The Y Combinator Experience – Remote Edition

https://magicbell.io/blog/the-ycombinator-experience-remote-edition

by mxstbr • 5 years ago

155 95 5 years ago

devops000• 5 years ago

Did you give your equity just for this? it doesn't sound a good deal on your side.

unamashana11• 5 years ago

I probably didn't do a good job in listing down all the benefits. I skipped the biggest one - the YC network. It's an amazing network that's ready to adopt new products as well as invest in them.

YC also gives you a lot credibility. If you don't have a pedigree (previous exit, FAANG network), it's your buy-in in the big league.

Besides they invest 125k, which may not sound like a lot but is a good first cheque in that can get you pretty far on it's own.

ramraj072• 5 years ago

What’s the current equity scenario again? I remember them saying it’s not fixed but what is it? And what is it practically in your cohort?

ZephyrBlu• 5 years ago

Yeah, even if you got $0 it would still probably be worth it. If you company fails you still end up with an insane network.

shash7• 5 years ago

A fully customizable notifications dropdown with a solid api sounds useful.

Note to the author: please for the love of god increase body font weight to 400.

unamashana11• 5 years ago

Ah so that was it! Thanks for pointing this out. Pushing up a fix now.

abhinav222• 5 years ago

Nice write up on your experience in YC, thanks for that.

How much do you think you get distracted by talking and listening with others in your YC network vs actually focusing on your product?

As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people

unamashana11• 5 years ago

They try to minimize the distractions (and they recommend you do too). Personally, I like being distracted a bit and mingling so it worked out just fine for me. Other than the group office hours, they don't insist you attend anything up until the demo day preparation starts.

abhinav222• 5 years ago

Thanks

yaseer2• 5 years ago

As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people

I've built things solo with my PhD (dropped out), and collaboratively in a startup.

The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing. We need to talk to people, whether it's customers, co-founders or colleagues to correct all the incorrect assumptions we've made, but can't see.

If you're building something new, there's likely to be many, many incorrect assumptions...

allenleein2• 5 years ago

The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing

I don't think talking to users can fix that. If you have the wrong vision about the product, you probably will talk to the 'wrong users' too. You’re not in the market the users think you’re in — you’re in the market you believe you’re in.

That approach will also lead you to very incremental solutions or even make you run around in circles achieving nothing. It lowers the cost of failure (downside), but also the potential impact of success (upside).

artembugara4• 5 years ago

Remote batch brought 1 more real benefit of YC: $125k.

Before COVID when you have to relocate to Bay Area this is just a living fee for a low quality house + personal spendings.

Now, 125k is almost a lot for pretty much any place on the planet. Therefore, many remote entrepreneurs can be more relaxed on raising capital. I'd say you even can decide to "bootstrap" with this money + GCP/AWS credits.

unamashana11• 5 years ago

That's right! I completely forgot about the AWS/GCP credits. Even in a realistic usage scenario, that's adding 25 - 50k to your funding over a couple of years. The legal fees waiver for upto 10k is another one.

artembugara4• 5 years ago

Indeed, we got 100k from GCP recently, and it will change a lot for our bootstrapped company.

It basically makes us "ramen profitable"

iagovar2• 5 years ago

I can live off a bunch of years in Spain for that money.

ramraj072• 5 years ago

Any suggestions? Spain has been a potential target for temporary relocation for me!

fabiandesimone• 5 years ago

Good luck with taxes in Spain.

koolba• 5 years ago

You could easily do that in the USA as well. Median income is $35K and that’s before taxes and without a corporate shell to transform some of the larger living expenses into corporate pre-tax deductions.

hashkb3• 5 years ago

True! Where I live now, that would fund my whole neighborhood working together on a startup for a year.

JoeOfTexas• 5 years ago

You know what's going to happen with that mentality brought to investors. They gonna demand lower pay rates, forcing people to move to lower income areas.

spoonjim• 5 years ago

Not really. The investors will want you to use capital efficiently. If that means hiring remote developers in the Philippines then that’s what they will want but for other applications, hiring away the $500k engineer from Google is the only way to accomplish the task.

artembugara4• 5 years ago

VC want you to efficiently spend money. Grow. Raise more. Exit. Or die ASAP

shuckles• 5 years ago

I don’t understand this point. YC lasts for 90 days. 3 months of rent in the Bay Area isn’t more than $15k more expensive than the counter factual, even ignoring ramen profitability ethos. Would you be indifferent between in person and remote YC if the remote version invested $110k at the same terms?

hashkb3• 5 years ago

The biggest one was that Ycombinator is all about raising money, and if you are not in the mindset of 'raise as much as you can, as often as you can,' you won't fit in.

