Life after YC and TechStars: What's our plan?
YC and TechStars results are out and we were not invited to either of the programs. That was hard to suck down, so I took a day off from hacking to reflect on our YC and TechStars application journey. The idea started off with a problem that I encounter day in and out so naturally I feel this pain would present itself to many other social application users like myself. I also spent a bit of time reading through threads on HN from others that too had got the whynot/non-selection email. Here's a few conversations that I feel was worthwhile following:
What we did to (not) get into Techstars
What we did to (not) get into Techstars - Part 2
Ask HN: Got rejected by YC 6-12 months ago? Where are you now?
Different thoughts rushed into my mind when I received the email from YC. "Is this it? Was the idea not good enough? What's lacking from our team?". I spent the entire day reviewing our applications again, reading through some of PG's article and came to some conclusions myself. However, that is not the motivation of what I would like to share with this post. So what's life after YC and TechStars for us? We're pretty clear on this at this point:Getting real feedback
We told ourselves that this is going to be big. We know we are building something cool. But there is just one thing that keeps hovering in our head. Is this going to be the next "Coolest App That No One Uses". We've talked to friends about the product and gotten rave responses, so what's holding us back then? Starbucks. Getting quality feedback from strangers, like-minded hackers and seasoned entreprenuers. Paul mentioned this in his interview at Startup2Startup: It is not unusual for Y Combinator startups to show their website to Starbucks customers and ask "would you use this?"
Location, location , location
We're moving to San Francisco. We battled between Colorado and San Francisco but silicon valley prevailed. We are going to keep crunching on the product to a demo-able version
and hang out at Tech meetups and starbucks, no other place beats San
Francisco for such social events/meetups.Release as promised
We plan to release a beta by May 31st. We plan to send David and Paul an email when we get to that stage. The reason behind this is because we did not have a prototype when we applied. This is the best way to show David and Paul that we executed and here's the super cool product that we've pitched about. I hope they'll be kind enough to give the advice or feedback that we love to have.
