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Ask HN: Share your idea that you feel would never be picked by YC?
12 points by rglullis 74 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 31 comments
As it has happened many times already, I started my application process to YC and didn't submit because, while I would love to get the validation and the network from YC, I simply can't convince myself that I am the type of person to be running any type of multi-billion dollar company.

I have many ambitions, and I'm the type of person who doesn't mind spending hours with one customer to figure out their problems and I would love to take my existing projects and turn them into healthy, sustainable businesses. But just the thought that I'll have to sacrifice a lot of my core values to achieve anything at the scale required by big VCs make me sick to my stomach.

So, if you are not applying (today is the last day!) because you think that your idea is worthy "only" a few million bucks, what would that idea be, and what would have to change for you to think that the application would be worth it?




Nearly 15 years ago I worked with a product called Cisco Prime Service Catalog. It was a self service portal where users could order IT services, from a new laptop to a provisioning a private cloud. On the backend it used a run book automation tool called Cisco Process Orchestrator to implement these services.

The software was very expensive and you had to deal with Cisco's licensing. The open source world has a replacement for Cisco Process Orchestrator, it is called Stackstorm and it is an excellent piece of software. I have deployed it at many companies I have worked for.

However there has not been an open source replacement for Cisco Prime Service Catalog. I have come across some portal solutions, but they are the source of truth for the lifecycle data about the service like PSC does. This replacement is what I am working on.

I want to keep it open source, so I don't want to take on VC investment. We have seen too many VC open source tools that end up with a run pull after a few years. My "business plan" is sell consulting and support services around it. I don't want to build a billion dollar business. I just want to earn enough to support my self and few other developers.

Right now I am working on building the MVP as I know a few companies that could use it. It is slow going because I am a devops guy not a full stack developer. So there is a lot to learn along the way.


I might be a good angel investor for you. I like people that care deeply about their craft, and are very long term oriented. I don't care if you build a multi-billion dollar company. If you do, I am THRILLED-five star hotels are so much fun-but far more important is you build great things for our world and reach your fullest potential and help many people.

https://flash.breckyunits.com/


Oh, nice! Where have you been all my life? Do you work with founders in Europe as well?


Yes! Off top of my head https://kilobaser.com/ and https://www.localyze.com/


Dunno what you would call it, but the idea is this:

* Hire a bunch of people with psychological background, who then spend 3-4 years going around colleges and companies across the world, interviewing the outliers of society (i.e career criminals, smart people that have made contributions to technology or science, serial killers, hermits, brilliant mathematicians, neurodivergent people, charismatic leaders, and so on). Would also need a good dataset of "normal" people in society.

* Figure out how to encode all the data in deterministic ways. The domain of that data should be able do sufficiently encompass a persons life on Earth with a good degree of accuracy. This is the hard part, but the domain is finite, so its just busy work.

* Train a neural network to predict a multi-dimentional impact on society.

* Reverse the neural network.

* Short term, build a dating app for immediate monetization.

* Long term, refine the data set, build out a test that people can take that lets you determine their "eventual aptitude" for technology - i.e doesn't have to be up front knowledge or skill, just the ability to be trained to be a great problem solver. Now you can simply find people to hire across the world, spin off a department, get those people trained up on modern tech, and point them at a problem.


Sounds like an IQ test. Maybe it would be better to match the problems with the things that people love to solve. Ie. crossword solvers to Enigma decryption.


I'm not building anything particularly billion-dollar scale (though my competitors think they are, given how much they've raised).

The idea is improving on uptime monitoring/status pages. It's a slow business to build, but it works.

I have friends doing the same for email platforms, web analytics, and more. Just be slightly better.


How slow is acceptable to you? I've been working with Communick (managed provider for Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix) as a side project for almost five years, and my main focus for over an year, and I am yet at the point where I can barely pay the operational costs.

I kept thinking it was just a problem with my execution, but from looking around it seems that no one has managed to turn this market segment (people/companies who care about privacy and want to run their own servers but are not technical enough to run on their own) into a strong customer base.

I kept telling myself "any day now", but the bitter truth is that the majority of people simply don't care. Those that care about control will run things themselves. Those that just want to be on the alternative networks are going to look for the free instances with open registrations, and just move on when they (inevitably) crumble due to lack of support. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg will just execute on his playbook: clone the competitors on the innovative parts for Threads and use FB's size to make ActivityPub into something that favors them so that they can become the AWS of social media.


