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Ask HN: What are you YC S10 applicants doing now?

17 points by follower ↗ HN
March 13th is just around the corner, what have you other YC S10 applicants been doing since you applied?

Refreshing HN looking for messages from pg? Searching your spam folder for anything from ycombinator.com? Continuing your search for a co-founder? Putting together a blooper reel from the outtakes of your video? cough Awesomizing your demo/MVP?

Past successful applicants: what did you do while you waited? Would you recommend it?

20 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 40.1 ms ] thread
icey
You should be building your software. No reason to wait on the answer from YC; if it was good enough to try to get them to invest in it, it should be good enough for you to keep building with or without them.
jacquesm
Absolutely. No matter what you do while you're out there scouting for funding and applying to places like YC, your work on your product is top priority.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst, even if you don't get funding you might find yourself with a winner, and your chances of finding funding go up with every hour you put in to your product.

Nothing better than being able to show your product in use by actual customers and a nice start of a growth curve.

It also gives you some real world numbers that you can plug in to your business plan.

python123
Lots of YC applicants these days view YC as the starting step. If they get in, they will "do a startup". If they don't, they won't. They are really more in love with the idea of being part of the startup community than the idea of actually building a company. They're outsiders peering into the walls of Silicon Valley and thinking there's some magical formula for success waiting there for them. Of course, they won't tell YC this.
shanked
I took a break for a week after spending the previous 3 weeks focusing on the prototype in most of my free time.

This past weekend I started on the prototype again. If not accepted in S10, I hope to re-apply for W10 with a deployed beta as my 'prototype'.

grosales
I worked with shanked on the prototype. But mostly it was all his work. We picked up again this week.
coryl
Been checking the posterous account for new views, also checking the log for hits on the demo from Mountain View IPs lol.

So far I think they've hit the video twice, but no hits on the demo which kind of makes me paranoid/anxious.

Otherwise, just trying to not think too much about it and hack together some more stuff for the project.

matrixownsyou
keep working on the day job to pay the bills and fighting the girlfriend for spare time to work on the beta
bandhunt
Don't worry so much about getting into YC. I'm surprised at the amount of people who see this as make or break. If you're committed to building a great product you should just be building and iterating all the time.
char
I'm a S10 applicant, and the only thing I've been doing since submitting the application is working my ass off to make my product better and increase my user base. It would be amazing to get into YC, but being reliant on it would be foolish.
hikari17
Yeah, I've checked the posterous video for new views (alas, none so far). But mostly I'm working on improving the existing app, dealing with a recent influx of users, and filling out applications to other programs with later deadlines.
Dav3xor
Mostly working on the Awesomization Process.

Out of curiosity; if you applied early, did you get some preliminary contact from Y-C?

Dav3xor
(And to get things started -- we got a Skype interview with Harj, who is a super nice guy.)
Roridge
I have been head down looking at the server technology I want to use in order to help scalability of the application. If it is a powder keg I want to be ready.

I have also been working on use case and domain models, and layout design. (and checking HN obviously)

sgacka
I took a week off from working on our app bc of a client project (we're a for-hire firm trying to create an app). We had hits on our demo from the SF Bay area and some hits on the video. maybe a good sign?

Either way, we'll be building our app and launching this summer. We applied to YC for the advice and mentoring opportunities - we don't absolutely need the money to launch (it would definitely be nice, but we can manage without it).

atiw
Working on finding out newer ways my technology could be used. Already know and have tested 4 applications. Thought of another silly use while replying to rtm thus sunday. I actually have been trying to get back to coding, but things are not so good. Hoping to kick off some of the 8-10 hour streaks of coding sometime tomorrow and all over the weekend.

Do you guys know, when we might get emails ??

Also, I am really kinda hoping to get my product out there and get some preliminary customers.

Any good ways to get some university people interested and try out our web app? How does someone contact university people?

Anyone a university department head/ faculty here by any chance?? If yes, do you guys HATE emails as way to introduction to products ??

My first focus (without funding way) is to sell a service to universities.

atiw
Apologies, I just got too excited and started asking questions and crying for help about finding customers, probably inappropriate for this discussion.

Desperate times... :)

danielzarick
I'm a student and work for Columbia College Chicago's Online Student Communications office. We handle most of the school's web projects. What are you working on? (Feel free to email me = daniel.zarick at gmail)
atiw
Sorry, I got late in replying. I really wanted to make a good video and/or write a good concise description to tell you about my product.

Well, I just got too busy. So, here it is.

In short, my software solves the "university course scheduling" problem. This problem is one that occurs on a department level. Basically, department heads/ registrar's office need to decide every semester which class room assignments for various courses. Now, there are rules about which courses can be scheduled together, and then there are preferences for each professor and then there are only so many number of classrooms available at any given time. My software takes in all those constraints /rules, number of rooms available and also serves as a collaboration tool to collect time slot preferences from professors and solves the problem. Currently, among the departments we have surveyed, it takes anywhere from 50-100 hours every semester, for each department head to solve this problem, since there is no tool for this.

Also, this is a NP-Complete problem. So, there are good chances of errors, and/or unhappy professors. There is no flexibility in hard coded tools. This tool confirms to your rules. There is a lot of things that you could change and the tool solves the problem for you then.

I only have a crappy demo right now, since the tool is only 99% complete still. But it does the job.

www.skejulers.com/demoing

So, please let department heads in your college have a look. I think they will be able to make sense about what i going on here.

Or, I can make the demo better, and the tool a little better and introduce some description as to what is going on there.

amazonfx
I'm giving our servers their nightly bath. It's important to keep them clean.
benologist
In the technical sense I've done but not shipped a major API update, I'm still re-tooling some components of the interface to better suit the new API capabilities. I also scaled out to a second server to help accommodate the 50 million events being logged a day. But really I haven't worked so much on the systems side of it this last month.

Mostly I've been working on traction, trying to get the big guys on board using my system ... and somehow it's actually working! I came up to SF (still here now) for the Flash Gaming Summit and I've had amazing opportunities to meet and pitch to the owners and reps of major portals like Kongregate, King, Armor Games, Crazy Monkey Games etc to get them on board. And loads of amazing developers ... this last week I've networked more than I even imagined was possible, hanging out with some of the top-tier developers and studios in Flash casual gaming.

I also shipped a game and am in the final stages of shipping another one, just waiting on the translations to come back to me now.

So I've been pretty busy... heh.