I think one founder is an automatic no at the amount of applications they have now, even if they say it maybe ok. I'd just check off all applications with one person and not have to worry about them.
It isn't an automatic no. If it was, they would just say that. It is probably an easy no and gets passed by quickly without a really compelling idea/product, some revenue already, past success and you don't really need YC, etc.
Why do you think there was no YC interview? Any retrospection?
Was it due to you being the only founder? How strict is the video time limit? The video sounds not really geared for YC but for general audience. Also, did you have a friend go through the application? A lot of it sounds like bragging, which is not bad at all but can be abrasive after a bit.
I like the project a lot, and may you reach heights with it.
> Why do you think there was no YC interview? Any retrospection? Was it due to you being the only founder?
I would guess that was a major factor. YC's view on the size of the founding team is that one is too few, four is too many. pg told Drew Houston to find a co-founder and I know of a four-man team that were turned down two years ago despite having two engineering PhD coders on the team and a product that was already being used by thousands of people.
Personal thoughts (trying to channel pg with a huge stack of applications to get through - I imagine the guy who first applied Naive Bayes to email spam being quite comfortable making snap decisions over small variables):
This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.
Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" - come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - he wasn't the first person to do something like this.
Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' - he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".
Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.
For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.
I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).
It reads like a great application and given aguynamedloren's previous AirBnB stunt he's certainly inventive - but it is obviously a one-man-show (previous collaboration projects: n/a), and so there's no evidence of team work and everything that goes with creating and working in a good team.
I wouldnt have thought the market was huge for this. You mention "Textbooks" - most commercial publishing companies would already have internal version control software, you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs. Where is the target market? It's neither casual nor a power tool. Thats probably why your pitch failed, their is adequate substitute products already in the market place.
> commercial publishing companies would already have internal version control software
You'd be surprised. I've talked to published authors, and here's the inside scoop: the writing/editing process is often, amazingly, word documents emailed back and forth with hacked up homebrew version control 'systems' and inline comments. Believe it or not. I've seen them. And it only gets worse when there are more editors involved (depending on the content, there can be many).
O'Reilly is working on a similar idea (http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com), which means there is at least some demand by commercial publishers for a system like this. If O'Reilly is working on it, it can't be solved very well.
Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.
> you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs
For short essays google docs is fantastic. I don't plan to touch that. But have you tried writing any kind of long-form group research paper (as in, over the course of a semester), especially technical, with google docs or dropbox? I have. It's a nightmare.
> their is adequate substitute products already in the market place
Craigslist and couchsurfing.org were adequate substitutes for Airbnb, Yahoo search was an adequate substitute for Google, and flash drives were an adequate substitute for Dropbox.
I agree, and I see a big market especially in academic publishing. A lot of course book text is written in a collaborative fashion with word docs emailed back and forth. Penflip could be to collaborative writing what Dropbox is to team file sharing.
Being a single cofounder might have been a negative factor, in your rejection.
Because formatting a book is painful. And you need to use the tools the publishers use (namely - InDesign)
And they import (keeping the styles) from: Word
What would be needed is a way to import from a Markdown type of thing to InDesign (or generate the PDF directly, and I'm not sure Latex caters to all the needs that InDesign caters to)
Penflip has markdown to PDF (and other formats) with a single click, with formatting and fairly well designed defaults. I included this feature as somewhat of an afterthought, but it's turning out to be one of the most used features on the site. So yeah, you're right - there seems to be some value in that.
well to be fair, your hitting a very crowded market that already has very established services with large userbases (If Google Docs, Word or Github just takes the idea then your basically done for) and there is a whole bunch of startups in the same exact space as you (Atlas, Editorially and Draft), that might of scared Y Combinator off because chances are one will thrive and the rest will fizzle out
"If Google Docs, Word or Github just takes the idea then your basically done for"
That is a very non-trivial task for any of those companies. Google could get closest fastest, but they're by no means going to churn something out in a month even if the good idea fairy hits one of their product managers. Microsoft, heck it'd take 3 years to see it.
