Remote batch brought 1 more real benefit of YC: $125k.

Before COVID when you have to relocate to Bay Area this is just a living fee for a low quality house + personal spendings.

Now, 125k is almost a lot for pretty much any place on the planet. Therefore, many remote entrepreneurs can be more relaxed on raising capital. I'd say you even can decide to "bootstrap" with this money + GCP/AWS credits.

True! Where I live now, that would fund my whole neighborhood working together on a startup for a year.

You know what's going to happen with that mentality brought to investors. They gonna demand lower pay rates, forcing people to move to lower income areas.

Not really. The investors will want you to use capital efficiently. If that means hiring remote developers in the Philippines then that’s what they will want but for other applications, hiring away the $500k engineer from Google is the only way to accomplish the task.

> If that means hiring remote developers in the Philippines then that’s what they will want

I'm not sure the first stages of a startup is the right time to start handholding offshored devs. You typically want talented folks with you because change will happen fast. No time to draft new requirements and make sure via lengthy meetings that the offshored devs really understands them.

VC want you to efficiently spend money. Grow. Raise more. Exit. Or die ASAP

>VC want you to spend money. Grow. Raise more. Exit. Or die ASAP

FTFY ;) Too many unprofitable / "pre-profit" companies have five figure monthly office rents for this to be untrue.

Maybe I am biased but having heard and seen horror stories of founders losing their companies because of _having_ to raise money: no thanks.

Bootstrap and if it doesn't hit ramen profitable, no biggie. If it does, go raise at favorable terms because you don't need their money.

Investor money used responsibly can be a huge boon. The main benefit is speed and focus. Bootstrapping often means you need to do side jobs, and that faster experimentation can be cost prohibitive. That means raising, but living cheaply, is probably optimal. If you can get to a million ARR or die in 3 years instead of 8, take it.

I can live off a bunch of years in Spain for that money.

You could easily do that in the USA as well. Median income is $35K and that’s before taxes and without a corporate shell to transform some of the larger living expenses into corporate pre-tax deductions.

Survive, yes. Thrive, no. The USA is an expensive place.

In a lot of the country, 125k is a lot of money, easily enough to live 2 years or more.

To answer a sibling comment since we can’t nest any deeper: so long as you’re not on the west coast with its decades long housing undersupply, small towns almost anywhere in the country are pretty affordable. This even includes parts of the otherwise expensive northeast.

In particular a lot of college towns offer a great mix of good quality of life with very affordable living.

Just so you know, you can nest deeper, you just have to wait a little while.

HN has an anti-flamewar system which kicks in when there's too many comments too fast in one chain.

You can also click the timestamp of any comment to reply before there is a reply button.

Part of it are; parts of it definitely are not.

Curious as an outsider, which parts are not?

The middle part.

It's a little more complicated than that, but mostly, away from the coasts and famous cities (Chicago, Austin, etc.), most of middle America is pretty cheap -- by American standards. It's still a lot more expensive than most of the world, obviously. But there are lots of places you could live reasonably comfortably for 2-3 years on $125k. Hell, there are a lot of places you could buy a house for $80k, and $45k buys a lot of food and internet. ;-)

I can live at my current spending level in the Bay Area for 3-ish years on $125k. In my small, Midwest hometown, I’m sure I could stretch that to 6-8 years. The disadvantage, of course, would be living in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere.

Is that living in a shoebox? Eating comfortably? Raising a family? Having any fun?

As another datapoint, my family of 4 has lived in the Bay Area for the last 4 years on an average budget of $62k. Rent is extremely expensive (60% of our total spend), but everything else can be had quite cheaply. It's true that we're more likely to spend the weekend camping in the Santa Cruz mountains than flying down to Disneyland, and prefer a charcoal barbecue at the park to dining in a restaurant downtown. Honestly though, that's how I'd spend my time even if the alternative were free. And we also take at least one international vacation each year -- even during COVID, we spent a month in the Mexican Riviera.

