

Ask HN: Got rejected by YC 6-12 months ago? Where are you now? - vaksel

I'd like to see where those people who got rejected by YC ended up. Did you finish your product? Abandoned the idea? Still working on it?
======
baguasquirrel
Quit job to work on it anyway. Old company has problems (with itself and with
me) and I never fitted in to begin with. Have lots of stock from that stint,
and good friends to bank on.

Cobbling together prototype, teaching myself the NLP and plan on combining it
with some techniques I learned in vision research. Figure that I can better
pitch it to my risk-averse fwenz once I can wow them with something...

I don't understand why everyone sees a rejection or acceptance to YCombinator
or TechStars as such a big deal. It's like college admissions. They are only
two shops, with fairly limited resources, and limited means of assessing
candidates. If you didn't make it, and you think that your idea really has
some serious long-term stock, then keep at it.

------
ALee
We were rejected (back in the day when we weren't working on JamLegend). Now
we're looking for people to join us on our mission in San Francisco.

Oddly enough, we're close friends with a lot of the YC companies. The honest
truth that every YC company (and LaunchBox, Techstars, etc.) will tell you is
that you still have 95% of the work to do, YC helps you get started, but
afterwards you sink and swim with the rest of the startups out there.

~~~
mingyeow
Hey Lex, met a while back at SF beta i think. Hope all is well!

------
meow1981
Gained great traction and received funding from a top tier angel a month ago.
Thanks for asking - it is an interesting thought experiment to look back and
consider "alternative" futures.

Because we did not get into YC, we were able to iterate freely on a big idea
and get to where we are right now. But we took longer than expected in a much
more painful way.

My sense is that if we did get into YC, we would have a much easier time, but
probably would have settled on a smaller goal.

Worth pondering over.

~~~
nanijoe
Is it possible your smaller goal was the very reason why you did not get into
YC? So to further your thought experiment, you may only have gotten into YC if
you agreed to make your goal bigger, you would have had an easier time, and
your startup would have been sold for hundreds of millions of dollars by now..

What an alternative to ponder.

------
damienkatz
I was rejected with CouchDB a couple of years ago. I was bad at presenting it,
and it was probably the wrong time anyway.

~~~
slpsys
"I was bad at presenting it"

was their constructive criticism to relax?

~~~
kirubakaran
I believe the constructive criticism was something like "You are a Woz. You
need a Jobs."

~~~
david927
This fits with what I'm now sensing about YC: that they're not as interested
in innovation as with what sounds good. Personally speaking, CouchDB is better
than a lot of the companies that they have funded, and it's truly innovative.

If Steve Jobs didn't have Woz, he would be a used-car salesman right now. Woz
essentially invented the PC. He could find a thousand people like Jobs in any
MBA program. Sure marketing is important, but it's frosting on the technology
cake. If you get the technology right, the marketing will follow.

~~~
sho
And if Woz didn't have Jobs, he'd still be at Hewlett Packard. A thousand
people like Jobs at any MBA program? You've got to be joking.

I have no particular love for YC, but let's be fair. They are interested in
things people can use, especially web apps. Things it might be possible to
make money off, one day. While I love CouchDB and use it every day now - it's
not an end user kind of thing. I'm not really sure what it is. Apache is a
pretty good home for it, IMO.

~~~
david927
Of course it's not an end-user sort of thing. The market is technical, which
doesn't respond well to marketing and early adopters tend to resent it. So why
in the world would they want a Jobs co-founder? I don't know but my best guess
is that it's because Paul & co. don't really know what they're doing. There
are situations where it works, but certainly not here. You wouldn't want one
here -- just a single technical founder (or two).

In fact, all the great, innovative startups were a Woz or Woz/Woz combination.
Ok, except for Apple, but again, Jobs really only added value later by playing
VC. The seed level was a pure Woz play.

------
raquo
I wanted to apply last fall but my day job prevented me from building anything
demoable in time and, being in Russia and not having any hacker reputation
(I'm bachelor of Economics, worked in management consulting) I figured I had
no chance to get in.

My job was steadily taking about 14 hours a day and some of the weekends so in
December I eventually quit in order to keep my sanity, then started learning
PHP, MySQL, nginx, etc. and by now I've came close to releasing alpha (a
couple of weeks, I think).

------
thorax
No chance we were going to abandon ship after not getting accepted--
thankfully, we've got a good bit of traction for our sites to build on.

We were invited down for an YC interview last November, and it was wicked fun
talking with them. But our 10 minutes was quickly consumed with their
excitement with our existing sites (and not on our new initiatives). Our
existing site <http://bug.gd> is a long-term play, not a quick growth play,
and, given the 8% drop in Dow the afternoon before our interview, it was
understandable that YC would be looking for something more aggressive. We just
had a bit too much to discuss in only 10 minutes and I'm pleased to see the
new video interviews giving YC'ers an opportunity to demonstrate more of their
plans.

We continue to grow bug.gd with the launch of our error database for companies
projects, errorhelp.com, but it remains a project of constant (but not
explosive) growth. We have some exciting features planned, though, that I
can't wait to get finished.

But the service we wanted to pitch to YC was our other crowd-sourced dating
site, Yumbunny.com. Two months ago we launched to public beta and were covered
on TechCrunch and other news. The site continues to grow and we're super
excited about it.

As a publicity project for YB, our team also squeezed in time to put together
Tinyarro.ws -- a URL shrinking hack that relies on unicode/IDN to create the
shortest URLs possible. It's been getting great traffic due to its oddity and
the inherent viral nature of url shrinkers. (All the silly discussion about
URL shrinkers being evil lately has helped that, too.)

All in all, we're having a great time and are plowing ahead. Best of luck to
the teams who got invites to go interview. Use your time wisely!

