There have been YC companies in the past that spent most of their time away from San Francisco, including some companies that actually spent most of their time in Europe. AirBnB famously flew to and from New York every week. You don't have to be there for the entire 3 months, although I think all that travel will likely exhaust you if you aren't absolutely committed to your company (and it sounds like it could be difficult with the baby).

Also, $80k for 3% is a far better equity proposal than YC. $80k for 5% would be equivalent. That said, I can't imagine they'd splinter themselves any further. I think the way they've set themselves up works great for them, obviously they can't please everyone.

If you really have that much interest for your idea, get several LOI (letter of intent) notices from your potential customers and take it to investors. That should get you a lot more than $80k.

thank you for your suggestions, LOI can certainly help with raising money, I'll focus on making a better tested MVP and demo it to potential customers and get LOI.

Just a suggestion, but why not switch to a services model to get started? Sell them on the demo, present a plan to integrate it into their systems and the costs associated with that (integration being the key word). The costs associated are however long it will take you times $125-$250 per hour. That's enough to set yourself up as a going business at least, then figure out how to grow it from there. It will be a lot easier to raise money if you have 5 customers and example case studies that have worked through this process. You may find you don't need to. You don't need YC's stamp of approval to do this, and many others have followed a similar process in various verticals.

thank you for the suggestion, that's what I'm planning on once I get MVP ready for customers.

If you are a software developer, the risk of committing to one year (three months at least partially in Mountain View) doesn't sound that scary to me. If you leave on good terms with your current employer you could probably just get your job back if you failed at your startup.

It sounds like you have a great potential business. The size of the addressable market will determine whether or not you could have a startup [0] as defined by PG. Generally speaking, YC only wants to fund startups in their main program, which would be the one that would give you enough capital to actually make a run at it.

When we did YC (S13) we had three cofounders that all had families and single incomes. We made it work. We rented an apartment and lived/worked together for a few days during the week, and returned to our home offices the rest of the time. You could find a room to rent somewhere if you are a solo founder. Some used credit cards to float things. You'll have to get uncomfortable...

Part of doing a startup is about sacrificing bits of your life for your business. Investors (including YC) want to make sure you are all-in. I would be surprised if you would be able to raise any capital from experienced startup investors while working part-time on the project. They typically want you to have already dove into the deep end.

If you don't have a startup on your hands, but instead have a great small business, there's nothing to be ashamed of there and you can probably find some investment from local high net worth investors if you do some networking. You can test that with pre-orders or LOI's or something of that sort. However, those investments are probably going to be more "Shark Tank," full of onerous terms and potentially much more dilution for you as a founder.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

> If you are a software developer, the risk of committing to one year (three months at least partially in Mountain View) doesn't sound that scary to me.

That assumes that they have enough savings to look after their family until they're making enough profit to take a reasonable salary.

>"Part of doing a startup is about sacrificing bits of your life for your business."

But not his baby. Some things are non-negotiable.

Where in SoCal are you? I do that kind of investment, and also live in SoCal. You can email me at: [email protected]

I've also been in your exact situation a number of times; much of my past consulting work was because I'd already developed a solution for something for my own personal use.

Best, Erich

That you have to be in the valley or get into YC to build a successful venture backed startup is just not true. I know it's hard to go against the grain and it's hard to bootstrap, but just focus on getting users and customers and traction and you can figure the other stuff out later. Don't let it paralyze you because it's just an insecure illusion (I know, I was there at one point and realized it was all in my head)

Also there are other accelerators if you really want to go to one (ex: Digital Ocean is out of TechStars).

totally understand, and that's the plan for now.

I usually don't recommend it at pre-seed stage, but you could contract product development out and manage it from a technical level. Not cheap, but it would allow you create the first version faster. Either that or trim down your MVP feature set.

There also hundreds of other accelerators. Though I can't really recommend doing any accelerator while you have a 1-year-old. (But you also don't really need an accelerator to get your MVP done.)

YC invests in the types of companies they know how to deal with. Why the fixation on them? There are people with money other than Y Combinator.

I didn't think there was a requirement to move to SV? Only that it was strongly encouraged.

They require you to relocate to SV during the program. Whether to move there permanently is up to you.

I'm little confused here, I thought the most value from YC is meeting with partners. I would probably consider applying for next batch, and get their feedback on whether they fund without the need to move