My salary could support a much looser budget, but we find our life very fulfilling as-is and don't see a compelling reason to spend more. Different way of seeing the world I guess.

That’s living in a 2BR apartment by myself, eating well, and having a bit of fun here and there.

Maybe the confusion is net vs gross?

Just a 2BR and food for 3 years = close to impossible on $125K gross.

But it is very much possible on $125K net.

NB: you're right, in the sense that if you're living off of savings it's net (and then some). But I can see why parent is... more than a little confused :)

I just played around with this tool some, and it seems to paint a reasonably accurate picture: https://howmuch.net/cost-of-living/ny/new-york

In general, the more rural an area is, the lower the cost of living. Rural college towns are more likely to have an abundance of cheap apartments than the average rural area.

However, it's all highly relative. San Francisco and NYC are the two most expensive locations in the United States. By comparison, everywhere else is cheaper. Lots of major US metro areas are extremely affordable by comparison, and $120k could probably last a frugal person for 2 or 3 years near those locations especially if living with roommates... so you don't have to live in the middle of nowhere to be somewhere affordable. Compared to a lot of places outside the US, even the affordable parts of the US probably seem expensive, but my limited understanding is that most of Western Europe is relatively expensive... so probably not too different from the US in many places, but definitely outside my area of expertise.

The places with higher supply of housing or land and lower demand.

To be less snarky, about 80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas. Those tend to be more expensive due to the higher demand. The other 20% live in rural or exurban areas where land is extremely cheap.

However, access to education and healthcare outside the urban/suburban regions can be very bad.

Where did you get 35K???

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

"Median household income was $68,703 in 2019, an increase of 6.8 percent from the 2018 median of $64,324 (Figure 1 and Table A-1)."

35K is closer to the poverty line in much of the USA for a family than the median income.

Assuming parent meant median income for a person, not for a household. $35K is correct. Here's the data: https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=country/USA&st...

Dual income households are pretty common these days, so a median household income of $65K with a median income of $35K makes sense.

I think it is household vs personal. The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median personal income at $35,977 in 2019.

For a startup founder, or in fact any single person, median personal income is a more relevant number.

Good luck with taxes in Spain.

what's the problem? Apart of a fact that you have to pay them

Any suggestions? Spain has been a potential target for temporary relocation for me!

My suggestion is that if you plan to open a business, go to Portugal instead of Spain.

Spain is increasing taxes and they already were pretty hefty for Limited Liability companies.

Portugal is similar on paper but it's easier to start, and their tax agency is not nearly as punitive and arbitrary as the Spanish one.

And you'll have sun (in the south), contained prices and polite Portuguese, which tend to speak decent English, in case you need hiring.

Portuguese infrastructures and utilities are still far below Spain, specially roads and highways, but Portugal is slowly improving while Spain has been declining for a while and it's basically walking to a cliff.

Goin on a Travel to Spain is pretty easy too.

I'm Spanish, if anyone thought I was advertising my country.

If you don't need the sea, I suggest some cheap german city like Leipzig or Dresden. Another not so common idea is Bulgaria: cheap, very low taxes (flat 10%) and a lot of english speakers (expecially in Sofia). I've been there several times and it's also a very nice place.

Dresden is amazing - one of my favorite cities in the world.

Barcelona is obviously amazing, but Malaga is very nice too, as is Seville. If you ever considered taking up kitesurfing or windsurfing, move to Tarifa, a fantastic place.

I'm partial to Granada because I grew up there, but it's an awesome place. About 20% of the population is college students, so that tells you about the city life. It's close to the tallest mountain range in Southern Europe, 45m from the beach, food is great and cheap, and it's small enough that you can walk just about anywhere you want, or take transit.

I live in Barcelona and love the quality of life. Happy to answer any questions. Twitter @unamashana

What would rent be like for a 2-bedroom apartment?

Within the city limits in a nice-ish neighborhood 1000 EUR per month. I've been living at a 1200 EUR/mo 2br in a hipster neighborhood for the past year and a half here.

