All Questions
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- Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founder(s).
- Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder?
- How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
- Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together.
- Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved.
- Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
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- How far along are you?
- How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time?
- When will you have a prototype or beta?
- How many active users or customers do you have? How many are paying? Who is paying you the most, and how much do they pay you?
- We're interested in your revenue over the last several months. (Not cumulative and not GMV).
- Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate?
- If you are applying with the same idea as a previous batch, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea?
- If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it.
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- Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
- What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
- Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't?
- How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
- How do users find your product? How did you get the users you have now? If you run paid ads, what is your cost of acquisition?
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- Have you formed ANY legal entity yet?
- Please list all legal entities you have and in what state or country each was formed (e.g. Delaware C Corp, Mexican SAPI, Singapore Pvt Ltd, etc.).
- Please describe the breakdown of the equity ownership in percentages among the founders, employees and any other stockholders. If there are multiple founders, be sure to give the equity ownership of each founder and founder title (e.g. CEO).
- Have you taken any investment yet?
- How much money do you spend per month?
- How much money does your company have in the bank now?
- How long is your runway?
- Is there anything else we should know about your company?
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time?
How 28 YC companies answered the "How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time?" question from the YCombinator Application.
— 28 answers
MagicBell(W21)
Full applicationAbout six months, of which the last month has been full time.
Dendron(W21)
Full applicationI left my full-time job at Amazon to work on Dendron. The first year was split between doing consulting work while working on Dendron. Starting February of 2020, I've moved to working full time on Dendron. Knowledge management has been a lifelong obsession of mine and I use Dendron to manage a corpus of +20K note
Metlo(S21)
Full applicationWe had the idea ~3 weeks ago. Since then, we've done 15 user interviews and are on track to ship our MVP by 03/26 to our first few users. Akshay has been working on this full-time for 2 weeks. Shri has been working nights and weekends for the last 2 weeks and full-time for 2 days (all the PTO he could take right now).
Virtually(S20)
Full applicationI’ve been full-time since leaving my software engineering role at Facebook in March of 2019. Since then, the company direction has changed 2–3 times after valuable insight from customers until eventually settling on this iteration in mid-November, 2019.
InEvent(S19)
Full applicationFull time for 4 years, all 3 founders. We will hit 5 years on November 4th, 2019. We have a commitment to work on this at least until 2030 or 1 billion in revenue, whichever comes first.
Prolific(S19)
Full applicationBoth of us have been full-time only the last 8 months and part-time (during PhDs) for the preceding 4 years. We've effectively used our PhD programs as incubators to get Prolific off the ground.
Goodly(S18)
Full applicationWe quit our jobs at Rippling four weeks ago to work on this full-time.
Slite(W18)
Full applicationFull-time, I have hard times being part-time on something ?
Simple Habit(W17)
Full applicationWe've been working on the company for 8 months (since February 2016). We have ~40k lines of code for all our platforms combined.
bxblue(S17)
Full applicationAbout 12 months. Full time.
Paystack(W16)
Full applicationSince Nov, 2014
The Flex Company(S16)
Full applicationI’ve been working on FLEX for over 1 year. Our product is fully designed and ready for manufacturing. We have a supplier contract drafted and we’re currently working to close with a North American contract manufacturer. * In April, we launch preorders * In September, we ship to customers * In 2017, we expand to retail
Shotput(S15)
Full application~5000 lines
Mimir(S15)
Full application1 year and ##k lines of code
GitLab(W15)
Full applicationSince 2011, over 10,000 commits, see http://contributors.gitlab.com/
80,000 Hours(S15)
Full applicationWe started working as volunteers in November 2011. Since July 2012, we’ve had about three full-time staff on the project. The latest version of our website has 20,000 lines of code and our prototype app has 700.
Kash(S14)
Full applicationWe’ve been working on our product for nearly 18 months. We’ve written just over 80,000 lines. We’ve processed 179,156 transactions already.
SketchDeck(W14)
Full applicationWe have paying clients, for whom Chris manually converts sketches to slides. David is coding an iPad interface to automate this ‐ it's currently a small codebase (< 1,000 lines) David has previously worked on a number computer vision projects before with applicable technologies. David also wrote 15,000 lines of code last year for our previous startup, Datoral.
Cruise(W14)
Full applicationWe have been working for about two weeks (started roughly mid October).
Apptimize(S13)
Full applicationWe started in January, and Apptimize is currently ~8K lines of code (not including libraries, html, or css) and works end-to-end. The frontend is JS, CSS, and Angular. We’re on EC2 mainly using PostgreSQL, nginx, and Netty/Java.
Standard Treasury(S13)
Full applicationPre-development. We've incorporated. I'm still at Stripe. Dan's still at Giftly. It didn't make sense to start until one of the banks signalled a willingness to sign a commercial agreement as their was nothing to integrate with. Ready to start now. Raising money because of non-trivial commercial and regulatory costs. Far along with recruiting the rest of the early team and considering raising a seed round.
Lollipuff(W13)
Full applicationThe proof of concept evolved from a blog (HerveLegerObsessed.com), which was started in January 2011. The new effort (automated, multiple designers, own brand) started in late-June 2012. Our Django application has ~5 kloc python (application code), ~1 kloc javascript, and ~3 kloc HTML / CSS. We also rely heavily on several third-party open source libraries.
One Month(S13)
Full applicationI've been working on a web app since November and `rake stats` shows me 615 lines of code and 415 lines of test code. How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If you're launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)? The web app is live – it allows users to sign up to access videos, lecture notes, tracks progress and generates certificates – and serves around 500 unique users per day. As we're still bootstrapping, all of our users come in and pay through other educational platforms like Skillshare, Udemy, General Assembly, and Appsumo. Upcoming features include payment processing through the app, multiple paths to build different kinds of apps, and the ability to see progress on a user-by-user basis. So far over 6,000 users have paid between $20-50 each to sign up and the feedback is incredibly positive. We've generated over $80,000 in revenue with almost no cost. When we opened up the most recent class, 3,000 paid users signed up in two weeks (40% growth week over week versus previously).
Make School(W12)
Full applicationAs of October 2011, we have: -Begun contacting solo developers of promising but ugly existing apps on the app store. -Begun contacting artists willing to work with these developers for free and share revenue. -Begun development of a very simple game that we will publish with and without high-quality graphics, so we can accurately measure the impact of production value on sales. By December, without needing to build to full site, we will have tested the essence of our site: matching talented engineers with talented artists, publishing the results, and taking a share of the revenue.
FamilyLeaf(W12)
Full applicationWe have not started building yet.
The Muse(W12)
Full applicationOur beta site is up and running at http://www.thedailymuse.com with a minimum viable product based on attracting the userbase necessary to hit the ground running with our job products. We are launching our first career newsletter Wednesday with a paid placement by Uber and are working on the outlines for our predictive job products.
OwnLocal(W10)
Full application7 months and 2834 lines of Ruby, SQL and sh, plus a large but uncounted volume of HTML templates.
Dropbox(S07)
Full application3 months part time. About ~5KLOC client and ~2KLOC server of python, C++, Cheetah templates, installer scripts, etc.