I've seen a lot of PG's interviews where he literally says "Don't worry about competition". Dropbox released at a time when Google Drive was looming in the horizon. Still they succeeded. It's the execution that matters.
honestly though there was a pretty large gap between the time Dropbox came out and Google Drive did though, Dropbox was already established and had a large user base when Google Drive launched
> Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.
A few years ago, when I first quit my job, I was originally going to start another magazine, but a previous experience in publishing had convinced me that I needed a version control system my writers, editors and advertising sales/production people could use. There wasn't anything available, so I started building something similar.
When I tried to validate it as an actual business, the biggest problem I ran into was that the vast majority of the (magazine publishing) business is in a shambles, nobody knows if they will have jobs in five years and everyone is understandably a little paranoid. Successful publishers could (hopefully) afford to pay me, but they were generally extremely bureaucratic, difficult to penetrate, and averse to change what was (sort of) working for them. New or floundering publishers were interested (and they were seeking something easy to solve this problem), but the most common feedback I received was that they'd love a free tier, but couldn't afford to pay for it.
The most interesting thing I saw during the whole process was an editor's version control system. This person edits a shocking volume using this system:
Thanks for sharing this, interesting. However, why don't you mention Google Docs and Dropbox as competitors? Google docs already does this, and Dropbox seems to be clearly heading this way.
To be clear, I have no intention of quitting. I started working on this project without even thinking about YC as a possibility, driven only by excitement and the desire to see it exist. In fact, I wasn't going to apply to YC at all, but changed my mind at the last minute.
Against my better judgement, this little idea has turned into a full time, 18hrs-a-day-7-days-a-week project (with the occasional burnout day), and I plan to keep working on it is successful or I run out of money.
Worked on the bulk of it over the course of a day, on and off. Thought about it for a while before that though (when I was unsure if I was going to apply). This was my third time applying[1], so I basically have the questions memorized at this point.
Oh, and I've been recording every thought and idea for the past three months (some of my lists: http://grab.by/rKOY), so filling out the application was mostly compiling those thoughts into readable form.
[1] Different ideas each time, spanning 3 or 4 years. Funny enough, last year I got an interview. By that measure, this is a regression :)
It's an overall strong application, but it's missing a few key components - namely, you're a single founder, and you're a bit early in terms of product and traction. That might've been enough to get in a few years ago, but competition and standards have gone up with each new batch (the single founder thing might've still held you back).
You'll probably have a better chance getting in the next batch, if your product continues to mature and you have more traction by then. If you're interested, I wrote about my experiences reviewing about 300 applications for a different accelerator, 500startups - might be useful http://www.techfounder.net/2013/08/22/after-reviewing-300-st...
I can't remember where I saw it before but ever since then any instance grates on me: describing your product in terms of other product.
- GitHub for writers
- Facebook for Pearl Divers
- LinkedIn for Horse Whisperers
- Twitter for Ornithologists
Merits of the idea aside it really turns me off, smacks of a lack of creativity, a lazy route to explaining your product benefits.
"One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It's like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It's like an answering service, but for email. It's eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Don't worry that it will make your idea seem "derivative." Some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas no one realized could be combined."
Good to know where it comes from. I still hate it I have to say, probably for the reason they mention i.e. it comes off as derivative. But yet I don't argue that some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas. I'm conflicted.
> [ http://www.lorenburton.com/ ]
> [...] I posted the site to HN and dropped a "share on twitter" button on
> the bottom of the page, racking up tens of thousands of hits and hundreds
> of tweets. I was in touch with Joe Gebbia (thanks pg!!) within hours, who
> expedited the interview process, and I flew to SF the next morning. Though
> I didn't get the job [...]
Wait, what?! You made http://www.lorenburton.com ... and then didn't get a job at AirBNB? Goodness gracious. The job was for some frontend stuff, right? You seem pretty good at making frontend stuff, I can't imagine why you didn't get it.
I have a solid history of failing remarkably. Good lessons learned, though.
To be honest I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was completely unprepared and under qualified, and it was my first job interview ever. I bombed it.
You may be selling yourself short, you might feel under qualified but with technology you're always in the fire meaning that things change at such a rapid pace the real qualification is that your competent to keep up with it.
That's crazy that you didn't get the job. Considering AirBNB's growth rate, it seems they could have taken a risk that someone like yourself would grow into the position.
