Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 107 posts.

Startups
2021
41

Goodbye YC

I sent this email to the whole team at YC yesterday: When I joined YC 7.5 years ago, there weren’t many people around. PG and Jessica were still running things. We had offices in Mountain View,...

45

How to Kill a Unicorn

I took a deep dive on freemium pricing and decided to document it in this post. Why freemium? I think it’s how the little guys can win against market leaders. Basically, it’s how you kill a unicorn. Notion, Figma, Canva, Mailchimp, and Segment. What do all of these

48

Scaling YC

One of the most common questions I hear is: “why has YC continued to grow our batch size?”. For each twice-yearly batch, we receive thousands of applicants through our online application [https://www.ycombinator.com/apply]. We have always wanted to fund as many great founders as possible and are convinced that in the…

55

State of Independent SaaS 2021

The State of Independent SaaS is our annual survey and benchmark report covering the insights you need to know in the Bootstrapped SaaS sector. Get data to help you make decisions about how to build and grow a successful software business.

58

Why Build Toys

I first wrote this essay a few years ago. A founder mentioned it to me over the weekend, and so I decided to re-publish it here. One thing that's bothered me in the time since I wrote it is the way...