~~~
frosty
I had the exact same idea for a crowd sourced dating service, exactly as
you've implemented it with Yumbunny. Looks great, hope you have great success
with it.

------
froo
I'm basically going to copy and paste from the other thread - I'll edit out a
few unimportant bits though

I applied to YC with a friend last year, we were rejected.

It was a very difficult idea to pitch.

We thought our idea was the best thing since sliced bread and all of our
friends told us so (this should have been a warning sign... false positives)

We went on to building it anyway.

We got a version built, up and running in a couple months after initially
dragging our feet. It basically worked, but poorly - we never took into
account that battery life would be an issue on the phone app.

We got a little disheartened, started bickering and eventually the thing
failed - before we even launched.

Somehow we had gotten the idea in our head that we needed YC to be successful.
No, we needed a good idea and our idea was, at the time, not so good.

Not being accepted isn't the worst thing in the world. Everyone thinks their
idea is the best idea EVER... We sure did.

The partnership broke down as a result of us forging ahead anyway without
really looking at our product and only talking to people who only gave us
positive answers.

Anyway, moral of the story for us? Being rejected was the best thing that
could have happened for us.

I learned a lot about the other person during this process and also a lot
about myself. I'm not bulletproof.

On reflection, I also learned that being unwilling to discuss my idea openly
with others for fear of it being stolen was stupid. We would have discovered
flaws early on and saved us a lot of trouble.

I openly discuss my new idea with others now.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502164>

Some people tell me it's stupid, I ask them why and we discuss it. Some others
tell me it's interesting, and we discuss it. Some tell me it's great and we
discuss it.

I refuse to accept simple answers now and discuss as many different aspects as
I can think up. I also appreciate other's perspectives on it.

This has also helped cement the idea in my head and I can pitch it relatively
easily now. I've come up with a solution to a problem, rather than having a
solution and looking for a problem.

Will I apply to YC again? Probably, I'm not sure. I've got a clearer head now
- not so caught up in the hype.

~~~
dbul
I'm not sure what your idea is exactly, but I had a similar one after reading
Cuban's rants on the television industry.

~~~
froo
I wrote a little about it here.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502705>

But essentially I believe that there is a real disconnect between the cost of
production and the amount of entertainment that a viewer can get, especially
since things are approaching a free pricepoint (impact of filesharing) and TV
and the Internet converging (like PG has written about recently) along with
major upgrades in bandwidth.

I also think that as home entertainment systems become more widespread and
advanced, people will prefer the convenience of watching from home instead of
cinemas, especially if it is significantly cheaper and the experience can be a
little more interactive (internet overlays)

Anyway, throwing down some numbers, doing some quick back of the envelope
math, The Dark Knight cost $180 million to make and it has a runtime of 152
minutes. So an approximate cost of $1.1 mil/minute for the production.

Conversely, Season 1 of Lost (which is known in the TV industry as being
notoriously expensive to produce) cost $44 million for 22 episodes of 44
minutes approx running time each, or 0.045 mil/minute.

Yet in terms of entertainment for the home viewer, 1 minute of entertainment
is 1 minute and tastes vary - so why the big difference in price of
production? The major costs are salaries of large numbers of people involved
and technology (sets/effects etc) [1].

This is why we start seeing ludicrous distribution agreements in place to
maximise profits so that the economics of this weird system can work [2], eg -
regions on DVD's

A little anecdote about what I tried to do the other month. I live in
Australia, and I jumped onto itunes because I was curious about what shows
were available. A lot of the shows I enjoy were not on there, but even more
surprising was that some shows that did exist were missing seasons. The worst
case of this was a certain show only having seasons 1, 3 and 5 available on
itunes - this is a result of stupid distribution agreements and simply being
unable to put it up on itunes yet.