This isn't the 1970s where you could get hired as a novice and trained on the job. In today's world you need to be a rockstar programmer right out of college. Training? No start up wants to gamble resources on that.
A person's capacity for learning complex concepts quickly matters more than their current body of knowledge. Startups are marathons, not sprints.
If Feynman were still alive and wanted to work as a programmer at your startup, it'd be foolish to turn him away. This was a guy who went from "zero knowledge of how a space shuttle works" to "knows the design of the Challenger shuttle in detail, and is able to spot overlooked problems" within a couple weeks. So he'd certainly have no trouble reaching rockstar programmer status at your startup within a couple months.
But I'm getting the feeling most startups would turn him down if he wasn't already a rockstar programmer the day his interview rolls around. That seems a little nutty.
I am not 100% certain but signal has it that they let one of your competitors in. And with that I mean one of the handful of other "github for writers" which were showcasing on HN.
Already on it! A small barrier is the $6000 donation to become an official NaNoWriMo sponsor, but I'm managing to get some NaNoWriMo writers on the platform through other means.
Thank you very much for sharing this. I found it very helpful as I am also preparing some applications. One thing that I noticed though, was that the video you submitted is both well beyond the 1 minute restriction, and you also spent a lot of time talking about the project and not about yourself ("1 minute video [...] introducing the founders").
When recording our previous video we were very worried about being on the 2-minute mark and straight to the point, spending more time introducing myself and my colleagues. Do you (and the HN community) think that may have caused some serious loss of points? Good luck from Brazil!
I wasn't aware LOC is used as a heuristic of sorts at YC.
Good luck Loren. It seems like you're not really targeting scientists and are willing to concede that to the Harvard folks. As someone that was recently involved in sending tex-files back and forth I can assure you there's a need there (and probably some money from volume licensing, univerities tend to buy this stuff with "wtf-don't care" money if you get a champion)
Edit: You could also sell it to conferences as SaaS. Call for papers -> use our amazing tool to write it link.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadWhy do you think there was no YC interview? Any retrospection? Was it due to you being the only founder? How strict is the video time limit? The video sounds not really geared for YC but for general audience. Also, did you have a friend go through the application? A lot of it sounds like bragging, which is not bad at all but can be abrasive after a bit.
I like the project a lot, and may you reach heights with it.
I would guess that was a major factor. YC's view on the size of the founding team is that one is too few, four is too many. pg told Drew Houston to find a co-founder and I know of a four-man team that were turned down two years ago despite having two engineering PhD coders on the team and a product that was already being used by thousands of people.
Video was too long, automatic rejection.
I'm kidding, who knows. I'm thinking a big part of it was probably due to being a single founder, but there are likely other reasons.
This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.
Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" - come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - he wasn't the first person to do something like this.
Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' - he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".
Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.
For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.
I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).
Could that be why YC skipped on him this round?
No YC interview neither, and somehow related:
http://sharepad.co
As "The idea doesn't matter much; it will change anyway", we mostly see SharePad as a foundation to build something awesome.
You'd be surprised. I've talked to published authors, and here's the inside scoop: the writing/editing process is often, amazingly, word documents emailed back and forth with hacked up homebrew version control 'systems' and inline comments. Believe it or not. I've seen them. And it only gets worse when there are more editors involved (depending on the content, there can be many).
O'Reilly is working on a similar idea (http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com), which means there is at least some demand by commercial publishers for a system like this. If O'Reilly is working on it, it can't be solved very well.
Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.
> you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs
For short essays google docs is fantastic. I don't plan to touch that. But have you tried writing any kind of long-form group research paper (as in, over the course of a semester), especially technical, with google docs or dropbox? I have. It's a nightmare.
> their is adequate substitute products already in the market place
Craigslist and couchsurfing.org were adequate substitutes for Airbnb, Yahoo search was an adequate substitute for Google, and flash drives were an adequate substitute for Dropbox.
Being a single cofounder might have been a negative factor, in your rejection.
