    
       return false;
    

}

Still, applying though.

