5 ms·
If it's the "What is your company going to make?" question, you have a problem on your hands. If you can't reformulate your pitch to be convincing and succinct
by jey 19y ago
If it's the "What is your company going to make?" question, you have a problem on your hands. If you can't reformulate your pitch to be convincing and succinct, I would bet that your idea is just not a compelling idea. So try to come up with a short and sweet pitch, and if you can't, you should really rethink whether your idea makes sense. Compressibility of the pitch is probably a good first-order heuristic for judging the worth of an idea.
If it's a different question, just delete stuff until you get it under 120 words. We just wrote too much stuff for all of the questions, then deleted the least important stuff to get it under 120 words.
These are just my talking-out-my-ass, non-expert and non-YC-partner-mindreading two cents.
- buss 19y agoI think jey is right, if it's the answer to "What is your company going to make?" then you're in trouble. You need to be able to refine your idea into something easily expressible and understandable. Our only long answer is to "What might go wrong?" Our list is a little humorous, so hopefully YC won't mind the length. Even so, it's only 150 words, so it's not too much longer than their suggested length.
- nextmoveone 19y agoIt's down to 156 from 798 (I included a real life example). The last 24 words are just links to: -the real life example -a chart showing the application process What do you guys think?
- buss 19y agoThat sounds like a good compromise. The real life example and a detailed description of the application process really shouldn't be part of the description, so I think adding them as extra resources at the end is ok. I wouldn't expect the links to be followed, though, unless you description is really good (there's just too many applications and not enough time to venture outside of the application, I would think).