@pg I think a great one would be "b2b customer acquisition". This was one of those things that we realized was CRAZY HARD and (anecdotally) I've heard a few other YC startups who have run into this wall. Stuff like inside vs. outside sales, lead generation techniques, hiring salesfolks, adwords, etc.
Of course this stuff only applies to maybe 25% of YC companies out of the gates (tho eventually, even the consumer plays have to hire ad-sales guys).
The process for getting consumers to pay $5 is completely different than the process for getting someone to pay 25k, so I think it makes more sense to split them up. Even just focusing on lead generation would make a lot of sense, since that's one of the hardest parts of B2B sales.
A no bullshit advertising conference might be good as well. We've learned tons of stuff on network vs direct sales that took a long time to figure out, and the fact that the advertising industry is filled with less than intelligent non-engineering people didn't help that process.
Amen. I've heard a lot of people run into same issue we did (wufoo and Joe Kraus' Jotspot both talked about this issue). We started with a free product, turned a paid product and promptly said, "WTF! Why aren't people buying our premium stuff?!" It was a long learning-intensive road to get smart(er) about freemium.
You know what we should do? Get a hotdog stand, then set up shop right outside where the conference is happening. Then when people get hungry, they come out for hotdogs, and we'll be like: hey, it's mrshoe and maxklein from news.yc, so, what did the speaker just say. Then we take notes.
Then they'd invite us for the after party, and we'd blow all the money we made from hotdogs on drinks, get them drunk AND get even more information about the conference.
If you haven't before, make sure you apply for a spot at Startup School (http://startupschool.org/) this year. It's run by YC and open to non-founders.
Edit: This is of course assuming that there will be a Startup School in 2010 since it hasn't been announced that I'm aware of yet.
I realize there is probably some jest in that sentiment, but if you only want to do YC for these sorts of things then you're not in it for the right reasons.
The extra events are certainly a nice perk, but the main focus is definitely bringing something to market that people want.
People can create a startup for lots of reasons- Wanting to change the world, wanting to make a lot of money, wanting to disrupt a market, whatever they want.
That's great. I wish them well.
YC is one way to get things started. It provides a pittance of money- $15K isn't really enough to fund substantial development, but it's enough to help build momentum.
The biggest thing that YC does provide is Networking and advice. Meeting with PG et all is a great way to get good advice on how improve your product, and how to handle the trickier aspects of running a company, such as buyouts, raising additional capital, and the like.
But beyond working with the YC staff, one of the other really nice advantages is working with the YC network. There is an ever increasing group of people who have gone through the same process you are- Who know a lot about what you're doing, and often have Great advice on what to do next.
To my mind, they're one of the best reasons to join YC. The problem is, like everything else that YC is facing right now, it needs to scale. Kn0thing can't meet with 400 founders to discuss the sale of Redit to Conde Nast.. While it'd be great, that'd be his new full-time job.
Holding a conference allows him to tell the same story once, and have everyone hear it. He can take questions, and answer them for everyone, rather than having 25 people ask the same variation of a question over and over.
So to your main point- I love the conference idea, and I think it's a great value-add to YC. People might do a startup for any number of reasons, but this increases the value of YC being a part of yours.
Yes, I agree with you, however I am speaking from current experience (I'm in the W10 batch and was at the conference last night). The extras are nice perks... very, very nice perks. The networking aspect is incredibly valuable (more so than I had foreseen). Yet, I maintain that those other things won't much matter if you don't prove your salt with your own startup. I was just responding to the "do YC just to get into these conferences" statement. That's all.
I'm with the original commenter: I can make something that people want without being part of YC, but the YC networking events are not independently reproducible. Many people say that higher education is going to lose out to online programs, but that opinion is oblivious to the institutional benefits that universities provide.
YC is becoming a similar institutional organization, where membership provides value independently of the reason for membership. That has interesting implications, as pg has said that Harvard/Stanford/MIT YC applicants statistically do no better than others. I would be very interested in a comparison of YC's output to similar programs (TechStars) to see if YC has succeeded in attracting / developing a statistically "better" population, or if YC membership benefits are being squandered on an arbitrary few.
There is a benefit to having a trusted crowd, but there may be a better way to decide who is "in". OTOH, it is good business for YC to nurture companies that it has invested in.
It was a blast-- as a panelist I learned a lot from Rand (who lives and breaths SEO).
Check out his post and certainly check out: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors - it's the most definitive work on ranking factors out there. Once you grok that, it's all about psychology-- figure out what would motivate the "linkerati" to link to you (and tweet about you).
I wonder how successful SEOs actually are in reverse-engineering Google. These pretty graphs look scientific, but they are based on an aggregation of opinions.
Also the current state with the "linkerati" having disproportionate influence on ranking is natural (there have always been people with bigger influence on what others think) but they are arguably less objective than the end users, so diminishing their influence might improve search results. One way for Google to do it would be to evaluate the topic of the page / site that links to you, and make the link count for more if the source and the target page / site are consistently about the same topic.
Will these conferences be recorded, such that they're available for YC Summer 2010 companies and beyond?
I understand that people want to keep things private, and not talk to the whole world, but assuming YC continues to do well, there will be scores of companies for years to come. It would be valuable to have access to the presentations for the incoming class.
That's entirely a fair attitude, but since you'll likely end up replacing speakers, as to not repeat yourself, people will miss out of valuable knowledge.
It'd be useful to hear how Company A sold itself, not just how Companies BCD sold themselves.
I might suggest recording the talks, even if you never intend to show them to anyone.
Having the media recorded gives you the option of changing your mind later.
Referral traffic is the traffic one site sends to another through direct linking. In this case if you add up all the traffic that third party sites get from all search engines, Google is the originating site for 85% of that traffic.
It basically means that a lot of people are searching yahoo for things like "yahoo mail" and "yahoo games." Those searches aren't likely to generate referrals to sites outside of yahoo.
never say never. if there's a topic where there wouldn't be reason for off-the-record stuff, we'd be happy to stream it. it's hard to think of something right now, possibly hiring.
I think it would be hard to predict what topic people wouldn't be candid about.
But more importantly, people change their behaviour when they're being recorded. So many speakers have been 'unprofessional' (for want of a better term) in a way that they wouldn't have been if they were recorded.
The only solution I can think of is to record them without telling them, edit out the 'candid' bits, and ask them afterwards if it could be shown publicly. But that might ruin it for later speakers, since they'd know it could happen.
It sounds like it's only open to YC founders (and invited guests) based on the following: The speakers were completely open, because they knew they didn't have to worry about someone cherry picking quotes in a blog post to make them look bad.
Yeah, there were a lot of anecdotes ("one time, when I was working for company X..."). It was very useful to see concrete examples of how different companies have handled (or mishandled!) a wide range of SEO problems, but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record.
Those specific anecdotes were also really useful because they let the audience go home and do more research on their own. If someone says "a company did this thing and it worked/didn't" that's useful. But if they give you actual companies who do a great/terrible job on different things, then you can dig up a lot more information after the fact and keep learning.
I agree with everyone who said it was a great event. Thanks to Paul, Jessica and everyone at YC for putting it together.
Well there's a ton of good reasons why company X wouldn't want you talking publicly about this stuff. What if you suggested an SEO strategy and they implemented it really poorly, or even not at all? Or what if they had a really successful SEO strategy and still consider it part of their "secret sauce"?
Even when you don't have an NDA stopping you from talking about company X, you still probably want to maintain good will between you and them.
Of course this stuff only applies to maybe 25% of YC companies out of the gates (tho eventually, even the consumer plays have to hire ad-sales guys).