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How to Value a SaaS Business
Discover the top SaaS metrics that drive real valuations. Learn how to track, optimize, and present your KPIs to attract serious buyers and maximize your SaaS exit
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,051 posts.
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PadMapper (YC S10) is Joining Zumper
More apartments across the US and Canada than you can ever imagine!
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Startup Failure Post-Mortems
It's hard to say goodbye. Find out how 483 startups have failed and why in the words of their investors and founders.
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Fundraising Advice for YC Companies
We’ve modified our fundraising strategy advice to YC founders. In the interest of everyone having the same information, here is the email I sent to the current batch this morning. Founders, As Y Combinator’s prominence has grown in recent years, we’ve seen a flood of new investors who are very focused on investing in…
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Why YC
Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Four times a year we invest in a large number of startups.
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Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
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IK12 and YC
We are excited to announce that Imagine K12, the original edtech accelerator, is joining Y Combinator to form an edtech vertical within YC. We founded Imagine K12 in 2011 to help companies innovate in education technology in order to improve outcomes for children in the United States and around the world. YC founder…
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How we got our first 100 paying customers
Being a startup in the SaaS segment, customer acquisition has been one of the most challenging topics for us. In this article, we describe our experiences.
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Fellowship V2
Last fall, YC ran an 8 week experiment calledThe Fellowship [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-fellowship]to fund and work with startups at the idea or prototype stage. The goal was to see if we could create a program that could help more early-stage startups at scale. The experiment went well and I have a few…
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A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
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Advice for companies with less than 1 year of runway
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
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It's harder to get into YC if you’ve been through another accelerator
A new trend in Y Combinator applications is that an increasing number of applicants have already been through some sort of accelerator or “pre-accelerator” program. As we’ve dug into this trend, we’ve found that many of the applicants did these programs not because they needed the money or advice but because they…
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Our Stock Option pledge
The latest news, feature releases, and how to grow with data. Get tactical growth tips once per week.
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A Guide to Seed Fundraising
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
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YC Updates and Additions
Y Combinator now has 5 major groups—YC Fellowship, YC Core, YC Continuity, YC Research, and Hacker News—and we’re putting one person in charge of each group. Paul Buchheit is taking over for me as managing partner of the core YC program. We’re going to continue doing YC Fellowship (!), and Kevin Hale is going to be…
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YC Open Office Hours
Earlier this fall, we announced our first Open Office Hours [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-open-office-hours-for-black-and-hispanic-founders] where founders got to meet one-on-one with YC partners. We piloted the program with Black and Latino founders, over 650 founders applied in under a week, and we were able…
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Launch of Figma, a collaborative interface design tool
Today, after three years of silence and hard work, I finally get to announce the launch of Figma, a collaborative interface design tool…
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Kickstarter is Debt
Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding platforms are often misunderstood. It definitely isn’t investment: It’s debt. Hardware startups struggle to manage their cash. It’s common to pay for large expenses (like tooling and inventory) 9–12 months prior to selling your product. This is why pre-
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How our freemium plan failed
Three months ago, we introduced a Free plan…and it nearly brought Baremetrics to its knees. Let’s take a look at what we did, how it affected our business and how it was ultimately a failure.
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Announcing Our $3.5M Philanthropic Growth Round
> Two years ago, we raised a seed round of donations to support our operations with one goal — to prove the Watsi concept. We built our dream team and started traveling to hospitals around the world to learn how Watsi could support more patients. Since then, we’ve grown 20x, supporting
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Docker Acquires Tutum
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
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Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Sendwithus helps teams manage transactional emails outside of source code — leading to streamlined workflows and always on-brand emails. Learn more here!
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YC Continuity
YC will fund its 1,000th company this year, and many of these companies are now scaling their organizations, revenue, and operations. Though years removed from our program, these founders continue to come to YC for advice and support, and we would like to do more to help them. To that end, I’m delighted to share that…
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