8 ms·

Ask HN: What startups were refused from YC but became successful?

112 points by mw67 11y ago

Alternatively, what startups did the YC partners failed to see become successful, but did so?

elmyraduff 11y ago
Buffer
thom_nic 11y ago
I think SendGrid initially applied to YC before getting into TechStars. See http://www.quora.com/Why-was-SendGrid-rejected-from-YCombinator http://www.quora.com/Why-was-SendGrid-rejected-from-YCombina...
santiagobasulto 11y ago
Give me a year and I'll say: "mine" :) Edit: removed name of my startup to avoid "click-bait"
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  Please don't. I suspect, like many here, I find many interesting and useful project via posts like this. I especially dislike it when someone shares a story of their startup or project, but then doesn't include the name, so I can't put it in context. That's not to say I'm in favor of blatant self promotion, but I think people on HN are more shy about their projects than they ought to be.
  - ZoF 11y ago
    It's in his profile if you're interested.
  - davidw 11y ago
    Yes - people here ought to be proud of what they're working on. We're smart enough to tell if someone does nothing other than toot their own horn.
  - santiagobasulto 11y ago
    I agree with you 100%. But I also understand that self-promotion might be uncomfortable for some people, so I just try to be respectful with them.
    - nitam 11y ago
      Don't listen to "some people". Do what's best for your customers. If you had a cure for cancer, would you promote it?
    - brlewis 11y ago
      I am uncomfortable with you deleting the name of your startup.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        It is his company.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- pdevr 11y ago
  I think you are too modest. Saving others an extra click to your profile page: "Co-founder @ rmotr.com. Ex-CTO @ Athlete.com"
- scottydelta 11y ago
  How do I become a teacher on your platform? I am a python developer.
jklein11 11y ago
None. Acceptance into YC is the ultimate measure of success /s
arihant 11y ago
Couchbase (then CouchOne) seems to be doing pretty well. SendGrid, Buffer, Storenvy, are others that come to mind. I think that there are more founders that were rejected by YC that became successful, not startups.
- mw67 11y ago
  interesting comment re founders. probably the reason why drew from dropbox applied a second time with a different idea.
lighthawk 11y ago
I'm surprised by how few are listed here and that "successful" wasn't even defined by any parameters in the initial question and no one has mentioned that yet. Does successful mean profitable? Reached some revenue target? Has grown organically by some amount? Didn't fail?
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  I think this is more interesting if the parameters of success is kept broad.
Alex3917 11y ago
I know there was a mobile gaming company that was very highly valued, can't remember the name though.
yesimahuman 11y ago
The Ionic team applied to YC before we were Ionic (back w/ Codiqa, our visual design tool for jQuery Mobile apps). I was freaking out since they didn't email us until the day after the interview! I guess we were right on the edge. Oh well, was a fun experience and we've been successful w/o it. (for reference: http://ionicframework.com/ http://ionicframework.com/)
- sgt 11y ago
  Somehow I missed this. At first sight I figured Ionic was Yet Another Framework, but this looks potentially amazing. Will check it out.
  - tindrlabs 11y ago
    Ionic really is amazing. Their development pipeline is really smart and makes the whole process a lot more enjoyable then most other "mobile" frameworks.
  - beermann 11y ago
    Pacifica (http://thinkpacifica.com http://thinkpacifica.com) is built on Ionic. We're also featured in iTunes right now, just a note that it's very possible to build beautiful hybrid applications. While the company isn't a success quite yet, we've been rejected from YC twice as well.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  Did you find other investors, or did you bootstrap yourselves?
  - yesimahuman 11y ago
    A mix of both. After the rejection we bootstrapped for a while and were able to go full time (we're bootstrappers at heart). Later we applied to TechStars and did that. Four months after TechStars though we started working on Ionic and then raised a $1M seed round quickly since we felt we were on to something big and wanted to get to work.
nkoren 11y ago
Some friends of mine started www.overleaf.com, and were rejected by YC a while later. They haven't had an exit yet, but as far as I can tell they're doing exceptionally well.
freshfey 11y ago
Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, applied to YC with his iPhone App Dayta
MicroBerto 11y ago
I think the guys from https://www.Pay4Bugs.com https://www.Pay4Bugs.com did. I'm a user of theirs (crowdsourced bug testing for apps / websites / software)... They've been developing tons of new features and seem to be getting more and more major positive press every week. But if nothing else, this is definitely one of those 'invest in the founders' situations... Larry and CS are crazy smart and are now at that solid experienced-but-not-too-old age.
- jeromegv 11y ago
  Can you explain what is too old for you? What is the impact of being "too old"?
  - csbrooks 11y ago
    Let me guess: "too old" is five years older than whoever you ask, is.
  - MicroBerto 11y ago
    It differs from person to person, but there's definitely a point where most of us have an energy level drop-off or family commitments that make a sheer-hustle startup life far more difficult. I think the early-to-mid 30s is a perfect age for most. "Old enough to do it right, but young enough to do it all night long"
gadders 11y ago
SamA needs to do an Anti-Portfolio :-) -- http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio
- mw67 11y ago
  what would be even better is to know why they got rejected. as a founder it's always very interesting to hear rationals from smart people (whether they end up being right or wrong).
- adamzerner 11y ago