If you go to neighborhoods where the locals live or outside the city limits you'll see the price drop considerably. A friend is living one hour away from here and paying 600 EUR for a nice house that's four times the size of my apartment.

Live in Barcelona too. Can confirm!

I got the impression that English level is really poor in Spain (when I was visiting Valencia, didn't go to Barcelona). Even with younger population - I was going out in the evening with some friends, we approached like 4 groups of 20-something and none of them could even give us basic directions. In shops and tourist places it's better but barely.

English is the most spoken second language in Spain, with ~35% of the population being able to speak it. Portugal is slightly worse at 27%, along with Ukraine (18%), Romania (31%), and Italy (34%). France (39%), Croatia (49%), Estonia (50%), Slovenia (59%), and Greece (51%) are all a bit higher. And then the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Luxembourg, and Switzerland are all between 60-70%+.

And although I wouldn't worry too much about language too much if your focus is primarily on work, Spanish is perhaps the easiest language to learn as an English speaker. You can achieve professional level fluency in 600 hours of study. Certainly with 80-100 hours of concentrated study and continued practice after that you can learn more than enough to get by in daily life.

Two big advantages with learning Spanish: 1) pronunciation is easy to learn and is the same for both written and spoken Spanish; 2) there are lots of cognates, so if your English vocabulary is good then you already know lots of Spanish words.

Spain is great, but for the purposes of picking a country for working remotely and having a longer runway, I would argue heavily for Mexico over Spain if you're picking a Spanish speaking country. The overall cost of living is low, internet access can be great depending on the area, you'll be on a similar timezone as the US, and services (cooking, laundry, babysitting, etc) are very inexpensive - leaving you with much more time to work (or to use your downtime more effectively than running errands/etc).

FWIW I’d argue Italian is even easier than Spanish as it has fewer conjugation rules to learn and the grammar is in many cases closer to English :)

Both are pretty easy, though, and Spanish opens up a lot more of the world. But Italian is just so darn fun :)

Italy is the only place I've seen worse English than Spain :D

Maybe my impression of Mexico is wrong, but I would feel much safer living in Spain/EU than Mexico or South America.

Someone from Latin America here.

Your impressions are correct. While some violence is greatly exagerated to paint a picture (For instance, Chicago, St Louis, Baltimore, Washington are more violent than São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro), it still is MUCH safer in Europe or Sillicon Valley/New York.

Maybe, just maybe, it's on you to learn the local language (even just basics) if you feel like relocating there?

He's not saying it's not his responsibility. He's just stating the difficulty level. Of course it's on you to learn the language, but you also should of course know the culture of where you are thinking of moving.

I did the nomadic, startup-in-the-gargage, life in Barcelona and didn't speak a lick of Spanish.

Barcelona is awesome and it's cheap (spent a total of $800 for the whole month on food, living, etc.). Highly recommend for someone on a budget who wants to hack away.

Can confirm, the average level of English in Spain is pretty bad. Even in Madrid, where I lived for a year. It's almost like they're proud of it - AFAIK they're very protective of their language, dubbing every movie (at least until recently), which in turn limits their exposure to English.

On the other hand, living in Spain and speaking fluent English can be almost like a superpower in some circumstances.

And why wouldn't they be proud of it? Countries that intentionally focus on their own language (e.g. Japan or France) have managed to maintain more of their own cultures, while smaller ones have been more easily gobbled up by global American culture.

Being proud and focusing on your culture, yes. Being proud of not speaking the lingua franca of the world, no.

(And for the record, my native language is Spanish)

Valencia (the region) literally has a part which locals jokingly call "Little Britain", where residents primarily expect to speak and conduct business in English.

Unless you're planning to hire your neighbours, why is this relevant?

Going out and being unable to speak to people on the street/in the shops or even talking to waiters in restaurants is not really a great experience for me.

Presumably you go to large cities for the social interaction.

If you move to Spain presumably you’re planning to learn Spanish?

