We are a team of 2 working full time on an app. We have a prototype ready, but still few weeks away from when we can have some early adopters test our app - and we can get feedback / validation. Although, we have been talking to people and they seem to like the idea of our app.
We are debating if we should apply for the YC next batch - the quality of YC finalists has gone up in a big way in the past one year, where the finalist startups are much beyond customer validation stage, they now have real users using and loving their product, and most of them seem very close to their beta.. some have even reached a stage where they can charge their users. We still have some time to reach that stage.
There are 2 point of views floating in our minds -
1.) We are not there yet, where we can compete head on with the current set of finalists.
2.) We should just apply and let the judges judge. Many times we ourselves are not the best judge of our work - as Sivers points out.
We know we should apply when we feel ready. However, at times it's just good to discuss it out with few others - the debate helps clear out our own thoughts.
What do you think?
With regards to the legit-business-ness of other YC companies: shrug. You know what they call the guy with the lowest grades from medical school? Doctor. You may think you'd be the worst prepared in a batch, but that isn't a bad place to be, and even with YC's expertise at picking winners there is a wide variance of results in every class, not necessarily replicating the variance as of interview day.