  > In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, who we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. What? I never would have thought that firms did this. And the fact that it's the first of two reasons listed sends the message that it's something they do more than just once in a while.
  - csbrooks 11y ago
    I think that would be a joke.
  - alex_sf 11y ago
    They're just being facetious. That reason is immediately followed up by: > In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet.
    - adamzerner 11y ago
      I see. Thanks.
- jcfrei 11y ago
  Wow, that's quite a prominent list...
- jv22222 11y ago
nmcfarl 11y ago
I’ll bite and say my firm CastingWords ( http://castingwords.com http://castingwords.com ) Even though just existing 9 years after the interview would have been a failure condition for our build to flip mindset at the time - but today it’s paying the founders salaries and still providing intersting challenges - so a success as we define it. And it must be said that the advice we got in our interview (that we rejected - no doubt one of the reasons we were turned down) was dead on - not just for what it would take to make the company a successful startup, but also for seeing some of the challenges in the road ahead. Just the interview was a fantastically useful. And the fact that we rejected the advice was probably a good indicator that what we really wanted out of our company was not a startup, but rather a platform to play with interesting technology and business problems and make money doing it. Startups really aren’t for everyone. YC was part of us discovering that.
- mw67 11y ago
  Can I ask what was the advice that you turned down? it's very interesting that after all this time you still consider that the interview was fantastically useful. I'll consider applying for mine just to hear their thoughts.
  - nmcfarl 11y ago
    It's fantastically useful as a touch point. It's a point that, retrospectively, the road forked and it changed who we are and what we do, and sort of defined our values. We compare ourselves, and our competitors, to the theoretical company we could've been fairly frequently. As for the advice even if it was shocking at the time it doesn't seem that scary these days. It does seem a little prescient. The big one was to ditch our largest supplier, Amazon Mechanical Turk, build it ourselves and compete with them, as our success would be limited by them. This wasn't something we were willing to do at the time, we viewed them handling those problems as a major leg up for us. However in the end much of this was correct and building our own (more limited version) was part of us being financially successful as a company. Most of the advice consisted of start up tropes, applied to our particular business. They basically told us to dream audacious dreams, do difficult things that don't scale to boot strap and build relationships while doing it. But they didn't use any of those words and did apply them specifically to our problems which was pretty helpful. But the real value was as a touchstone, and illustrating how far ahead people who are good at this can see
jojopants 11y ago
Falling into thinking that YC only produces successes because it touts a few unicorns - a few out of Thousands of companies, is Blindly falling for media hype. There are many many successes that have absolutely nothing to do with YC, whether they were rejected or not. Here are a few Non-YC & Non-YC Culture hits (non-brogrammer single founders): Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos (Worth 4.7B.. More than YC and media darling Drew Houston who's worth 1.4B) http://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/drew-houston/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/drew-houston/ Sophia Amoruso from NastyGal Deena Varshavskaya from Wanelo Tracy DiNunzio from Tradesy Pete Cashmore from Mashable Shane Smith from Vice *Michael Arrington (i believe) from TechCrunch 2 obvious "secrets" are this: 1. Nobody tells their actual secrets. 2. Real leaders don't need to be accepted by others to define themselves. No success story is going to waste time talking about being "rejected" from YC... because it's not important, and it's YC's loss, not theirs. So you can define yourself by buying into YC media hype, or you can actually open your eyes to how many successes there are that had absolutely Nothing to do with YC.
bazillion 11y ago
As a sort of real-time answer, my startup[1][2] just had a booth at the NMX/NAB show in Las Vegas and completely blew up from a user acquisition perspective, and had applied to this upcoming round without getting an interview. We wanted to sign about 8 blogs in order to cover the costs of going to the show, and wound up signing over 1200 blogs, 5 major retailers, a couple licensing deals, and a lot of smaller retailers (some fashion startups among them) whose products we could list in our catalog. I'm kind of glad that the interview wasn't even an option, since we're based out of San Diego and it simplifies the logistics of our operations for not having to move to SF for a period. Having no idea of how NMX/NAB was going to go, YC seemed like the best way to get our idea out there whilst getting their great support system. Now, we can just go heads-down in development and prepare for our June release. It's always extremely discouraging to get rejections -- we got rejected from EvoNexus[3], TechCrunch Disrupt NY, and YCombinator (twice). This pretty much tells me that I'm horrible at filling out applications. I'd like to think that if the YC partners had walked up and talked to us at our booth, we would have definitely gotten the interview. This Vegas trip was the most amazing thing that has happened since I came up with the idea of pleenq[4], because we barely had to sell the product -- people were so excited by the possibilities it would bring, and about all the monetization opportunities it opens up. Most of our customers were referrals from others who had seen our booth, and were told to "make sure they saw pleenq before they left the show". I closed every single person I talked to at our booth over the 4 days of the show, which was basically the highest form of encouragement I could have hoped for. [1] https://facebook.com/pleenq https://facebook.com/pleenq and http://pleenq.com http://pleenq.com [2] Demo of PLEENQ that we showed at NAB/NMX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wu4gaiaA7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wu4gaiaA7I [3] A San Diego-based incubator that takes 0% equity and is really great for startups with a little bit of traction [4] Pleenq lets you tag items in any image on the internet and link them to where they can be purchased
