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How's your YC Winter 2008 application coming along?
We finished the first draft of the application questionnaire, and we implemented about half of the features we'd like to show in our demo.
We are a team of two awesome cofounders, and our idea is not technically heavy.
How's your application coming along?
- daniel-cussen 19y agoWill learn to program first.
- adnam 19y agoIf only I had a co-founder.
- rokhayakebe 19y agohackermatcher
- nickb 19y agoYou have to be more proactive in your search. Have you ever posted to any of the numerous "I need a cofounder" threads? Have you blogged about it? Have you discussed anything that interests you with any of the people who comment on here? Has anyone's comment or story they posted interested you? Why not email them? Most people have emails in their profiles.
- mattmaroon 19y agoI'm always skeptical about approaching the cofounder process that way. I wouldn't recommend doing this with someone you don't know very well. It will strain the bonds of friendship, without that, it's a crapshoot.
- cperciva 19y agoI sent an email asking to withdraw my application (I doubt it would be accepted anyway; but it turns out that I'm going to be busy on the "fly to Cambridge" weekend, and I don't want to waste their time) last week. I haven't seen any response, but I assume that someone reads the info@ address and has removed my application from their stack of reading materials.
- Tichy 19y agoWouldn't it have been easier to resubmit the application with all fields blanked out, except for one with the explanation?
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- henning 19y agoIt isn't. I'm a wage slave for now.
- npk 19y agoSounds like you're moving along quite nicely. I realized that I will not finish my PhD in time for the deadline, so it's been postponed 1/2 a year. At one point, I toyed with the idea of submitting, just to receive feedback, but thought it would be somewhat unethical. Good luck all.
- waleedka 19y agoI'm experimenting with a couple of ideas to see if one has potential. If so, I might consider applying in October. I've received lunch invites from a couple of investors to chat further, but I don't need the money yet. I believe that I should take investment only after I feel confident that the idea has a good chance of success. I can experiment with ideas on my own; it's much faster and I can change direction quickly if something doesn't look like it's working. If I do apply to YC, it'll be for the community and the support, not the money.
- wonjun 19y agoI think you should defintely apply. YC application process in itself is another way to experiment and get feedback. and how did you get lunch invites from investors? That sounds very promising.
- waleedka 19y agoI simply attended a lot of hacker/tech networking events to meet other entrepreneurs hoping to find a co-founder. And in the process, I met a lot of other people, some of whom turned out to be investors or working for investors. I also met many good entrepreneurs with good ideas, but none (yet) with an idea that has good enough potential (in my opinion) to commit myself to for the next few years. I'm still searching, but until then, I will continue to experiment.
- nreece 19y ago:) Enslaved
- zach 19y agoOkay... hey, what did you get for #6?
- jsjenkins168 19y agoAnyone applying again who was previously turned down? I am also curious of what YC's opinion is of groups who would like to re-apply?
- nostrademons 19y agoI am. Rejected SFP05 and SFP07, hopefully 3rd time will be the charm...
- wonjun 19y agoWhat happened after rejections? Have you ever launched your products after being rejected?
- nostrademons 19y agoAfter SFP05, I took a realistic look at the product and my ability to complete it before competitors did and decided not to pursue it. I took a job with another startup instead, first finishing up a long-time volunteer coding project I'd been working on. It turns out the product (web-based collaborative editing) would've had a market, but I probably would have been crushed by Google. They folded similar features into Google Docs not long afterwards. After SFP07, we continued working on it. We launched a side project (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233) and put about a month of effort into that before deciding it wasn't worthwhile. We also launched an intermediate milestone that we'd mentioned in our application, which is linked in my profile. It's had the same lack of success that we predicted, though I was of course hoping that there may be an off-chance of it taking off. (We did it that way because we need the functionality anyway for the main idea, so might as well package it up and get feedback while we work on that.) Well, some subset of "we". We had applied with 5 founders, and PG immediately shot back an e-mail with "too many uncommitted founders!" It became apparent that he was right, so the 3 that were not really into it left a couple months later. Curiously, our schedule in the SFP07 app would've been nearly dead-on had we not done the 5-week side project. We were initially planning to launch Diffle in late April; it actually launched on June 1. Then we were going to prototype the main idea between then and the start of the SFP; we actually got our first prototypes done during the first week of July. Progress since then has been slower than we anticipated, mostly because I kept the day job through the summer (I'm in the process of quitting now, and really would recommend that anyone in a similar situation quit as soon as they have an idea - it's not worth the hassle of ensuring you own your own IP).
- Mistone 19y agoits going great, hope to have it submitted by the weekend. last term was going to be too hectic. This round the timing feels right!
- gibsonf1 19y agoWe're working on it now. :)
- NoMoreSnow 19y agoThe application process has taken us longer than I thought it would because it has made us question whether there really is a market for the idea. Yes, it does help to solve a problem, but we don't have a working product to get user feedback. So for the past couple of weeks I've set the application aside and have focused on administering a market survey, so most of my time has been on the right wording for the test. Hopefully with the help of social networks, email, WOM, etc... We'll be able to get a large enough sample to help us understand if we're heading in the right direction. If so, we'll submit our application with the survey results. I am sure, though, that upon reading the questions, the person taking the survey will know quite easily what our start-up will be doing... which can be good and bad. Our positive spin on this is the survey will be our public declaration that we are up to something.
- staunch 19y agoIMHO your application would look much better with a prototype than a market survey attached.
- staunch 19y agoI'm not submitting an application, but my partner and I have copied it to Google Docs and filled it out for our own use. It turns out all our discussion meant when we wrote it down we were already 95% on the same page. It's still very useful as a way to refresh my memory, like pitching the idea to myself.
- brianmckenzie 19y agoI'm drafting my application now, but will probably not submit unless I have a solid prototype by the deadline.
- Leon 19y agoI already submitted my application before I finished my prototype, which I now have to get done before the deadline. I'm trying to use this as really strong motivation to just finish the prototype instead of waiting until feature creep, polish, etc. is completed before submitting. I'll resubmit once the prototype is minimally functional. My biggest problem is being a single founder; pg said he usually doesn't accept them so I'm probably dead.