From the other side, I've been working on my goal for much of the past year and a half if I include collaboration attempts with offline businesses in my market that ended with job offers but no collab. I understand the long time span looks bad. I understand that it's minus that I'm a solo founder. It's just that I've gone a long time without a real salary or even insurance, I deeply believe in the value of what I'm working on and am beginning to have an idea of how much longer and harder the path is without mentorship from people who have done it before.
I see a tremendous value in YC and have already benefited from its free content. That said, estimating the EV of applying, has to include an assessment of likelihood and the costs of time and distraction as well as the tremendous upside.
Knowing the acceptance rate would be helpful in calibrating how to approach future applications, both for me and others who weren't selected.
In our case, we've built MyAppConverter about three years ago, starting from native iOS to native Android code conversion and now building an online mobile application porting platform. We've applied and we feel so privileged to have been selected because it costs us nothing except our time we have to put in (watching lectures, online group sessions, tutor/advisor sessions and assignments). We do not have to move to SV (as yet) and yet benefit from shared valuable experiences amongst YC fellows as well as from other entrepreneurs.
At first I thought everybody got in, but now I see I was pretty damn lucky with my product Median (www.median.tech), since I'm solo.
This MOOC is just the best, I didn't expect there would be so much community around it. As a solo founder, I'm very grateful be in a group with other founders from all around the world.
Whether I get into YC or not, I'm willing to bet my life on the fact that they will know my name soon and realize they made a mistake.
I don't care how crazy or delusional this sounds because this isn't a project or a startup, this is my reason for existing. Finding a way is all I have in this life.
I don't think I recreated the wheel here. I'm making a software product that businesses want to buy.
Hoping to bring that in-house later this year.
I am not saying you are wrong to be proud of your achievement, but as a practical matter, YC doesn't think of startups as new companies. It thinks of startups as a specific kind of new company that is trying to grow very large, very quickly.
Edit: Just realized someone else brought up this point and linked to the essay downstream. I guess I'm leaving this point here because it is closer to the question.
> Class Office Hours will also be held each week to give live advice and feedback to the class.
but that schedule only has office hours planned for weeks 2, 5 and 9. Is one an update of the other? Are there any office hours the first week?
Apologies for the confusion!
Which makes me think: it would be interesting to have a diff tool for videos, but it diffs a representation of the content not specific video frames.
Customers might include all the students of Udacity, Coursera, EdX and Startupschool.
videoA -> transcriptionA
|
V
videoB -> transcriptionB
|
V
diffIt might work well if you can first pair up the similar sentences from A and B, using word-level edit distance, or mapping to a lower-dimensional space using sentence embedding?
For business talks, you can see it here: http://findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type_l2_C...
This includes the older startup school talks, plus a few good software business conferences. For the next phase, I want to highlight talks that are most unique to the category (using word lists in the transcript/captions, not video diff)
In other words, there's a bit of a discounting in effect now too.
It's actually more valuable for early user feedback than showing traction for investors. yc network companies are usually willing to spend more time poking through stuff than some company you don't know, help with pitches, etc.
Rationale:
- you develop unique expertise and skills that are more valuable (ie more acquihire rationale) if things go south
- easier to fundraise and recruit
- optionality: downshifting to solving a smaller problem is easier than leveling up to solving a bigger one
It will be of great help for the folks who applied and did not get selected to have access to an official 'Mattermost' room to build a community of like minded individuals keen on entrepreneurship to share information and motivate ourselves.
In what cases should the primary metric be "other"?
You should talk to your advisor (possibly one-on-one) about selecting the right metrics. Many groups are not focused on the right things at the moment, and that's OK but something we should talk about and fix!
If you have revenue>0, you probably want it to be revenue. Similarly, if you have revenue==0 && users>0, you probably want it to be active users. (Not cumulative registered users, but daily or weekly actives, for example.) You should probably only be using "other" if those two don't apply.
Think of it this way: at the end of the 10 weeks, what metric will you really care about showing 10 weeks of growth in? For example, having 10X-ed your revenue is much more impressive than 10X daily active users, which itself is much more impressive than 10X people manually seeing a demo of your prototype!
I have a free product launched (and then pulled because my API provider dramatically increased prices). I'm about 3/4 of the way to building a paid content-based product to ideally fund development of the free one.
So basically my most promising avenues I see are to
1) focus 100% on the paid product
2) eliminate the API provider as a dependency and go all out on the primary free product (risking running out of cash in a couple of months)
3) try to raise 12k in funding so the runway extends to the end of the year.