- fnbr 11y ago
  Why do you want/need an incubator? Pleenq seems like an idea that's very easy to bootstrap.
  - bazillion 11y ago
paragpatelone 11y ago
Depends on what you mean by success. If you mean being a profitable bootstrapped business there are probably tons of companies. Companies that went on raise series A and beyond some companies might be out there. However I have feeling success for YC is having a company become a Unicorn. The question to ask is which startups that didn't get into YC are now Unicorns.
will_brown 11y ago
I have been rejected each and every time I have applied, and have submitted with various ideas/projects. However, the most recent project is patent-pending software that allows drivers to hire ticket defense law firms without the need for human involvement. The proverbial...Rocket Lawyer for Ticket Defense. Our software has been live since September with a Florida Ticket Defense Firm we have seen great traction and growth (400 clients in the last 90 days), and we appear to be on schedule to offer our software to law firms nationwide starting next month. I am not sure to date this could be defined as a success in the YC sense, we have had no funding, we have had no media coverage, no VCs on the board...but there has been local market adoption of our product and the potential to scale this seems attainable even if boot-strapping. Edit: To be clear I am not saying YC defines success as funding, or media coverage...but show me a YC company that has achieved anyones definition of success without getting Funding and media coverage as a step along the way.
- FlyingAvatar 11y ago
  For curiosity's sake, what exactly is patentable about what you describe?
- Shorel 11y ago
  The only one I know (Platzi), achieved those before applying for YC.
- biot 11y ago
  How are you different from Fixed? http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking-tickets/ http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking-... In terms of traction, you got 400 people in a quarter (and how many of those routinely get tickets?) vs. Fixed's waiting list of 25000 signups from more than a year ago.
  - will_brown 11y ago
    Everything...Fixed is an App that facilitates the resolution of parking tickets fought by in-house staff (I think non-attorneys). Our software is for a driver who gets a traffic ticket and our software connects drivers with law firms licensed to fight the ticket and offer transparent pricing. The transparent/automated pricing is the basis for our pending patent and what differentiates our software. On the business side Fixed's 25k waiting list...none of them are paying customers, of those who are not on the waiting list and using the app, Fixed gets nothing when they challenge a ticket and lose (which appears to be 80% [1]), but when Fixed wins I think they get 25% of the original fine. I think more generally Fixed wants to offer "Justice as a Service" and start challenging all kinds of quasi-legal problems that do not require a licensed lawyer, which is a tremendous space and I look forward to seeing them grow. Of our 400 in the last 90 days, they are paying clients of our partner law firm, and the relationship is between the client and law firm, not us and the client. [1] http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/fixed-parking-ticket-app-not-so-great http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/fixed-parking-ticket-ap...
endlessvoid94 11y ago
How do you define "successful"?
iamwil 11y ago
Lightsail.
nickhould 11y ago
Sendgrid was rejected from YC.
pshin45 11y ago
Munchery was rejected by YC after the interview[1], and they have since become arguably the most successful and fastest-growing[2] "prepared food" startup in Silicon Valley and the US. (More than Sprig, despite Sprig receiving significantly more tech press coverage.) [1] https://medium.com/@munchery/pitch-your-life-2f170eab933b https://medium.com/@munchery/pitch-your-life-2f170eab933b [2] They raised a $28 million Series B round this time last year.
awwstn 11y ago
The team at Keen.io recently shared a fantastic blog post about being rejected on stage at YC startup school, and their success since then: https://keen.io/blog/116400439081/lessons-from-a-failed-yc-pitch-with-paul-graham https://keen.io/blog/116400439081/lessons-from-a-failed-yc-p...
- Mahn 11y ago
  > Then I jumped on Hacker News and there’s a post on “How Not to Talk to Investors” and it had two videos, and I was one of the examples of how not to do this, basically being publicly humiliated. Well, aren't we a lovely bunch. Good for him he didn't give up.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    I'd be interested to see which thread it was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172273
- MCRed 11y ago
  I think it's really useful to watch the video of the "failure". The guy explains the value add and PG is just not getting it. He didn't do a bad job of pitching, but he would be answering the question and getting to the salient point and then PG or the other guy would interrupt him to ask an irrelevant question. They kept derailing him rather than listen. I'm sure they were trying to wrap their head around it, but it's clear in the first 30 seconds that PG had locked onto "this is the same as mixpanel" and then wasn't hearing what was different. I think he did a great job of explaining it. I don't fault PG for locking onto the wrong concept-- it's gotta be hard to be up on stage like that and figure out what people are really doing with so little info and on a rushed time scale, and then do it again and again 10 times in an hour. I think the most important lesson from that is, whatever the first words out of your mouth are, they are going to flavor the entire rest of the conversation because they set the context, and it's really easy to get the investor locked into the wrong context.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

