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?

I'm working in this field because its something I've been trying to solve for myself over the last decade. In that time, I've created a solution that has almost completely solved "information overload" for myself in domains that I care about. I now want to bring that solution to everyone in the world. Knowledge management tools of the past fifty years allow users to input more information in expanded formats. But when it comes to getting information back out, we are still stuck with the same set of primitives as people in the fifties (keyword search, tags, and folders).

I am working on MagicBell because it's a problem faced universally by B2B apps, and one I have experienced personally at my last company - SupportBee, a shared inbox product. There, we deliver over a million notifications a month to our users. Before MagicBell, we spent a significant amount of time writing code to figure out whom to notify (based on the activity and their preferences), delivering the notification via email, and providing customer support when it wasn't delivered timely. When our users asked for an in-app notification center and mobile push notifications, we realized that we'd have to do a lot more work, especially if we wanted to avoid duplicates across channels. We talked to other companies at our scale and validated that they struggle with this problem too. Instead of solving this problem just for SupportBee, we decided to build MagicBell.

How we came up with this idea: Our goal for YC build sprint was to figure out what we want to make, launch a product and get 1 paying customer. We didn’t quite accomplish that but we spent a lot of time talking to our friends who work at smaller companies (Series A/B) and non-tech F500s (Boeing, Medtronic, UnitedHealth Group) about their workflow and problems. Among all our conversations (27 convos), 4 people who were Data Scientists at startups brought up that they “could be managing our notebooks much better”. Shri works in python notebooks a lot at Facebook so he knew that they had a pretty good solution to the problems our interviewees brought up and Akshay made a lot of the data infra for Uber’s marketplace experimentation team so he knew how to make the back-end. We went back to the 4 DSs and pitched them Supernote -- they liked it so we did 11 more interviews with people we knew. We asked them to pay us $50 for life-time access to the product. 3 out of the 15 people paid us (1 of them is a close friend though) so we decided it was a good idea and we should work on it. Domain expertise: Shri knows exactly what product we need to build because he’s a power user of Bento notebooks and ANP (internal tools) at Facebook which is what we used to validate our idea with customers. Akshay did a *ton* of data work at Uber and knows exactly how to make the back-end -- otherwise we couldn’t get our MVP up in 2.5-3 weeks. How we know people need what we’re making: As described above we validated it with a bunch of people and got some pre-sales. Additionally, Facebook and Uber both have fairly large teams that work on these powerful notebooks as internal tools so we’re confident that there’s a real need here.

For the past year, I’ve built intimate relationships with 30+ influential content creators and online educators. From them, I’ve learned the pains of building an internet business. We originally built this software to power our own training programs, but over time we had clients reach out and ask if they could use it to host their own classes/memberships. As such, we’ve generalized the software so that it can be used by any individual/organization.

We saw how enterprise software is slow and bulky and outdated. We selected events and marketing, but we could work with anything related to enterprise software. We believe there is a long term opportunity here to build a billion dollar marketing and events CRM platform.

In the first year of my PhD I had a hard time finding participants for my research – there simply wasn't any decent site or service that could meet my needs. We then realized that my colleagues, and my broader network, had the same problem. I've recently completed a PhD in this area. In fact, being a PhD student was a great help to building the business, because I was the target customer. I was going to conferences, constantly learning what the biggest pain points were and what the ideal solution would look like. I also spent time at various institutions abroad, including at Columbia and Stanford Universities, developing deeper insight into what researchers care about. Our MVP, and many of our early Prolific researchers came from these in-person conversations, and the MVP quickly gained traction as a result, and has now spread far beyond my network! I know people want the product because: 1) I need it! (I've published research using data from Prolific, which I couldn't get anywhere else) 2) we have thousands of paying customers who are advocating for us and referring colleagues and we're seeing the resulting network effects: Researchers recommend Prolific at conferences, in their results, and online, without any Prolific staff being involved (just search for "prolific.ac" on Google Scholar) and 3) we're seeing new market segments we haven't explicitly targeted using our product. 20% of our customers now are from companies running market and user research and they're getting in touch regularly to request features specific to their use case.