However, I could jump onto any torrent tracker and download everything for
free, including the seasons that were not available through legal online
systems. There is something wrong when the path of least resistance is
unlawful.

So my idea is that you could produce content for the online market using a
process fairly similar to a digital animation studio [3], just limiting
yourself with digital assets and working it a bit like a sitcom. Limited pre-
made sets, characters, story driven and episodic content.

Your production pipeline then essentially becomes a case of an asynchronous
digital puppet show and if you keep most of your talent inhouse, you could
work it using a team about the size of a small to medium sized startup.

Anyway that's the basics, I haven't detailed much about my monetisation
strategies (there's more that can be done than just advertising) and there's a
little bit of secret sauce I can't reveal, but that's the general gist.

[1] - Marketing costs don't usually get taken into account in the cost of
production of a film, instead the company distributing the film takes a
percentage. For example, in Pixar's early days, Disney was taking an
approximate 50% cut. Internet distribution reduces these costs and so the
total amount of income required is less to break even, so easier to attain
profitability on any production.

[2] - When you see people saying that you can't make money with online video,
I personally think it's because they're still wasting money unnecessarily on
production costs. If you use online advertising as a benchmark for
monetisation, the way it is now, you really need to reduce the cost of
production to be able to make a profit and when/if online advertising
recovers, you will only stand to make more money.

[3] - Another thought is to produce content like Uwe Boll is notorious for.
I'm not sure what the situation is now since there has been a few enquiries
about his practises, but in the past a film produced "in Germany" (basically
by a German production company) was able to have 100% of the money invested
into it written off due to German Tax law. So investors were investing say,
$10 million into a film, which would only net a $3 million return, yet it
essentially cost them nothing due to the tax loophole, so the return was all
profit. Uwe Boll would pick up video game licenses (which are why all his
films are based of video games) cheaply and produce "films" (I use the term
loosely) at an alarming rate.

------
tomsaffell
Got rejected 6 months ago, went ahead and built it anyway. I spent 4 of those
months in India (because an opportunity to live there came up, and what better
place to write code..)

I now having a working product in private alpha. Everyone who has seen the
demo says it rocks. It's a tool for commenting online videos, geared towards
sports analysis. There's nothing out there like it to the best of my
knowledge.

I'm now looking for a co-founder. I need a developer. I have done all the
development so far, but I now need to focus more on the business, so I need
someone to keep the development momentum. The front end is mainly Flash/Flex,
(which I can continue to handle myself). The back end is in GAE today, so my
co-founder needs to either know that, or be capable of convincing me to port
it. Knowledge of Red5 / FMIS / FFMPEG / JavaScript / Flash/Flex would all be a
bonus.

If you're interested, email me: tango charlie sierra two two zero one (7
characters)@gmail

~~~
nessence
Be careful assuming there isn't competition.

~~~
tomsaffell
Totally agree. I am _assuming_ that there is competition, I just don't know of
any yet...

------
rishi
We finished our product: www.FlyingCart.com - cash flow positive, 6,000
stores.

That said. Would still love some mentors to figure out how to scale my company
faster.

~~~
richcollins
I remember meeting you at startup school. Congrats on profitability :-)

I'm working on <http://stylous.com/>. Making sales but not profitable yet ...

~~~
vorador
Why did you choose to have a grey text on a white background ? It's not very
legible.

~~~
rishi
you mean at the footer?

~~~
vorador
No, I'm speaking of the text in the about page.

------
aristus
We interviewed last November. Paul seemed to fixate on a phrase from our
written application, and it went downhill from there. We regrouped with
bourbons at a bar in the middle of the day, and moved on. Stressful, yeah, but
_they_ have to run through 60 startups in 3 days. I don't envy them.

We are funded and launched (<http://www.archivd.com>) and, yes, it is
"addictively useful". :)

~~~
YuriNiyazov
wow.... my ex-team and I were planning to build something scarily similar,
except packaged as an RSS reader.

------
randallsquared
18 months ago, I think. Abandoned that idea; now working at a job. I'll try a
startup again with a different idea in the future.

~~~
monological
What was the idea you abandoned?

~~~
randallsquared
A site for people who want to complain about their landlords. It was called
DontRentFrom.com, and I only recently let the domain go.

