3 ms·

Rejected for YC and still feeling awesome

30 points by buro9 14y ago

The company I'm working on is receiving a lot of support right now. We needed £30k to get a 9-12 month runway and in the last week our users have pledged £90k with a couple of organisations pledging another £20k+. This is really emboldening, if you have users you can draw strength from, an idea so validated and working that you can draw from that... then do it. Remember what you're working on and why. That's the only thing matters, to do today that which needs to be done to move your work forward and get that successful business built sooner. I hope all of the those who received the email join me in digging even deeper today.

duiker101 14y ago
Aaaand.... what company is it? If it' s possible to know. Good job anyway this is the right attitude!
- buro9 14y ago
  It's called Microcosm. http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ * Working on discussion boards. Like tumblr, for forums. We already run some forums based on vBulletin, XenForo, Vanilla, etc... and have ~300k monthly unique visitors, ~40k registered members, ~15k active (each month) users, and mailing lists of ~25k. Forums being one of the oldest things on the internet (usenet) and one of the most resilient. But we're not making this forum or that forum... those are muffins and we're building a muffin making machine. A hosted platform to build great forums. The whole business came out of user demand. Frustration at the stagnation of forum software and what users have to do, and how they have to compromise to make a community work on such software. We (the users and I) started to ask "What if we..." instead of "How do we work around this limitation?". Where we've ended up isn't technically impossible... it's just a lot of work. But they're really excited by it, as am I, and the first mockups have all been built with a lot of feedback from them and their response has largely been: That mock-up thing is rad as fuck! Hurry up and get some bank details or something up so I can blast some patron money in your direction! The fundraising is to help support the building of it (stipends for people to work on it, rent for a small office, etc), and the users themselves are asking for hack weekends so that they can come in, and pool 20 people's effort into pushing it along. But still, the YC application was borne out of hope that we could move even faster. We make a profit already from affiliate fees, and there's a lot of money in hobbies... we just want to get the first real version out of the door and into the hands of the users. * The LaunchRock page is just that... because we're already working with users most of what we've focused on has been in-person stuff from our office near London Waterloo. We haven't yet felt a pressing need to spend time on a pretty landing page.
  - d0m 14y ago
    Obvious question but still worth asking: what about the other 'Hosted Forum Services?' (I know absolutely nothing for this domain, but with a quick googling I came up with a couple services such as http://www.proboards.com http://www.proboards.com) If you compare it to tumblr, I guess it has to do with the way a user can follow multiple ones at the same time? As such, would it be a little like "Reddit for forum?"
    - buro9 14y ago
      The complaint users have against existing software is that not everything is a post in a thread. That simple thing means that things like classifieds are currently threads. Events, are threads. Articles, are threads. Reviews, are threads. It drives them mad. They can't find anything, cannot do anything with the information. They can't even compare classifieds, or find events and map them. They're forced to then smash up their community's content and litter it around the web. Some on eBay, some on Facebook or Meetup.com. Which is a real problem for them: discoverability/search is poor, data ownership is a mess, permissions are confused, etc. They want a basic form of all of this stuff within the forum that they're using. They want to bring it back home. None of the hosted forum software solves this. And because of things like the built-in search, it's really hard to hack a vBulletin (or something else) instance into having this. It should've been there from day one.
      - precisioncoder 14y ago
        That sounds incredible, I am going to have to look deeper into your company when I get the chance.
        buro9 14y ago
        Not a great deal publicly visible yet... but if you do enter your details on LaunchRock http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ I promise that when we have news we will let you know. But if you want programmer insight and are ever in London, UK... I run open office hours all the time. Just drop me an email and pop in.
Sherrilbfx 14y ago
That's the right attitude to have. You only fail by giving up.
dsugarman 14y ago
"Remember what you're working on and why." The same goes for if YC invests in you, you are not magically not a startup. YC does not solve all of you problems, you do. If getting rejected makes you stronger, then you are on the right path and don't let anyone say you aren't. YC does have this skill for finding really strong founders, but any partner will tell you that they have missed out on plenty of great founders and companies. If you get rejected here or anywhere else, understand that this is expected and has happened to everyone. Grit is one serious indicator of success.
brackin 14y ago
YC is amazing because you have the time to just build, saying that it doesn't make all of the companies but if you give up after not getting in then they made the right decision. Drew Wilson would still have done well. Keep building and as you say once you have traction talk to angels or other incubators like 500Startups.
PrinceGeo 14y ago
Entrepreneurs must celebrate their failure, it will temper their character and pave the way for great success, but this failure must be an outcome of quick failure. Learn how to fail quickly :) Thanks!