We picked this idea for three reasons: Idea: Goodly came from Greg's personal experience with student loans. After Greg's father passed away unexpectedly due to a heart attack, he had to borrow $80k in student loans to pay for his education at Dartmouth. After moving to Silicon Valley to work for a startup, he saw the war for talent and how challenging it is for tech companies to hire a diverse workforce. Need: - 44 million Americans hold $1.5 trillion in student loan debt (300% increase since 2006) - 70% of Americans graduate from college with debt - Average borrower owes $37,127 - 22 years (average time to payoff) - 1 in 4 student loan borrowers are in default - 37% have missed at least one payment 49% of millennials prefer student loan benefits to a 401k and 53% would consider a salary cut to have this benefit. 86% of employees said they'd stay with a company for at least 5 years if their employer helped pay down their student loans. Goodly bridges the gap between the demand for this benefit from employees and the cost and complexity of administering student loan benefits for employers. Domain expertise: Hemant and Greg gained deep domain expertise building and selling HR/benefits software at Rippling. They started working together a week apart, before Rippling launched or had customers, and helped build the company from the ground up. Hemant built over 100 of Rippling's integrations. During YC W17, Greg worked with Parker to develop and execute Rippling's go to market and first sales strategy. Greg had a 75% close rate selling Rippling's HR/benefits software.

Before starting OpenPhone, I was building mobile products for over half a million trade contractors at Joist.com. I observed that contractors who looked more professional, followed up with their customers, and were more organized, earned noticeably more money. I also noticed that almost all of them used their personal phone number for business and hated doing so. For them that meant: Giving out their personal number to strangers Not knowing when a call is personal or for business No way to share a business phone with partners or colleagues Phone constantly ringing off-hours All personal and business interactions mixed up and impossible to search for This problem impacts almost all small business owners and a quick analysis of search volume shows that 2 million people search for small business phone systems every month just in North America so people are already looking for a solution. We are the right team to go after this problem. Daryna has a lot of experience building communication products for businesses. She launched and grew Vidyard GoVideo to 200k+ users. We both love building products that simplify complex workflows and make technologies that are inaccessible or hard to use, simple and accessible to everyone.

I launched Slite because note is an evidence to me. Like Chat went from private sphere to business sphere with software like Slack, I'm convinced Note will spread from consumer to businesses. Note is more than writing, it's holding our personal knowledge, and nothing is as powerful as sharing knowledge. That's why we're building Slite: to have 1 place for teams to make the content that matters to them both transparent and easily accessible.

We’ve all struggled in our own dating lives and know the feeling of having no clue what to do next. Questions like, “What’s the first thing I should say?” or “Why aren’t they texting me back?” are just a couple examples of the many worries we’d anxiously mull over. We spent years dissecting dating and learning the skills piece by piece, most of which sounded unnatural to us. We went out every weekend to bars, clubs and parties. We spent over $20k on seminars from various high-profile dating coaches, and countless books/blogs/videos. Some were helpful, some were actively harmful, and sadly we didn’t know which were which at the time. The skills and confidence eventually clicked for us, but looking back, we saw no reason why this had to be a grueling 10-year process. We wanted to help others figure it out much faster and cheaper. Liron and Lior started blogging about texting techniques. Lior also coached dating professionally for in-person clients. Today, we are seeing many more people in the same position we were in 10 years ago. We believe these people and many others are suffering because they’re unsatisfied with their dating lives and don’t feel like they have anywhere to turn to for help. They either can’t afford or trust a dating/relationship coach, or they don’t know how to apply generic dating advice they consume online or in books to their own lives. We want to be the place people trust to get reliable, affordable, and instant dating/relationship advice. We hope to change how people date and have relationships for the better, both personally and culturally, leading to strong bonds, less frustration, and more fulfilling romantic lives.

Even though we are in 2017 and we are talking about a USD 80+ billion market, it is still impossible to get a payroll-deductible loan on an online, fast and convenient manner. The credit industry in Brazil is old, offline and resistant to change. However, the customer base is not. In 2016, close to 55% of banking operations were done through digital channels. Consumers are desperate looking for convenience and that also reflects the way they look for credit. For instance, most Brazilians resort to calling their bank managers when they need credit advice, although knowing that he will give a biased recommendation, just to avoid the hassle of visiting different banks in person. Regarding our expertise in the area, the fact that we are based in Brasilia makes us interact on a daily basis with several public servants (including two wives and two parents ;), so the team have witnessed many people going through the trouble of getting a payroll-deductible loan. Also, Fabricio and Roberto have worked on projects with banks before, allowing them to get a glimpse of the banking industry.

