FYI: Just received an interview email. No joke.

I did too. I am shaking so much I can barely type... I am shocked.

DUDE. So was I! My hands could barely dial my partner's number on my cell phone!

Let us know of the deal at the end. I am really interested about the % they will ask for.

hey congrats to u too :)

Has anyone received a rejection email yet?

I got a rejection email just now

Bummer. I guess that finally puts a fork in the karma theory of YC admissions.

There were too many reasons against me in my application. The idea is weak, poorly explained, no demo, etc. My cofounder also dropped out on me after we submitted the application so I would have had to disclose that I'm now a single founder which would have guaranteed rejection. Never mind, on to plan B.

Us rejects should team up.

There's nothing investors hate more than missing out on something big, especially if it was originally offered right to them, like Apple and HP/Atari.

just got my rejection. :(

we got rejected too. No worries as its the start of a long journey :)

Rejected.

I am curious. Did all the accepted applications provide a demo or prototype link in their application?

We provided a demo link: novlet.com, but apparently they didn't visit it.

I actually kinda like the concept. Some feedback:

1.) Every alpha test should have an easily acceptable "Feedback" link in the layout. I know you've got "Contact Us" on the about page, but most people won't look that far (I wouldn't have had someone not commented about ads on the About page). Feedback is for your benefit, not really your users, so users will not jump through hoops to give it to you.

2.) The front page is too cluttered. A lot of sites try to give a taste of every bit of functionality on the front page, but it doesn't work well. Which do you go to: Google or Yahoo? Why did AltaVista die (hint: it had something to do with "portal")? I'd take the Most Active and Last Registered users off the front page and onto a separate "Stats" page.

3.) You need to display more than a couple sentences of each story in the summary. Typically, readers decide whether they'll read a book after the first 2 paragraphs or so (that's an oft-quoted statistic from the dead-tree publishing world). I'd display about that much, and avoid cutting stories off in mid-sentence.

4.) The language links should also filter the stories visible to a casual browser. I can't read Italian, and so have no interest in Italian stories. Also, duplicate the language links on the story box itself. I was looking for some way to filter the languages and didn't see any until my eyes moved up to the top left corner.

Thanks for the feedback. Good advice, definitetly.

The only problem is about the language filter: we already thought about it, but now we have only one story in english, so you wouldn't have seen anything. This is one of the first things we'll fix in the next days.

Dont feel bad, but the fact that novlet.com got rejected looks like a right decision. The home page has only a small block of usable information [Top stories section ]. Everything else is just space fillers.

Last registered users, Top usrs.. are all sections that should become prominent once the community gets strong.To let the section take a major portion of page doesnt make sense at this point of time .

Yes its an alpha, but when you do alpha,you should be DOING alpha.

Not that you guys have done a bad job, but the site gives an impression that it was cooked up without developers themself having no genuine interest in the site.

Please dont get discouraged even a little bit..Keep working with an open , positive mind. Best of everything to you . :)

Thanks for the advice!

The only thing that makes us feel bad is the impression that we developed it without interest. We built novlet in our spare time while graduating, so we couldn't spend the time we would have liked to, however we were very interested in the project and it's a pity that it doesn't seem so.

The site was initially meant mainly as a proof that we could work togheter, but it would be great to work on it full time, but apparently they didn't even look at it.

We are not discouraged, it would have been a fantastic experience. We'll keep on working.

Why do you have ads on your about page?

Actually, during PG's talk at UC Berkeley ( where I go to school ), I went up and asked him if a demo is important..etc and he advised me to put up a screencast instead, so we did that. I don't know if they actually viewed it because I can't tell from the server logs.

check the apache log, if you get few ips, use geo ip (don't remember exactly the site) to see if the requests are coming from their area.

We did not provide a link to our demo. They didnt look at my personal site with all my info either.

Well it seems it did not play a huge role either way. In my opinion a demo or a prototype is a huge advantage in getting across an idea. At the same time we were reluctant to show ours this early in the process. Anyway goodluck to those who made it. Maybe I will see you at some of the Boston web meetups.

we didn't make it. Maybe it was because we didn't get that prototype online.

I seriously might go over to JoyEnt and kill all those lousy bastards ;-) We were promised our new server repeatedly the next day for two weeks now, believed in it and didn't just put that damn thing online on an improvised dyndns box. Big fault, I suppose... :(

No.

we did.

we did

Think positive, otherwise you'll get bad karma.

Just now, yes. Ah, well...

Hey thats a great news. Congrats

hmmn... nothing yet. I hope this doesn't mean they sent the yeses in one batch and the nos in another...

Let's hope they're just sending them off one by one. But I'm not going to speculate. That way lies madness.

was thinking the same thing.. those that got emails: did they look hand-composed or mail-merged?

It'd be silly to ask for email headers to check the client, right? :-P

Well, it wasn't a personalized email, and it was CC'd to an anonymous list.

thanks for the data! congrats! (and fingers crossed...)

Congrats to you guys!

How totally exciting. I think I'm going to get blisters from constantly refreshing

well, I've got new spam, but no new ham.

Congrats! I didn't, so I'm guessing I didn't make it this time around. Oh well.

does anyone want to share a hotel room for Saturday and Sunday night? Conversely, if anyone wants to house a Ycombinator interviewee for two nights, I would be eternally in their debt.

Thanks, Mark

Thanks for the update. Congrats and best of luck!

Hey, congratulations! That's fantastic!

