I cannot reconcile this article with this year's YCombinator stats..<p><i>43% of the batch were accepted with only an idea</i><p><i>71% of the batch had zero revenue before YC</i><p><a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-summer-2022-batch/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-summer-2022-bat...</a><p>Is it about how you behave during the interview and/or your past record (ex. successful serial entrepreneurs)? Otherwise, I do not see any reason why this startup was rejected 5 times and many other startups are accepted presumably first time itself with just an idea or no revenue/customers.
Surprised at the rigor they had for your process. Just looking at a lot of crypto companies that have joined their batch, I was questioning whether they even looked at the ideas or not.<p>Maybe they are just better with b2b SaaS and other verticals, with crypto being exceptionally bad.
This is obviously based on anecdata, take it with a healthy helping of salt, but from what I've heard from a bunch of founder friends who have applied to YC with varying results, I get the sense that if you want to get in, you might be better off applying before you even start working on your startup.<p>Once you actually start, the bar for getting in seems to get much higher, because there's suddenly a lot more concrete data points to benchmark your startup against. Before that all they have is basically an idea and a bunch of resumes. This is of course contingent on the fact that you have impressive looking resumes and at least a plausible idea.<p>It's a bit of a catch 22 for B2B startups hoping to use the YC startup network as a source of early customers, but didn't apply early enough. If you're thinking of starting a B2B startup that could make good use of YC's network, my recommendation would be to apply as early as possible, before you even start working on it. Worst case scenario is you get rejected and end up having to apply again in 6 months (which is fine because you applied 6+ months earlier than you might have otherwise, and now have feedback from their rejection to make your next application better).
> Our ideas were long and vague.<p>> We had practically zero proof that we could execute our plans successfully.<p>> And as a result, our interview with YC went terribly.<p>If they were doing so badly, how did they even get an interview in the first place?
I work at Notion.<p>I advise you to avoid the .so TLD - there’s a lot of institutional bias against Somalia’s TLD, like blanket blocks in many corporate firewalls. This problem will be worse if you serve public user-generated content from that TLD because the chain of communication from you to SomaliNIC might have a bunch of unknown third party intermediaries where an abuse report can get lost. Today Notion is large & successful enough to be resilient to these issues, but in the 2019-2020 years the use of .so was responsible for a few long outages. To this day, we have many requests to move our service to .com. I’m always a little worried when I see other startups using this TLD.
I definitely can understand this and appreciate you sharing candidly the failures and rejections.<p>I'm in a similar boat, and every time we've learned a lot from the rejections. We have thousands of recurring, paying customers, a unique product, great engagement, but yet we still can't seem to get to the interview stage. Hoping that changes this time around. I'm not a traditional founder - I am a medical doctor and full stack programmer/designer, so if anyone has any insights or tips that would be greatly appreciated! The YC pedigree and more importantly, the rapid learning and network is something I am definitely aiming for.
Congratualtions on your temerity!<p>I looked at relate.so, and I already use a CRM that does everything listed on your website. What are the new features that relate provides compared to other CRMs?
Congratulations!<p>I would like to make a suggestion, if you that's possible... Your landing page has way too much text. There's the copy from the landing page + the text on screenshots. I found it overwhelming and could not really grasp the benefits of your product. If possible, please consider changing the real screenshots to mockups where the text is not real text but placeholder bars (except for action buttons/text that's necessary to show functionality you're featuring).<p>Wish you guys the best.
It's no longer around in its current form, but this looks like the same exact value prop and feature set that RelateIQ had, whom Salesforce purchased. I just can't help but wonder if its coincidence that your company name is also relate...
Congratulations!<p>I've been thinking about this a bit, even for a company as renowned as YC, I don't like how the power balance is, and the sort of "we made it!" vibe as if you finally impressed some diety enough to grace you with good fortune. I see the same kind of posts (oddly) about people who tried n times to get a job at google and finally they "made it". Like what are we doing?<p>I think that once an institution has this kind of getting in as the goal, rather than the actual hard work of making an objectively successful company, incentive structures get all screwed up. This is in no way specific to YC, the same happens in universities, in investment banking, whatever. But it signals the beginning of a hollowing out where the credential is everything and what underlies it doesn't matter. There are definitely areas where the culture is skewed very much in this direction, and it isn't somewhere I'd want to be
>But for the past three years, we've struggled to find the right problem to solve and gain even a small traction.
Each time we pivoted and applied to YC (and were rejected), we learned something new.<p>Respectfully, I’ve never particularly understood this approach to business. It seems like a lot of VC-funded or VC-hopeful companies take the approach of “I know I should be in business, I just don’t know in what” which feels entirely backwards to me. I understand the company that starts out selling one service (renting DVDs for instance) and then shifts to an adjacent business (streaming movies) because one falls out or there’s opportunities to expand. But the hunting around for a market seems bizarre.
This story just really doesn't read like the triumph of will it was meant to be...<p>My takeaway from this is that the founders wanted to get into YC. The business doesn't matter, they just wanted to be in YC.<p>The business morphed around what they thought would get into YC, not what would actually make a good business. I have a ton of respect for YCombinator, but they are not all knowing oracles who get it right 100% of the time. The fact that the immediate response to each rejection was "pivot" I think speaks volumes to the founder's goals here.
People question why startups are so focused on getting into YC. They ask the reasonable question "Why care so much about getting into YC? How about focusing on building a great product instead of optimising for YC?"<p>I think the answer is that YC is a significant success factor, and if your company is a member of YC then many future objectives and challenges will become easier.<p>People who have attended certain universities gain many ongoing benefits from the recognition of the university. "Oh, you went to Harvard/Standford/Melbourne University? Yes please come talk to us."<p>People who have worked at certain companies many ongoing benefits from the recognition of the company. "Oh, you worked at Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Netflix/Apple? Yes please come talk to us."<p>"Oh, you're a YC company? Yes please come talk to us."<p>It's instant credibility and that really helps open alot of doors.<p>Dress well, be kind to people, go to a recognised elite university, start your career working at one or two of the top tech companies, get your startup into YC and you're likely to be able to pay your bills into the future.<p>I should say I did not go to an elite university, did not work at a top tier tech company and have not been through YC :-)