mitchellshow

Someone outside of the startup world asked me "what is YC" and my reply was "the accelerator that rejects you."

My impression from having applied, and from knowing founders at various stages (some of whom went through YC, others who were rejected at various stages, one rejected at interview 5+ times in a row!), is that there is such a high volume of applications now that the person you get matched with to review yours is a total shot in the dark. If it isn't someone who "gets" your industry, you'll kind of just be thrown to the back of their pile. There is a lot of serendipity to who advances. I have heard some insiders complain that their recommendations aren't really taken seriously.

YC was the only accelerator who rejected us. We did a different one (at a true "idea stage") and it went great. Make sure to apply to others like Techstars, Capital Factory, Masschallenge, Betaworks, Boost VC, the list goes on. If it's a numbers game now, then whether you get picked for any particular accelerator is probably more a function of the total number of applications to that accelerator than anything else.

If you're super early stage, I'd recommend trying to find out if there are any accelerators sponsored by your local government, they tend to have way less applications since they're only pulling from a local pool.

There is probably a value-add to YC besides just money, but there are literally hundreds of accelerators that have copied the model at this point. If you really have something, the venture community that YC taps will notice regardless. It's always better just to take the cash and build IMO.

You're thinking of BandPAGE - Bandcamp is still privately owned.

Great point. Our DB actually does include quite a few of these “hidden” gmails that some VIPs use - we’re getting better at that - but FWIW the vast majority of VIPs aren’t using those.

Re your harvesting comment, we don’t even keep a temporary copy of the CSV you upload, for privacy reasons - it’s all handled on the frontend. Clearly, customer trust is paramount for a business like ours :)

Thanks for the feedback!

If you have some database of notable domains, aliases used by investors and celebrities when testing, etc - highlight that competitive advantage.

That's exactly what we have - if that isn't coming through via the landing page, we should probably focus more on it.

I would pay $20/month for a simple, easy to set up affiliate management service.

Seriously - there are literally hundreds of affiliate management services out there, I've looked at dozens of them, and none of them quite fit the following requirements:

- Simple setup - Reasonably low cost - Dashboard for affiliates to track clicks & signups

Most existing systems also wrap up some sort of customer referral widgety thing, which I don't need. Or, the websites are broken / look like they're from 2001.

ReferralCandy is probably the closest thing, but again, it's way more set up for "customer referrals" vs professional or semi-pro affiliates. The integration process is also super heavy.

We literally built our own affiliate management since everything that fit our requirements was so expensive. This seems like an obvious side-project for someone to knock out.

Super helpful list Bram!

+1 for instant search

We often refer to this practice as engineering-as-marketing.

It works, for all sorts of obvious reasons.