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Ask HN: Applying to Y Combinator if your company is already profitable.

7 points by emiranda ↗ HN
My partner and I started a mobile game company about 4 months ago. At the moment we are generating enough money to be able to pay ourselves a decent salary every month and have a couple grand left over to re-invest in our company. All while working full time at the company.

Would it still be worthwhile to apply for Y Combinator Winter 2012? We would love to accelerate our startup up to the point were we have more employees and are able to have more resources in order to develop more games at a faster rate. This is both mine and my partners first startup, we are both in our early 20s (24 and 23).

13 comments

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martinshen
I have no specific experience with YC... but something I've observed over the years is:

[length of time to decide to apply/email reporter, incubator or vc etc] is equal or greater than [length of time to actually apply]

... make your decision after you get in. At the very least the YC questions make you formulate better elevator pitch answers.

For gaming people like yourself... why not CrowdStar?

emiranda
Y Combinator is not the only option we are looking into. We have started searching for Angel investors in the area for small amounts of funding ($25k - $75k).Y Combinator is just something else that we are considering. Since lots of successful companies have come out of Y Combinator we find that the network and connections are much more valuable then the initial seed funding.

CrowdStart seems to be geared towards specific projects (or games in our case). We want to fund a company, not a product. I could be totally wrong in this case, since I have not personally used CrowdStart.

Your advice does make perfect sense, apply regardless and then if we get in we can decide if this is the correct choice or not. Another thing that we are considering is that early next year might be too late (we might have already gotten funding or moved passed considering Y Combinator).

nibo
I spoke with a few YC alumni.In your case I think it would be great to apply. PG and YC partners are looking for companies they can mentor but they don't want to baby-sit you. Since you are already profitable, I suspect you already know what you are doing and you simply need some guidance. Moreover if you have a good product I think your chances to get into YC are quite good. Getting to YC is becoming harder and harder and "just having an idea" is not enough. Since you already have the product AND are profitable your chances are quite good.
emiranda
Guidance and mentorship is definitely something we are looking for.
icey
Do you think your chance of success / profitability will increase by a percentage greater than YC takes?
emiranda
I'm honestly not sure. I always saw Y Combinator as a startup incubator for founders that have an idea, strong team, and just need some initial funding to get the idea off the ground. This is not the case with us.
garry
As YC matures, more and more startups come with a fully built out product, traction, revenue/earnings. It's no mistake that these are the companies do find themselves accelerating their progress.

Feel free to email me if you have additional questions!

templaedhel
From "What Happens at YC": http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html - "If you think you might need YC, you need it. If you think you might not need YC, you need it. If you are ABSOLUTELY SURE you don't need YC, you probably still do, but maybe not."
ashleyreddy
Check this out http://37signals.com/bootstrapped . There are people running companies without outside funding and are probably pretty happy doing so. Applying to YC is time consuming: making videos, writing bios etc.
emiranda
My job at the moment is working full time on the startup. I have been working full-time on it for the past month or so, so I wouldn't be "quitting" my job.

Thanks for your different perspective on the question.

emiranda
The sentence "All while working full time at the company" seems to be unclear to some. What I meant here is that I'm working full-time at the game company that I started and mentioned in the first sentence. I am not working for another company at the moment, running thestartup is my full-time job.