I don’t understand this point. YC lasts for 90 days. 3 months of rent in the Bay Area isn’t more than $15k more expensive than the counter factual, even ignoring ramen profitability ethos. Would you be indifferent between in person and remote YC if the remote version invested $110k at the same terms?

That's right! I completely forgot about the AWS/GCP credits. Even in a realistic usage scenario, that's adding 25 - 50k to your funding over a couple of years. The legal fees waiver for upto 10k is another one.

Indeed, we got 100k from GCP recently, and it will change a lot for our bootstrapped company.

It basically makes us "ramen profitable"

What’s the criteria for getting 100k? The most I ever got was 5k.

> Some people around me felt that my experience bootstrapping my last business should be enough to close seed funding, but the only thing that helps close funding is the fear of missing out on your deal. I witnessed this first hand after we launched to #2 on Product Hunt. We got some good inbound investor interest, but I couldn't create the pressure needed to close funding - there was no forcing function like the demo day.

TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.

Had some trouble scanning through the article. You have this header

> Tips on applying successfully

And the next subheaders are

>> Talking about my idea only from a customer's perspective

>> Writing to sound impressive

>> Stopping to apply after a couple of rejections

Things were confusing, I had to go back and read the small print after the first header, which says "do NOT do these things". Maybe the first headers should read something like "pitfalls to avoid when applying"? Or rephrasing the sub-headers?

Excellent feedback! I updated the article and used the heading you suggested. Thanks.

> The biggest one was that Ycombinator is all about raising money, and if you are not in the mindset of 'raise as much as you can, as often as you can,' you won't fit in.

This must have changed. I went through YCF #2 and we were essentially laughed at each time we mentioned staying local or becoming profitable. Literally the only thing our advisor talked about was raising.

I'm sorry you had that experience - I would hope it's an outlier.

We're on the same W21 cohort as OP. I remember when we started, they hammered home frugality as a key trait of successful founders. One founder talk stood out - "If they have office snacks before product market fit, you know they're going to fail". W21 wanted to put that on a T-shirt.

This advice seems to be repeated all over YC's manuals, partner office hours and culture generally.

It was not an outlier. If they're snack shaming now...

If you have snarky shirts before you have a product...

Nice write up on your experience in YC, thanks for that.

How much do you think you get distracted by talking and listening with others in your YC network vs actually focusing on your product?

As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people

> As a lone wolf programmer, I avoid talking to people

I've built things solo with my PhD (dropped out), and collaboratively in a startup.

The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing. We need to talk to people, whether it's customers, co-founders or colleagues to correct all the incorrect assumptions we've made, but can't see.

If you're building something new, there's likely to be many, many incorrect assumptions...

> The biggest mistake we make is building the wrong thing

I don't think talking to users can fix that. If you have the wrong vision about the product, you probably will talk to the 'wrong users' too. You’re not in the market the users think you’re in — you’re in the market you believe you’re in.

That approach will also lead you to very incremental solutions or even make you run around in circles achieving nothing. It lowers the cost of failure (downside), but also the potential impact of success (upside).

Can you explain your approach/philosophy, or is it intuitive?

I believe the most successful companies don't discover markets, they create them. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk forge the macro (10x) jump and then ask customers for the micro improvements.

I'm writing an essay about this topic, feel free to take a look the draft if your are interested :)

https://ab0ve.substack.com/p/ec282c2c-95fa-4914-820f-7463cb5...

It looks more symbiotic in my experience. Apple now has the power to “create markets” because they have a reputation, a brand, and lots of money. Steve Jobs was once a nobody working on a startup, and nobodies working on startups are at the whim of the market. He rode the wave of dramatically increasing enthusiasm for consumer computing, which had been a hobby industry for years at that point and had began to take off. The market already wanted it, he didn’t create it.

Likewise, Elon Musk has been a big personality for years. Now he can start a company drilling holes and attract big partnerships and investments. When he started, he was just a nobody making maps software, then still nearly a nobody making internet money transmission software. Both relied on the massive wave of internet popularity in the 90s, with PayPal riding eBays wave. In hindsight, victory seems obvious, it looks like they created their markets. In their time, they rode a market wave. Markets are people, and you can’t make people want something they don’t want.