Thanks. Good luck to everyone!

Congrads to you.

Congrats.

I have to admit I am a little unclear on one point: Does everyone who applied get emailed or just the ones accepted to the interviews? I would hate to be waiting for something that will never come.

Darn you, Godot! You wasted two hours of my life! :-)

Yes, every team receives an email, although not necessarily all founders. Might just be the founder whose account you applied under.

We'll email the founder whose yc account the application was made through. The from addr will be [email protected].

yeah, can someone please answer that?

I wouldn't want to be waiting for easter eggs on Christmas.

edit: nvm

I've got a Sieve script running on my IMAP server, set to redirect to my phone any message from an address containing any of the strings "pg@", "tlb@", "rtm@", "x@", or "ycombinator".

I also have my email here set to a subaddress, which is also included in the above forward. Points to anyone who understands Sieve semantics well enough to predict whether the message will get matched and redirected twice.

Sieve happens in realtime :-)

I'm 300 meters away from YC in Mountain View, so the email doesn't have to travel as far through the intertubes to get to my inbox. Beat that!

I'm about a 100ms away from there so presumably you'll know before I do

Doesn't have to. But it sure might not get routed that way.

Hold up Hold up! The data will travel straight to Seattle first before getting re-routed! So even if you guys are 100ms away ... the data pipes are facing in my direction :-D

I've got you beat. I built a robot last night (runs on Lisp and parts from Radio Shack) that constantly monitors the internet, my phone lines and packets going out of YC's office. As soon as my robot picks up a signal of interest it beams the messages directly to my HUD that I've been wearing ever since I sent my app in.

Hurray for over-engineered solutions! While you're at it, though, you might as well just have your robot slip inside YC and grab a copy of Arc--then it wouldn't just be Lisp, it would be Hundred Year Lisp!

How high would you jump if I sent you an SMS right now?

Well, given that I'm on the second floor of Marston, I'd probably find out what the view from the roof is. :-)

"I tried to call but no one answered..."

And now we're all refreshing this thread too

he's awake!

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=11399

(I can't believe I'm posting this)

Rejection the best motivator? or is it just me? The passion to prove yourself and your ideas is more motivating than acceptance. Anyway we have some extra office space available to share with all you future ycombinator startups that will be locating in boston for the summer. We are located in davis square minutes from harvard sqaure in cambridge. We have been there for 4 months now and have 2-3 desks to spare. You can see pics at dreamvex.com (our soon to be designed blog).

If anyone is interested when you move to the city, you can email me at todd at dreamvex.com

goodluck to everyone who got an interview.

wow, I'm so happy =) look forward to seeing you guys in mountain view, CA

Congrats to all winners. For anyone who won't be in this YC batch, here is an idea.

I suggest joining my YC alum startup, Xobni, instead. Sometimes great hackers joinup instead of startup. That is what Paul Buchheit did : http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/looking-for-co-founder-try-attending.html

send resumes: http://www.xobni.com/jobs.php

Emails fall through.

This isn't survivor. Get back to work. :-)

For American teams who got interviews and need to fly to Silicon Valley: Southwest has a sale that includes flights to San Jose. Sample fare: $79 each way from Seattle to San Jose. Here: http://www.southwest.com/hotfares/hotfares2.html

You'll need to book before Thursday midnight (now is that midnight between Thursday and Friday, or...?).

It's too late for that: "with 14-day advance purchase"

Ah, yes. Oops.

Got a thumbs-up @5pm EST. It was a generic msg, sent to a suppressed mailing list. knewjax, we did not provide a demo or prototype. We did, however, spend quite a bit of time in writing a detailed reply to a question pg sent by email about 5 days ago.

Did PG read this posting?

"Just try to take a released feature away from customers and see how pissed off they get." (37signals.com)

Here we are all waiting for that email and its more or less like this ;-)

This is just for fun. Relax.

I read someone recently refer to startups as the NBA of high-tech (luring kids away from college). If that's the case, does that make this draft day? It would appear to have some of the feel.

GMail. It refreshes for me.

Other than that - I'm trying to get some work done so I can get home at a reasonable hour and work some more on my startup.

I got a mail from GMAIL team asking me not to abuse Gmail by constantly refreshing it :D

Gmail doesn't refresh that often! I think there is still a lag....keeeep refreshing!

Let's all refresh at the same time and crash Google!

Of course its constantly refreshing as always :)

The time zone difference is killing me, its only 8am over there!

Goooooood Moooorning! Still no mail....?

Agree with the Gmail people -- although I love it, the notifier can't be trusted with important matters!

To everyone rejected, don't give up , remember the fedex story, bootstrap it and work hard!

I sense a marketing opportunity for blackberry in this thread! :) yay for push email

Oh did any hacker intercept the mail? Its rater dangerous if that happens ;-)

Considerably more often than that. Dreamhost is gonna be pissed with me.

why refresh mail when I can refresh ycombinator? The second when one of the emails gets received it will be posted here for shure... :-)

How is that different from a normal day?

hakuna matata = my philosophy in life.

Has anyone heard back yet?

Yes, but he wants me to buy penis enlargement pills for some reason.

I'm in love with my Junk Email box today too. Nothing gets deleted without proper consideration.

Heh. I didn't know YC was into that kind of thing. How interesting.

fingers crossed

congrats. i can't believe it when my partner told me :)

Was rejected.

Congrads

no.

troll?

no.