Hey! Since we're all waiting for the emails why don't we do something productive? Like maybe sharing our ideas so that we could give each other feedback?.. Oh and guys if I may give you an advice : "Plan for the worst and hope for the best!"
Yep I know, only problem is that you don't get feedback. (At least I didn't, I had 14 hits and no feedback so..) plus this thread have a better visibility/reach.
I had a look and I have quite a job understanding you. "Solving problems by reaching problems." Do you mean reaching or researching and if reaching, how do you reach a problem?
I imagine a lot of people looking would think be confused.
I dont have to enough domain knowledge to offer much critique but having known a few very close people with mental health issues the though of having at home care and therapy seems like a boon.
Also it would be great if there is a little more information on the website before I have to sign up. But I think you are in early stage and working on that :)
We're at the point we need to run trials to confirm that nothing we are doing is dangerous, and that it shows promise of some kind (Phase I and II trials). The problem is a large scale study using EEGs is rarely, if ever done.
The website is just kind of there, we haven't updated it in a year. We have over 50 people willing to participate and pay to be in a trial. We just need an initial, relatively small investment to purchase a few EEGs, hence we applied to YC.
It's somewhat similar in the user flow, but different in the therapy. Joyable uses cognitive behavior therapy, which is essentially talking through issues, learning techniques, etc. All of this is qualitative, and although it supposedly works well, it's hard to judge success.
Our therapy is called neurofeedback[1], which is a quantitive form of therapy. Essentially, we do the same thing as Joyable, but with the addition of hardware and algorithms which teach the techniques in a partially automated way.
Users place an EEG on their head, and sit in front of a computer so we can track their face. With both of those we can accurately determine focus, stress, anxiety, etc. Then we teach the user techniques to help reduce those feelings and we can determine if it's working or not. Enabling a quicker feedback loop to both the user, but also doctors.
I think that is awesome. I will start then. Our idea in a line would be "Codecademy meets Finance".
So we are trying to bring financial education to the masses in an interactive fun way. With hoards of apps available to invest and save now we think that financial education will go a long way in helping people out.
We made a quick ( and dirty, frankly a little embarrassing prototype) at : www.thefinac.tk . Do check it out :) We apologise for the bugs that you may encounter.
Also if you want to look at the standings of all the Apply HN startups you can do so at www.thefinac.tk/applyhn . Another quick hack we made.
Would love to give some feedback on other ideas as well so start posting :)
Why not say your idea in a line is: "We are trying to bring financial education to the masses in an interactive fun way" instead of the "Uber for X" style idiom? Its easier to understand for the lay person that way too.
Hmm intersting point! The reason we did that was sometime back YC released a list of its graduating startups and each company was described as something like "Uber of dog walking" and that is the reason we stuck with it! Point noted though!
I've tried it and here's what I want to say :
- I like that it was developed with mobile-first design.
- In my opinion when you develop a prototype always go for minimal design, use as less colors as possible (use the white space to your advantage)
- I like the interactive part of it, because it forces me to be engaged (in contrast with dead articles where I might skip whole passages).
- Beside the interactivity part, why would I use this platform? What advantages do this platform have over books?
Thank you for checking it out. We totally agree with you. I think we should have spent more time getting the right market fit.
We want to make Finance as cool as programming. I think you pointed out the chief advantage yourself, books sometimes do get boring ( we love books but not everybody has the time or the inclination) . By making this platform we can have access to a much larger user base and just add a little bit of fun to sometimes not too exciting (but very essential) concepts of finance.
We have also thought about adding financial advisors ( WAY into the future), partnering with schools to bring this to teenagers who are about to leave for universities and guiding the audience to tools ( partnering with other companies that provide such tools ) or providing them with same tools.
But in the starting we want to stay focussed on just making educational content.The paradigm is shifting to learning stuff online and we hope to take advantage of that.
Got it. Now I have a harder question for you. I was just warming you up so prepare yourself mouhahahahaha (yeah.. That's my evil laugh) : How will you monetize it ? How will you fight the new trend: "Education should be free" ?
haha love it! the harder the better! :) The things that we have thought about right now are:
1. After we have built community trust, and become the go to place for financial education, we can bring in mentors who can offer personal financial advice on a 1 on 1 basis.
2. We can enter into partnerships with other applications that act as financial instruments but are not offering the financial know-how.
3. We can provide financial tools ( platform for investing n such) to people in the future.
4. We can license customized courses for school students and university students.
5. Freemium model where interesting and challenging projects are offered, which advanced students, would pay to do - and get mentoring on.
6. After we have built an audience we can also make money off digital advertising and sponsorship.
We know these are very broad and vague but this what we have so far. That is why in the starting we want to be laser focussed on building up the content. Would love to know your thoughts about it.
Actually this is quite concise in my opinion though I have few suggestions about each point:
2. With Investopedia maybe ? They have tons of great articles but they lack the fun and living part (which you can compensate!)
3. Like you said, you want to be laser focused on one thing and one thing only : teaching. Maybe you can partner with RobinHood ? Just don't do it yourself.
4. This. I would definitely pay for it.
5. Nope nope nope, as a young platform you want to get people come see you so I suggest maybe organizing some kind of competition where participants have to pay a fee, you take your % and you give the winner(s) the rest.
2. We actually thought of them as our competitors but that is a very intersting point of view.
3. Robinhood yea we would love to partner with them ( sounds like counting the chickens before they hatch but anyhow ). And yea our priority is and should be teaching.
4. Awesome!
5. That is a good idea. and yea the part of projects was way into the future and borrowed from Udacity, apparently a lot of people are paying for their Nanodegrees.
Awesome!! Thanks for your valuable time!! You just motivated us to work a lot lot harder. Do let us know if you have any tips/criticism about the idea too !
