Thousands of groups applied for S13. Only 255 groups were selected for interviews. Only 53 companies ended up getting funded.<p>My advice: Stop worrying about perfecting your application or trying to game it. Stop worrying about trying to get into YC. Submit it, forget it. Go build a company. You don't need their validation, and you certainly don't need their permission.<p>Just go freaking make something people want.
I'm so tired of the billion dollar bullshit. No one believes it. No one can predict it. But everyone seems to have to say it.<p>Spare me.<p>YC is investing $18k. If you build a $10 or $25 million business off that springboard, even with an angel round, that's awesome for all.<p>As software fills out the niches of the world, that's where the real wins are going to be.<p>So in short, saying your company will be worth a billion dollars isn't cool. It's just douchey.
> don’t say “if we capture 10% of this 100 billion dollar market, we’ll be making 10 billion dollars!”<p>> From this, based on the volume of repairs in San Francisco...we could be operating at about $70k per day in just SF.<p>A bottom-up story can just be a top-down one in disguise. Capturing 10% of a market doesn't sound too hard until the word "billion" appears. Instead, we can capture 114% of one region. And $20 million per year is too big, so let's give it per day.<p>Just saying "the average dishwasher needs a $200 repair once every two years" tells me more than that entire paragraph.
Personally, I think one of the best ways to prepare is to look for common trends in other successful applications. I helped write a VentureBeat article on this very subject [1]. As part of that article, we (Lollipuff, YC W13) released our entire application [2], and of course YC provides plenty of application advice too [3].<p>[1] <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-y-combinator-application/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-y-c...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-experience" rel="nofollow">https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-ex...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html</a>
> Although, they also want to see how quickly you can execute. 2 years to build an iPhone app is too long.<p>Why would they care about how quickly you can build something? If you took 2 years to build an iPhone app in your spare time, but that iPhone app ended up being Candy Crush, wouldn't that make that metric pretty meaningless?
It seems like lots of YC app advice posts think it's super important to have a .com. I always thought a .com wasn't that important, especially if you have to pay money for it that you could use towards development. Am I missing something?
//This function has a 96% accuracy<p>public boolean yc_acceptance(String application){<p><pre><code> return false;
</code></pre>
}<p>Still, applying though.