Y Combinator applicant advice

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&#x27;t need their validation, and you certainly don&#x27;t need their permission.<p>Just go freaking make something people want.

I&#x27;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&#x27;s awesome for all.<p>As software fills out the niches of the world, that&#x27;s where the real wins are going to be.<p>So in short, saying your company will be worth a billion dollars isn&#x27;t cool. It&#x27;s just douchey.

&gt; don’t say “if we capture 10% of this 100 billion dollar market, we’ll be making 10 billion dollars!”<p>&gt; 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&#x27;t sound too hard until the word &quot;billion&quot; appears. Instead, we can capture 114% of one region. And $20 million per year is too big, so let&#x27;s give it per day.<p>Just saying &quot;the average dishwasher needs a $200 repair once every two years&quot; 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;20&#x2F;how-to-write-a-winning-y-c...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-experience" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lollipuff.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;102&#x2F;lollipuffs-ycombinator-ex...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycombinator.com&#x2F;howtoapply.html</a>

There should be a question in there &quot;Did you continue building your company after getting rejected by YC? Which?&quot;

&gt; 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&#x27;t that make that metric pretty meaningless?

It seems like lots of YC app advice posts think it&#x27;s super important to have a .com. I always thought a .com wasn&#x27;t that important, especially if you have to pay money for it that you could use towards development. Am I missing something?

&#x2F;&#x2F;This function has a 96% accuracy<p>public boolean yc_acceptance(String application){<p><pre><code> return false; </code></pre> }<p>Still, applying though.