This must have changed. I went through YCF #2 and we were essentially laughed at each time we mentioned staying local or becoming profitable. Literally the only thing our advisor talked about was raising.

yaseer2• 5 years ago

I'm sorry you had that experience - I would hope it's an outlier.

We're on the same W21 cohort as OP. I remember when we started, they hammered home frugality as a key trait of successful founders. One founder talk stood out - "If they have office snacks before product market fit, you know they're going to fail". W21 wanted to put that on a T-shirt.

This advice seems to be repeated all over YC's manuals, partner office hours and culture generally.

hashkb3• 5 years ago

It was not an outlier. If they're snack shaming now...

If you have snarky shirts before you have a product...

Frodo478• 5 years ago

So magicbell is a dropdown displayed with an API? $99 /month for 2000 users? I don't understand what problem is trying to solve your startup. To me it seems that you're trying to sell a library more than a service.

unamashana11• 5 years ago

It certainly looks deceptively simple. Once you factor in real-time updates with multi-device sync, things start to get challenging pretty fast. Also, that's 2,000 monthly active users. Happy to discuss on twitter @unamashana

colesantiago• 5 years ago

push notifications and state management across devices is a very hard problem, try doing this yourself.

I am glad that something like magicbell exists.

mxstbr• 5 years ago

It sounds really simple to do, but we literally spent a month or two implementing a notification inbox, browser push notifications, granular settings and permissions, etc at Spectrum. Even with all that work it was still relatively buggy!

I'm very glad MagicBell is tackling this — I never want to build another notification system myself, I'd much rather pay them to solve this problem for me!

_0o6v2• 5 years ago

Surely the one thing that should be on the Magic Bell homepage is a Magic Bell I can click on and see what this product is?

unamashana11• 5 years ago

That's a fair point. We need to setup some examples with mock API calls so we can offer a consistent state to all new visitors. In the meantime, here is a quick demo - https://codesandbox.io/s/elastic-northcutt-9pcgv

_0o6v2• 5 years ago

I don't think you (just) need to set up some examples, you need to use your own product on your own homepage.

Looks good btw.

_xnmw• 5 years ago

The hardest thing about implementing notifications for me is not the UI, it’s the rate limiting (avoid bombarding users with duplicates), intelligently handling state changes, and figuring out when to escalate to an email/sms channel. The homepage doesn’t convince they’ve solved the hard problems surrounding notifications.

unamashana11• 5 years ago

We handle state changes (and sync them real-time). We'll get to rate limiting and other features you mentioned in the coming months. We have a pretty extensive roadmap and would love to keep you posted - @magicbell_io.

ggambetta3• 5 years ago

Had some trouble scanning through the article. You have this header

Tips on applying successfully

And the next subheaders are

> Talking about my idea only from a customer's perspective
> Writing to sound impressive
> Stopping to apply after a couple of rejections

Things were confusing, I had to go back and read the small print after the first header, which says "do NOT do these things". Maybe the first headers should read something like "pitfalls to avoid when applying"? Or rephrasing the sub-headers?

unamashana11• 5 years ago

Excellent feedback! I updated the article and used the heading you suggested. Thanks.

newbie578• 5 years ago

I would love to hear experiences regarding Remote vs On-site YC. What is the magnitude of difference? How much does the average startup lose out on networking because of the lack of physical presence.

And for people from Europe, is it a net positive that the batch is remote, or is the on-site still better?

switch0072• 5 years ago

I couldn’t quite tell from the api docs but is the user’s email required? Can I just supply an external ID? I’m just wondering from a privacy point of view.

unamashana11• 5 years ago

You can use (as you guessed) an `userExternalId` - https://developer.magicbell.io/docs/browser-js#identifying-u....

That's how we built our HN Chrome extension that never asks for your email - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...

switch0072• 5 years ago

Thanks. I was on mobile and only skimmed the docs - sorry!

Cool extension. A Firefox version would be great!

dcolkitt• 5 years ago

I know from a personal perspective, I've considered applying to YCombinator in the past, but would never to the Bay Area.

This is just one datapoint, but I'm sure there are many others like me. How many businesses never launched, because our society has insisted that startups must happen in a single, extremely unlivable part of the country.

krrishd• 5 years ago

Some people around me felt that my experience bootstrapping my last business should be enough to close seed funding, but the only thing that helps close funding is the fear of missing out on your deal. I witnessed this first hand after we launched to #2 on Product Hunt. We got some good inbound investor interest, but I couldn't create the pressure needed to close funding - there was no forcing function like the demo day.

TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.

The Y Combinator Experience – Remote Edition

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