9 ms·

The Y Combinator Experience – Remote Edition

155 points by mxstbr 6y ago

devops000 6y ago
Did you give your equity just for this? it doesn't sound a good deal on your side.
- unamashana 6y ago
  I probably didn't do a good job in listing down all the benefits. I skipped the biggest one - the YC network. It's an amazing network that's ready to adopt new products as well as invest in them. YC also gives you a lot credibility. If you don't have a pedigree (previous exit, FAANG network), it's your buy-in in the big league. Besides they invest 125k, which may not sound like a lot but is a good first cheque in that can get you pretty far on it's own.
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    What’s the current equity scenario again? I remember them saying it’s not fixed but what is it? And what is it practically in your cohort?
    - unamashana 6y ago
      7% for $125k with some pro-rata rights - https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Yeah, even if you got $0 it would still probably be worth it. If you company fails you still end up with an insane network.
shash7 6y ago
A fully customizable notifications dropdown with a solid api sounds useful. Note to the author: please for the love of god increase body font weight to 400.
- unamashana 6y ago
  Ah so that was it! Thanks for pointing this out. Pushing up a fix now.
abhinav22 6y ago
Nice write up on your experience in YC, thanks for that. How much do you think you get distracted by talking and listening with others in your YC network vs actually focusing on your product? As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people
- yaseer 6y ago
  > As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people I've built things solo with my PhD (dropped out), and collaboratively in a startup. The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing. We need to talk to people, whether it's customers, co-founders or colleagues to correct all the incorrect assumptions we've made, but can't see. If you're building something new, there's likely to be many, many incorrect assumptions...
  - allenleein 6y ago
    > The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing I don't think talking to users can fix that. If you have the wrong vision about the product, you probably will talk to the 'wrong users' too. You’re not in the market the users think you’re in — you’re in the market you believe you’re in. That approach will also lead you to very incremental solutions or even make you run around in circles achieving nothing. It lowers the cost of failure (downside), but also the potential impact of success (upside).
    - rytill 6y ago
      Can you explain your approach/philosophy, or is it intuitive?
      - allenleein 6y ago
        I believe the most successful companies don't discover markets, they create them. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk forge the macro (10x) jump and then ask customers for the micro improvements. I'm writing an essay about this topic, feel free to take a look the draft if your are interested :) https://ab0ve.substack.com/p/ec282c2c-95fa-4914-820f-7463cb51dc7d https://ab0ve.substack.com/p/ec282c2c-95fa-4914-820f-7463cb5...
artembugara 6y ago
Remote batch brought 1 more real benefit of YC: $125k. Before COVID when you have to relocate to Bay Area this is just a living fee for a low quality house + personal spendings. Now, 125k is almost a lot for pretty much any place on the planet. Therefore, many remote entrepreneurs can be more relaxed on raising capital. I'd say you even can decide to "bootstrap" with this money + GCP/AWS credits.
- unamashana 6y ago
  That's right! I completely forgot about the AWS/GCP credits. Even in a realistic usage scenario, that's adding 25 - 50k to your funding over a couple of years. The legal fees waiver for upto 10k is another one.
  - artembugara 6y ago
    Indeed, we got 100k from GCP recently, and it will change a lot for our bootstrapped company. It basically makes us "ramen profitable"
    - nowherebeen 6y ago
      What’s the criteria for getting 100k? The most I ever got was 5k.
- iagovar 6y ago
  I can live off a bunch of years in Spain for that money.
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    Any suggestions? Spain has been a potential target for temporary relocation for me!
    - unamashana 6y ago
      I live in Barcelona and love the quality of life. Happy to answer any questions. Twitter @unamashana
hashkb 6y ago
> The biggest one was that Ycombinator is all about raising money, and if you are not in the mindset of 'raise as much as you can, as often as you can,' you won't fit in. This must have changed. I went through YCF #2 and we were essentially laughed at each time we mentioned staying local or becoming profitable. Literally the only thing our advisor talked about was raising.
- yaseer 6y ago
  I'm sorry you had that experience - I would hope it's an outlier. We're on the same W21 cohort as OP. I remember when we started, they hammered home frugality as a key trait of successful founders. One founder talk stood out - "If they have office snacks before product market fit, you know they're going to fail". W21 wanted to put that on a T-shirt. This advice seems to be repeated all over YC's manuals, partner office hours and culture generally.
