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How far along are you?

How 26 YC companies answered the "How far along are you?" question from the YCombinator Application.

26 answers / 70 words on average
Demonstrate that you're on a path to success. Tell YC partners about your traction (customers/ evenue/LOIs/waitlist growth/etc). Also, they want to see you can move quickly, so tell them about your growth rate as well.

"How far along are you?" — 26 answers

Metlo(S21)

Full application

We came up with the idea ~2 weeks ago, have done 15 user interviews since then and should have our MVP up and running by Saturday (3/26) To validate the idea we also asked some of our users to pre-pay $50 (USD) to get lifetime access for Supernote and 3 of them agreed so we have $150 in revenue (bookings? Not sure how to account it, but money in the bank)

Dendron(W21)

Full application

We launched our preview June of 2020. We've hit the following milestones within two months of preview: - over 100 users in our community Discord channel - 28 very active users (people who use Dendron multiple times a day and are active on our Discord channel at least once a week) - formed a community moderator group of half a dozen dendrologist with coverage of every major timezone - have desktop clients available across all operating systems

MagicBell(W21)

Full application

We have a stable MVP delivering over a million notifications a month for two B2B apps. Here is what's already deployed: * The core APIs (notifications/preference management) * Javascript based In-app notification center with real-time updates * Email source and delivery channel * Open-source libraries for React (to build custom interfaces) and Ruby (for creating notifications and managing user preferences in Ruby/Rails apps). In terms of traction, we are signing up one enterprise lead a week through content on our blog.

Virtually(S20)

Full application

We built and launched this software in mid-November of last year. Since then, we’ve become the host for five online training programs. In total, these programs have generated $1,570 in revenue with over 200 student participants. The recent COVID-19 virus has created a surge of interest for this product and led to a large amount of interest from instructors and professors looking to build their virtual classroom. We’re doing our best to onboard them onto our software.

Prolific(S19)

Full application

We've had [redacted] in GMV in 2018 and [redacted] of that was revenue (200% YoY growth). We're already profitable. We've achieved this by building a great MVP that users shared with friends and colleagues. We're a tight-knit team of 13 (4 devs, 3 support reps, 2 data analysts plus CFO/advisor, COO, CTO, and CEO). The two co-founders worked on this part-time until 8 months ago. We have not raised any money so far.

InEvent(S19)

Full application

We have an ARR of 1,1 million USD dollars. We are growing 120% per year. We have 30 people working with us. We have customers in 12 countries. In the last 12 months 85% of our customers buy upsells or renew.

Goodly(S18)

Full application

We're building our MVP. Over a two week period we met with 40 thought leaders in the HR/benefits space, including startup founders, tech CEOs, VC's on the boards of HR/benefits companies, and HR and people operations employees in our target market to guide our product development. We started sales outreach for our alpha last Friday, by end of day Monday we had five alpha customers.

OpenPhone(S18)

Full application

In January 2018 we released the app up to the public. Since then we grew to 1,500 users. We added a paid tier 2 weeks ago and are focused on converting our free users to paying customers while continuing to grow our user base.

Slite(W18)

Full application

I wrote the first line of code 1 year ago, and the journey has been incredible. In a year, we designed and developed a real-time desktop app with a full-featured collaborative editor, with no technical debt. We built an incredible team with the right skills in product and development. I kicked-off Slite technically, built the first version of it, and found Pierre and Arnaud, our 2 first senior developers. They had respectively built a chrome note editor with more than 50K users and a B2B collaborative business plan editor. More than their technical skills and experience, the cornerstone of Slite has been our human fit. We launched our private beta 5 months ago, and with no public communication, we have a gathered a great set of beta testers, companies from 3 to 120 users, giving us incredibly useful feedback. It allowed us to fix the remaining weaknesses of the product in order to launch our public beta in October. To handle this, we are now a team of 7, with 4 amazing developers, a sales, a marketing person, and myself handling the product.

Simple Habit(W17)

Full application

I started the company in Feb 2016 and launched the iOS app in June 2016. In just 3 months, we are reaching close to 100K downloads on our iPhone app. 5% of sign-ups end up paying for a subscription that costs about $12 a month. [Redacted.] Our week-over-week growth rate is [redacted]. We are currently developing Android — expected release date for November. Simple Habit has already been featured by Apple 5 times and written about by media extensively.

bxblue(S17)

Full application

Using the good old ‘don’t scale to scale’ methodology, we have a fully functional MVP: lots of Zapier + Pipedrive + Heroku in the last 6 months. We’ve created (and are refining) an algorithm that analyses paycheck information and estimates how much a user can borrow today. Then, the user can choose between the best available loan offers and get the loan online. Fast, transparent and convenient. After that, we will also notify users of when they will have room for for new loans and how much they will be able to get in future. We’ve been growing 20% MoM in number of deals since we launched our MVP last October/2016, with a GMV of around USD 300K so far. We have been operating indirectly with 6 major banks and we are currently signing up directly with them, as finally incorporated.

Paystack(W16)

Full application

Private Beta. We are piloting with a dozen merchants and we have hundreds of merchants on our waiting list.

The Flex Company(S16)

Full application

April marks our 1 year anniversary and we’ve raised $225k. Key milestones: * We’ve run product trials with over 200 women * In the last 3 months, we’ve acquired 20,000 signups of customers who want to try FLEX * $0 spent on acquisition * We continue to grow with 1,000 trial signups each week * 25% of our signups are men

Shotput(S15)

Full application

We have a web app with a beta customer and a beta warehouse. In the warehouse, our software manages 50,000 orders per month. Our beta customer has prepaid and is shipping out 1103 orders in December.

