Advice on the YC application from YC alum
About me:
Yurii Rebryk (YC W2024)
Founder 👉 Fluently: AI English speaking coach
ex. Google, Nvidia, Amazon
Intro
Many people on LinkedIn send me their YC applications for review, and many of them have the same repetitive issues. I've checked more than 100 applications and decided to put together a simple guide with examples that will help founders build successful applications and avoid common pitfalls.
I've personally applied for YC three times, and was accepted only on the third time. So this guide is based on my personal experience, and also on wisdom and advice of other YC alumni and partners. You can find all used materials at the end.
Remember, we play low-probability games
Content
High Level Recommendations
Answer questions directly, clearly, and concisely:
Base your responses on facts and numbers.
Use simple language and avoid marketing buzz.
Most answers should be 1–5 sentences long.
YC invests in people, so focus on your team and what makes each of you exceptional.
Share insights and obstacles that you discovered while working on the idea.
Good application should be a cohesive compelling story.
Last, but not least: be honest.
Application Questions
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
Use clear, specific language that accurately describes your product or service. Avoid jargon and vague terms.
Identify what sets your company apart and include that in your description. This helps to quickly communicate your unique selling proposition.
Ideally, it should be clear for whom and which problem your product solves.
Make sure that the description is not greater than 50 characters.
Use phrasing like "Airbnb for X" only if everyone would know the company you are referencing.
Algolia: A developer-friendly and enterprise-grade search API
Loom: Record and share video messages instantly
Loops: Email sending for startups
Paystack: APIs and tools to enable merchants accept payments in African Markets
CommandBar: Make web apps easier to navigate and learn
Tynker for B2B creative thinking mLearning
- Not everyone might know the Tynker company
- Description does not clearly explain what the product does
Educational platform to boost creative thinking
Company url, if any:
If you don’t have a website you can easily build one in 1-2 day without coding using tools like Framer. There are many good templates available for free if you lack design skills.
Benefits of having a website:
Communicating your idea in a clear and concise way is hard, and creating a website is a good way to practice doing that.
Easier to understand what you are building.
You can put a waitlist or a booking form to start accumulating potential customers.
If you have a demo, attach it below.
If you have an MVP that you can show, spend some time to make a short 60-90 seconds demo video. It might be easier to understand what your company does, and it will demonstrate that you can actually build things.
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
You can expand your 50 characters description to give more details.
It should be clear who is your customer, what problem they have and how exactly your product solves it.
Share your long-term vision in a single sentence.
Keep it under 5 sentences.
Dropbox
Dropbox synchronizes files across your/your team's computers. It's much better than uploading or email, because it's automatic, integrated into Windows, and fits into the way you already work. There's also a web interface, and the files are securely backed up to Amazon S3. Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team. Hackers have access to these tools, but normal people don't. It's currently in private beta and I add batches of people every few days.
There are lots of interesting possible features. One is syncing Google Docs/Spreadsheets (or other office web apps) to local .doc and .xls files for offline access, which would be strategically important as few web apps deal with the offline problem.
Simple Habit
We built an iOS app that offers 5-minute meditations for life situations throughout the day. For example, meditations to reduce anxiety before a meeting, improve focus at work, and sleep better.
Meditations are recorded by top meditation teachers from all over the world — we currently have over 100 teachers on our platform and are listened to by [redacted].
Our goal is to build the world's leading platform for mindfulness and meditation content. We want to help millions of people learn to live more mindfully and be more resilient.
MagicBell
MagicBell is an out of the box, notification system with multi-channel delivery. Notifications are created via the API and the embeddable notification center can be fully customized to match your product's UI and UX. Companies with existing email notifications can simply bcc them to a project-specific email address to roll out MagicBell to their users within 30 mins. You can think of it like a smart router for your company’s notifications to your customers.
MagicBell enables you to think in terms of users and respect their notification preferences, instead of being bogged down by the complexity of understanding platform APIs for different channels.
Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?
Ideally, YC would love to see your team in SF. However, if your business benefits from you being in a different location, explain that in the following question.
The company will be based in Delaware, USA, yet I am not sure about the exact location for residence. I am happy to work remotely, so most likely I will become a digital nomad.
YC and other investors will likely think you are not serious about starting a company and will turn you down.
How far along are you?
Provide a brief description of the company's current state using facts and numbers, ideally in a 3-5 bullet point list. Avoid fluff.
If you have revenue or other strong indicators like users or LOIs, list them first.
