r/startup

Quick thread for anyone who just got a YC rejection email or is thinking about applying:

Y Combinator is genuinely great. They've funded Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, Coinbase. Their alumni network is legendary. Their 1.5% acceptance rate makes Harvard look easy.

But they've also said no to companies that went on to be massive. And that's worth talking about because the startup world fetishizes YC acceptance like it's the only path forward.

Here's what actually happened to some of the companies YC passed on:

SendGrid - Rejected by YC. Got into Techstars instead. Built an email delivery infrastructure company. Grew. IPO'd on NYSE. Eventually acquired by Twilio for $2 billion in 2019.

Buffer - Rejected by YC. Joel Gascoigne didn't just move on he published the rejection application. Buffer is now one of the most transparent, profitable indie SaaS companies out there.

Dropbox - Rejected by YC not once but twice. On the third application, Drew Houston got in. Then Dropbox IPO'd at a $10B+ valuation. The lesson: YC themselves couldn't spot it the first two times.

Chameleon - Rejected by YC AND 500 Startups. Zero Silicon Valley connections. Still managed to raise and build a real business.

Now here's the truth about YC: they're evaluating hundreds of applications in a short window. They're looking for specific signals, traction, team, market size, through a text application and a 10-minute interview. It is genuinely hard to evaluate a company in that format. And they're the first to admit they get it wrong.

YC co-founder Paul Graham once reflected on SendGrid specifically, acknowledging the miss and what it meant for how they evaluated companies going forward.

The acceptance rate at YC is 1.5%. The vast majority of successful startups were never in that 1.5%. Getting in is valuable. Not getting in is not fatal.

Hi all, I’m meeting the CEO of this startup incubator(fairly large in our field, they have about 12-14 startups under them) based in CA in about 2 hours.
I’m a senior in college (his alma mater as well) and I’m graduating in June.
We met for the first time at a mixer his team organized on campus, I texted him the same night thanking him for the opportunity and asked if he was open to a call to discuss opportunities and my ideas. Did not get a response then but I later heard through a friend in the industry who said that he felt I “jumped the gun”. My thoughts were that there’s no jumping the gun in the startup world, if you want to talk to someone or build a connection, you do it instantly. This was October 2025. Fast forward to April 2026, I met him again and he asked me to setup a time to meet.
Our interests align but I don’t know what he expects.

Any guidance would be appreciated

Context: I've been at this for about 6 months now and doing all the outreach myself. Finding quality prospects is eating up way too much of my time.

Right now I'm manually searching LinkedIn and then using Hunter to find emails, but half the time they bounce or the data is old. Also burning through their credits pretty fast for what I'm actually getting back.

Prospeo caught my eye because they only charge for verified contacts (no credits wasted on bounces) and their mobile number data could help me mix up my outreach channels. Apollo seems solid too but looks pricier for what I need as a solo operator.

Anyone here running solo and found a good prospecting tools setup that doesn't break the bank? Especially interested if you've found something with accurate mobile numbers since cold email alone isn't cutting it anymore. I feel like b2b prospecting as a one-person shop shouldn't require this much duct tape and manual work, but here we are.

We run a small full-stack marketing team (design + content + paid media) that works specifically with D2C and eCommerce brands — mostly Shopify stores in the $50K–$500K/month revenue range.

We've been getting traction through Upwork and LinkedIn outreach but wanted to ask people who've been doing this longer — what channels or approaches actually moved the needle for you when it came to landing D2C or eCommerce clients?

A few things we're already doing:

• LinkedIn outreach to DTC founders and marketing directors
• Upwork proposals for relevant projects
• Content marketing (SEO blogs targeting D2C pain points)
• Reddit community participation (r/ecommerce, r/Shopify)

What we haven't cracked yet is finding warm leads outside of cold outreach. Referrals are starting to come in but it's early days.

Curious if anyone here has had success with:

• eCommerce-specific communities or Slack groups worth being active in
• Partnership models with Shopify developers or web agencies
• Any platforms or directories we might be sleeping on
• Anything that worked surprisingly well that we wouldn't expect

Not looking to spam anyone — genuinely trying to figure out where D2C founders actually go when they're looking for marketing help, because it doesn't seem like it's always the obvious places.

Any advice appreciated.

We’re building a gaming café booking startup in India and I recently learned something interesting:

People often say they want convenience.

But behavior has been different.

Many users liked the idea of discovering cafés, booking slots, and having everything in one place — but actual usage increased much more when we introduced small incentives and credits.

It made me wonder if early-stage products are less about solving a problem and more about creating enough immediate value for someone to change their existing habits.

For founders here:

What’s something users told you they wanted, but their actual behavior taught you something completely different?