GitLab(W15)

Full application

Over 100.000 organizations are using GitLab. , Qualcomm, NASA, Nasdaq OMX and Interpol are paying customers. Over 600 people have contributed to it. It is the most popular open source version control software. It has more installations than anything else (including GitHub Enterprise and Atlassian Stash).

80,000 Hours(S15)

Full application

We’ve written an online career guide that receives over 20,000 unique viewes monthly, up from zero in August, and up 10% over the last month. We give one-on-one advice to 5-10 people per month to figure out what users most want, and so far have advised over 200. We’ve tracked over 170 significant career shifts due to our advice. Previous users have founded 5 new non-profits and collectively donated over $1m to high-impact charities. Others have started political careers or entered high-impact research fields such as AGI safety. See examples here: https://80000hours.org/about/impact/studies-of-career-change/ Last month, we released a prototype web app to automate the first stages of our one-on-one advice. The first version was seen by 225 uniques and had 11 sign ups over a week, with an average revenue of $25 per person. It cut time per user served by 70%, and 40% of users said they changed their career plans.

Mimir(S15)

Full application

We launched the MVP of the Mimir Classroom in the Fall of 2014 (branded as Mimir Platform). Our MVP contains all of the technology to automate a classroom but lacks the dynamic course content. It currently acts as a toolbox for existing courses rather than a standalone course. We are currently 50% done in developing a version 1 of our product to replace our MVP. We are currently hosting around 350 students with our MVP. We are currently upgrading it to more scalable technology and updating its feature set based on user surveys.

Kash(S14)

Full application

We have a retailer-side app and a user side app out on the market now. We are making about $1500 in recurring monthly revenue now. Our revenue is growing at about 30% a month. Our user transactions are growing at 75% a month. Our user-base is growing at 20% a month.

SketchDeck(W14)

Full application

We're in week two of our business, but we already have our first paying client. They are paying £5 per slide we create for them and we are learning a lot about there needs. We've also had meetings with some larger consultancy firms to measure there interest for rolling out SketchDeck across their business. Feedback has been good so far. We are working towards letters of intent with them. Currently, Chris is the product. We will have a rounded tech beta in March. We make all our technology demonstrable from the start, so we can test and grow lean ‐ ensuring we are building something people want.

Cruise(W14)

Full application

In our first two weeks, we've already met with many of the smartest people in the industry to learn everything we can about what's already been done. We've acquired an Audi S4 (has electromechanical steering + looks cool) to use as our demo car, and have started fitting it with cameras and drive‑by‑wire equipment. We hope to have a demo ready it by Demo Day, but it will be just a demo. We are not launched, and don't plan to until after raising much more money. This is a capital‑intensive business.

Lollipuff(W13)

Full application

The test blog is 1.5 years old. The blog has facilitated over 200 sales, with approximately 750 bidders/buyers/sellers. We have approximately 2000 people/email addresses who contacted us through the blog. If we launched, we estimate a conservative 500 accounts will be created almost immediately. The new, automated website (Lollifpuff.com) will launch in late-October, 2012.

Standard Treasury(S13)

Full application

We're far along on regulatory/commercial contract/legal stuff. Once we have that settled, there is a lot of backend, unsexy stuff to do to make it as pretty/smooth as we'd like: settlement files over SFTP, testing required by the banking partner, automatic underwriting built on Microbilt/LexusNexus/Iovation, etc, and then launch.

Apptimize(S13)

Full application

Apptimize works and we just launched our private beta this week! We have 100+ signups but we only accepted 2 friends this week because we are working closely with our first customers to shape the future of our product. The beta has the Android library, a website dashboard to manage experiments, and a results page showing statistics and conclusions. The WYSIWYG interface will be ready in a few weeks. Our research suggested starting with Android because Android developers rely on freemium (compared to iOS who make a lot off premium) and want to AB test to optimize in-app purchases, etc. Our iOS version is coming in a few weeks.

The Muse(W12)

Full application

We had 22,000 users to our beta in September with 25-­30% growth predicted for October. We've done our first revenue deal, a recruiting contact with Uber, which was a flat fee for the job posting / "Career Concierge" newsletter plus a performance bonus for each hire sourced through The Daily Muse. That newsletter and contract begins the day after tomorrow (10/12/11).

FamilyLeaf(W12)

Full application

We plan to have a beta by January 2012.

Dropbox(S07)

Full application

Prototype - done in Feb. Beta - in people's hands now. Version I can charge for: 6-8 weeks?

"How far along are you?" — advice from YC partners

Michael Seibel (CEO, YC Core at Y Combinator)

Source

We often use the term “traction”, usually understood as “customers”. But you can get it without customers. What we really want to know is what have you accomplished in the time you’ve been working on your startup? If the main part of your business is a website and you are still in beta after two years, that is not impressive. But if you are building a rocket and have final drawings of the core engine after 6 months, that could be a big deal!

Zain Shah (Data Scientist at Opendoor, YC alum)

Source

Have a high potential of success. This can either mean there is already evidence of great success to come, or there isn’t. What’s bad here is evidence to the contrary. If you’ve already launched but have little traction, it’s often worse than having not launched at all. Done the prototype. We haven’t launched but I have been signing up customers for pre-ordering their first repair to the service at a 10% discount for the past month and I’m already at 2500 pre-paid repairs, which is about $135k in profit already.

Zain Shah (Data Scientist at Opendoor, YC alum)

Source

Evidence that you can actually build it and aren’t just building it for YC. Although, they also want to see how quickly you can execute. 2 years to build an iPhone app is too long. I’ve been working on it for about a month and already have a prototype of the iPhone app built. It’s about 1500 lines of code on the app side and 1000 on the server side.

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