Rejected for YC and still feeling awesome

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4792940

by buro9 • 14 years ago

30 18 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The company I'm working on is receiving a lot of support right now. We needed £30k to get a 9-12 month runway and in the last week our users have pledged £90k with a couple of organisations pledging another £20k+.

This is really emboldening, if you have users you can draw strength from, an idea so validated and working that you can draw from that... then do it. Remember what you're working on and why.

That's the only thing matters, to do today that which needs to be done to move your work forward and get that successful business built sooner.

I hope all of the those who received the email join me in digging even deeper today.

duiker101• 14 years ago

Aaaand.... what company is it? If it' s possible to know. Good job anyway this is the right attitude!

buro96• 14 years ago

It's called Microcosm. http://microco.sm/ *

Working on discussion boards. Like tumblr, for forums.

We already run some forums based on vBulletin, XenForo, Vanilla, etc... and have ~300k monthly unique visitors, ~40k registered members, ~15k active (each month) users, and mailing lists of ~25k.

Forums being one of the oldest things on the internet (usenet) and one of the most resilient.

But we're not making this forum or that forum... those are muffins and we're building a muffin making machine. A hosted platform to build great forums.

The whole business came out of user demand. Frustration at the stagnation of forum software and what users have to do, and how they have to compromise to make a community work on such software.

We (the users and I) started to ask "What if we..." instead of "How do we work around this limitation?". Where we've ended up isn't technically impossible... it's just a lot of work. But they're really excited by it, as am I, and the first mockups have all been built with a lot of feedback from them and their response has largely been:

That mock-up thing is rad as fuck! Hurry up and get some bank details or something up so I can blast some patron money in your direction!

The fundraising is to help support the building of it (stipends for people to work on it, rent for a small office, etc), and the users themselves are asking for hack weekends so that they can come in, and pool 20 people's effort into pushing it along.

But still, the YC application was borne out of hope that we could move even faster. We make a profit already from affiliate fees, and there's a lot of money in hobbies... we just want to get the first real version out of the door and into the hands of the users.

* The LaunchRock page is just that... because we're already working with users most of what we've focused on has been in-person stuff from our office near London Waterloo. We haven't yet felt a pressing need to spend time on a pretty landing page.

d0m• 14 years ago

Obvious question but still worth asking: what about the other 'Hosted Forum Services?' (I know absolutely nothing for this domain, but with a quick googling I came up with a couple services such as http://www.proboards.com)

If you compare it to tumblr, I guess it has to do with the way a user can follow multiple ones at the same time? As such, would it be a little like "Reddit for forum?"

IsaacL• 14 years ago

Interesting... so is this going to be "a better PHPBB / IP.Board / Forumcircle" or something much more customisable? It sounds like the latter, but it would be interesting to hear how that would work.

A good plugin architecture, and ecosystem of plugin writers, would probably be key, at least down the road. My recent freelance projects have been in Wordpress and Magento and IPBoard ... all powerful frameworks with a rich amount of plugins available. Makes for tedious dev work though -- "here's a plugin that does 90% of what the client wants, let's just randomly change PHP code I don't understand until I've implemented the other 90%". If you can fix that problem, that'd be something special.

nurik• 14 years ago

I love that idea!!!

Sherrilbfx• 14 years ago

That's the right attitude to have. You only fail by giving up.

dsugarman• 14 years ago

"Remember what you're working on and why."

The same goes for if YC invests in you, you are not magically not a startup. YC does not solve all of you problems, you do. If getting rejected makes you stronger, then you are on the right path and don't let anyone say you aren't. YC does have this skill for finding really strong founders, but any partner will tell you that they have missed out on plenty of great founders and companies.

If you get rejected here or anywhere else, understand that this is expected and has happened to everyone. Grit is one serious indicator of success.

brackin• 14 years ago

YC is amazing because you have the time to just build, saying that it doesn't make all of the companies but if you give up after not getting in then they made the right decision. Drew Wilson would still have done well. Keep building and as you say once you have traction talk to angels or other incubators like 500Startups.

PrinceGeo• 14 years ago

Entrepreneurs must celebrate their failure, it will temper their character and pave the way for great success, but this failure must be an outcome of quick failure. Learn how to fail quickly :)

Thanks!

Rejected for YC and still feeling awesome

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