> In their picture of the world, you, the founders, should only build a product and talk to customers, everything else is superfluous and waste of time. Hiring is waste of time, paid advertising is waste of time, content is waste of time, talking to investors is waste of time, getting media coverage is waste of time.
IMHO YC doesn’t want you to “build” a product they want you to “grow” a product. I think the YC framework (again IMHO) is to get an idea out and then do everything you can to make it grow 30% each week, and if after a few months you’re obviously failing at that — maybe that product isn’t working.
This seems, on the whole, like kind of reasonable high level operating parameters for startups, since traction is what defines revenue and fundraising chances.
I do think there is a flip side to this approach which is it can kind of lead to short-term-erism where if things aren’t working you flail about, and/or it can encourage founders to specifically tackle things they can ship quickly rather than things that are maybe more compelling.
I would argue that when things are slowly working that’s exactly when you need skilled advisors and founders to give you critical advice. Most dying startup don’t flat line… they slowly grow.
> In their picture of the world, you, the founders, should only build a product and talk to customers, everything else is superfluous and waste of time. Hiring is waste of time, paid advertising is waste of time, content is waste of time, talking to investors is waste of time, getting media coverage is waste of time.
Getting you to focus on those two things, particularly the second one which many technical founders are initially out of their comfort zone doing (I need to work on it myself), is probably a huge value add in itself if they're successful at doing just that.
> get an idea out and then do everything you can to make it grow 30% each week
Compounded? After 8 weeks you go from 10 customers to 81, seems doable. But after 6 months you'd have 5,428 customers. Maybe if it was an App Store app? But if you have to talk to any of them, yikes. Might not be the most sustainable rate of growth?
Yeah, the entire venture capital model is based on outlier outcomes. They don't want 2x or even 10x returns, they want 1000x returns on the outliers, so in aggregate they can hopefully 5-10x the fund overall.
I'm not sure I understand the question but HN discusses what it wants and this post happened to show up and get upvoted. Considering that the author went through YC a year ago I'm not sure that the timing matters much.
All I am saying is that YC terms should be a place for clarification outside of HN - and if Q's show up on HN, they should be answered and addressed in a YC FAQ/forum-specific/whatever...
> In their picture of the world, you, the founders, should only build a product and talk to customers, everything else is superfluous and waste of time. Hiring is waste of time, paid advertising is waste of time, content is waste of time, talking to investors is waste of time, getting media coverage is waste of time.
IMHO YC doesn’t want you to “build” a product they want you to “grow” a product. I think the YC framework (again IMHO) is to get an idea out and then do everything you can to make it grow 30% each week, and if after a few months you’re obviously failing at that — maybe that product isn’t working.
This seems, on the whole, like kind of reasonable high level operating parameters for startups, since traction is what defines revenue and fundraising chances.
I do think there is a flip side to this approach which is it can kind of lead to short-term-erism where if things aren’t working you flail about, and/or it can encourage founders to specifically tackle things they can ship quickly rather than things that are maybe more compelling.
I would argue that when things are slowly working that’s exactly when you need skilled advisors and founders to give you critical advice. Most dying startup don’t flat line… they slowly grow.