  - hashkb 6y ago
    It was not an outlier. If they're snack shaming now... If you have snarky shirts before you have a product...
Frodo478 6y ago
So magicbell is a dropdown displayed with an API? $99 /month for 2000 users? I don't understand what problem is trying to solve your startup. To me it seems that you're trying to sell a library more than a service.
- unamashana 6y ago
  It certainly looks deceptively simple. Once you factor in real-time updates with multi-device sync, things start to get challenging pretty fast. Also, that's 2,000 monthly active users. Happy to discuss on twitter @unamashana
- colesantiago 6y ago
  push notifications and state management across devices is a very hard problem, try doing this yourself. I am glad that something like magicbell exists.
- mxstbr 6y ago
  It sounds really simple to do, but we literally spent a month or two implementing a notification inbox, browser push notifications, granular settings and permissions, etc at Spectrum. Even with all that work it was still relatively buggy! I'm very glad MagicBell is tackling this — I never want to build another notification system myself, I'd much rather pay them to solve this problem for me!
_0o6v 6y ago
Surely the one thing that should be on the Magic Bell homepage is a Magic Bell I can click on and see what this product is?
- unamashana 6y ago
  That's a fair point. We need to setup some examples with mock API calls so we can offer a consistent state to all new visitors. In the meantime, here is a quick demo - https://codesandbox.io/s/elastic-northcutt-9pcgv https://codesandbox.io/s/elastic-northcutt-9pcgv
  - _0o6v 6y ago
    I don't think you (just) need to set up some examples, you need to use your own product on your own homepage. Looks good btw.
    - tasn 6y ago
      I don't think they can. They do notifications for users, but website visitors are anonymous. It doesn't make sense to add it to the landing page. With that being said, I think a live demo is a great idea and would go a long way!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
igammarays 6y ago
The hardest thing about implementing notifications for me is not the UI, it’s the rate limiting (avoid bombarding users with duplicates), intelligently handling state changes, and figuring out when to escalate to an email/sms channel. The homepage doesn’t convince they’ve solved the hard problems surrounding notifications.
- unamashana 6y ago
  We handle state changes (and sync them real-time). We'll get to rate limiting and other features you mentioned in the coming months. We have a pretty extensive roadmap and would love to keep you posted - @magicbell_io.
ggambetta 6y ago
Had some trouble scanning through the article. You have this header > Tips on applying successfully And the next subheaders are >> Talking about my idea only from a customer's perspective >> Writing to sound impressive >> Stopping to apply after a couple of rejections Things were confusing, I had to go back and read the small print after the first header, which says "do NOT do these things". Maybe the first headers should read something like "pitfalls to avoid when applying"? Or rephrasing the sub-headers?
- unamashana 6y ago
  Excellent feedback! I updated the article and used the heading you suggested. Thanks.
newbie578 6y ago
I would love to hear experiences regarding Remote vs On-site YC. What is the magnitude of difference? How much does the average startup lose out on networking because of the lack of physical presence. And for people from Europe, is it a net positive that the batch is remote, or is the on-site still better?
switch007 6y ago
I couldn’t quite tell from the api docs but is the user’s email required? Can I just supply an external ID? I’m just wondering from a privacy point of view.
- unamashana 6y ago
  You can use (as you guessed) an `userExternalId` - https://developer.magicbell.io/docs/browser-js#identifying-users https://developer.magicbell.io/docs/browser-js#identifying-u.... That's how we built our HN Chrome extension that never asks for your email - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifications/bbkfblhdgiddlkfkipjdhhfoephonoba/related?hl=en&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...
  - switch007 6y ago
    Thanks. I was on mobile and only skimmed the docs - sorry! Cool extension. A Firefox version would be great!
dcolkitt 6y ago
I know from a personal perspective, I've considered applying to YCombinator in the past, but would never to the Bay Area. This is just one datapoint, but I'm sure there are many others like me. How many businesses never launched, because our society has insisted that startups must happen in a single, extremely unlivable part of the country.
krrishd 6y ago
> Some people around me felt that my experience bootstrapping my last business should be enough to close seed funding, but the only thing that helps close funding is the fear of missing out on your deal. I witnessed this first hand after we launched to #2 on Product Hunt. We got some good inbound investor interest, but I couldn't create the pressure needed to close funding - there was no forcing function like the demo day. TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.

