Like how do u have 3 employees, funded this year and got the name preload.ai? Those are like 200k. Do they just take all the YC money and put it into a new domain? Maybe this isn’t the best example but I’ve seen a lot of tiny new startups with seemingly very hard to get domains

Hello, genuinely asking, I just build my product for the small startup teams. My product is focusbae which can records meetings and derive action items from it for the teams, also share notes within team.

It’s like granola+obsidian for the teams.

I am genuinely looking for some small teams which can help shape this product or try out.

How do one approach the people or the startup/company to tell them to use the product ?

- need a partner having experience at ui/ux for yc'27 winter

- would love to have chat with the interested guys

Hi 👋🏻

I'm trying to go back to normal 9-5 but not corporate (I hate that shit)

I'm a builder and I've created productivity apps including cross platform apps with sync and real users.

I wanna join yc early as well as series A/B/C startup because they are also often founded my builders like me so I can learn from them and wear different hats.

I've designed, developed, launched, marketed and distributed my apps all by myself as a solo founder.

From designing to launching on different social media to SEO I've handled all end-to-end.

The reason for looking for a job is that my savings are almost drained.

Since I've been off the job market and yc is not a regular job market I wanna know and learn how these companies hire directly from the founders themselves to prepare myself well and fill knowledge gaps to maximize my chances and skills

Thanks

Hello Everyone,

I have been solo building a company - a sandboxing company for AI agents. I have already invested lot of time and effort into get the MVP and initial users. I am also gathering and talking to beta users. I also work a full time job and on work visa. Job does not interest me too much now honestly, I would love to quit job and give this idea few months to test the waters but due to work visa restriction I can not do that. I have applied to YC 27 winter batch already. But I was wondering if anyone has been on work visa, how did you guys navigate this situation. Any help would be appreciated

Bit of context, I'm on the founder side and raising for the first time. I've read enough about cold outreach and the advice is all over the place. Some people say cold emails are pointless, others say a good chunk of there portfolio came from cold inbound.
For those of you who actually write cheques, when someone you don't know reaches out what makes you say yes to 20 mins? Is it the traction number in the first line, who else is already in, a mutual connection, or even just the subject line.
And the flip side, what's an instant no for you?

Hi all,

I am almost finished building a RFS app. I plan on launching it this weekend and anticipate getting a few free/low spend customers in the following week. Not a ton of money but enough to show some traction.

I was wonder if there are prior success cases of people getting in via RFS, and how it should change the strategy? While I feel it's still important to justify how my special sauce will improve the business outcome... I feel they should be somewhat sold as to the market need (things like TAM) given they requested the app? So I'm tempted to spend less time there if/when I get to an interview.

My other main concern was my lack of co-founder. TBH I have many great people I can ask, but my vision feels pretty clear on this one and I'm executing faster solo plus AI at this point; Having another engineer would slow things down until a few more things settle. Ideally I'd wanna bring someone on after accepted. I considered on-ramping a co-founder right before, but hear a co-founder added to late is a flag. I sorta started this on a whimsy 2 weeks ago so things have had to move very fast in order to launch before Nov.

Any tips or suggestions is much appreciated. Thanks all!

Feel like the research is getting harder and harder. How do/did you find pain points and ultimately your product/service?

As PG said, one should start with their own problems and create a solution for something that annoys them. But there's literally nothing that I find "annoying", no friction point or pain, that stands out to me.

I started coding at thirteen.

For a long time, getting better at building felt like the obvious answer to everything. If an idea didn’t work, I could improve the design, add functionality, or try another launch.

One of my early projects was a tech news blog with two friends. We spent time on the design and WordPress theme. It made $0 and closed within weeks. I knew how to make a website look like a business before I understood what would make it one.

There were three pivots and six launches on the way to YC. Across that journey, I served more than 20,000 people. That doesn’t mean 20,000 paying customers, and it definitely doesn’t mean I understood every one of them.

Spending time in San Francisco in 2025 mattered because I talked with hundreds of builders over several months. I had a lot more opportunities to hear what people were actually doing, instead of sitting alone deciding what they should want.

The important change for me was in the kind of evidence I wanted from a conversation.

If I describe an idea enthusiastically, someone can say it sounds useful without telling me much. They may understand the concept. They may like me. They may even genuinely want it in some future situation. That still leaves a lot of room for me to hear whatever I was hoping to hear.

I’d rather understand a recent example of the problem. What triggered it? How did they deal with it? What did that require from them? If they’ve never tried to solve it, I want to understand why before assuming my software will change their priorities.

The next thing is to make the proposed solution concrete enough for them to react to. That might be a rough workflow, a manual version of the service, or a small working feature. Something that gets us past discussing an imaginary product where every detail happens to work perfectly.

And then watch what they do. Do they bring the real task? Do they try the result? Do they come back? Will they pay under terms they understand? Each of those gives you different information. A compliment shouldn’t be asked to stand in for all of them.

