Why We Think We Failed Our YC Interview
We were pitching as a bootstrapped startup working with something many would consider a small niche: name badges. But during those 10 minutes, we were mostly incoherent, and incoherence is usually not a trait associated with us.
That incoherence rose from our desire to please the interviewers. Our mind played us. We were not answering their questions with logic and pragmatism; we were trying to come up with what we thought they were expecting us to say.
It happens that, YC partners are intelligent people. You can’t fool them that easily.
They didn’t really care about our big vision, they wanted us to convince them of how useful our actual solution was to our potential customers. The most destabilizing thing for us was how hostile they seemed at the idea. Saying we had, after 3 months, revenue, healthy growth and happy customers was not enough. They just didn’t believe in it. The body language was obvious, 8 minutes in, I knew we failed, they were all longing for the end of the interview. We are still wondering why they wanted to interview us in the first place.
Seeing the hostility at the idea, I guess they were interested by the team. Seeing our incoherence, they probably lost all interest.
Y Combinator is seen by a lot people as the Mecca of web entrepreneurship. Being part of it is like receiving a badge of honor. Like veterans proudly wearing their war medals on their vintage uniform, I could have tell my grandkids: “I was part of it, I changed the world”. That is, at least, for the romantic attraction of Y Combinator.
That was our case. The main reason we applied to Y Combinator was to fulfill our desire to be part of it. Which of course is totally wrong. You should join Y Combinator for their ability to let you meet investors and scale your startup.
The good news is…
We’re a team of 4. After three months of operation we have 4-digit monthly revenue and a healthy 100% growth rate. We plan on becoming ramen profitable in the next 2 or 3 months . We are focused and ship new features on a regular basis. We pride ourself of our ‘heroic’ customer support and our customers are happy. We live and work from Quebec City, where cost of living is a fraction of the Bay area.
And we definitely know how much our solution is loved by our customers from their awesome feedback and because we built it to scratch our own itch.
ConferenceBadge.com is not a billion-dollar idea, but it is certainly a million-dollar one. Let’s iterate one step at a time, who knows where we are going to end up? The days after the interview, we shipped a new feature, had sales, met our biggest partner and helped customers. That’s how we roll.
Authored by Philippe-Antoine Lehoux — Follow him @plehoux