155 points by mxstbr 6y ago

devops000 6y ago

Did you give your equity just for this? it doesn't sound a good deal on your side.

unamashana 6y ago
I probably didn't do a good job in listing down all the benefits. I skipped the biggest one - the YC network. It's an amazing network that's ready to adopt new products as well as invest in them. YC also gives you a lot credibility. If you don't have a pedigree (previous exit, FAANG network), it's your buy-in in the big league. Besides they invest 125k, which may not sound like a lot but is a good first cheque in that can get you pretty far on it's own.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  What’s the current equity scenario again? I remember them saying it’s not fixed but what is it? And what is it practically in your cohort?
  - unamashana 6y ago
    7% for $125k with some pro-rata rights - https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Yeah, even if you got $0 it would still probably be worth it. If you company fails you still end up with an insane network.

shash7 6y ago

A fully customizable notifications dropdown with a solid api sounds useful. Note to the author: please for the love of god increase body font weight to 400.

unamashana 6y ago
Ah so that was it! Thanks for pointing this out. Pushing up a fix now.

abhinav22 6y ago

Nice write up on your experience in YC, thanks for that. How much do you think you get distracted by talking and listening with others in your YC network vs actually focusing on your product? As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people

yaseer 6y ago
> As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people I've built things solo with my PhD (dropped out), and collaboratively in a startup. The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing. We need to talk to people, whether it's customers, co-founders or colleagues to correct all the incorrect assumptions we've made, but can't see. If you're building something new, there's likely to be many, many incorrect assumptions...
- allenleein 6y ago
  > The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing I don't think talking to users can fix that. If you have the wrong vision about the product, you probably will talk to the 'wrong users' too. You’re not in the market the users think you’re in — you’re in the market you believe you’re in. That approach will also lead you to very incremental solutions or even make you run around in circles achieving nothing. It lowers the cost of failure (downside), but also the potential impact of success (upside).
  - rytill 6y ago
    Can you explain your approach/philosophy, or is it intuitive?
    - allenleein 6y ago
      I believe the most successful companies don't discover markets, they create them. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk forge the macro (10x) jump and then ask customers for the micro improvements. I'm writing an essay about this topic, feel free to take a look the draft if your are interested :) https://ab0ve.substack.com/p/ec282c2c-95fa-4914-820f-7463cb51dc7d https://ab0ve.substack.com/p/ec282c2c-95fa-4914-820f-7463cb5...

artembugara 6y ago

Remote batch brought 1 more real benefit of YC: $125k. Before COVID when you have to relocate to Bay Area this is just a living fee for a low quality house + personal spendings. Now, 125k is almost a lot for pretty much any place on the planet. Therefore, many remote entrepreneurs can be more relaxed on raising capital. I'd say you even can decide to "bootstrap" with this money + GCP/AWS credits.

unamashana 6y ago
That's right! I completely forgot about the AWS/GCP credits. Even in a realistic usage scenario, that's adding 25 - 50k to your funding over a couple of years. The legal fees waiver for upto 10k is another one.
- artembugara 6y ago
  Indeed, we got 100k from GCP recently, and it will change a lot for our bootstrapped company. It basically makes us "ramen profitable"
  - nowherebeen 6y ago
    What’s the criteria for getting 100k? The most I ever got was 5k.
iagovar 6y ago
I can live off a bunch of years in Spain for that money.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Any suggestions? Spain has been a potential target for temporary relocation for me!
  - unamashana 6y ago
    I live in Barcelona and love the quality of life. Happy to answer any questions. Twitter @unamashana

hashkb 6y ago

> The biggest one was that Ycombinator is all about raising money, and if you are not in the mindset of 'raise as much as you can, as often as you can,' you won't fit in. This must have changed. I went through YCF #2 and we were essentially laughed at each time we mentioned staying local or becoming profitable. Literally the only thing our advisor talked about was raising.

yaseer 6y ago
I'm sorry you had that experience - I would hope it's an outlier. We're on the same W21 cohort as OP. I remember when we started, they hammered home frugality as a key trait of successful founders. One founder talk stood out - "If they have office snacks before product market fit, you know they're going to fail". W21 wanted to put that on a T-shirt. This advice seems to be repeated all over YC's manuals, partner office hours and culture generally.
- hashkb 6y ago
  It was not an outlier. If they're snack shaming now... If you have snarky shirts before you have a product...

