This is great advice - and similar to the one we got from another YC alum:

"My advice is 3 points to communicate in your application. 1. You have revenue or a plan to make it 2. You and your co-founders are a solid team 3. You will pursue this even without getting an investment"

> 3. You will pursue this even without getting an investment"

Makes all the difference in the world. If you're doing a startup contingent on getting into YC, its worth re-thinking. YC helps, but startups are still hard regardless.

I forgot about #3, so now I feel much better about not applying this time around. I'm still weak on #2 with two "maybes" which was just one of several reasons I don't think it would have worked anyhow.

Makes sense. Knowing those reasons you don't think it will work and attacking those specifically is actually a really good way to debug. Dave Friedberg (Founder of Climate Corporation) actually has a really good approach to this that he talks about here (3 minute video): http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2796

He basically says to lay out the unknowns, and systematically work towards making them knowns. Good luck!

Postmortems like this are really interesting to see, they benefit incoming and future YC classes. I'd love to see more as well.

I agree that if you don't pass the conviction 'sniff test', it's really hard to grind through the ups, downs, and fundraising.

If you're interested in seeing more like this, then I'll throw ours into the hat as well:

[1] https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-ex...

[2] http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-y-c...

Thx. There's lots of good advice out there from other founders as well. This was just a limited view of what I keep seeing over and over again.

Great advice but I wish more alums would share their actual application and video. There are a few floating around and we all try to divine as much from them as possible but the bigger the sample the better.

Good advice, staying with it and believing in your idea is certainly important and I guess they'll see through that if you're not genuine.

> believing in your idea is certainly important

Not just your idea - also important to believe in yourself and your team. In many ways this will supercede the idea because the idea is just one manifestation of a solution to a problem that you're solving. With time and experience your understanding of that problem will evolve, as will your solution.

Great advice, Ayo! I'm glad that you focus on the company rather than writing the application.

Thanks. It's pretty easy to focus on optimizing your app rather than optimizing your business (I see this a lot actually), and it's a bad way to go. Similar to PG's thoughts on raising money as quickly as possible and then going back to work, you should tell the best story you can in your app and then get back to work as quickly as possible. Whether you get into YC or not, your business will still be there waiting, warts and all.