Early last year I left my job as Head of Engineering at a stock advisory startup (scaled to 5Mn users) where I was employee #1 to go build an AI mobile app builder. Had offers paying more than I'd ever made but I turned them down because this felt like the right moment. AI plus my background building complex systems, felt like I could actually productize something hard.

And the product actually worked. Full mobile app development, app store deployments, monetization, custom backend orchestration for every app, invisible context trimming pipeline that handled 10,000+ messages in a single thread, cache deviation and protection, nested agentic collaboration. If you've worked with LLMs seriously you know some of this stuff is way harder than it sounds.

People were upgrading themselves from the lowest tier to the top tier at $200/month without us doing anything within 2 days on an average. That part felt amazing. Early retention for top tier subscribers was 75%. People shipped nearly 100 mobile apps on their own using the platform with 0 technical knowledge and within a month of starting.

The problem was I hadn't raised money and every message a user sent was costing me more than I made from it. I was personally putting money in to keep things running while we talked to top tier VCs. We got really far with one of them. Like ready to write the check far. Then they backed out at the last second. That one broke me a little bit honestly. I'd been stupid enough to not have a real pipeline behind them (I was raising money for the first time) and after that rejection something shifted. My energy in pitch meetings was off. I was in a spiral with no time off to recover and every rejection kept getting more personal. I kept getting calls, kept making it to round 2 and 3, but then always a rejection for some reason. Meanwhile every competitor was raising and getting stronger while we got weaker.

Around November growth just stopped. We raised prices to survive which obviously made growth worse. Kind of a spiral at that point. Still tried a few things to stay afloat, but personally and financially, I was draining myself. So last month, I finally shut it down.

It's been a rough six months. I'm taking some time off now. No plans to jump into anything full time, just decompressing and talking to other founders. Helped a friend who just closed their Series A work through some messy architecture stuff last week and honestly it felt better than anything I'd done in months. Forgot how much I like solving other people's problems when the stakes aren't mine. If you're building something and want to think through hard technical problems with someone who's been deep in AI infra, fintech happy to chat.

my accountant asked for a breakdown of business vs personal expenses and I realized I didn’t have a clean way to show it. everything is there but not organized in a way that’s easy to explain

The Instacart origin story has a lot of surface-level retellings. Here's what actually happened, including the YC internal email that's rarely quoted.

Timeline

June 2012: Apoorva Mehta, 26, former Amazon supply chain engineer, builds Instacart alone in 3 weeks. He had tried roughly 20 other startups over the prior 2 years. All failed.

He misses the YC Summer 2012 deadline by 2+ months. Emails every YC partner. Gets rejected.

One partner Garry Tan replies differently: "You could submit a late application, but it will be nearly impossible to get you in now."

Mehta submits immediately. Gets rejected again, no interview.

Then he sends Garry Tan a 6-pack of beer using his own app.

Garry forwards it to all YC partners the same day (June 11, 2012):

"Late app that was interesting, is it too late? InstaCart is an iPhone app that lets you order and get delivered to your doorstep anything from Safeway, Walgreens or Walmart... I was impressed with the idea, and they sent me beer using their system just 5 minutes ago now, delivered to YC. It was delivered in under an hour or so."

Next day: one-hour interview with 4 YC partners. He's asked to leave the room. 10 minutes later, Harj from YC calls: "I can't believe we're doing this. We haven't let anyone in this late. Ever."

What YC was actually evaluating

Product age: 3 weeks. Team: solo. Revenue: $0. Market: every investor connected to Webvan's $800M failure. Application: 2 months late.

None of that changed. What changed was that the product existed and worked, demonstrably, in real time, in their neighborhood.

Post-YC, things got scrappy fast

When shoppers were unavailable early on, Mehta and team went to stores themselves ("ninja shopping") to fulfill orders manually. First Trader Joe's catalog: every item photographed manually, $50k, team ate TJ's food for two weeks. Day the catalog went live: demand in that area doubled.

They raised $2.3M seed inside the YC batch.

Outcome

IPO September 2023. $10B valuation. $2.7B+ raised. 600K+ personal shoppers. 14,000+ cities. 1,500+ retail partners.

The Webvan comparison eventually faded not because investors forgot, but because Instacart's no-warehouse, no-inventory model was structurally incomparable. You couldn't see that in the pitch. You could only see it when the app worked.

I am going deep down and writing up 23 of these case studies which has the early stories of founders who got rejected are underrepresented in the startup conversation, happy to share, if someone wants it

I've been actually incredibly locked in over the last 2 months working on my latest startup solo venture.

Filming youtube videos, marketing, coding, cold calling customers.

The one thing I'm having a hard time with is there is no one I can talk to about this. My friends are fat lazy bums who sit around all day and spend their time not at work watching tv and playing video games.

When I'm at my desk at 11pm on a Tuesday it feels incredibly lonely.

