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?
If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.
How 18 YC companies answered the "If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application." question from the YCombinator Application.
— 18 answers
Metlo(S21)
Full application1. Feature Store for ML 2. Consumer subscription app studio (many are very successful in Belarus, Israel, China, Florida, and Bordeaux) 3. Sourcing tool for recruiters based on data merged from GitHub and LinkedIn
Virtually(S20)
Full applicationN/A
Prolific(S19)
Full applicationIf you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.
InEvent(S19)
Full applicationNone at the moment. We are really interested in the business enterprise software market. We are open to similar ideas at them.
Goodly(S18)
Full applicationMarketplace for job applicants to find open roles at companies that offer the benefits that matter most to them.
Slite(W18)
Full applicationReally not for right now but at some point in the future I'll build the next generation of remote tool, allowing with a set of mixed reality & 360 cameras to get the proximity effect you have with your teammate across the desk. While it's really still in my mind, I'd be happy to be challenged on this one!
80,000 Hours(S15)
Full applicationNo
SketchDeck(W14)
Full applicationPulse: A lightweight employee engagement/happiness gauge that measures and advises managers how to improve their workplace SnapBet: Take a photo, choose a bet (e.g. "I'm better looking", wager £5) and be pitted against a random stranger. Third person judges, and one photo taker wins the bet (e.g. £10) Nobox: An inbox that tracks what is unread / what items are flagged as 'being worked on' and rejects further mail until you've had time to deal with the current load. This forces senders to take responsibility rather than overload their colleagues Work for Change: Connecting up homeless people with Amazon Turk and Virtual PA work, to empower them to generate an income and change their lives for the better A platform that radically evolves an entire website's design, through A/B testing for core business metrics Shazam for calories ‐ Snap the menu, get the nutritional info Automated corporate communication advice ‐ it gives an effectiveness measure against target demographics and suggestions for improvement An easy way to short bitcoins in the UK/Europe Automated personal finance advisor ‐ pulls your current account and savings account information, then provides cashflow suggestions throughout the month
Cruise(W14)
Full applicationTurbotax for mortgages DNS for snail mail Github for CAD
One Month(S13)
Full applicationAn app to send a picture to a doctor for diagnosis, a marketplace for second-hand airline tickets, reliable Wifi for conferences, a line of brain enhancing supplements, among many others.
Apptimize(S13)
Full applicationEEG machine to read babies’ minds. We like playing with our Emotiv machine, know prominent MIT/Stanford researchers, and see parallels between EEG analysis and high frequency market data for financial instruments (both systems produce massive amounts of data that seem random but aren’t). A page-less browser using crowdsourcing. It’d show logical dependencies, assumptions, relationships between ideas, and best arguments for and against each belief.
Lollipuff(W13)
Full applicationWe didn’t have any other application ideas per se. However... we do have ideas for auxiliary uses of our platform. Consignment shops (both online and off) often lack expertise in authenticating clients’ goods too. Using our authentication expertise, we could provide a service to such stores. The store could go through the authentication process in the same way as creating an auction listing. Instead of placing the item up for bid, we could generate a “certificate of authenticity” that could be displayed (and verified via a Lollipuff URL) to potential buyers. In this way, we become a trust service... much like the origins of “PayPal verified.”
FamilyLeaf(W12)
Full applicationFlower delivery business for spontaneous romance and home/office subscriptions. An exchangeable gift card. An AirBnB for audio, video, and photo equipment (e.g. sound mixers, DSLR lenses, high-end HD camcorders). A Birchbox for organic dried food. A Zappos for sports equipment. A web-based video chat client focused on scheduling meetings (great for office hours). A furniture shopping comparison engine. An API for product data from all retailers with an online presence.
The Muse(W12)
Full applicationNope :)
Make School(W12)
Full application1. Social games - we are developing a social game for iPhone called Realms at War. We hope to be the Kixeye or Kabam of mobile gaming – a more hardcore audience that is correspondingly more engaged and spends more. 2. Games that teach people real world skills or solve real world problems. We could turn a website like Omegle into a game, allowing people to rate each others' conversation ability, and have everyone compete for the title of "Most Interesting Man/Woman in the World". 3. Kickstarter, but for mobile apps. 4. An App recommendation engine, through user profiling and collecting data from their social networks we could address the problem of discoverability in the app store. 5. This or That engine. A user would input two products they wanted to buy (or two cities they wanted to visit), the system would profile you based on your Facebook and Twitter accounts and try to predict which of the two you would like more. Effectively this would be like asking your wife/girlfriend/mom for advice on what to do. 6. The precursor to our main application idea: an app academy, open only to developers in high school in college. We provide guides, help, and a community, they develop (simple) games for free, we pay artists to skin them at no cost to the developer, and we publish the games for 99c or $1.99 taking 50% of the revenue.
OwnLocal(W10)
Full applicationWe spend so much time thinking about newspapers and local advertising, that we find that our ideas can almost always be integrated into our current goals. However, here are some annoying things that need to be fixed: a clothing recommendation engine or Zappos plusAmazon for shirts and pants; online grocery shopping application with an Amazon-style recommendation engine, ie, "it's been two weeks since you've purchased milk, do you want that added to your order?"; a search or recognition engine that matches houses or cars to a unique set of user-entered values, ie, John is a traveling salesman who wants an efficient vehicle with plenty of room to install his laptop; and a kayak-style travel search for idle corporate and private jets--both for buyers and sellers.
Mixpanel(S09)
Full applicationWe’re considering entering other areas of analytics and business intelligence such as Mobile and outsourced data processing through Hadoop. After looking at your ideas page, we thought it was interesting that we might address #30: Startups for startups.
Dropbox(S07)
Full applicationOne click screen sharing (already done pretty well by Glance); a wiki with version-controlled drawing canvases that let you draw diagrams or mock up UIs (Thinkature is kind of related, but this is more text with canvases interspersed than a shared whiteboard) to help teams get on the same page and spec things out better (we use Visio and Powerpoint at Bit9, which suck for working collaboratively); some ideas surrounding better web analytics for newbies
— advice from YC partners
Zain Shah (Data Scientist at Opendoor, YC alum)
SourceIf they like you but not your business idea, any of these ideas may turn the tables in your favor. Therefore it is to your advantage to put something here. I’m sure you have other ideas.