Yeah, the one thing I'd say is get rid of the TypeForm questionnaires (or integrate them better)... having said that we recently tried to recreate them at work and they have taken astronomically more time than originally thought!
I know the integration was a little poor. A number of our testers did complain about that. But yea it was the quickest option when it came to building the prototype! Will definitely do a better job in the next iteration.
Thank you for taking out the time to check it out. I agree the prototype is subpar but we are working on the second iteration that will surely be a lot better. Would love to ask you a couple of questions if that's ok :
1. Would you be interested in an approach to learn which includes text and videos ( like Udacity.com) or something which is mostly interactive ( like Codecademy.com / what we planned to convey via prototype )?
2. Are there any particular topics in Finance that you would be interested to know about? (Stocks, mutual funds, investing in general, taxes, etc. )
Hey I'm the other founder of Finac :) I love your suggestions!
We agree that incorporating real world examples would really make learning finance a lot more relatable and easier to understand.
Regarding the second point, we ourselves got heavily into Finance over a year ago and the on boarding process was very time consuming for someone who hasn't had a formal education in finance. We were really frustrated that despite financial education being so essential, a lot of it is very convoluted.
My thing's a bit like airbnb but where you can buy the place if you like it. Fairly confident I'm not getting an interview this time round - no views on my vid. I don't fit the YC pattern very well.
Keep at it. The best thing you can do is make as much progress as possible between now and W17.
Anecdotally, I'd say >50% of our batch applied more than once. The one thing we all had in common was traction/progress between applications. This is probably the single best thing you can do to increase your prospects of getting in, as it shows YC that you are 1)serious about working on this, and 2) capable of doing what you say you're going to do (which is to say, make something people want).
Happy to also provide advice that's tailored specifically to what you're building. You can reach me at (firstname @ lawnlove.com)
Might be more interesting if you did something like 'rent for a year.' Right now the problem with Airbnb is that you're limited to 90 days as the renter. If you tweak your idea to 'I want to live in that home for a year' with the option to buy, that might become more interesting and useful (you now have multiple audiences - long term renters, long term tenants and possible home buyers).
I would laser focus on one approach vs trying different stuff. YC would view 'trying different stuff' as a possible lack of focus (I'm not implying that's the case - I'm trying to help you avoid phrasing things that might get misinterpreted). Also, if you focus on a single strategy, you'll quickly see what does and doesn't work and if it's worth pursuing. I think your first step is seeing if this is even legal (renting/leasing a home for a year - I have no idea).
You may be right. It also could create confusion amongst customers as to what we actually do. There are legal questions and the laws tend to different from place to place as to tenants rights and so on.
Yeah basically - kind of rent with an option to buy. Still a bit at the early stage - not quite sorted the details.
If someone's interested in getting involved drop me an email 0707tim at gmail. I'm in London now and may be in LA/SF shortly. One of my problems applying to YC is I'm solo presently.
Invitations and rejections have been sent for applications that were submitted before the deadline. If you haven't gotten an email, it may have bounced, so please check at https://apply.ycombinator.com with the account that you applied with to see the status.
IF we got an interview and had applied for both the Fellowship & main program is there a way to tell which one we were invited for to interview or is the interview where you decide what program we would do if accepted? Thanks
They can be as early as 4-5pm (EST) or as late as 10-11pm (EST). I suspect since this was a longer review round it will be around the 4-5 mark, but who knows.
In the spirit of trying to pass time, my application idea:
A service that allows you to not only search for homes, but also make an offer directly online, and receive a 50% commission refund in cash upon purchase.
Additionally, all questions that you have about properties, neighborhoods, or any suggestions a typical agent might give you our service can too thorough AI.
The premise is simple: Zillow meets home buying. Imagine making an offer directly on a home that you find on Zillow? Not only is this necessary in extremely competitive housing markets such as Boston, LA, and Denver, but the 50% commission discount is possible by generating the documents automatically.
Thoughts? Not sure how many of you have purchased a home, but the experience of working with an agent is so outdated. Their value is gone now that most homes are available online through Zillow. All they really do is write contracts. We can do that an automate their knowledge with AI, as well.
Got rejected! :D
Well, time for some advertising - please visit https://www.chillmonk.com/#/about
We're reinventing classifieds and making it safe and fraud free to buy and sell locally.
"YC has said [..] their software doesn't play well with view counters. Every application gets looked at by multiple reviewers." So don't worry about it, they surely have seen it ;)
I am setting code deploy, autoscaling and load balancing on AWS, so my app can handle 10.000.000 users ;-)
Better to keep the brain busy while we are waiting. Do you think YC has the list ready?
Do the people who are not accepted also receive an email? Or if you don't receive an interview email, does it imply that you did not get selected to interview?
Waiting impatiently. Please could someone give me some feedback on my idea and the name. Is someone working on something similar? Any ideas on what features I should try to implement on day one. Thanks.
I would clarify the problem and solution. At first I thought your product (based on the description) was a soup to nuts IoT platform (i.e. building out the hardware as well). I might possibly rephrase your product as 'We're like Facebook Connect for Nest.' Or 'We're like IFTTT for IoT.' I think you want to drive home the point that you're connecting devices from different manufactures and adding additional functionality. The social network aspect is probably less important (I used the Facebook analogy since they were a developer platform at one point).
Since a lot of potential amazing startups here, and an applicant myself, do checkout www.sofia.ai guys! We have worked super hard, just like all of you, and it can hopefully be very helpful to you guys during the growth phase (its free!).
Quick promotion - I applied as a solo founder. I'm looking for a co-founder with an EE background and an interest in wearables/hearables. The idea is awesome (of course!) - still in the pre-prototype stage. Would be glad to share more!
