Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850089

by dmvaldman • 14 years ago

68 100 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I applied as a solo founder with my project http://www.quipvideo.com, but alas I didn't get an offer for an interview. I think a big part of that is the fact that I don't have a team behind me. I don't know too many other awesome hacker types, but maybe you - failed YC applicant - are such a person, or suffer from the same problem. Perhaps we should get to know each other better?

Let's turn this unfortunate news into an opportunity to share ideas, brainstorm and meet like-minded folk. Share your thoughts in the comments.

jiganti• 14 years ago

I'm building http://moodstir.com and http://kothpoker.com. If the idea's shortcomings weren't the reason I was rejected, it was likely because I'm currently a solo founder. It seems like there are a lot of awesome teams applying and that alone is hard to compete with.

I would be happy to meet up in SF with fellow failed YC S12'ers.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Does YC gives you any kind of explanation for the rejection? Or is it just a no?

tunnuz• 14 years ago

It just says "sorry".

longcreative2• 14 years ago

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

nickler• 14 years ago

They give you the best reason for the rejection, which is quite frankly that there were a tremendous amount of outstanding applications.

While YC represents the cream of the crop, it's probably most attractive to aspiring founders who want to carve the path of least resistance to success.

The hard truth is that YC's format makes it the most useful for teams that have the best ability to leverage the strengths of its networks and advice. Technically savvy, with obsessive work ethic and the ability to iterate quickly and constantly.

The response was apt, others were a better fit. None of their reasoning should be interpreted as your team, demo, or product won't be successful.

Best of luck to all of you!

jsmith722• 14 years ago

Don't know I applied as a team and still got rejected, ummm passed over. Should I take that more personally :-). Actually they have quite a tough job to do in reviewing so many applications. I the e-mail was actually almost too nice. It would have been helpful if it had some quantitative data as in what each person thought of it as in. As in a score or something even such as, we liked you but your idea really stunk, or no technical co-founder, or don't give up your day job.

Actually open call here. I am very interested in hearing any ideas that didn't get accepted. I hope to modify my site in the next day to allow a discussion on this and to talk to others. Y-combinator is a great way it seems to develop concepts, but not the only way. If other rejected ones are like us then we should really talk to each other. Feel free to e-mail me at joshua.smith@i4edge.com. Better yet here post on this page http://www.i4edge.com/ycombinator-apply-list/ ‎

allanscu5• 14 years ago

While it would be great for founders to get quantitative and qualitative feedback from PG & team, it would be a pretty daunting task for YC partners to give a well thought out answer to the 1000+ groups.

While 1-2 sentence answer from YC could help out your company, it could open up a whole new can of worms that causes some groups to say, "but wait.." or "good idea, we can pivot...".

Their nice rejection letter is probably the best result the non-interviewees can get.

jsmith722• 14 years ago

I thought the same thing, except when they are reviewing it they must be taking brief notes like, hey my pet peeve no co-founder, or what ever. All I am saying is if they structured it to say a scale of 1-10 (as in 5 of the reviewer thought you needed a co-founder) or 5 out of 10 think the idea isn't good enough, or 7 of 10 thought the you didn't stand out, etc.

longcreative2• 14 years ago

We're building http://HuntersDB.com - a big-game hunting database with search, data and maps.

This process forced me to ask myself the tough questions and for that we are better.

markng• 14 years ago

And also forced us to make videos that make us cringe :)

linh2• 14 years ago

Didn't apply to YC but interesting idea. I thought of the same idea but there was one fundamental problem I couldn't solve. That is, the text on the side is too distracting. I hope you can think of some ways to solve that problem!

dmvaldman8• 14 years ago

That is one of the top problems! And I have many ideas. One of which is limit the number of comments by building a social networking feature where you only see the comments of people in your network. This could be Facebook, or it could be "Hacker News people" or IBM employees.

There's also user interface ways to make things less jarring.

linh2• 14 years ago

Even if you limit the comment, it is still there on the side, which means you are still distracted. I would attack the problem from an UI and UX standpoint. I know there is a website or app (can't remember the name of the website) that shows the comment ON the video as the video plays, kinda like subtitles (you can turn it off). Nonetheless, it's still too distracting for me.

Here is an idea you can play with: wikipedia for videos. So sometimes after you watched a video, you want to know EVERYTHING about it, and usually the comment are crap for factual information about the video. What you can do with that technology is allow users to learn more about the video when he or she pauses or when the video ends. Lots of possibilities here =).

chrisacky• 14 years ago

We received our rejection letter as well.

We are building a centralized platform as a service which allows vacation rental home owners and property agents to launch and create their own marketing website which they can manage from a single location. Property owners can also receive marketing and exposure on any number of sites. (We're placing more emphasis on enterprise rather than the social side that AirBnB went down). ie Agents can launch their own marketing website, manage their own property portfolio and run their own branding. Kind of like how you can launch your own Desk.com website and create your own knowledge base... on our platform you can do the same by managing your own catalogue of properties and revenue share with other advertisers who might make a booking on your behalf.

The enquiry management, booking tools and payment facilities are all built in. We haven't launched yet. Which was why this cycle would of been the best fit for YC.

http://rentivo.com/how-it-works

We will be launching soon (so no demo is available), but in case anyone knows a designer send them to the post on Baby Unicorns and Rockstar Designers I wrote this morning.

http://rentivo.com/blog/baby-unicorns-and-rockstar-designers

munaf• 14 years ago

I'd consider shortening that description a bit.

mirsadm2• 14 years ago

We applied with http://www.musicfilmcomedy.com :).

dmvaldman8• 14 years ago

This is very well done. I've gone to Coachella the last three years (before this one) and I wish I had this. Your interface is already better than theirs.

