

Rejected for YC and still feeling awesome - buro9

The company I'm working on is receiving a lot of support right now. We needed £30k to get a 9-12 month runway and in the last week our users have pledged £90k with a couple of organisations pledging another £20k+.<p>This is really emboldening, if you have users you can draw strength from, an idea so validated and working that you can draw from that... then do it. Remember what you're working on and why.<p>That's the only thing matters, to do today that which needs to be done to move your work forward and get that successful business built sooner.<p>I hope all of the those who received the email join me in digging even deeper today.
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dsugarman
"Remember what you're working on and why."

The same goes for if YC invests in you, you are not magically not a startup.
YC does not solve all of you problems, you do. If getting rejected makes you
stronger, then you are on the right path and don't let anyone say you aren't.
YC does have this skill for finding really strong founders, but any partner
will tell you that they have missed out on plenty of great founders and
companies.

If you get rejected here or anywhere else, understand that this is expected
and has happened to everyone. Grit is one serious indicator of success.

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brackin
YC is amazing because you have the time to just build, saying that it doesn't
make all of the companies but if you give up after not getting in then they
made the right decision. Drew Wilson would still have done well. Keep building
and as you say once you have traction talk to angels or other incubators like
500Startups.

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Sherrilbfx
That's the right attitude to have. You only fail by giving up.

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duiker101
Aaaand.... what company is it? If it' s possible to know. Good job anyway this
is the right attitude!

~~~
buro9
It's called Microcosm. <http://microco.sm/> *

Working on discussion boards. Like tumblr, for forums.

We already run some forums based on vBulletin, XenForo, Vanilla, etc... and
have ~300k monthly unique visitors, ~40k registered members, ~15k active (each
month) users, and mailing lists of ~25k.

Forums being one of the oldest things on the internet (usenet) and one of the
most resilient.

But we're not making this forum or that forum... those are muffins and we're
building a muffin making machine. A hosted platform to build great forums.

The whole business came out of user demand. Frustration at the stagnation of
forum software and what users have to do, and how they have to compromise to
make a community work on such software.

We (the users and I) started to ask "What if we..." instead of "How do we work
around this limitation?". Where we've ended up isn't technically impossible...
it's just a lot of work. But they're really excited by it, as am I, and the
first mockups have all been built with a lot of feedback from them and their
response has largely been:

 _That mock-up thing is rad as fuck! Hurry up and get some bank details or
something up so I can blast some patron money in your direction!_

The fundraising is to help support the building of it (stipends for people to
work on it, rent for a small office, etc), and the users themselves are asking
for hack weekends so that they can come in, and pool 20 people's effort into
pushing it along.

But still, the YC application was borne out of hope that we could move even
faster. We make a profit already from affiliate fees, and there's a lot of
money in hobbies... we just want to get the first real version out of the door
and into the hands of the users.

* The LaunchRock page is just that... because we're already working with users most of what we've focused on has been in-person stuff from our office near London Waterloo. We haven't yet felt a pressing need to spend time on a pretty landing page.

~~~
IsaacL
Interesting... so is this going to be "a better PHPBB / IP.Board /
Forumcircle" or something much more customisable? It sounds like the latter,
but it would be interesting to hear how that would work.

A good plugin architecture, and ecosystem of plugin writers, would probably be
key, at least down the road. My recent freelance projects have been in
Wordpress and Magento and IPBoard ... all powerful frameworks with a rich
amount of plugins available. Makes for tedious dev work though -- "here's a
plugin that does 90% of what the client wants, let's just randomly change PHP
code I don't understand until I've implemented the other 90%". If you can fix
that problem, that'd be something special.

~~~
buro9
A lot of my users work for agencies in London, and what they've asked for is
an API that powers everything, and an open web app that runs from it and which
the users see.

They do want the ability to extend the data structure and query things in
their own way, but mostly they want the ability to pick up a forum and deeply
integrate it into their projects, or to take their project and deeply
integrate it into the forum.

What I've got are users, designers and agencies telling me:

1) Give me an API that does everything so that we can make our own mobile apps
for it.

2) Give me full and unrestricted access to the entire front-end so that we can
do whatever we want with it.

3) Give me some way in the future to extend or associate data in your API.

Which ultimately has shaped the design as: You create a forum/site on the
platform, and we'll give you a dedicated API for your forum. We'll also give
you a simply customisable forum front-end in Django. You can take the Django
front-end and host it yourself if you want, and butcher it to your heart's
content... making it whatever you want it to be, and we continue to solve the
storage, searching, problems via the API.

In essence, there's two parts to it. One part extensible (the API), and the
other part 100% within your control (the front end web app).

But if you're not technically inclined and just wanted a forum already, then
you got that in 30 seconds and it was really simple to change the look and
feel so that your community has it's own strong identity.

We actually see a far bigger market in the space of the non-technical wanting
forums. I've setup or helped so many forums over the years, and honestly...
most would just love to get something running today, not have to learn how to
be a sysadmin, and to not have to worry about security issues and updating the
forum software.

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PrinceGeo
Entrepreneurs must celebrate their failure, it will temper their character and
pave the way for great success, but this failure must be an outcome of quick
failure. Learn how to fail quickly :)

Thanks!