That's the thing, I work full time so that my business is default alive - I see myself doing this in 10 years.

It being able to pay it's own bills from the first month was encouraging, but I don't really have a framework for when to give up


Well, if you have some other revenue through some full-time then any time horizon is fine, but is it really fair to put yourself in the same type of conversation as your competitors who've raised money?


I guess it's true, I'll be around in 10 years, they probably won't be.


Cockroaches are also likely to survive all sorts of catastrophic events, yet we don't think of them as somehow competing with us.

I'm not trying to engage in a battle of wits. I'm just saying that there is no win for you by outliving these competitors. The idea for you (I hope) is to turn your business into something that can be your main business and not something you do on the side "just in case".

If you think in terms of ROI, how long are you willing to keep working on this without it being profitable? Ok if you say "5 to 10 years", but if you say "as long as I can", then this is not a venture, this is just a nice hobby.


Well, what problem are you solving, for whom? If the problem is not that big, then no amount of time spent working on it will make it successful, as it would be fundamentally limited by the market.


Yeah, that's exactly the issue: I thought that enough people had seen the extent of damage caused by Surveillance Capitalism. I thought that a large enough percentage of these people would be willing to pay a for social media / messaging services and treat it as an utility.

Turns out that the market is there but it's just too small to sustain its own economy. The questions are now then (1) how much shittier will things have to become for this market to grow? (2) how long is it going to take for us to get there, if ever? and (3) even if we do get there, will I ever be able to get enough customers on this market or will I just be witnessing people jumping from one bandwagon to another?


Given the inevitable enshittification cycle for most successful products, this is a really solid approach.

Solid core offering with long term vision and continuous improvement, sufficient profit for a small team, no VC money and entanglement.


YC, and VC in general, is just one path to build a product. There are others. I don't apply to YC with any of my ideas not because of any lack of quality to the idea or its potential scale, but simply because I'm an old, slow, peaceful type of person... and not the slightest match for the startup culture. That doesn't invalidate my ideas in any way - it just changes my approach.

Sounds like you want a different approach as well. I'd say don't fret over YC/VC, and instead go forth to bootstrap and enjoy a more sustainable pace to life. Don't "go big or go home" -- instead "go small and stay home."


> Sounds like you want a different approach as well.

Sure. That's exactly what I want and have been trying since 2019 (part time) and have been "forced" to do full-time since July of last year [0]. I've been bootstrapping the whole time, but also have looked into the "smaller funds". So far:

- Applied to calm.fund - rejected.

- Applied for antler.co - rejected.

- TinySeed only considers applications if you have already $500 MRR.

> "go small and stay home."

But meanwhile I have bills to pay, two kids to feed, and countless rejections because my CV is screaming "not proven in a manager/executive role" while the market is overflowing with "purely technical" developers who are younger than me and able to ride out this shitty market.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034


Maybe the rejections by funds and by customers are related and your product/execution is the real problem?

Being jealous of younger "purely technical" developers with a track record you don't have won't help you.


> Being jealous of younger "purely technical" developers with a track record you don't have won't help you.

Where does that observation come from?


> Where does that observation come from?

  and countless rejections because my CV is screaming "not proven in a manager/executive role" while the market is overflowing with "purely technical" developers who are younger than me and able to ride out this shitty market.
Those younger developers might have a better product than him, not just an easier life. Some of them actually might have a more difficult life depending on which country OP is from.


The rejections I'm referring to are in regard to job interviews... not competitors.


There is no jealousy. I'm just stating my limitations. I am in a point of my life where I can not give every ounce of my energy to work, like I could 10 years ago.

Also, I did not mention rejections by customers, did I? The customers I do get are actually quite happy.


> There is no jealousy. I'm just stating my limitations.

Your limitations and also a diagnose of what you think it is needed to be selected by VCs that you are lacking. It doesn't mean you are right. There are plenty of people in your exactly same situation going through YC, bootstrapping, succeeding or failing.


You misread the original comment. I was talking about my CV, because I am talking about rejections in job interviews, which I have been also pursuing.


I'm not sure what my idea is worth, but here it goes.

I once worked at a really cool company that had robots that could do handwriting. I thought it would be cool to get the robots to draw pictures of people, and after a little hacking I had a prototype UI that could convert bitmaps to traceable vector paths.

Since then I have worked on automating the process. I have a half-built machine that will be able to do pen plotter stuff, without any connection to the internet. I am currently using a Cricut machine to render plotter art which ties me to the useless bored mom cloud. Also I can't use the machine without internet... NOT OK!