112 points by mw67 11y ago

Alternatively, what startups did the YC partners failed to see become successful, but did so?

elmyraduff 11y ago

Buffer

thom_nic 11y ago

I think SendGrid initially applied to YC before getting into TechStars. See http://www.quora.com/Why-was-SendGrid-rejected-from-YCombinator http://www.quora.com/Why-was-SendGrid-rejected-from-YCombina...

santiagobasulto 11y ago

Give me a year and I'll say: "mine" :) Edit: removed name of my startup to avoid "click-bait"

IgorPartola 11y ago
Please don't. I suspect, like many here, I find many interesting and useful project via posts like this. I especially dislike it when someone shares a story of their startup or project, but then doesn't include the name, so I can't put it in context. That's not to say I'm in favor of blatant self promotion, but I think people on HN are more shy about their projects than they ought to be.
- ZoF 11y ago
  It's in his profile if you're interested.
- davidw 11y ago
  Yes - people here ought to be proud of what they're working on. We're smart enough to tell if someone does nothing other than toot their own horn.
- santiagobasulto 11y ago
  I agree with you 100%. But I also understand that self-promotion might be uncomfortable for some people, so I just try to be respectful with them.
  - nitam 11y ago
    Don't listen to "some people". Do what's best for your customers. If you had a cure for cancer, would you promote it?
  - brlewis 11y ago
    I am uncomfortable with you deleting the name of your startup.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      It is his company.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
pdevr 11y ago
I think you are too modest. Saving others an extra click to your profile page: "Co-founder @ rmotr.com. Ex-CTO @ Athlete.com"
scottydelta 11y ago
How do I become a teacher on your platform? I am a python developer.

jklein11 11y ago

None. Acceptance into YC is the ultimate measure of success /s

arihant 11y ago

Couchbase (then CouchOne) seems to be doing pretty well. SendGrid, Buffer, Storenvy, are others that come to mind. I think that there are more founders that were rejected by YC that became successful, not startups.

mw67 11y ago
interesting comment re founders. probably the reason why drew from dropbox applied a second time with a different idea.

lighthawk 11y ago

I'm surprised by how few are listed here and that "successful" wasn't even defined by any parameters in the initial question and no one has mentioned that yet. Does successful mean profitable? Reached some revenue target? Has grown organically by some amount? Didn't fail?

wodenokoto 11y ago
I think this is more interesting if the parameters of success is kept broad.

