No chance we were going to abandon ship after not getting accepted-- thankfully, we've got a good bit of traction for our sites to build on.
We were invited down for an YC interview last November, and it was wicked fun talking with them. But our 10 minutes was quickly consumed with their excitement with our existing sites (and not on our new initiatives). Our existing site http://bug.gd is a long-term play, not a quick growth play, and, given the 8% drop in Dow the afternoon before our interview, it was understandable that YC would be looking for something more aggressive. We just had a bit too much to discuss in only 10 minutes and I'm pleased to see the new video interviews giving YC'ers an opportunity to demonstrate more of their plans.
We continue to grow bug.gd with the launch of our error database for companies projects, errorhelp.com, but it remains a project of constant (but not explosive) growth. We have some exciting features planned, though, that I can't wait to get finished.
But the service we wanted to pitch to YC was our other crowd-sourced dating site, Yumbunny.com. Two months ago we launched to public beta and were covered on TechCrunch and other news. The site continues to grow and we're super excited about it.
As a publicity project for YB, our team also squeezed in time to put together Tinyarro.ws -- a URL shrinking hack that relies on unicode/IDN to create the shortest URLs possible. It's been getting great traffic due to its oddity and the inherent viral nature of url shrinkers. (All the silly discussion about URL shrinkers being evil lately has helped that, too.)
All in all, we're having a great time and are plowing ahead. Best of luck to the teams who got invites to go interview. Use your time wisely!
I had the exact same idea for a crowd sourced dating service, exactly as you've implemented it with Yumbunny. Looks great, hope you have great success with it.
We were invited down for an YC interview last November, and it was wicked fun talking with them. But our 10 minutes was quickly consumed with their excitement with our existing sites (and not on our new initiatives). Our existing site http://bug.gd is a long-term play, not a quick growth play, and, given the 8% drop in Dow the afternoon before our interview, it was understandable that YC would be looking for something more aggressive. We just had a bit too much to discuss in only 10 minutes and I'm pleased to see the new video interviews giving YC'ers an opportunity to demonstrate more of their plans.
We continue to grow bug.gd with the launch of our error database for companies projects, errorhelp.com, but it remains a project of constant (but not explosive) growth. We have some exciting features planned, though, that I can't wait to get finished.
But the service we wanted to pitch to YC was our other crowd-sourced dating site, Yumbunny.com. Two months ago we launched to public beta and were covered on TechCrunch and other news. The site continues to grow and we're super excited about it.
As a publicity project for YB, our team also squeezed in time to put together Tinyarro.ws -- a URL shrinking hack that relies on unicode/IDN to create the shortest URLs possible. It's been getting great traffic due to its oddity and the inherent viral nature of url shrinkers. (All the silly discussion about URL shrinkers being evil lately has helped that, too.)
All in all, we're having a great time and are plowing ahead. Best of luck to the teams who got invites to go interview. Use your time wisely!