I'd like to start a community of founders who are all in one place. Seriously forming a network of people who are DEDICATED TO THIS CRAFT and sharing and learning from each other. Let me know if you're interested ill DM you.

Quick breakdown because I keep seeing people post ideas here that have an obvious problem and it's usually the same one.

YC has funded over 4,000 companies. They've noticed strong ideas almost always come from one of three places:

Personal lived experience with the problem. Not desk research. Not customer interviews at the idea stage. You were the frustrated user. You tried every existing solution and none worked. You kept thinking about the problem months later. That's a signal. Stripe founders didn't research "payment APIs are hard" they tried to build something and wanted to give up when they hit the payment integration wall. That's how they knew.

Industry insider knowledge. Years in a specific field means you see through the surface-level problems to the ones that are actually structural and unsolved. YC partners have heard thousands of pitches and they can immediately tell when someone actually knows an industry. It's not about being articulate it's about the specificity of the pain you describe.

A timing unlock. Something changed. A model got powerful enough. A regulation opened a door. Infrastructure got commoditized. The problem existed before, but NOW it can be solved, and nobody has solved it yet. YC pushes on "why now" harder than almost anything else. If your answer is vague you're in trouble.

And then 4 filters they run ideas through:

- How often does this happen to your user? Daily is fundable. Annually is an uphill battle. Frequency creates retention.
- How bad is it when it happens? Inconvenient vs. actually painful. Lost money, lost time, real consequences. Pain severity matters as much as frequency.
- How big is the market? Not just today's size. The credible trajectory. A small market with an obvious expansion path beats a big market that's capped.
- Are you specifically the right person to solve this? This is where most pitches fall apart. "I'm passionate" isn't an answer. What access, knowledge, or experience do you have that's genuinely hard to replicate?

Honest question for people posting ideas here: which filter does yours fail?

Apollo charges $5k+/year for contact data. I’m building something different.

The idea: A B2B lead intelligence platform where the community owns the data supply chain.

Here’s how it works:

1. Anyone can contribute leads/contacts to the platform
2. Every lead gets scored transparently on quality (email validity, company existence, freshness, relevance)
3. Revenue generated from selling access to this database gets split proportionally based on your contribution quality, not just quantity
4. All stats are public: who contributed what, quality scores, revenue splits. Full transparency.

Think of it as Apollo or Clay, but community-built and contributor-rewarded and giving it at a fraction of price of current market price.

The model flips the script, instead of one company hoarding data and charging enterprises a fortune, contributors become stakeholders.

Where I’m at:
Platform is in active development. I’m looking to connect with:

1. Developers who want to co-build this (backend, data validation, API)
2. Sales/BD people who have lead lists or enterprise contacts and want to contribute from day one
3. Anyone who thinks this is interesting and wants to poke holes in it
4. Businesses who will help us in this at our early stage, we will help them out in lead generation for their ICP.

Revenue will be split as per the contribution as we grow.

PS: I am a full-stack developer with 4 YOE. Want a fair discussion or criticism around this.

Drop a comment or DM me if this resonates. Happy to share more details about the tech architecture and the quality scoring model.

Series A startup, 22 people all in the US on Gusto. Just signed offers with 2 engineers in Berlin and 1 in Lisbon, starting in 6 weeks. Gusto can't touch international so I'm looking at either setting up entities (expensive, slow) or using an EOR. Ideally want one platform that handles US W-2 payroll and the European EOR side so our finance lead isn't logging into 3 different things every month. What did you go with when you crossed this line?

i have been trying different approaches to reach potential clients and one thing that keeps coming up is how inconsistent the results are
the same type of message, sent to a similar profile, can perform completely differently from one week to the next
it makes it difficult to tell whether something is actually improving or if it just happened to land at the right time
i expected this process to be more systematic, but it often feels harder to identify what is actually working
would be interested to hear how others approach this without constantly changing everything

I've started doing this exercise from Summer 2026 YC batch to read the RFS, filter for categories that don't require hardware, regulatory licenses, or a co-founder army, and map out what a real v1 looks like.

Summer 2026 was trickier than usual. Out of 15 categories, 8 are legitimately hard tech counter-drone swarms, lunar manufacturing, inference chips for space. You can't side-project those. They're also not pretending to be side projects.

But 5 categories are pure software, and within those, I found real surface area for solo founders.

Here's the filter I used:

- No hardware
- No regulatory licensing required at launch
- No large proprietary dataset needed on day 1
- First customers reachable through existing online communities
- v1 buildable in under 3 months by Solo founder

The 5 categories that passed:

1. AI-Native Service Companies (specifically: compliance prep for startups)
YC wants companies that sell completed work, not tools. The wedge that passes my filter: SOC 2 / GDPR readiness delivered as a service. Pure knowledge work. No license required. First customers are technical founders in YC HN threads and Indie Hackers. Charge $500 flat to get them audit-ready. Do 10 manually, automate from there.