The biggest problem with the Cricut cloud is the process is so clunky and painful that I cannot do "realtime" drawings. The process of bouncing between my UI and the awful cricut cloud makes the process too labor intensive for me to talk to people and do the P.T. Barnum thing while I also execute the art. I would love to have an assistant but I cannot afford it.

So I have a machine, eventually I will be able to run a server process on a raspi listening for requests, and when it gets one it will execute some gcode to do some drawing.

I also have figured out how to use a DSLR library to control cameras.

The end goal is for camera to fire, automated tracing to run, and then the robot should kick out a sketch in 3 mins or less

It's called "Robot Draws You!" because people couldn't understand what "facetrace" meant and I also found existing companies using that wordmark / term.

I have been dragging this project behind my failing career for about 6-7 years now. I hope to get back to it.... I'm not giving up. I love making vector pen plotter artwork but unfortunately I am a shining example of the starving artist stereotype.

https://www.instagram.com/robotdrawsyou/

On one hand I feel bad for holding onto this project and not being able to give up. On the other hand, it's too cool and enjoyable for me to let go of. If I can get a MVP demo working, I'll be able to bring it to parties and hopefully get paid to do "photo booth" style events. I also would like to use the project as an educational tool to teach people the difference between bitmap and vector graphics.

If anybody wants to join me in this project or is interested in funding me send an email to mat at vtapi dot co


Interesting project! I could definitely see that being a fun thing at corporate parties (if those ever come back!) Btw, The url on your instagram is misspelled, should be .com


Hey, I recently created an app (StaffSpace). I have trying to find ways to promote the app to obtain users and figure if it is a good idea or if I should move on. Your feed back would be great. Check it out here: www.thestaffspace.com IOS - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/staffspace/id6444011682 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.staffspace...


Who are your competitors and why should I choose you over them?


Most of the competitors do not have focus in the niche of the restaurant industry. Typically they treat as if it similar to every other job. This is where we can capitalize where they lack. Furthermore, this can allow space for growth. Promoting and Event (weddings, birthday, etc for personnel) and also random spot pick ups for employee who take time off or if the venue needs an immediate fill in.


It's simple... the BitGrid[1,3].

Take a simple FPGA fabric, and rip out all of the routing hardware, and specialized modules. This gets you down to a cartesian array of Look Up Tables. (Simulator for one LUT/Cell here[2])

Add a delay after each one, so that you can use the magic of graph coloring to clock them in 2 phases, and eliminate all race conditions. This simultaneously makes it a horrible FPGA, in terms of latency, and the easiest FPGA ever, in terms of general purpose, secure, computing.

Most computing problems can be broken down to a directed graph of bitwise operations. Executing all of the graph in lockstep means that you can simply flow data through it. You could get FFTs that window data, then output results at the same rate as the input. For Radar processing, this might be useful.

Ideally, you could flow GPT4 tokens through, the latency for a given stream would be horrible, but you could have millions of parallel streams.

To do this, you have to map the directed graph to hardware. In an FPGA this can take days because of the special modules, etc. This makes programming a nightmare. With a BitGrid, you can just use a greedy mapping algorithm, and Bob's your Uncle.

Because every cell is essentially the worlds smallest Excel Sheet cell, it's easy to know all of the dependencies for any given cell. You can move cells, rotate them, flip and mirror them if you need to maximize the utilization of hardware, or want to wall off a given graph inside walls for isolation.

Until recently, I've always thought of it as a chip, but recently I've come to see that you could just as well take a farm of RP2040 chips and have them all running slow simulators of a fairly huge BitGrid chips, and network them through their I/O pins to make an arbitrary size array, cheap!

The BitGrid topology thus becomes a universal computing solvent. Scaling anything that can be expressed as the directed graph can be run very slowly on a CPU with a lot of RAM/Disk, or quickly on silicon, with identical results. I think this could scale to PetaFlops quite cheaply (a few runs through TinyTapeOut then scaling up)

[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

[2] https://mikewarot.github.io/Bitgrid_C/bitgrid_sim.html

[3] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid


One idea is more of a thought exercise at this stage: a digital cooperative. VCs can make investments in the co-op but this doesn't give them any equity or leverage (as a co-op it probably follows the one member one vote principle). VC investments could instead realize value through access to, and participation in, co-op projects and commercial initiatives... probably too far out of the VC playbook and comfort zone.




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