Frodo478 6y ago

So magicbell is a dropdown displayed with an API? $99 /month for 2000 users? I don't understand what problem is trying to solve your startup. To me it seems that you're trying to sell a library more than a service.

unamashana 6y ago
It certainly looks deceptively simple. Once you factor in real-time updates with multi-device sync, things start to get challenging pretty fast. Also, that's 2,000 monthly active users. Happy to discuss on twitter @unamashana
colesantiago 6y ago
push notifications and state management across devices is a very hard problem, try doing this yourself. I am glad that something like magicbell exists.
mxstbr 6y ago
It sounds really simple to do, but we literally spent a month or two implementing a notification inbox, browser push notifications, granular settings and permissions, etc at Spectrum. Even with all that work it was still relatively buggy! I'm very glad MagicBell is tackling this — I never want to build another notification system myself, I'd much rather pay them to solve this problem for me!

_0o6v 6y ago

Surely the one thing that should be on the Magic Bell homepage is a Magic Bell I can click on and see what this product is?

unamashana 6y ago
That's a fair point. We need to setup some examples with mock API calls so we can offer a consistent state to all new visitors. In the meantime, here is a quick demo - https://codesandbox.io/s/elastic-northcutt-9pcgv https://codesandbox.io/s/elastic-northcutt-9pcgv
- _0o6v 6y ago
  I don't think you (just) need to set up some examples, you need to use your own product on your own homepage. Looks good btw.
  - tasn 6y ago
    I don't think they can. They do notifications for users, but website visitors are anonymous. It doesn't make sense to add it to the landing page. With that being said, I think a live demo is a great idea and would go a long way!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

igammarays 6y ago

The hardest thing about implementing notifications for me is not the UI, it’s the rate limiting (avoid bombarding users with duplicates), intelligently handling state changes, and figuring out when to escalate to an email/sms channel. The homepage doesn’t convince they’ve solved the hard problems surrounding notifications.

unamashana 6y ago
We handle state changes (and sync them real-time). We'll get to rate limiting and other features you mentioned in the coming months. We have a pretty extensive roadmap and would love to keep you posted - @magicbell_io.

ggambetta 6y ago

Had some trouble scanning through the article. You have this header > Tips on applying successfully And the next subheaders are >> Talking about my idea only from a customer's perspective >> Writing to sound impressive >> Stopping to apply after a couple of rejections Things were confusing, I had to go back and read the small print after the first header, which says "do NOT do these things". Maybe the first headers should read something like "pitfalls to avoid when applying"? Or rephrasing the sub-headers?

unamashana 6y ago
Excellent feedback! I updated the article and used the heading you suggested. Thanks.

newbie578 6y ago

I would love to hear experiences regarding Remote vs On-site YC. What is the magnitude of difference? How much does the average startup lose out on networking because of the lack of physical presence. And for people from Europe, is it a net positive that the batch is remote, or is the on-site still better?

switch007 6y ago

I couldn’t quite tell from the api docs but is the user’s email required? Can I just supply an external ID? I’m just wondering from a privacy point of view.

unamashana 6y ago
You can use (as you guessed) an `userExternalId` - https://developer.magicbell.io/docs/browser-js#identifying-users https://developer.magicbell.io/docs/browser-js#identifying-u.... That's how we built our HN Chrome extension that never asks for your email - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifications/bbkfblhdgiddlkfkipjdhhfoephonoba/related?hl=en&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...
- switch007 6y ago
  Thanks. I was on mobile and only skimmed the docs - sorry! Cool extension. A Firefox version would be great!

dcolkitt 6y ago

I know from a personal perspective, I've considered applying to YCombinator in the past, but would never to the Bay Area. This is just one datapoint, but I'm sure there are many others like me. How many businesses never launched, because our society has insisted that startups must happen in a single, extremely unlivable part of the country.

krrishd 6y ago

> Some people around me felt that my experience bootstrapping my last business should be enough to close seed funding, but the only thing that helps close funding is the fear of missing out on your deal. I witnessed this first hand after we launched to #2 on Product Hunt. We got some good inbound investor interest, but I couldn't create the pressure needed to close funding - there was no forcing function like the demo day. TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.