Correct me if I'm wrong, but as a startup your metrics, learnings, and progress grows every single day, which means that applying early puts you at a disadvantage from your future self, let alone from competing companies, to get into one of those 400 interview spots. YC doesn't have the time and resources to re-review 7000 applications over and over again. If you re-submit later in this application cycle, you may not get reviewed again (I've regretted submitting early in the past, after our updated video with co-founders, vs solo founder, didn't get viewed at all.) Thus even with months of application time, it still makes sense for applicants to wait until the last moment to submit. Again, comment if you know more.
Is rolling admissions an idea worth trying out for YC - all teams start at the same time, but interviewing and admission decisions don't have to?
If you have already submitted your application and then your startup has material changes to the idea, new cofounders, huge progress, etc. you can email us using this form https://www.ycombinator.com/contact/ and we will make sure to make note of what has changed since you submitted.
i think there's a hot spot if you can get your shit together a week or two early. If it's your first time, obviously your shit will not be together and you should submit last second with everybody else.
There's always spots for good startups (even at/especially at YC).
The worst thing for an investor is a missed opportunity (after all, they're looking for that 100th portfolio item that makes up for the 99 other losses).
Meanwhile, you're just shooting yourself in the foot by giving yourself a bad early impression from the get go (solo founder who didn't find a technical cofounder a few weeks later, didn't close your first customer yet so you were still pre revenue, etc.), and the difference week over week can be night-and-day for an early stage startup.
YC is great and am interested to see how their investment thesis progresses. It is an answer to Harvard/Ivy league criticism that if the teaching methodologies were as good as the institutions claim; scaling them would be a net good. Conversely, they are competitive because they do not scale them and thus Ivy schools have a finite demand and the scarcity boosts the value.
I hope YC can continue to deliver value by raising batch levels and providing support to through their satellite offering. It is difficult to replicate; or if replication is the wrong word-- provide a service consistent with their brand and values-- via a distributed network with a remote team.
In many ways since it started, I think the Stripe Atlas program is a great way to address this issue and I can see it evolving into an investment model. I hope YC has the resources to scale their efforts. Scaling is hard; a mistake hurts their brand, credibility and their companies. Success broadens their Network, their portfolio and gives them a foothold in different markets and verticals.
Good luck; and sincerely thanks for pioneering this. It is much more brave than the ivy approach. YC believes-- with good reason-- in it's mission and I'm glad they are willing to expand it's breadth with this, non profit, hard science and funding research
Yes, please do it. I am not affiliated with YC, but I have heard YC Partners mention many times that they encourage people to reapply. There was a case when someone didn't get in 7 times but got in on the 8th attempt.
There are also cases of people applying every cycle and never getting in. YC seems to be looking for sustainable companies that can be accelerated. If you weren't going to work on your company without YC, that's a point against you, as far as I know. Not a showstopper, but the overall goal is probably to fund people committed to their startup rather than fund people who might commit to a startup.
The application process is valuable beyond simply getting accepted, though, so it's worth doing.
take everything said here with a grain of salt. as a fund, they naturally want to maximize their deal flow, so they are incentivized against advising you not to re-apply (if you aren't accepted this time, it's mainly your time that's wasted, not theirs).
Are decisions going to become rolling? i.e. if a company applies now, rather than the night before applications are due, ostensibly they are at a disadvantage because they should have shown some kind of growth (even if in just understanding of the problem) over those 4 months.
I was doing Startup School online this year with MLJAR (https://mljar.com - it is Machine Learning as a Service) - the progress during school was huge. I am very curious how the acceleration after stationary YC will look like :)
Pure Amazon reselling, about 300k revenue in 2016.
I would love to run a tech company, and code on the side and to some extent code tools for my business, but I feel safer in a business that's actually bringing in money.
That's lifestyle business, not a startup. It's a great way to live and maintain your current lifestyle.
I am not a VC, however if I was I would be looking for businesses that can generate 10x the investment in few years.The margins are really really thin in your business and its hard work
We run a startup that helps sellers like you scale up and move to "Seller fullfilled prime" because that's where the profit margin is slightly better
I'm currently in the SFP trial but not too excited about it.
I absolutely want to be grossing $3 million a year in a few years and think it's realistic. There are plenty of motivated $3 million/year sellers and I've met a few.
But I agree there's a limit on growth. Looking at the top few companies, that limit is about $100/million a year in gross revenue.
