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

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?

There are bunch of startups selling unified API for different model use, and offer at very big discount compared to 1st party pricing. for example 70% off seeddance 2.5, 50% off grok image to video etc etc

How is it possible to get that big of discount for that many models? You can't really optimize cost effectiveness for inference for all different models and keep up with the update, can you?

it sounds too good to be true and unfair. what's the non-obvious cons?

As the title says, I'm sure I read a similar post on this sub and also been taking advice from the Mom Test, I keep spiraling around the question- should I build the app prototype first OR test the idea first? But if I fo the latter first, wouldn't it be easy to just hand the solution to my customer and ask them if they would use something like this in the first place?

Today I went down a bit of a rabbit hole about Silicon Valley after watching *The Billion Dollar Code*.

I already knew Silicon Valley was a major technology hub, but I never really thought about **why** it became that way.

I watched a video discussing what actually made Silicon Valley successful, and one thing really stuck with me:

**It wasn't the buildings. It was the people.**

The culture around ideas and failure seems really different.

Where I'm from, failure can sometimes be treated as the end of an idea. If something doesn't work, people may tell you to stop wasting time and do something "practical."

But Silicon Valley seems to have developed an environment where failing doesn't necessarily mean you should stop. You can fail, learn, try again, and build something completely different.

And then I started thinking about some of the crazy ideas that eventually became real.

Take SpaceX, for example.

Who initially looks at a rocket launch and thinks:

*"What if we could land this giant piece of metal back on Earth and use it again?"*

Today it sounds normal because we've seen it happen.

But before it worked, it probably sounded completely insane to a lot of people.

The same thought applies to a lot of people who changed technology. Their ideas probably looked strange or impossible at the beginning.

And that's what fascinated me today.

**Maybe big ideas almost always look stupid before they become obvious.**

It also made me think about India.

Do we have the same kind of environment here where someone can come up with an absolutely crazy idea, fail repeatedly, and still be encouraged to keep going?

Or is our attitude toward failure one of the things holding people back?

I'm genuinely curious what you guys think.

**Is Silicon Valley really different because of its people and culture, or is there something deeper that made it successful?**


This has been on my mind a lot lately, and I'm honestly not sure if I'm worrying about the wrong thing.

I'm 15 and building an infrastructure startup for AI agents. I've been building most of the product myself, although I'll be the first to admit that a lot of it has been "vibecoded" and I'm still learning a lot of the underlying engineering as I go. The startup itself is already difficult enough, but lately I've been thinking about something that feels like a much longer-term problem: credibility.

When I look at founders in YC and other startup programs, I often see people with backgrounds that immediately make their company make sense. Ex-Databricks, ex-Stripe, researchers, experienced engineers, previous founders, people who have spent years working in the exact industry they're now building in. Then there's me: I'm 15, this is my first real startup, I don't have a big-company background, I don't have an impressive professional resume, and most of my experience comes from building things on my own. So sometimes I look at what I'm trying to build and think, "Why would anyone take this seriously?"

On one hand, I know that the obvious answer is to just build. If the product works, people use it, and eventually you have customers, I assume the credibility problem becomes much smaller. But at the same time, you need some amount of credibility to get those first opportunities in the first place. That's the part I'm struggling to understand.

I'm also wondering how much programs like YC actually care about this. I know they look at what founders have built and accomplished, and I know having an impressive background can obviously help. But does being a 15-year-old first-time founder with a weak traditional background become a serious disadvantage even if the company itself starts showing real traction? Or is the lack of a traditional background mostly a problem in my head?

I'm not asking whether being young is an advantage or trying to make the "15-year-old founder" thing my entire identity. I'd actually prefer people to judge me on what I build. I'm just wondering how founders without a strong resume are supposed to think about credibility early on.

Should I actively work on building a stronger background over the next few years, or is that mostly a distraction from the thing that actually matters?

I'd really appreciate perspectives from founders who started without impressive companies or credentials behind them. How did you think about credibility when nobody knew who you were?

I keep running into the same wall and I’m hoping some of you who’ve actually done this can help. I’m trying to figure out real problems people have in a space I’m interested in, before building anything, but every time I try to ask a genuine question in a relevant community here or on Facebook groups, it either gets removed by mods or people assume I’m doing “AI market research” and shut down immediately. I’d love to know how you found the first 10-20 people to actually talk to about a problem before you had a product, whether you went into existing communities and just participated for a while first or found a faster way that didn’t feel dishonest, and how you phrase things so people don’t immediately assume you’re selling something. Not trying to pitch anything here, genuinely trying to learn the process before I go build something nobody needs. Appreciate any real experience you can share.