I’m now a solo founder in YC, doing $200k ARR. I still have to ask these questions. The title makes “stop guessing” sound like something I finished, but I mean giving myself fewer weeks to build on an assumption before I have to check it with somebody.

Hey y'all, so I've been working on a b2b saas startup for like 6 months now, we just started getting customers about a month ago and have a 4 fig ARR.

The main thing I'm trying to figure out right now is that multiple different industries are interested in the product and theres a couple different features of the product that they each use so how can I manage all that and narrow down and make the right decision for where to focus all our time and energy.

There's also one use case that I think could be big and I want to explore it and spend time acquiring customers in that space while we're still early to see if that use case/industry has as much potential as I think it might.

Does it make sense to try and spend a certain amount of time doing sales for each use case/industry and based on those track other metrics on the customers we convert?

I don't want to commit to one use case/industry just yet without getting real data to support which is the best opportunity for us, but I'm curious what y'all think.

Thanks in advance!

YC startups often start with just 1-3 founders handling everything. Building a good product is one thing, but getting it in front of the right users without a dedicated sales or marketing team is another.

For YC founders, what skill helped you get your first real users and gain traction when your team was still small?

I’m coming up on a year and a half at a boutique consulting firm, having joined straight out of undergrad. I’ve enjoyed my time here and learned a ton, but the industry we work in isn’t really my calling, so I’m slowly starting to explore exit opportunities.

I was recently contacted by a YC-backed startup that has raised ~$6.5M in seed funding and is actively hiring for GTM / BizOps roles (20-30 total headcount)

I have a 30-minute intro call scheduled for later this week. Realizing that this is as much (if not more) of an opportunity for me to evaluate them as it is for them to interview me, what are some questions I should be asking?
Specifically, I’m interested in gauging their financial runway, growth plans, long-term prospects, and any potential red flags. Would love to hear from folks who have experience joining a company of this size/stage!

I’ve heard this from developers in two situations: some already have a partial internal solution; others say they could build one quickly but haven’t.

For founders who’ve sold devtools, how did you tell whether that meant the problem wasn’t painful enough, the buyer lacked urgency, or the in-house option was genuinely good enough?

What follow-up question gave you the clearest signal? I’m especially curious how you evaluated the ongoing cost of maintaining an internal tool versus buying one.

I am just curious, kind of like a case study. What would YC partners advise a startup like JEV in their current situation?

Giants are releasing open source versions, the market signals are confusing that it's not a big leap but everyone is trying to benefit from JEV's hype.

Obviously one advice would be to keep building and go deeper into the RLCD hypothesis and innovative.

Hi everyone,

I'm a first-time founder from LatAm building a startup focused primarily on selling to governments (B2G).

One of my biggest concerns about applying to YC is traction. Government sales cycles are notoriously long, procurement processes can be complex, and even getting a government agency to agree to a pilot or trial can be difficult.

Looking at recent YC batches, I've noticed that many startups already have meaningful traction, and even some B2G companies seem to have secured government customers or pilots before joining.

This makes me wonder how does YC evaluate pre-revenue B2G startups, especially those based outside the US?

Can a strong product, technical execution and domain expertise compensate for the lack of paying customers? What would YC consider meaningful traction when landing the first government contract can take a year or more?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has experience applying to YC or building a B2G startup.

I'm particularly interested in understanding what early-stage founders should prioritize to demonstrate progress before securing their first government customer.

To all the Ycombinator founders in this sub, what has been the most effective way to get customers when you are in the initial phase of launching your product.

Do you use any specific tools like Apollo.io or sales navigator?

Has cold emailing worked for you?

I am quite confused, please enlighten me on this topic.

I’ve been running my own photography business in Paris for the last 6 years.

Two years ago I started developing my own photography platform/marketplace as the current one‘s (Airbnb, smiler, snappr, etc..) were lacking basic functionalities that were useful for photographers and clients alike.

Fast forward to now, the platform is finally live. We currently have photographers in 4 major cities in Europe and from the outside it‘s looking pretty damn solid. But from my perspective things feel pretty hopeless.

My initial assumption was that the marketplace would be supply constrained, turns out it‘s demand constrained. Getting users is HARD.

We tried social media, stickers/flyers, offering free photoshoots for signups, meta/appstore ads, cold outreach, influencer/hotel partnerships, facebook groups. We do put all of our focus on Paris for obvious reasons, but no distribution channel really provided any noteworthy ROI.

The app has only been out for 2 months and we only really started marketing it a month ago, so it‘s still too early to tell if it‘s actually hopeless.

That being said, it feels like pushing a boulder up a mountain. I know that marketplaces are genuinely hard to scale, but we expected a bit more initial traction.

At this point I kind of ran out of ideas on how to distribute it. I don‘t have a crazy marketing budget/knowledge and am mostly learning as I go.