Because formatting a book is painful. And you need to use the tools the publishers use (namely - InDesign)
And they import (keeping the styles) from: Word
What would be needed is a way to import from a Markdown type of thing to InDesign (or generate the PDF directly, and I'm not sure Latex caters to all the needs that InDesign caters to)
The problem with automatic conversions are the adjustments that are sometimes needed, as well as things like sideboxes, pictures, etc
But yeah, since it's been used a lot, looks like a very nice something to have. Good luck!
That is a very non-trivial task for any of those companies. Google could get closest fastest, but they're by no means going to churn something out in a month even if the good idea fairy hits one of their product managers. Microsoft, heck it'd take 3 years to see it.
A few years ago, when I first quit my job, I was originally going to start another magazine, but a previous experience in publishing had convinced me that I needed a version control system my writers, editors and advertising sales/production people could use. There wasn't anything available, so I started building something similar.
When I tried to validate it as an actual business, the biggest problem I ran into was that the vast majority of the (magazine publishing) business is in a shambles, nobody knows if they will have jobs in five years and everyone is understandably a little paranoid. Successful publishers could (hopefully) afford to pay me, but they were generally extremely bureaucratic, difficult to penetrate, and averse to change what was (sort of) working for them. New or floundering publishers were interested (and they were seeking something easy to solve this problem), but the most common feedback I received was that they'd love a free tier, but couldn't afford to pay for it.
The most interesting thing I saw during the whole process was an editor's version control system. This person edits a shocking volume using this system:
/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/from-author.doc
or
/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/my-edits-to-author.doc
You've definitely got a great idea and I can vouch that it's needed. Best of luck!!
"Indirect competitors: (...), Google Docs, Dropbox, (...)"
Edit: BTW, he also mentions them in the video linked to near the top of the application.
To be clear, I have no intention of quitting. I started working on this project without even thinking about YC as a possibility, driven only by excitement and the desire to see it exist. In fact, I wasn't going to apply to YC at all, but changed my mind at the last minute.
Against my better judgement, this little idea has turned into a full time, 18hrs-a-day-7-days-a-week project (with the occasional burnout day), and I plan to keep working on it is successful or I run out of money.
=]
Oh, and I've been recording every thought and idea for the past three months (some of my lists: http://grab.by/rKOY), so filling out the application was mostly compiling those thoughts into readable form.
[1] Different ideas each time, spanning 3 or 4 years. Funny enough, last year I got an interview. By that measure, this is a regression :)
Really like PenFlip btw. Keep up the good work.
You'll probably have a better chance getting in the next batch, if your product continues to mature and you have more traction by then. If you're interested, I wrote about my experiences reviewing about 300 applications for a different accelerator, 500startups - might be useful http://www.techfounder.net/2013/08/22/after-reviewing-300-st...
Merits of the idea aside it really turns me off, smacks of a lack of creativity, a lazy route to explaining your product benefits.
Very superficial I know, it may be just me.
"One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It's like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It's like an answering service, but for email. It's eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Don't worry that it will make your idea seem "derivative." Some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas no one realized could be combined."
http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
To be honest I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was completely unprepared and under qualified, and it was my first job interview ever. I bombed it.
If Feynman were still alive and wanted to work as a programmer at your startup, it'd be foolish to turn him away. This was a guy who went from "zero knowledge of how a space shuttle works" to "knows the design of the Challenger shuttle in detail, and is able to spot overlooked problems" within a couple weeks. So he'd certainly have no trouble reaching rockstar programmer status at your startup within a couple months.
But I'm getting the feeling most startups would turn him down if he wasn't already a rockstar programmer the day his interview rolls around. That seems a little nutty.
It's probably the most artsy personal page I've seen.
Thanks for the kind words! Edit: at least I think those were kind words :)
When recording our previous video we were very worried about being on the 2-minute mark and straight to the point, spending more time introducing myself and my colleagues. Do you (and the HN community) think that may have caused some serious loss of points? Good luck from Brazil!
Good luck Loren. It seems like you're not really targeting scientists and are willing to concede that to the Harvard folks. As someone that was recently involved in sending tex-files back and forth I can assure you there's a need there (and probably some money from volume licensing, univerities tend to buy this stuff with "wtf-don't care" money if you get a champion)
Edit: You could also sell it to conferences as SaaS. Call for papers -> use our amazing tool to write it link.