After graduating from Duke in 2011, I worked in investment banking and later founded my first startup, Locket (eventually I sold Locket to Wish). I raised $3m+ for the company and I became more stressed than ever. I tried lots of stress-relief products at the time: massages, lavender pillows, silent retreats and other meditation apps. Meditation worked best for me, and while I liked the meditation apps currently on the market, I didn't like how most apps were one teacher/personality based. I wanted to be able to browse through different types of teachers and teachings and make meditations bite-sized so busy professionals could use it. I built Simple Habit to really serve my needs. Since launch, we had thousands of users who suffer from stress, anxiety, depression tell us how our app has changed their lives. Check out our app store to see their raving reviews! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simple-habit-mindfulness- meditations/id1093360165

When i founded my first startup in 2010, we needed a way to accept payments online, there was no solution locally, we had to work around using Avangate BV and creating accounts in the UK. 5 years later, there’s still no easy way. I spent the entire 2014 implementing payments and disbursement solutions for Banks and i realized that most of the infrastructure needed to build a full stack payments API already existed, and it just needed someone to do the hardwork of putting it all together and doing all that is necessary. I finished the engagement in Nov. 2014 and immediately created Paystack. The demand for Paystack is amazing, we haven’t done any PR or Marketing and we’re growing our waiting list at 10x monthly, just from word of mouth. I’ve personally spoken to over 150 merchants and everyone is excited and waiting. Our pilot merchants need it so much that they started using it without a settlement system, so they did not mind leaving their money with us for over 6 weeks.

I picked this idea for three reasons: 1/ I hate tampons and like many women, I’ve spent a quarter of my life in discomfort caused by traditional menstrual products. In addition to physical discomfort, I’ve always been bothered by the social stigma that surrounds menstruation and period sex. Couples are missing out on 23% more opportunities for sex, and the great tragedy is that this is the time of month when women want it most. If women weren’t ashamed to talk about their periods, I’m certain we’d have better alternatives to the products that we use today. 2/ NPR called 2015 the “Year of the Period.” We have reached the tipping point of a global menstruation movement. Women are trying “new” products like menstrual cups, period panties, and tampon subscriptions, but these solutions have come with a new set of challenges and frustrations. Women (particularly millennials) are demanding new product innovation and are open to trying brands that resonate with them more than ever before. 91% of women want a tampon alternative (Journal of Women’s Health). 3/ In the product development process, we discovered an old patent for a product that’s been completely neglected by a small, private drug company (the company is focused on making a lubricant that’s more profitable for them). This product has 20 years of post-clinical research for us to draw from, and we’ve been able to use samples of this product for user research with over 200 women. We’re using this product for the basis of our product design, which allows us to move very quickly, streamline the FDA regulatory process, as well as expensive design iterations with manufacturers. We’re making a few improvements to differentiate the product (better fit/materials, more environmentally friendly, and made in the USA). We have the perfect experience building brands and e-commerce platforms to bring this product to market in a completely new way that resonates with millennials. * We have 30 years’ experience using products we loathe. * I have ten years of experience launching consumer brands and communications strategies at companies like Coca-Cola, Autodesk and Upwork. * Erika has ten years of e-commerce experience. Most recently she grew e-commerce sales at JimmyJane from roughly $X to $Y in 1.5 years with a $0 budget.* * Our advisory team is hard-working and each member has 15–20 years of expertise in related fields: board certified OB/GYN, consumer e-commerce/subscription, healthcare manufacturing and supply chain, healthcare venture, and engineering.

We are passionate about solving logistics problems because they have a large societal impact and require small investments in technology to gain leverage. Originally, we were making software to increase storage density in warehouses to dramatically lower storage costs. That led us to learn a significant amount about warehousing and the supply chain process and why warehouses have so much trouble investing in technology. Additionally, Praful’s previous startup developed hardware and he knew the difficulties of managing his supply chain. Finally, James and Praful knew the problems that product companies have based on their experience mentoring startups and within 2 weeks of switching to the new business, we were able to get our first check.

Dmitriy wanted a solution he could use at his previous job. All employees except our account managers (8-2=6) are software developers. We listen closely to the community via direct customer feedback, pull/merge requests, issues, twitter, mailinglists, chatrooms and the non GitLab B.V. employees on the GitLab core team.

Why this idea? It’s the advice we wish we’d had. When we graduated we wanted to use our careers to make a difference. But we couldn’t find any useful advice on what to do. So we did the research and created our own advice. People listened, totally changed their plans, and became fanatical supporters: e.g. we’ve been approached by users who want to run groups promoting us at Cambridge, Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, Bain and elsewhere. We’ve helped spark a whole new social movement: Effective Altruism. Domain expertise We’ve spent over three years doing systematic research into how to make the biggest difference with your career, and advised over 200 people. As far as we know, no-one else has worked on this question as much as us. Why will this work? 31% of graduates say making an impact in their work is “essential”, but they have little idea what to do except work in the social sector or give up (“sell out”). So most of their potential for impact is wasted. We’ve shown we can solve this problem for an extremely valuable niche: we’re advising some of the most talented young people in America and the UK, and enabling them to have far more impact. By improving our web app, we can serve a much larger audience. We can distribute widely by releasing engaging content: Will has a Vox.com column and a $150,000 book deal with Penguin (already finished, to be released August ‘15).

