Mathilde Collin is CEO and co-founder of Frontapp. This article originally appeared on the blog Frontapp.
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Four months now, we have accepted the Y-Combinator for our shared inbox solution. We wrote about our first month inside the famous California structure. But recently we were asked to write what happened after. And let's face it, many things happened!
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So here I am again, after three months at Y Combinator. I go back to what he did for our team, our product and our fundraising.
(There are also some tips for completing your application YC and doing interviews at the end of this article, be sure to check if you're interested.)
He or breaks your team, and that's a good thing
Y Combinator is pretty intense. Among all the other things that you will bring it stands :. After 3 months, you probably know that your team is
When we started Y Combinator, there were five of us work in front (my co-founder, three employees and I). To make things easy, we decided to rent a house in Palo Alto that we all welcome and from which we could all work.
We are not in the Bay Area at all - we were not even the United States - so we thought it was just the easiest way to go. Being away from our families and our friends had one advantage least :. We could be fully focused on the work we wanted to do and what we did, from our living room
But it also means that we stay together 24/7 .
This will necessarily test the relationships you have with your teammates more than anything you've done before. YC pushes you to your limits and ensures that nothing is going according to plan.
If the relationships are easy to maintain when all goes well, it is a whole different story when the pressure is on. You will probably need to face downtime, poor launch weeks without any growth, excessive churn, you and your team will be tired.
And not only you will manage all this, you will also need to ensure that morale remains in place and that everyone is always motivated to get up every day and walk to the room living to continue to build a product that people will love.
But there is definitely a silver lining to the point I'm making: Our team came out of this was stronger than ever could have been otherwise. We now know who we are, how we work together and when it's time to just let everything down and eat a hamburger.
And that, in my opinion, is definitely priceless.
It helps you to answer the only question that matters: your product is something that people want
Y Combinator makes things go faster
This sound pretty obvious that knowing? Y Combinator is an "accelerator" but these are the different reasons that actually make everything go very fast.
- As a start-up lot, you get great visibility thanks to Demo Day and launch your own TechCrunch. Thank you for this, we were able to get over 300 entries in our first two weeks (see exactly how we did here).
- YC partners are highly connected and are always happy to make as many intros you need experts, potential customers, press ...
- The alumni network is YC very high (over 1,400 startups founders and 700 today). And everyone's really sensitive when it comes to giving you advice or you meet in person. Here is how we managed to get meetings with the founders of Stripe, Dropbox or Airbnb!
- Being right in the valley made it really easy for us to go to events and jogging and meet great people there too.
But you still need to figure things out for yourself: YC will never tell you what people want
If there one thing that is true about YC partners, it is that you can not expect them to do the work for you.
I still remember the day when we finally got to meet Paul Buchheit. At that time, he was the partner we were very happy to meet him because of the creator of Gmail. We prepared this whole series of questions to ask him about our application.
We presented three different directions for the product and asked his opinion on which we must choose. We thought it would just pick one and we would like the office hours with a magic solution that would make everything clearer. His response: "Follow your growth."
I can not say we were not disappointed, but it actually makes so much sense. Two reasons for this: we knew how we market better than any YC partner and we talked to our customers more than they ever could. And that meant he did not have the answer, we did.
In the end, even if you are in good company and if there are many people ready to help you, you are the one who will do the hard work and make the tough decisions.
It makes your financial future more secure, at least for the next 18 months
Demo Day will be one of your main objective during the three months and it will certainly be an additional source of pressure. But you should know one thing :. You will be well
Of course, you will probably need to repeat your steps dozen or even hundreds of times and you will reach a point where you're not sure what you're really more to say.
But, again, you will never feel alone in the weeks before the event. We found that the partners were always there for us whenever we needed them. During their office hours, of course, but also during the Christmas weekend night or when questions usually slide. They are always just a Skype call away!
The D-Day, do not be fooled by all investors and people in the room (500 if I counted right). Of course, there are some of the most impressive fund there as Sequoia or A16Z the VC, as well as important seed funds (SV Angel, First round ...) and large business angels. But they have been waiting for this day so that you have for the last four months.
Basically, you just have to consider your site as a gift for them and everything should be fine.
Tips and Tricks for candidates
1. Application
- Be concise. One or two sentences per answer is quite large. Bullet points are great.
- give figures. These may be lines of code, the number of beta or beta users, your total market, your price ....
- Show that you are doing something that people want. Again these will probably be numbers :. email subscribers, paying customers, active users, pre-orders ... But you can also share good feedback or LDI
Zain Shah, YC Summer 2013 batch, has also written question advice question you should really take a look at.
2. Interview
- Be concise. Again. Try to stay at least 15 seconds per answer. Time flies when you're in the interview room and you want to cover as much as possible.
- give figures. Feel free to use the same that you used in your application.
- Be prepared. List all the questions you get asked (some ideas here and here) and write down all the answers. Once you have done this, assign responses to different co-founders so as not to interfere.
- Exercise. Do not think that knowing the right answers is sufficient. You need to repeat over and over again (we probably repeated more than 10 times) to ensure that everything is transparent. You can stop repeat of the day before the interview to avoid the unnatural effect of reciting the text. If you can, do mock interviews also, if possible with a US company (if you are not the United States). They have a different approach to selling products from which you learn a lot.
3. Do not be afraid to ask for advice
We have all been helped before entering Y Combinator and now we all feel really grateful. So do not be afraid to ask for help alums YC for a mock interview or to prepare answers to difficult questions. I'd be happy to help you (just shoot me an email at mathilde (at) frontapp.com)
And what happens next for you, remember that the preparation of an application for YC will never be a waste of time.
If you have not accepted after the written request, look on the bright side: you now have a better understanding of your market, you thought your team and you put more words on your idea and your vision. These are things that you would not have taken the time otherwise.
If you have not accepted after the interview, you will have the reason and you will be able to improve your product. What happened to SoapApp. You can ping them on Twitter, they will tell you how they were able to rotate after their interview.
That being said, we wish you the best of luck
Make sure you just said hi
Previously :! One month Y Combinator: What it's like after acceptance