As revenue increases margins tend to decrease, but at my level I'm able to make 20% net margins and I know some bigger sellers who are also at those margins.
I guess it doesn't compare to 90% margins of software, but nothing can.
I started last year with 10k in the bank and ended with around 100k. I know I made 30k or so from various unrelated stuff, but the 20% number is realistic.
if I were you, I wouldn't apply for funding. I would just go ahead and scale it.
For our startup funding is life or death situation. The number of users is overloading our CPU and if we don't scale up, everyone leaves.
I would love to avoid approaching VC's and spending months talking to them, demoing them products etc. I would rather be working and scaling up my own product
Yes I am profitable but I can't take more users and I might lose the existing ones because the system is overloaded and the accuracy of ML algorithms are laughable.
> I would love to run a tech company, and code on the side and to some extent code tools for my business, but I feel safer in a business that's actually bringing in money.
It looks like you and ikeboy would be competing in the same space, but they have actual experience as a customer for the problem that needs to be solved.
ikeboy: Skip YC, study marketspace tooling, refine using your existing business to dogfood, sell those tools as a SaaS. Buy me a beer if you get rich.
I've been thinking about that for a while, actually. Existing services are pulling in 6 figures of subscription fees monthly (e.g. Tactical Arbitrage, thousands of subscribers at $100/month). But I couldn't build something like that alone, would need to be a team and there's no way I could manage that kind of complex software and also run a reselling business.
I try to be the encouraging voice on HN, so here goes my pitch:
I think you could most definitely build it alone. Start with an MVP. Don't know enough code to build an MVP? Learn to code. Ruby or Python IMHO. Once you've got an MVP, dogfood part of your business through it. Iterate. Slowly, run more of your business through it. Once you're driving your entire business off of it, start selling it to others. You have the perfect testimonial: "We run our 300k/year business off of the platform, and its the core of our business".
You don't know what you can do until you try. Try.
Thanks for reporting it. We use javascript to calculate FBA on the extension now and use Amazon API in our site.
The Javascript is unreliable because it parses the item dimensions from the page. We can't use API on the extension because we had way too many downloads and the Amazon API is throttled.
We are working around both issues and our next update will have more precise calculation
Anyway, the idea I've been applying with is in my profile, but I didn't do much work beyond get a site built. I think it has potential but without funding I'm not going to stop what I'm doing and do that.
We were in a similar spot, and applied and got through to interview stage twice, once in 2013 and once again in 2015. We went to the interview in 2013 and didn't make it, and we had reasons to not follow through in 2015.
Everyone I have talked to who went to YC said it was great. They've accepted older/mature companies in the past (Quora as an extreme example), who have joined purely for the network and the mentorship.
We decided not to go with it for a few reasons:
* Over the years we had gathered a couple of angels in the cap table. And YC was unlikely to budge from their $120k@5m terms for us, which would have ruffled some feathers from the others.
* We'd outgrown (ie us cofounders as individuals) the "hustle or die for my startup" mentality -- being a profitable business where we make our own rules was nice and valuable and we are extremely happy with it. We don't want to live as the stars of a Silicon Valley episode, it's nice watching from the sidelines in a profitable, fun business.
* I did not have a US visa at the time and it would have been a logistical nightmare to colocate with my team in Mountain View, which is (was?) non-negotiable to YC. Americans underestimate how much of a showstopper immigration to their country can be.
>* I did not have a US visa at the time and it would have been a logistical nightmare to colocate with my team in Mountain View, which is (was?) non-negotiable to YC. Americans underestimate how much of a showstopper immigration to their country can be.
A very valid point that you bring up and it's not even to do with the current political climate.
My co-founder left US and moved to Australia with me. There are plenty of people like him (and even my wife) who are pretty adamant to not even visit US, even for a day.
We used to live in Brooklyn and the number of times we saw/heard gun violence is staggering.
Once you get used to the ultra-safe communities like EU/Australia/Canada you can just wonder why would you even think about visiting US risking your life and your families life?
> Once you get used to the ultra-safe communities like EU/Australia/Canada you can just wonder why would you even think about visiting US risking your life and your families life?
This is why I love Waterloo, Ontario. You can walk around the sketchiest allies at 2 am in the morning and feel safe.
I don't have a website yet. But I'm working on a CMS for AMP websites.
It's also an AMP generator, you pass it an URL and it returns an AMP version of the website.
Is rolling admissions an idea worth trying out for YC - all teams start at the same time, but interviewing and admission decisions don't have to?