Alex3917 11y ago

I know there was a mobile gaming company that was very highly valued, can't remember the name though.

yesimahuman 11y ago

The Ionic team applied to YC before we were Ionic (back w/ Codiqa, our visual design tool for jQuery Mobile apps). I was freaking out since they didn't email us until the day after the interview! I guess we were right on the edge. Oh well, was a fun experience and we've been successful w/o it. (for reference: http://ionicframework.com/ http://ionicframework.com/)

sgt 11y ago
Somehow I missed this. At first sight I figured Ionic was Yet Another Framework, but this looks potentially amazing. Will check it out.
- tindrlabs 11y ago
  Ionic really is amazing. Their development pipeline is really smart and makes the whole process a lot more enjoyable then most other "mobile" frameworks.
- beermann 11y ago
  Pacifica (http://thinkpacifica.com http://thinkpacifica.com) is built on Ionic. We're also featured in iTunes right now, just a note that it's very possible to build beautiful hybrid applications. While the company isn't a success quite yet, we've been rejected from YC twice as well.
anon3_ 11y ago
Did you find other investors, or did you bootstrap yourselves?
- yesimahuman 11y ago
  A mix of both. After the rejection we bootstrapped for a while and were able to go full time (we're bootstrappers at heart). Later we applied to TechStars and did that. Four months after TechStars though we started working on Ionic and then raised a $1M seed round quickly since we felt we were on to something big and wanted to get to work.

nkoren 11y ago

Some friends of mine started www.overleaf.com, and were rejected by YC a while later. They haven't had an exit yet, but as far as I can tell they're doing exceptionally well.

freshfey 11y ago

Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, applied to YC with his iPhone App Dayta

MicroBerto 11y ago

I think the guys from https://www.Pay4Bugs.com https://www.Pay4Bugs.com did. I'm a user of theirs (crowdsourced bug testing for apps / websites / software)... They've been developing tons of new features and seem to be getting more and more major positive press every week. But if nothing else, this is definitely one of those 'invest in the founders' situations... Larry and CS are crazy smart and are now at that solid experienced-but-not-too-old age.

jeromegv 11y ago
Can you explain what is too old for you? What is the impact of being "too old"?
- csbrooks 11y ago
  Let me guess: "too old" is five years older than whoever you ask, is.
- MicroBerto 11y ago
  It differs from person to person, but there's definitely a point where most of us have an energy level drop-off or family commitments that make a sheer-hustle startup life far more difficult. I think the early-to-mid 30s is a perfect age for most. "Old enough to do it right, but young enough to do it all night long"

gadders 11y ago

SamA needs to do an Anti-Portfolio :-) -- http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio

mw67 11y ago
what would be even better is to know why they got rejected. as a founder it's always very interesting to hear rationals from smart people (whether they end up being right or wrong).
adamzerner 11y ago
> In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, who we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. What? I never would have thought that firms did this. And the fact that it's the first of two reasons listed sends the message that it's something they do more than just once in a while.
- csbrooks 11y ago
  I think that would be a joke.
- alex_sf 11y ago
  They're just being facetious. That reason is immediately followed up by: > In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet.
  - adamzerner 11y ago
    I see. Thanks.
jcfrei 11y ago
Wow, that's quite a prominent list...
jv22222 11y ago

nmcfarl 11y ago

I’ll bite and say my firm CastingWords ( http://castingwords.com http://castingwords.com ) Even though just existing 9 years after the interview would have been a failure condition for our build to flip mindset at the time - but today it’s paying the founders salaries and still providing intersting challenges - so a success as we define it. And it must be said that the advice we got in our interview (that we rejected - no doubt one of the reasons we were turned down) was dead on - not just for what it would take to make the company a successful startup, but also for seeing some of the challenges in the road ahead. Just the interview was a fantastically useful. And the fact that we rejected the advice was probably a good indicator that what we really wanted out of our company was not a startup, but rather a platform to play with interesting technology and business problems and make money doing it. Startups really aren’t for everyone. YC was part of us discovering that.

