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Should I apply to YC if my site is similar to a previous YC site?
I'm currently working on a neat project. My co-founder and I have started the YC application for this semester. We got to the question about our competitors and mentioned one that we're aware of - it's a recent YC service (MessageParty).
Yes, we're in the exact same market and yes the concepts are very similar. We obviously feel like ours is great and are passionate about it. We like the concept of MessageParty, too, but it's not how we would have done it. It's not how we're doing ours.
Should we still apply to YCombinator? We lost of good amount of steam at this question, and decided to save the application and come back to it tomorrow. We were getting into the "what ifs" and stuff. We concluded with the agreement that we're going to go through with the application and just see how it goes. It's an experience either way - one that I've wanted to do for the past two years.
- yurisagalov 16y agoFrom the FAQ (http://www.ycombinator.com/faq.html http://www.ycombinator.com/faq.html) Will you fund multiple startups working on the same idea? Yes. If you fund as many companies as we do it's unavoidable you'll end up with some overlap. Even if you tried not to accept competing companies, you'd still get overlap because startups' ideas morph so much. The way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we don't talk to one about what the other's doing. In practice it has not turned out to be a problem, because most big markets have room for several slightly different solutions, and it's unlikely that two startups would do precisely the same thing.
- allantyoung 16y agoHasn't there been instances where two YC startups working in a related space end up merging or one acquiring the other?
- jeremydavid 16y agoOf course you should apply. If you don't, there's a 0% chance you will be accepted. Even if you aren't chosen for an interview, I have read many comments here from people who found going through the application process was a worthwhile endeavor in itself. Good luck.