2. Company Brain (wedge: boutique agencies and small law firms)
The full vision is ambitious. The side-project version: ingest a 10-50 person firm's Notion/Google Drive/Slack, extract their SOPs and decision rules, produce a structured internal wiki + Q&A bot. Sell it as "AI-ready onboarding." These buyers move fast and don't have procurement processes.

3. Software for Agents (MCP server for an underdocumented domain)
YC literally said the next trillion internet users will be AI agents, not people. One solo founder can build a clean MCP server for a niche that's currently a mess municipal permit APIs, court filing portals, niche B2B data sources. Ship it, post it in developer Discords, charge usage fees.

4. Dynamic Software Interfaces (personalized dashboard, one SMB vertical)
Instead of rebuilding Salesforce, pick one SMB type Shopify merchants, freelancers, restaurant owners and build a dashboard that reconfigures itself based on how the user actually works. Sell it as "the dashboard that learns how you run your business."

5. AI-Native Bookkeeping for Solopreneurs
This one is my personal pick. Connect their Stripe/Mercury/Wise, AI categorizes everything, you personally review edge cases, send a clean P&L monthly. $99-199/month. You are the customer. Distribution is free the Indie Hackers / Build in Public community shares their tools obsessively. One tweet/Reddit post from a respected voice and you're at capacity before you've automated anything.

I went deeper on each of these categories and built out 120 concrete startup ideas specific, named, with v1 scope and customer acquisition angle for each one. Happy to share, if anyone wants it..

After reviewing 1000+ of websites, here I am again.

I do this every week. Make sure I havent reviewed yours before!

Hi, I'm Ismael Branco a brand design partner for pre-seed startups. Try me!

Quick numbers first because i know thats what you all care about.

mrr: 4.2k (april), up from 2.9k in feb
churn: 4% monthly, holding steady
arpu: 89/mo
total customers: 47
i ship solo, no co founder, no contractor, this is full time for me

The thing that broke for me around 30 customers was follow ups. i was running 3 to 5 user calls a week, plus async support in 2 discord channels, plus a roadmap that lived half in linear and half in random apple notes. every time someone asked me "when is feature X shipping" i either had to scroll back through 200 messages or just guess. i guessed wrong twice and one of them churned. that one cost me 2.4k a year.

So i did the obvious thing first. tried to be more disciplined. wrote a template for every call. set up a weekly review block on calendar. lasted nine days, then i had a deploy emergency on a wednesday and the whole system died.

Second thing was tooling. i moved discord conversations into linear with a zapier trigger which was honestly a mess and i removed it after a month. tried granola for calls which actually does work but only solves about 30% of the problem because it doesnt know about my linear or my code. tried setting up a custom rag pipeline over my obsidian, which yes i actually built and yes it took a weekend and yes it was worse than just searching obsidian. at one point around 2am i was literally searching "best ai agent for solopreneurs" on twitter hoping someone had figured it out. spoiler, the threads were mostly people selling courses.

What helped, partially, was lowering the activation cost of remembering things. ive been trying airjelly in the background on my macbook for about 3 weeks. its not magic, the first week i thought i was going to uninstall it. but it pulls across the apps i already use including discord scrollback, so before a customer call i can just ask what they told me previously instead of scrolling. the part i actually open most is the People view, where each customer has their own running thread of asks and what ive promised them, which is the bookkeeping i kept dropping once i passed 30 customers. its on device which mattered because some of these conversations include customer code i wouldnt put through a saas backend.

Is this a productivity post or a marketing post? both i guess. the concrete change was: customer call prep got noticeably faster, somewhere between cutting it by half and cutting it to almost nothing depending on the customer. that time is what gives me the runway to ship features, which is what makes the mrr move. its not just one tool though, i also finally killed the zapier mess and that alone got me back like 3 hours a week.

Next month im targeting 5k mrr. realistic plan is to ship the team feature thats been in tech debt limbo since february. the call prep math now gives me the bandwidth to actually do it.

Will report back end of may.

Question for founders:
If continuing became unsustainable, would you rather shut down quietly or transfer the project to someone else if possible, retaining a portion of equity in the process. If so, Why?

Does anyone know a US-friendly reloadable virtual Visa/Mastercard API with real transaction webhooks?

Need:
- create/assign reloadable virtual cards
- fund/reload from platform balance
- Apple Pay / Google Pay if possible
- transaction-level webhooks for auths, declines, settlements, refunds, reversals
- secure card detail display/API
- beta/startup friendly pricing

Most providers I’ve found are either enterprise-only, rewards/payout-only, or don’t expose real card spend webhooks. Any leads?