mw67 11y ago
Can I ask what was the advice that you turned down? it's very interesting that after all this time you still consider that the interview was fantastically useful. I'll consider applying for mine just to hear their thoughts.
- nmcfarl 11y ago
  It's fantastically useful as a touch point. It's a point that, retrospectively, the road forked and it changed who we are and what we do, and sort of defined our values. We compare ourselves, and our competitors, to the theoretical company we could've been fairly frequently. As for the advice even if it was shocking at the time it doesn't seem that scary these days. It does seem a little prescient. The big one was to ditch our largest supplier, Amazon Mechanical Turk, build it ourselves and compete with them, as our success would be limited by them. This wasn't something we were willing to do at the time, we viewed them handling those problems as a major leg up for us. However in the end much of this was correct and building our own (more limited version) was part of us being financially successful as a company. Most of the advice consisted of start up tropes, applied to our particular business. They basically told us to dream audacious dreams, do difficult things that don't scale to boot strap and build relationships while doing it. But they didn't use any of those words and did apply them specifically to our problems which was pretty helpful. But the real value was as a touchstone, and illustrating how far ahead people who are good at this can see

jojopants 11y ago

Falling into thinking that YC only produces successes because it touts a few unicorns - a few out of Thousands of companies, is Blindly falling for media hype. There are many many successes that have absolutely nothing to do with YC, whether they were rejected or not. Here are a few Non-YC & Non-YC Culture hits (non-brogrammer single founders): Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos (Worth 4.7B.. More than YC and media darling Drew Houston who's worth 1.4B) http://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/drew-houston/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/drew-houston/ Sophia Amoruso from NastyGal Deena Varshavskaya from Wanelo Tracy DiNunzio from Tradesy Pete Cashmore from Mashable Shane Smith from Vice *Michael Arrington (i believe) from TechCrunch 2 obvious "secrets" are this: 1. Nobody tells their actual secrets. 2. Real leaders don't need to be accepted by others to define themselves. No success story is going to waste time talking about being "rejected" from YC... because it's not important, and it's YC's loss, not theirs. So you can define yourself by buying into YC media hype, or you can actually open your eyes to how many successes there are that had absolutely Nothing to do with YC.

bazillion 11y ago

As a sort of real-time answer, my startup[1][2] just had a booth at the NMX/NAB show in Las Vegas and completely blew up from a user acquisition perspective, and had applied to this upcoming round without getting an interview. We wanted to sign about 8 blogs in order to cover the costs of going to the show, and wound up signing over 1200 blogs, 5 major retailers, a couple licensing deals, and a lot of smaller retailers (some fashion startups among them) whose products we could list in our catalog. I'm kind of glad that the interview wasn't even an option, since we're based out of San Diego and it simplifies the logistics of our operations for not having to move to SF for a period. Having no idea of how NMX/NAB was going to go, YC seemed like the best way to get our idea out there whilst getting their great support system. Now, we can just go heads-down in development and prepare for our June release. It's always extremely discouraging to get rejections -- we got rejected from EvoNexus[3], TechCrunch Disrupt NY, and YCombinator (twice). This pretty much tells me that I'm horrible at filling out applications. I'd like to think that if the YC partners had walked up and talked to us at our booth, we would have definitely gotten the interview. This Vegas trip was the most amazing thing that has happened since I came up with the idea of pleenq[4], because we barely had to sell the product -- people were so excited by the possibilities it would bring, and about all the monetization opportunities it opens up. Most of our customers were referrals from others who had seen our booth, and were told to "make sure they saw pleenq before they left the show". I closed every single person I talked to at our booth over the 4 days of the show, which was basically the highest form of encouragement I could have hoped for. [1] https://facebook.com/pleenq https://facebook.com/pleenq and http://pleenq.com http://pleenq.com [2] Demo of PLEENQ that we showed at NAB/NMX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wu4gaiaA7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wu4gaiaA7I [3] A San Diego-based incubator that takes 0% equity and is really great for startups with a little bit of traction [4] Pleenq lets you tag items in any image on the internet and link them to where they can be purchased

fnbr 11y ago
Why do you want/need an incubator? Pleenq seems like an idea that's very easy to bootstrap.
- bazillion 11y ago

paragpatelone 11y ago

Depends on what you mean by success. If you mean being a profitable bootstrapped business there are probably tons of companies. Companies that went on raise series A and beyond some companies might be out there. However I have feeling success for YC is having a company become a Unicorn. The question to ask is which startups that didn't get into YC are now Unicorns.

