p.s. any chance of scanning the copy? I would much rather read this version than the one you could torrent now.
I like how you can change the text size for a small phone. And it's light-weight for mobile connections - caches all the front page articles so makes it worthwhile for commuters.
One alumni told me that YC was all about picking billion dollar, not million dollar businesses. In that case, could you say juniper would scale to the billion dollar market? Could your users track their usage with a recurring Google calendar entry? (I know women that do). Why not scale to include other high usage products - toothpaste, toilet paper, etc? (I know of one startup in stealth mode doing this, so it's probably a feasible plan). Sorry for playing devil's advocate - really like what you got so far though.
Interesting that you mentioned "serious." Looking back I don't think I was a whole lot "serious" the last time I applied, but I think my application might have been better (see my comment below - got more video views last year, but that could have been an anomaly).
In any case, I wonder if being in school this time hurts our chances. Most of our founders are graduating, and the rest have signed on to jobs. But we are more serious about it this time around - hacking away on public transit, on campus and pulling all-nighters to get features out.
There was a blog post here by that title or similar. May replace "Facebook" with the "next big thing" or "accelerator" with "Y Combinator". But my Google search skills and HNsearch isn't helping me out here. Anyone bookmark it?
1. Never compare your beginning to someone else's middle
http://www.lifewithoutpants.com/someone-elses-middle/
2. Don't look to the past. It's all dead back there.It seems like they do - I just returned to HN from reading flux's pitch, and my eyes did not take too well to the higher contrast on HN. Can anyone confirm if the colors on their website change over the day?
A good effort, I didn't realize it was a pitch for the magicscroll extension till I read it a few times.
- qualities of the founder/team
- the product you're pitching
- traction (growth rate, # paying clients, etc)I'm from Toronto I've read some comparisons on costs of living, taxes, etc on blogs that are a few years old. Need an update whether it's worth moving from Toronto to SF, or for those that moved here, do you hate it here? And why? Is it really true stores close earlier in the Bay Area than in Toronto? Besides now having to deal with Canadian winter, what else do you love about SF? How diverse...
- Keep up to date with industry news
(e.g. record labels and producers would read it daily)
- Improve your chops
(much like the technical coding articles)
- Provide a community
(but not in the sense of YouTube or MySpace)
i.e. more signal, less noise; perhaps deliberately small.
As HN is to hackers, is there a site for musicians?
Any blog posts on this? Just as coders may use APIs to expedite development, I often wondered how teams got such well-designed sites up in such a short period of time. Do they use templates? Themeforest? And after they launch and iterate, do they outsource some of the design work? Esp. if it's all technical founders? Is this frowned upon? Is this done at Y Combinator or at other accelerators?
- What YC or any VC would love to see is traction.
- If you have a simplified version of your idea that's
functional, and solicit user feedback, take it from there.
- Work at it during nights at first.
- If your growth rate is good, apply to YC.