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I started a one-man biz that's beating VC-backed startups
Guides for independent artists on music distribution and promotion, plus announcements and updates from DistroKid.
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YC’s Essential Startup Advice
A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups. Whether common sense or counter-intuitive, the guidance below will…
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Startup Ideas
Hey, my name is Kyle Corbitt and I’m a software developer at Y Combinator. I spend most of my time creating software to support our founders as they build their businesses. Before joining YC I ran my own startup. When I was in high school, I sometimes got the frustrating feeling that all of the good startup ideas had…
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How We Bootstrapped Our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability
It’s been seven months since we launched our SaaS startup and we’re ramen profitable. Canny makes enough to pay for its own expenses and our personal living expenses. This is far less money than we made working at Facebook, but a huge milestone for our bootstrapped startup.
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Stripe Atlas: Getting your first 10 customers
Guide to getting your first 10 customers
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Why Should I Start a Startup?
A lot of people ask themselves this question. They often mull over one or more of the following facts: 1. The vast majority of startups are not successful 2. For talented technical people, it’s relatively easy to get a job and make a large salary 3. Large companies offer opportunities to work on very difficult…
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How to start a startup without ruining your life
Startups are emotional roller coasters that one minute make you feel like you’re changing the world and the next minute, that everything is falling apart. This guide about how to start a startup may help.
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Dilution
There has probably been more capital looking to invest in private technology companies in the past five years than any five-year period before. An obvious consequence of this increased supply is that company valuations (i.e. prices) have gone up, and so has the amount of capital raised by most companies. A non-obvious…
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Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy
If you’re working on a startup or non-profit that addresses any of the challenges discussed below, we’d love to see you apply. News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. The business model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That…
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Startup School – YC’s Online Class
[https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSYC_Logo.png] We’re excited to announce our new online Startup School, with classes beginning on April 5. Anyone can sign up at StartupSchool.org [http://startupschool.org/] for the 10-week massively open online course (MOOC), starting today. We want to…
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YC Annual Letter 2017
Dear YC Community: In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress. Our mission is to enable the most...
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Everything I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS
Everything you want to know about Medellin and Colombia
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Benefits of a Lifestyle Business
Get the latest news from Bugfender, learn about logging for React, Javascript, iOS, Android; Angular Logging and more!
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Things learned while running your own self-funded startup
Here's a brain dump of the things we've learned while running our business and shipping our first product ( Basis ). My experience at Valv...
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Y Combinator When No One Cared
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
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Yes, but what does your startup do?
I recently signed up for a hackathon. Part of the deal these days is that sponsors get to send promotional messages to the attendees. Fair enough. The only problem is, most of these messages are rubbish! Here's the verbatim message I received - there were no links other than to Twitter. See if you can work out what…
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Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Lea…
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Twice as happy customers means half the marketing spend
Halving your cancel rate doubles the number of customers your business has. Even if you run a subscription business forever, you will not have infinite customers. Instead you reach a steady-state number.
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Startups should not use React
That is, if you ever hope to be acquired by a larger company
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Lessons we learned while bootstrapping
Check out the lessons we learned during our bootstrapping journey, and how we turned our startup into a 7-figure business. Nothing is impossible!
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Why I don't believe in Uber's Success
I wanted to write this blog post for well over half a year. I don’t believe Uber will be a successful business . I’ve been making my points in individual conversations over and over again - with this post I’m creating a writeup of my arguments that I can share in future.
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Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 Startups
Jasper Kuria of Capital & Growth [https://capitalandgrowth.org/index.html] interviewed YC Partner Paul Buchheit about his experience as employee #23 at Google and his key investing insights. Jasper : You came up with Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto in 2000. Sixteen years later, do you feel they have stayed true? Paul …
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Successful Solo Founders
Note* Since publishing this, a research study came out by MIT with more information and data on this. See 2 founders are not always better…
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Y Combinator's Founding Principles
Y Combinator's Principles, as written by its founders.