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mrkurt, ChuckMcM: As my co-founder mentioned in another comment a bit further down "We had been approached and offered investment as well as a global IT company

by akh 14y ago

mrkurt, ChuckMcM: As my co-founder mentioned in another comment a bit further down "We had been approached and offered investment as well as a global IT company asking for an exclusivity deal. However, I think the numbers that the Valley works on is on a different scale and that's what we are trying to convey in the blog post (not bulshitting without basis)." (http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4112064 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4112064) So I think we're passed the research stage, and we are actively developing software at the moment (no more research). Overall, as I mentioned in the post, the experience of going through a YC interview is definitely worth it, specially for guys like us who're doing our first startup. But we got the feeling that YC is after more consumer-oriented startups that can scale to huge numbers.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Fascinating, I don't think the ycombinator guys run the 'hackerne.ws' site, it looks like a pure MitM type deal (registrar name.com, hosted by ThePlanet in Houston TX?) I don't doubt you're past the research stage, my comment was that your advice to 'make up numbers, multiply by 10, and then bullshit' is really horrible advice, Scottish or not. My opinion is that if someone can't providing the reasoning behind their numbers from first principles then you're not in a 'business' you are in a research project. I've heard dozens of pitches from folks who 'hand wave' around numbers and I sigh. They say "You can't know this, we'll just have to try it and see." And its true you cannot know what sort of revenue you will get but you can do the research to isolate what you know and what you don't know, and then you can come up with some tests for what you don't know which might inform the possible answer. You're blog post advice tickled a bit of scar tissue that a lot of people reading this share.
mrkurt 14y ago
There are really two ways to impress a super early investor like ycombinator: 1) Have some admirable amount of "traction", if you've managed to get 20,000 users for a product, that's pretty cool. 2) Be able to articulate why and how you're going to get traction, where the pool of interested users will come from, and how much money that could be worth in the best case. YC does a ton with non-consumer startups (like mine), but we still have the same two hurdles to overcome. What you're probably sensing is that the viral features you can build into consumer startups are easy answers to some of their questions, though chicken and egg problems come up in most of those cases.

by akh 14y ago

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Fascinating, I don't think the ycombinator guys run the 'hackerne.ws' site, it looks like a pure MitM type deal (registrar name.com, hosted by ThePlanet in Houston TX?) I don't doubt you're past the research stage, my comment was that your advice to 'make up numbers, multiply by 10, and then bullshit' is really horrible advice, Scottish or not. My opinion is that if someone can't providing the reasoning behind their numbers from first principles then you're not in a 'business' you are in a research project. I've heard dozens of pitches from folks who 'hand wave' around numbers and I sigh. They say "You can't know this, we'll just have to try it and see." And its true you cannot know what sort of revenue you will get but you can do the research to isolate what you know and what you don't know, and then you can come up with some tests for what you don't know which might inform the possible answer. You're blog post advice tickled a bit of scar tissue that a lot of people reading this share.

mrkurt 14y ago

There are really two ways to impress a super early investor like ycombinator: 1) Have some admirable amount of "traction", if you've managed to get 20,000 users for a product, that's pretty cool. 2) Be able to articulate why and how you're going to get traction, where the pool of interested users will come from, and how much money that could be worth in the best case. YC does a ton with non-consumer startups (like mine), but we still have the same two hurdles to overcome. What you're probably sensing is that the viral features you can build into consumer startups are easy answers to some of their questions, though chicken and egg problems come up in most of those cases.