That's a really good point. When early-stage founders aren't technical, the time/ability they have to "[build] what they should have made" is essentially constrained by whatever change budget is in the contract they have with their outsourcers. And in my experience, a change budget is set based on an (optimistic) estimate of the time needed to add a few unexpected features. It's certainly not enough to allow for major shifts in focus.
Great point - Often times, even after launch, startups haven't reached product market fit, and having a technical co-founder that can iterate the product according to the evolving vision is key. I recommend reading Eric Ries' Lean Startup methodology for methods of finding product / market fit.
You get an email when you don't get in with a nice couple of lines explaining why.
Our email came in the early hours of the morning. I'd encourage you not to respond to it, at least for a few days. I felt compelled at the time to send a few paragraphs the next morning responding to some of the criticisms. Retrospectively it probably wasn't that all that useful to anyone.
It must be an exhausting 3 days for the YC team. I don't think there are enough hours in the day for them to call all the unsuccessful interviewees. Especially when some of them (like us) will want to take more of their time responding to feedback.
The quantity and quality of the questions and feedback you get in the short 10 minute interview alone is brilliant. Even though we didn't get funded it's had a massive impact on the way I think about things. I'd fly out from the UK to do it again even if there wasn't any chance of funding.
Despite being given the same advice by others that had been through the process we still foolishly wasted time preparing a short 1 minute pitch.
We might have had a better result if we'd invested more time in getting the user experience in our demo right and answering the one critical question - "Why would people want this?"
That actually goes for investors in general, from what I can tell. Biggest mistake we made with the first investor that invited us in was assuming that he knew what we did. (One of his associates apparently had said that he should talk to us; he'd never looked at our website.)
In the case of YC interviews, that paragraph that says what your company does is buried in the thousands of pages of text that are going across their eyes during the screening process. Don't expect them to remember it verbatim. ;-)
I think its incredibly foolish to try to get funding for something that has no basis in reality yet. That's what a demo really is -- a toe-hold. But that toehold is usually enough to know whether a team can make it a reality, and whether they have a chance in the real world.
There's so much competition from great teams that it may well be a waste of time without showing your best.
I understand but Paul Graham really makes an emphasis on the team, and that a demo is not required. I mean there has to be a way to prove that that the team can produce what they claim: past work, past startups, etc right?
I think YC is sufficiently competitive that teams without a demo (on the application) will not even get an interview. Also (I believe it has been said), the two weeks from when you're notified to the weekend of the interview should be sufficient to produce some kind of early stage demo. Your startup idea might be unfit for YC if you can't at least have something to show in two weeks of fervent work.
Thanks for the advice. I was under the impression that the demo would be unimportant, and since I'm in school right now, I thought I'd go slow at it unless I am accepted.
I can whip up something in two weeks easy (even with school), but I didn't submit a demo in the application because I didn't think it would be necessary, so I focused on developing the idea instead.
I guess what my situation was that I could balance school and the application, or school and the prototype. While I had an urge to work on the prototype I always felt guilty because frankly the application has a deadline, the prototype does not. Actually after the application deadline I was able to get back to the prototype.
What approaches do other OAuth providers take to this problem? Revoking all OAuth tokens on a password change/reset takes away a good chunk of the value that many people get from using OAuth.
Every OAuth site has a "log in with Twitter" feature, correct? Maybe Twitter could organize things such that, when you change your password, you're automatically logged out of every OAuth site?
Agreed, but would it be difficult to have a checkbox marked "revoke all permissions to use my account from all applications" to the reset password menu?
Heroku is the only business critical service I use that makes me smile almost everyday. I wish my telephone company, ISP and bank could provide such an excellent product with the same levels of customer service.
This week I finished migrating the last of my clients' applications over to Heroku from SliceHost. This has dropped the hosting fees for most of them down to zero while at the same time really impressing my clients with significant speed increases. I might have been able to get the same performance increase out of SliceHost if I was more skilled at sysadmin but I'm not a sysadmin.
The costs have dropped to zero for many of the smaller low traffic sites because they don't currently need more resources than those provided by Herkou's basic free service. We can boost the resources almost instantly as and when they need it.
If they are fairly low traffic sites with small databases (< 5 MB) that don't require SSL or more than a daily cron, they should fit within the parameters of a free plan - i.e. "blossom" database server, 1 dyno, etc.
Our approach is to respond to RFPs with a fixed-rate proposal development fee.
Anyone that's good enough to be in demand should do the same. Clients that expect you to do work for free will probably turn out to be difficult people to work with in the long term.
Do people tend to actually pay you to develop proposals? Or is that just your way of turning down RFPs?
I make this same observation every time the spec-work argument comes up (if you haven't picked up on it, I'm also not against spec-work):
When we were just getting started, lawyers from WSGR and another firm spent literally hours on the phone with us, for zero money and no promise of ever being compensated, presumably because the fact that they're willing to be that cool to work with costs them very little and makes them incredibly attractive in the long run.
I guess the main reason this works for us is that we prefer smaller projects. We don't aspire to being a huge consulting company / agency taking on bigger and bigger projects. We like working on small projects that grow into bigger things.
Just be aware that you're not only restricting the size of the projects you take on, but also the selection of clients you have to work with. Some very excellent projects will require competitive proposals for you to get in the door.
I find it amusing that they actually seem to think $60 is the right price point for "students, hobbyists, individual developers". How out of touch with the community can you get.
Looking at their visitor stats (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wolframalpha.com/) I'd guess they have unused capacity for at least 2MM queries a month if back in May each visitor was hitting it twice. I don't get the impression they are using an infrastructure that they only pay for on demand.
If they want anyone to use their API (or their service as a whole) they should give away at least 1000 queries a month to the first 2000 developers that sign up.
One of the most significant bits for me:
Seedcamp do plan to open source their funding documents.