will_brown 11y ago

I have been rejected each and every time I have applied, and have submitted with various ideas/projects. However, the most recent project is patent-pending software that allows drivers to hire ticket defense law firms without the need for human involvement. The proverbial...Rocket Lawyer for Ticket Defense. Our software has been live since September with a Florida Ticket Defense Firm we have seen great traction and growth (400 clients in the last 90 days), and we appear to be on schedule to offer our software to law firms nationwide starting next month. I am not sure to date this could be defined as a success in the YC sense, we have had no funding, we have had no media coverage, no VCs on the board...but there has been local market adoption of our product and the potential to scale this seems attainable even if boot-strapping. Edit: To be clear I am not saying YC defines success as funding, or media coverage...but show me a YC company that has achieved anyones definition of success without getting Funding and media coverage as a step along the way.

FlyingAvatar 11y ago
For curiosity's sake, what exactly is patentable about what you describe?
Shorel 11y ago
The only one I know (Platzi), achieved those before applying for YC.
biot 11y ago
How are you different from Fixed? http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking-tickets/ http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking-... In terms of traction, you got 400 people in a quarter (and how many of those routinely get tickets?) vs. Fixed's waiting list of 25000 signups from more than a year ago.
- will_brown 11y ago
  Everything...Fixed is an App that facilitates the resolution of parking tickets fought by in-house staff (I think non-attorneys). Our software is for a driver who gets a traffic ticket and our software connects drivers with law firms licensed to fight the ticket and offer transparent pricing. The transparent/automated pricing is the basis for our pending patent and what differentiates our software. On the business side Fixed's 25k waiting list...none of them are paying customers, of those who are not on the waiting list and using the app, Fixed gets nothing when they challenge a ticket and lose (which appears to be 80% [1]), but when Fixed wins I think they get 25% of the original fine. I think more generally Fixed wants to offer "Justice as a Service" and start challenging all kinds of quasi-legal problems that do not require a licensed lawyer, which is a tremendous space and I look forward to seeing them grow. Of our 400 in the last 90 days, they are paying clients of our partner law firm, and the relationship is between the client and law firm, not us and the client. [1] http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/fixed-parking-ticket-app-not-so-great http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/fixed-parking-ticket-ap...

endlessvoid94 11y ago

How do you define "successful"?

iamwil 11y ago

Lightsail.

nickhould 11y ago

Sendgrid was rejected from YC.

pshin45 11y ago

Munchery was rejected by YC after the interview[1], and they have since become arguably the most successful and fastest-growing[2] "prepared food" startup in Silicon Valley and the US. (More than Sprig, despite Sprig receiving significantly more tech press coverage.) [1] https://medium.com/@munchery/pitch-your-life-2f170eab933b https://medium.com/@munchery/pitch-your-life-2f170eab933b [2] They raised a $28 million Series B round this time last year.

awwstn 11y ago

The team at Keen.io recently shared a fantastic blog post about being rejected on stage at YC startup school, and their success since then: https://keen.io/blog/116400439081/lessons-from-a-failed-yc-pitch-with-paul-graham https://keen.io/blog/116400439081/lessons-from-a-failed-yc-p...

Mahn 11y ago
> Then I jumped on Hacker News and there’s a post on “How Not to Talk to Investors” and it had two videos, and I was one of the examples of how not to do this, basically being publicly humiliated. Well, aren't we a lovely bunch. Good for him he didn't give up.
- DanBC 11y ago
  I'd be interested to see which thread it was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172273
MCRed 11y ago
I think it's really useful to watch the video of the "failure". The guy explains the value add and PG is just not getting it. He didn't do a bad job of pitching, but he would be answering the question and getting to the salient point and then PG or the other guy would interrupt him to ask an irrelevant question. They kept derailing him rather than listen. I'm sure they were trying to wrap their head around it, but it's clear in the first 30 seconds that PG had locked onto "this is the same as mixpanel" and then wasn't hearing what was different. I think he did a great job of explaining it. I don't fault PG for locking onto the wrong concept-- it's gotta be hard to be up on stage like that and figure out what people are really doing with so little info and on a rushed time scale, and then do it again and again 10 times in an hour. I think the most important lesson from that is, whatever the first words out of your mouth are, they are going to flavor the entire rest of the conversation because they set the context, and it's really easy to get the investor locked into the wrong context.

deleted 11y ago

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