~~~
davidmurphy
Man, this site would have been great. A lot of people I know (myself included)
have previously had bad landlords.

~~~
randallsquared
Yeah, I know a lot of people like that, too, which is what gave me the idea.
In spite of some Google advertising, though, it never really took off (a few
hundred posts total over 2 years or so).

------
calvin
Whether you moved forward with the idea or abandoned it, I'd love to hear some
of your thoughts and reasoning (rather than a plethora of yes/no responses).

What have you learned?

~~~
agotterer
PriceAdvance.com is a YC interview reject from Fall 07. We went to our
interview with a prototype. After the rejection call, we had a few beers and
discussed next steps. We started development the following week and launched
about 2 months later. Our application recently passed 250K downloads and has
received a decent amount of press. We are now covering monthly expenses and
should be profitable soon.

~~~
meow1981
Beers are awesome after rejections. ;)

------
jyu
It was about 1 year ago. Now I do affiliate marketing, which seems to be a
faster and more reliable way to "F U" money.

~~~
nanijoe
No offense, but what is affiliate marketing?, cos I sure need some "F U" money

~~~
vaksel
you pitch other people's stuff to users. i.e. you pitch a weight loss company
that sells a drink for $39.99, and a $10 bonus for affiliates.

You basically pitch their stuff, by buying adwords and other advertising
methods and hoping to drive paying customers.

Basically the people I know who do this big time, start out small, then when
they find something that works, they scale their campaigns by putting more
money into it.

Of course there is a huge risk, since a campaign might suck and you might lose
money. The guy I know who did this, lost something like $15,000 before he
learned how to do it properly. Now he makes something like 3K/day in profit on
average. His record was something like 25K in one day.

------
raffi
I applied for YC W'09 w/ a software service to add grammar, style, and spell
checking to web apps. It wasn't selected. No big deal. I went ahead with full
scale development anyways. I have an early beta now and am still working to
achieve my development vision. I've had inquiries from potential paying
customers and have a small but growing active user base. We'll see what
happens.

------
lincolnq
Presented an idea 12 months ago for a new programming language that understood
modern scalability, concurrency, and software design concerns. Got shot down.
We worked on it anyway for 4 months.

Then we had an idea for a new webapp we wanted to build, so we switched to
that. Got funding in December through fbFund and we're still working on it
today.

------
kaiserama
Applied for an got rejected for YC08 - W. I ended up quitting my day job (not
because of the rejection) to pursue some of my other business ideas. Currently
the one I am working on just launched a successful pilot last Friday and hope
to expand organically.

I think the YC application really made me think of making the leap in earnest.
While acceptance is always more desirable than rejection I think being
rejected by YC has still been a very good thing. As others have said if you're
willing throw your idea(s) away because YC said "not this time" you probably
don't have what it takes or your idea just isn't what they're looking for. It
doesn't mean you should just abandon or that you can never have a good idea
again.

That said I certainly would have loved to have the experience and to meet
Paul. Oh well, maybe one day.

------
sgk284
Still working on it! Just went to the entrepreneur expo in Philly and did a
lot of great networking. Talked to some great people and made great
connections. Will probably pursue funding sometime this year because
bootstrapping has been slowing us down a lot.

~~~
snprbob86
(note: parent post is my co-founder)

We were rejected after an interview this time last year, but received some
great feedback in our rejection mail. We've taken it to heart and evolved our
plan of attack accordingly. We're inching closer to launching a product worth
using.

We've been working together remotely on Sundays for 4 to 6 hours and
individually a few hours a week. As you can imagine, that is sloooow going.
Especially considering we took a few months off to settle into full-time jobs,
re-imagined our product based on feedback, and missed a quite few Sundays. The
funny thing is, that if you call it an average 10 hours per week since August,
it looks a lot like the length of a YC round... so we should project that
trend linearly and set our own "demo day" :-)

------
carterschonwald
continuing university and doing side projects, as is my habit

------
ph0rque
Paused the idea I applied with for now; will revisit once I have the skills to
code it up in a very short period of time (<20 man-hours) as well as figure
out an intuitive UI for its functionality.

------
megamark16
A coworker and I were implementing a DropBox style file storage/sharing site.
We worked towards a pilot but in the end our momentum fell out, with him in
grad school, me with a family, and both of us working full time, it was too
much to keep going. He's finishing up his degree now and I'm working on a new
project, which I currently have my family and friends testing out for me.

------
revolvingcur
My team was a YC reject in April '08. My partner and I split and we've each
spun out a few ideas independently. I now work as a web programmer at a
Windows shop and moonlight in a variety of areas.

The reason for choosing this route was the pressure to be cash-flow positive
as an individual through whatever means necessary.

------
hotshothenry
i abandoned it but have started a new project

------
mingyeow
I would like to summarize this thread by saying "it is not the end of the
world, some cool shit have been built!"