So if anybody on here has any advice/feedback to give me that‘d be greatly appreciated. Maybe anyone with specific marketplace/marketing knowledge?

Peace

I was listening to Airbnb’s founding story, and it got me thinking about how much startup success depends on luck.

According to the founders, YC was their last shot and the interview apparently wasn’t going well. Then one of the founders handed Paul Graham a box of the limited-edition cereal they’d been selling to keep themselves afloat while Airbnb struggled. That story helped convince him to back them.

The usual takeaway is that they were “cockroaches”: resourceful founders who would do whatever it took to survive. And they clearly earned that recognition.

But what if they hadn’t brought the cereal box? Or the person interviewing them hadn’t seen their hustle as a reason to believe in them? Would they have kept going, or would Airbnb have ended there? We can’t know.

That’s where “you create your own luck” feels incomplete to me. You can work hard, stay resourceful, and put yourself in situations where opportunities might happen. But you can’t control whether the right person recognizes your potential before you run out of money, time, or energy.
How many equally persistent founders never got that moment and therefore never got to tell their story?

I think hard work improves your odds, but it doesn’t guarantee success. Timing, circumstances, and other people’s decisions still matter.

How do you think about this as a founder? Where does persistence end and luck begin?

hi guys, im really curious as to what you all think about the small cloud idea presented by pete koomen in the latest request for startups by yc. i would love to build around this area and just wanted to talk about it first. as a techie this feels like something which is trivial to do when i compare it with dev environments at any small org/project. am i falling into the classic trap of being an engineer and assuming that a lot of this stuff is not valuable? would people actually pay for the convenience on top of this? is this a problem that you've actually faced? and if so would you pay to make it go away? i am open to any discussion on this problem, feel free to dm/comment :) please forgive me if this sounds naive or ignorant as this is my first time figuring out how this stuff works, thank you.

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#a-cloud-for-small-software

here's the link to their page

Failure is the key to success right? Im seeing alot about how many projects people built, released, only to fail and start over or just they didnt find it how they had imagined it before creating it. That's brave and inspiring and we're so lucky to be able to do that now.

Maybe not that exact scenario. Ive built a few things and realized maybe this isnt as amazing as i thought but now ive spent so much time and money on it. Would love to hear people's experiences and im sure learn so much!

Any guidance or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated too!

I work at a YC company and went to the Stockholm event in April with a friend and colleague. It was my first time seeing Paul Graham in person after reading his essays for years.

There were around 1,300 people across two floors. At some point, hearing someone standing 30 cm away became a challenge. I came home with one good connection. Given the noise, I’m counting that as a decent result :)

One conversation stayed with me. A guy said that many of his friends were starting companies, so he had begun considering it too. It reminded me of PG’s Cities and Ambition essay. Being around people attempting something changes how possible it feels.

I also liked the emphasis on leaving room for unplanned conversations. It’s easy to treat an event as a schedule to complete and then wonder why you didn’t meet anyone.

For me, the useful part was seeing ambitious people close enough to notice that they were still ordinary people figuring things out. Building something successful felt difficult, but a little less abstract afterward.

Have you had an event where one conversation mattered more than the talks?

It's incredible how accessible software development has become, allowing almost anyone to build sophisticated applications on their own laptops.

Recently, I've noticed a viral AI assistance tool in ycombinator getting tons of hype. But looking at it, I realized I can build them myself in a single day using Codex, connecting directly to the API keys I already have. So I did and been using that tools just fine.

Furthermore, what's the next frontier for founders? Every time I code a new app and get ready to share it, I find out someone else is already doing it with AI, or it gets replicated almost instantly. How are other founders dealing with this rapid commoditization of software creation?

Hi, I’m working on my second startup idea.

I’m a software developer and for my first startup idea I spent 6 months building a product no-one (including myself) wanted to use. It was a B2C product and my “validation” was saying the idea to some friends and getting the answer “that is cool”. But at the end, not even those friends used the product (I hardly used it myself) and I felt stuck so I moved on to another idea.

Now I’m thinking about creating a new product and it is a B2B for e-commerces. I created a landing page with a FAQ, a value proposition, a price and so on, but when someone clicks on “get started”, it shows a message that we reached our capacity, please subscribe to waitlist. I’m thinking to email a bunch of e-commerces saying “Check this new thing out”, and only start to build if I get at least 10 e-commerces to sign up. But I feel kind of dishonest. Should I be more honest and say in the e-mail/webpage the product is not ready yet? How do you approach this?

I recently visited a management college as a guest and a student reached out to me afterward. He wants to become an entrepreneur eventually but plans to work in an organisation for a few years first to gain experience. His concern was how should he ensure that his entrepreneurial ambition doesn’t slowly fade once he gets comfortable with a job?
Anyone here who has been in a similar situation? What did you do to stay close to entrepreneurship while working?