They try to minimize the distractions (and they recommend you do too). Personally, I like being distracted a bit and mingling so it worked out just fine for me. Other than the group office hours, they don't insist you attend anything up until the demo day preparation starts.

Thanks

Surely the one thing that should be on the Magic Bell homepage is a Magic Bell I can click on and see what this product is?

That's a fair point. We need to setup some examples with mock API calls so we can offer a consistent state to all new visitors. In the meantime, here is a quick demo - https://codesandbox.io/s/elastic-northcutt-9pcgv

I don't think you (just) need to set up some examples, you need to use your own product on your own homepage.

Looks good btw.

I don't think they can. They do notifications for users, but website visitors are anonymous. It doesn't make sense to add it to the landing page.

With that being said, I think a live demo is a great idea and would go a long way!

I know from a personal perspective, I've considered applying to YCombinator in the past, but would never to the Bay Area.

This is just one datapoint, but I'm sure there are many others like me. How many businesses never launched, because our society has insisted that startups must happen in a single, extremely unlivable part of the country.

A fully customizable notifications dropdown with a solid api sounds useful.

Note to the author: please for the love of god increase body font weight to 400.

Ah so that was it! Thanks for pointing this out. Pushing up a fix now.

The hardest thing about implementing notifications for me is not the UI, it’s the rate limiting (avoid bombarding users with duplicates), intelligently handling state changes, and figuring out when to escalate to an email/sms channel. The homepage doesn’t convince they’ve solved the hard problems surrounding notifications.

We handle state changes (and sync them real-time). We'll get to rate limiting and other features you mentioned in the coming months. We have a pretty extensive roadmap and would love to keep you posted - @magicbell_io.

I would love to hear experiences regarding Remote vs On-site YC. What is the magnitude of difference? How much does the average startup lose out on networking because of the lack of physical presence.

And for people from Europe, is it a net positive that the batch is remote, or is the on-site still better?

I couldn’t quite tell from the api docs but is the user’s email required? Can I just supply an external ID? I’m just wondering from a privacy point of view.

You can use (as you guessed) an `userExternalId` - https://developer.magicbell.io/docs/browser-js#identifying-u....

That's how we built our HN Chrome extension that never asks for your email - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...

Thanks. I was on mobile and only skimmed the docs - sorry!

Cool extension. A Firefox version would be great!

Did you give your equity just for this? it doesn't sound a good deal on your side.

I probably didn't do a good job in listing down all the benefits. I skipped the biggest one - the YC network. It's an amazing network that's ready to adopt new products as well as invest in them.

YC also gives you a lot credibility. If you don't have a pedigree (previous exit, FAANG network), it's your buy-in in the big league.

Besides they invest 125k, which may not sound like a lot but is a good first cheque in that can get you pretty far on it's own.

Yeah, even if you got $0 it would still probably be worth it. If you company fails you still end up with an insane network.

What’s the current equity scenario again? I remember them saying it’s not fixed but what is it? And what is it practically in your cohort?

7% for $125k with some pro-rata rights - https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/

So magicbell is a dropdown displayed with an API? $99 /month for 2000 users? I don't understand what problem is trying to solve your startup. To me it seems that you're trying to sell a library more than a service.

It sounds really simple to do, but we literally spent a month or two implementing a notification inbox, browser push notifications, granular settings and permissions, etc at Spectrum. Even with all that work it was still relatively buggy!

I'm very glad MagicBell is tackling this — I never want to build another notification system myself, I'd much rather pay them to solve this problem for me!

push notifications and state management across devices is a very hard problem, try doing this yourself.

I am glad that something like magicbell exists.

It certainly looks deceptively simple. Once you factor in real-time updates with multi-device sync, things start to get challenging pretty fast. Also, that's 2,000 monthly active users. Happy to discuss on twitter @unamashana