We know, education is not the sexiest thing to work on. The reason we picked it is because we love how much power programming grants you to create. The three of us were lucky enough to go to one of the few High Schools in America with a full CS Program. It helped us decide that we wanted to pursue a career in CS and gave us the fundamentals to succeed in postsecondary school and the rest of life. We want to give the same opportunity to every other High School student out there. We know that people will want our products due to the huge national push towards adding CS to the core-curriculum led by people like Mark Zuckerberg. Pretty soon High Schools will be mandated to introduce CS courses in their curriculum but they will struggle to do so due to budget constraints and the fact that there is a huge deficit in qualified instructors and Computer Scientists in general.

We've both worked in strategy consultancies, and created around two thousand slides for big corporates. Chris (whilst at McKinsey) has used their internal human powered service that converts sketched slides into powerpoint files. David has turned many people's sketches into powerpoint files whilst at a strategy consultancy and at Barclays Investment Bank. We picked the problem because we know it well and the current solution is very slow and expensive ‐ many of the highest paid members of society spend 20+ hours a week doing it!

Self‑driving car technology has so many positive effects on society that it sounds absurd when you start to list them (but I will anyway). It can reduce carbon emissions and oil consumption, unluck billions of hours of lost productivity, save hundreds of billions of dollars lost due to auto accidents, and save tens of thousands of lives. I can't think of many other ways to have this kind of impact on the world. We have both built self‑driving cars before. Kyle built a wifi‑controlled Ford F‑150 at MIT. Jeremy built the LIDAR sensor systems for Graymatter Inc, the first company ever to raise venture capital to build self driving cars. We personally know many of the smartest people working on this stuff (it's a small circle) and we will get them on our team. People want this technology. A study by KPMG shows car buyers are willing to pay a 20‑25% premium for a vehicle that can drive itself. But people also really *need* this technology. One million people are injured in car accdients in the US every year and 33,000 of them don't survive. 90% of those accidents can be attributed to driver error, so this technology will save thousands of lives.

The first product the three of us created was a mobile loyalty solution. It didn’t work. We pivoted to add an Android based point-of-sale with integrated mobile payment app. When this product hit the market, we saw a surprisingly high percentage (8%) of customers paying via our platform. We talked to lots of retailers and realized they were pushing their customers to download our app so they would avoid credit card fees. That’s why we’ve picked this idea. CanadaKaz started working as a retailer when he was in high school at his family’s stores. He is also a former lawyer who has represented banks and is well versed with the regulations around the payment industry. Our dev team is 100% from University of Waterloo. They have 9 patents to their names. They’ve built North America’s first mobile virtual store and operational tools for large banks and financial institutions.

We started by thinking about ACH, which is a problem that Dan actually had in his work. Zac sees how hard it is for even Stripe to deal with Wells Fargo on F/X, wires, etc. Dan knows a ton about payments. Zac won finance prizes @ Brown. We both want to disrupt banking and have been talking about it for years.

Fei is a respected authentication expert for several brands.** Her blog morphed into a pseudo-auction site for authentic Herve Leger clothes (a single brand!). It attracted a healthy community of bidders (buyers) and sellers, completed more than 200 successful transactions (>$60,000), and (redacted). However, the current site represents a single (small!) brand, there’s a 1.5-2.0 month wait list, and everything is done by hand (inputting items, email communications, and Excel tracking) -- yet sellers are clamoring to get on the list and keep asking us to add more brands! ** She has provided third-party testimony in eBay and PayPal disputes and is a well known authentication expert in the online forum communities.

A year ago - as part of my last Y Combinator application - I taught myself how to code in Ruby on Rails. I realized that there are a lot of things wrong with the way we teach non-technical people how to code. Within less than a year I won the official Meetup Battle of the Braces hackathon (http://www.meetup.com/Battle-of-the-Braces/) on my own. My experience turned into a series of blog posts (https://generalassemb.ly/blog/on-learning-to-code-pt-1), a talk at internet week (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0qAjgQFR4c), and a project-based online course. The online course covers the topics I wish someone had taught me when I first wanted to build my own web application. They're all videos so it's been easy to scale to thousands of students and iterate on the content. The focus is on getting an application live as quickly as possible, while still making it as functional and good-looking as possible. There are millions of people out there who have an idea but don't know how to build it. They're currently being underserved by every single resource that is currently available.