Be honest about your company's state; don't present it better than it actually is or mislead partners. No one will want to work with you if you're not genuine. For example:
Don't say you have 1000 users if it's actually 1000 installs.
Don't claim you have LOIs if there are no signed papers yet.
Don't state that you have great 30-day retention X without specifying that it's calculated only on paid customers.
If you have made little progress, don't hide behind a wall of fluff or a lot of different research, customer interviews, etc. You might think such an answer looks more solid, but it's actually quite the opposite.
I updated my doctor's knowledge by researching 832 recent fertility studies and selected 87 with the strongest scientific evidence to form the basis of our guidance system.
We built a founders team and completed the first four initial user interviews to refine our approach.
We have onboarded two skilled engineers. One is a principal mobile developer from my current company, and the other is a brilliant front-end engineer who previously collaborated with Victor. They were inspired by our mission and agreed to contribute part-time for free.
We have completed 70% of the MVP and will be ready to gather more insights about our target audience and the product's market value in a few weeks.
Additionally, we started to work with an advisor, the former medical director of digital health at Yale.
- That answer does not provide a concise understanding of what the team has accomplished to this day.
- There is too much emphasis on things that are not of primary importance.
- Founding team of 4 is assembled
- 70% of the MVP is done
- 10 onboarding calls are scheduled in 2 weeks
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
Ideally, all cofounders are working full-time on the startup. If you have left your Google job to work on the startup - that’s a green flag, because it shows that you are serious about it.
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?
Answer each part of that question, and note that each response should contain factual numbers.
So far, four couples have tried our product and received personalized fertility guidance through primarily a manual process. This early stage was for validating our questionnaire and guidance value. In the last case, we provided a donation option, and the user sent $150. We also received positive feedback from friends of friends who helped test the product (we don't count positive feedback from our close friends and family).
- Too many unnecessary words
- Answer the given questions directly
- Make the answer more concise
- 4 couples are using the product
- The app is free, but we got $150 in donations
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?
Write one sentence on what inspired you to solve that problem.
If you have experience in the domain, it's a great opportunity to sell your team's expertise in 1-2 sentences.
Use facts and numbers to support that people care about what you are building (again, 1-2 sentences long):
Payments, product usage, LOIs, etc.
Customer interviews, market research, etc.
GitLab
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.
Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don’t?
List a few of your most promising competitors. If there are no direct competitors, list companies whose products are currently used to solve the user's problem.
Show how you are different from them, and why it makes sense.
GitLab
GitHub Enterprise and Atlassian Stash are our primary competitors.
An open source development process allows you to market your product for free. It also allows a good product market fit at a low cost. We believe that version control is infrastructure software and that open source is the natural model for this kind of software. But to create and grow a competitive open source offering you need to have a proprietary commercial version to generate scalable revenue, support income alone is not enough.
How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
Briefly recap your business model and provide Total Addressable Market (TAM) calculation.
There are two effective ways to express that your idea is big: a) calculate the TAM, or b) show what percentage of the market you need to capture to generate $100 million in annual revenue.
Use a bottom-up approach to calculate your TAM instead of referencing some analytics reports. TAM = <number of potential customers you could have> x <average cost of your service per customer on an annual basis>
Ideally, it should be a clear path to $100M ARR, so your company can be considered a unicorn.
Globally, companies spend $10 billion annually solely on English corporate training. We want to sell our solution to companies with L&D departments that already invest in products such as Preply, Duolingo, and Grammarly.
Our app targets non-native speakers who work in an English-speaking environment, such as salespeople, developers, and customer support agents. That's more than 84 million people.
Better to use bottom-up approach with specific pricing.
If we charge $25 per month for a subscription, we need 334k paid customers to generate $100 million annually, and that represents only 0.4% of all non-native professionals.
Please describe the breakdown of the equity ownership in percentages among the founders, employees and any other stockholders.
Every founder should be essential to what your company is doing. If not, why bring them on the team at all? Giving your cofounder just 10% equity seems like a bad idea. They might not be motivated enough to stay when things get tough. Michael Seibel advice on that: “Aim for roughly equal equity splits”.
Michaela Kidd, CEO: 50%
Lana Rivas, CTO: 50%
Eve Caldwell, CEO: 90%
Caleb Potter, CTO: 10%
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.
On our first YC Interview, they clearly didn't like our main idea and asked what other ideas we were considering, but we didn't have any good alternatives. So I recommend adding a few other promising ideas that you have also considered.
Consider this format:
50 character description of the idea
1 sentence behind that idea
Links
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