30 points by buro9 14y ago

duiker101 14y ago

Aaaand.... what company is it? If it' s possible to know. Good job anyway this is the right attitude!

buro9 14y ago
It's called Microcosm. http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ * Working on discussion boards. Like tumblr, for forums. We already run some forums based on vBulletin, XenForo, Vanilla, etc... and have ~300k monthly unique visitors, ~40k registered members, ~15k active (each month) users, and mailing lists of ~25k. Forums being one of the oldest things on the internet (usenet) and one of the most resilient. But we're not making this forum or that forum... those are muffins and we're building a muffin making machine. A hosted platform to build great forums. The whole business came out of user demand. Frustration at the stagnation of forum software and what users have to do, and how they have to compromise to make a community work on such software. We (the users and I) started to ask "What if we..." instead of "How do we work around this limitation?". Where we've ended up isn't technically impossible... it's just a lot of work. But they're really excited by it, as am I, and the first mockups have all been built with a lot of feedback from them and their response has largely been: That mock-up thing is rad as fuck! Hurry up and get some bank details or something up so I can blast some patron money in your direction! The fundraising is to help support the building of it (stipends for people to work on it, rent for a small office, etc), and the users themselves are asking for hack weekends so that they can come in, and pool 20 people's effort into pushing it along. But still, the YC application was borne out of hope that we could move even faster. We make a profit already from affiliate fees, and there's a lot of money in hobbies... we just want to get the first real version out of the door and into the hands of the users. * The LaunchRock page is just that... because we're already working with users most of what we've focused on has been in-person stuff from our office near London Waterloo. We haven't yet felt a pressing need to spend time on a pretty landing page.
- d0m 14y ago
  Obvious question but still worth asking: what about the other 'Hosted Forum Services?' (I know absolutely nothing for this domain, but with a quick googling I came up with a couple services such as http://www.proboards.com http://www.proboards.com) If you compare it to tumblr, I guess it has to do with the way a user can follow multiple ones at the same time? As such, would it be a little like "Reddit for forum?"
  - buro9 14y ago
    The complaint users have against existing software is that not everything is a post in a thread. That simple thing means that things like classifieds are currently threads. Events, are threads. Articles, are threads. Reviews, are threads. It drives them mad. They can't find anything, cannot do anything with the information. They can't even compare classifieds, or find events and map them. They're forced to then smash up their community's content and litter it around the web. Some on eBay, some on Facebook or Meetup.com. Which is a real problem for them: discoverability/search is poor, data ownership is a mess, permissions are confused, etc. They want a basic form of all of this stuff within the forum that they're using. They want to bring it back home. None of the hosted forum software solves this. And because of things like the built-in search, it's really hard to hack a vBulletin (or something else) instance into having this. It should've been there from day one.
    - precisioncoder 14y ago
      That sounds incredible, I am going to have to look deeper into your company when I get the chance.
      - buro9 14y ago
        Not a great deal publicly visible yet... but if you do enter your details on LaunchRock http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ I promise that when we have news we will let you know. But if you want programmer insight and are ever in London, UK... I run open office hours all the time. Just drop me an email and pop in.

Sherrilbfx 14y ago

That's the right attitude to have. You only fail by giving up.

dsugarman 14y ago

"Remember what you're working on and why." The same goes for if YC invests in you, you are not magically not a startup. YC does not solve all of you problems, you do. If getting rejected makes you stronger, then you are on the right path and don't let anyone say you aren't. YC does have this skill for finding really strong founders, but any partner will tell you that they have missed out on plenty of great founders and companies. If you get rejected here or anywhere else, understand that this is expected and has happened to everyone. Grit is one serious indicator of success.

brackin 14y ago

YC is amazing because you have the time to just build, saying that it doesn't make all of the companies but if you give up after not getting in then they made the right decision. Drew Wilson would still have done well. Keep building and as you say once you have traction talk to angels or other incubators like 500Startups.

PrinceGeo 14y ago

Entrepreneurs must celebrate their failure, it will temper their character and pave the way for great success, but this failure must be an outcome of quick failure. Learn how to fail quickly :) Thanks!