We picked this idea because Jeremy had looked for a mobile AB testing solution when working on Drawchat, but couldn’t find one. Three 50+ people companies, 3 YC companies, and 10+ indie developers have signed up to beta test our product. All the programmers/contractors we’ve interviewed have also asked to sign up for our private beta. This is an immediate need for most mobile companies. Nancy is an expert in experiment design and data analysis. Jeremy is an expert in mobile and has built many efficient, scalable backends. We both love being data driven and view life as an experiment.

Ashu’s experience with Helicopter and Jeremy’s experience with Manifold Studios have given us a good understanding of the mobile games market and how to create the kinds of apps that get featured and make money. When Ashu was writing Helicopter, he had limited knowledge of the art + business aspects of game development. With the right connections he could have produced a more professional app and improved sales. We hope to provide the right connections for people like 16 year old Ashu. In the competitive market of mobile games, the little things (production values, targeted marketing, etc) can often make or break games. By reducing the friction involved in game development, we can allow more engineers to avoid obstacles on their way to making great apps.

We picked this idea because my sister (a high-school softball star) told me the issues she was having with her online athletic recruitment profile and asked me to make her a better one. Then I discovered that millions of other athletes all have the same problem because their teams were using technology from 1998. I have played club Baseball and Football since 3rd grade, and recently just finished a year of 2 D1 Varsity sports (Sprint Football and Pole Vaulting). I know people need what we're making because 2MM teams use eTeamz (direct competitor), 2MM athletes use BeRecruited, and we've spoken to many coaches, parents, and athletes.

We picked this idea because we are our customer: ambitious, confident women who don't want to find our next job on Monster.com; who are equally likely to consider a tech start­up as the Gates Foundation as a hedge fund; who spent years searching for smart content that doesn't dumb down career issues for women. Among the members of the founding team we have domain expertise in recruiting; in content creation and promotion; and in directly engaging with women ages 20-­35. What's more, we've been working in this specific field (job opportunities and career advice for professional women) for the last year, and the response from women has been unbelievable. Our user testimonials sometimes verge on the fanatical.

Finding and fixing software bugs is expensive. Taazr will save companies time and money by identifying bugs and potential fixes in web applications. We chose to work on Taazr primarily due to our familiarly with related research fields, but also because it represents a challenging problem. Ethan has two years of experience hacking with the Automatic Program Repair (APR) research group at U.Va, where he’s worked with state-of-the-art techniques in program analysis, testing, and statistical debugging. He has published work increasing the efficiency and scalability of APR. Muzzammil has a year of experience with the GuardRails research group at UVA, where he helped create a secure web framework for Ruby on Rails. His work is published in USENIX 2011 and will also be presented at RubyNation. More generally, Taazr was inspired by the Cooperative Bug Isolation Project [2], in combination with ideas gleaned from our respective research groups at U.Va.

We describe our domain expertise, and slip in evidence that we can get things done. However, we do come off as a bit researchy, which I think is a bit of a risk. Convey expertise through specific accomplishments. You should be perceived as people who know what they are getting into.

Be careful! This is not a question asking you to explain why you’re personally passionate about X. Just because you love X does not make X a good idea. It’s fine if you feel this way, but I would not make this your primary reason for doing this idea. It’s better that you chose this idea because you know a lot about the domain and see a real, unmet need either via personal experience or because you know certain businesses are willing and able to spend money to solve this problem.

The thing we care most about in interviews (at least of things one can change) is how engaged the founders are with users. How do they know people actually want what they’re building? Have they talked to real, live users? What have they learned from them?

They want to know this is a compelling problem that you’ve experienced yourself or know first hand that people want solved. Tell a story about how you came upon this and realized you have the particular set of skills best suited to solving this.

This is where you can talk more about the space and its relevance in your country. Don’t assume the partners know anything about the space (even though they are really smart people and probably do). This means no acronyms, no assumptions etc. Make sure you talk about the size of the market and briefly about how you arrived at the number. This is extremely important because the partners like to know that the problem you are trying to solve, about which they were totally unaware till now, is faced by millions of people, wherever they maybe located in the world. Regarding domain expertise or wherever you choose to talk about the founding team’s previous accomplishments, avoid referring to accolades that only those familiar with your country know about, without providing the required context. No reader is going to google any of it. If it’s a big deal, briefly state why it is. Don’t brag though — it will do more harm than good.

We look for in ideas is not the type of idea but the level of insight you have about it