Clearly YC applicants are getting much better for them not to even give you an interview.

Where are you located, and who is your team?

mirsadm2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the kind feedback! Unfortunately the time that (I think) they looked at the web site we didn't have the scheduler implemented!

We're located in Melbourne, Australia. I was a senior software engineer before and so was my co-founder. We are in our late 20s and have both quit our jobs few months ago and could relocate. I think the applicants this time round were very strong!

prawn• 14 years ago

I'd jump to the schedule more quickly lest people think it's just another gig index. I was pretty unimpressed until I got to playing around with selecting acts in the schedule.

I like the "similar to last selected" bit though I wasn't sure if it always worked very quickly.

Also, on a typical screen, it required a bit of scrolling around to see the day plus the "next day" nav. I wonder if you could tighten things up a bit for fairly busy schedules?

Showing promise though. Don't give up.

allanscu5• 14 years ago

We built http://embark.at - the easiest way to buy and sell cruises online. We're a marketplace that connects people that like to cruise with travel agents who have awesome unadvertised deals. We have a demo video at http://embark.at

untog2• 14 years ago

BTW, there is already a YCombinator company called Embark: http://ycombinator.posterous.com/embark-s11-is-now-plotting-...

allanscu5• 14 years ago

Yeah. We noticed that a few weeks ago.

wmw• 14 years ago

We are building a realtime digital signage solution mainly powered by nodejs. Maybe we got rejected because we are from germany?

allanscu5• 14 years ago

That shouldn't be a problem being from out of the US.

mituljain• 14 years ago

I'm not so sure - historically only people from the US , UK, Canada & Australia seem to have made it in. I don't blame them - being from one of these places significantly simplifies the whole visa stuff.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Not sure why you got down voted, seemed like valid info.

Of course being twisted in the way that I am twisted, it also generated a thought about 'real time digital signage.'

There are lots of trucks on the freeway, they drive along at night from point A to point B, so how cost effective would it be to put a very high mileage car to drive along behind them and optically stabilize the projection of signage on the back of the truck? (I saw the building projections and thought, those are pretty cool) Imagine you're driving down the freeway and you see a billboard for a restaurant which is available in a couple of miles.

Trucks could do this on themselves, perhaps it would offset the cost of gas. Imagine a unit that used GPS to know where it was and an arm that extended out the back and projected on the truck a location sensitive billboard. Either way it would be a fun hack.

donw• 14 years ago

On the application instructions page, the original 'how to make a YC application video' is the pitch video for Directed Edge -- both of whom were out of Berlin.

Lukeas143• 14 years ago

I'm building http://www.iwaat.com, a search engine for web applications that I'm working to turn into a Yelp for apps. Also a solo founder looking for others to join me on this project.

If you're building a web app feel free to add it to the site.

Tossrock• 14 years ago

Sounds similar to Quixey: https://www.quixey.com/

Lukeas143• 14 years ago

Yup. They'd be the closest competitor. Although, they seem to be focused more on the technology than building a community which is my next focus.

dmvaldman8• 14 years ago

Also sounds similar to Chomp (http://chomp.com) which focuses on mobil. Apple recently bought them (http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/apple-chomp/)

Very nice interface. Where are you located?

Lukeas143• 14 years ago

Thanks. There's a number of app discovery services focused on mobile(chomp and crosswa.lk), which is why I chose to focus on webapps first.

Located in San Mateo, CA.

vashishthajogi3• 14 years ago

We are building http://listypedia.com

Listypedia is like Wikipedia for lists. It is a place for the users to find precise and concise information about the things they are looking for. It allows users to create and share lists with their social network. Few examples of the lists could be most scenic places on earth, things to carry for a camping trip, must have productivity apps for iphone, etc. The items added to the lists will be character limited precise answers. The users will be able to create protected lists that will be visible only to authorized users. Users will be able to create new lists or use existing lists and share it with their network to keep track of what they want or things that should be done as a group by using the list as a checklist.

There will also be curating features where in the list creators and also the curators will be able to control what goes in to only allow relevant content. It will also allow users to vote and comment on individual items.

Listypedia will bring in all the good features of yahoo answers, wikianswers and stackoverflow. It aims at organizing the unorganized content on the web in the form of social comments, blog posts, etc.

We are planning to launch soon in a month.

__float• 14 years ago

That's a cool idea. Unfortunately...I find the name rather awkward. Your site looks quite nice, though, best of luck :) Simply applying to YC is an achievement in itself.

vashishthajogi3• 14 years ago

Thanks for the positive comment. I have heard not so good things about the name from multiple folks. We are thinking to change it, but until we find a better one we are just going to keep it :)

trippp• 14 years ago

This looks great -- I applied with my co-founder with a social list site as well and didn't get an interview either.

Are you all in the Bay area? We'd love to grab coffee if you're interested -- it sounds like we have a slightly different twist on lists than you do and would love to meet if you're up for it. My email is trippp at gmail.

vashishthajogi3• 14 years ago

Sure. Check your email :)

int3rnaut• 14 years ago

Be positive. Stay determined. Keep Hustling.

It sucks to be rejected with anything in life, but you only truly fail if you give up. You all seem smart and there are some great ideas here; don't give up and I am sure I'll be hearing about you all in the future. :)

untog2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure this is the right question. pg repeats time and time again that the product doesn't matter, the team does. So really, the title ought to be: