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Well, We Failed – Wattage is shutting down
We set out with ambitious plans but after a year of development, we’ve run out of cash and are shutting down Wattage.
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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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How HoursTracker earns five figures a month on the App Store
Insights from an indie app developer
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YC Open-Source Sales Agreement
We’ve just open-sourced a sales agreement [http://www.ycombinator.com/documents/#sales]any company can use. Though obviously you should use this at your own risk, we’ve had a lot of experience with what makes good and bad sales agreements. Special thanks to Tyler Bosmeny, James Riley, and Carolynn and Jon Levy for all…
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Your Job as a Founder Is to Create Believers
Before we launched HelloSign, I remember showing HelloFax to a family member. This person was normally supportive, but he took a glance and walked away. He wasn't the only one. A lot of people...
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Projects and Companies
In the early days of my startup, I used to get slightly offended when people would refer to it as a “project”. “How’s your project going?” seemed like the asker didn't take us seriously, even...
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Bubble talk
I’m tired of reading about investors and journalists claiming there’s a bubble in tech. I understand that it’s fun to do and easy press, but it’s boring reading. I also understand that it might...
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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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My Interviews with Airbnb, Dropbox, Posterous, Reddit, Weebly and Wufoo
Mixergy's feature today inspired me to dig up these old video interviews I did years ago with some YC founders. We talked about things like how they got started, what went wrong, and what surprised...
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Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
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Ghost: $411k Annual Revenue with a team of 6
It's April 2015, our annual run rate is $411,000 - and today we're announcing the Ghost public revenue dashboard, proudly powered by Baremetrics.
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Why investors don’t fund dating
I’ve been listening to the excellent Season 2 of the podcast Startup , which gives an inside look at YCombinator startup The Dating Ring (NYT coverage here ). The episodes are all great. They talk about many important topics, but I had some specific comments on fundraising for dating products .
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Let a thousand flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them out
For the past eleven months I’ve been the tech lead for Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness group. Engineering Effectiveness is our name for what elsewhere might be called Developer Tools, Developer Productivity, Engineering Infrastructure, or Developer Efficiency. We provide the tools and processes that allow the rest…
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HippyVM goes to Y Combinator and fails
tl;dr; We decided to go to Y combinator with HippyVM , our high performance PHP implementation, and we did not get through after two round...
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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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How I killed app sales by going freemium
Why going freemium may not be the best idea for your app
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List of Y Combinator companies I have worked with (hacked)
Background: I have worked with lots of companies as security consultant through bug bounties either I asked them if they need my service or they approached. I’m a big fan of Paul’s essa…
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The Social Radar: What I Did at Y Combinator
Culture matters for startups. For a startup to succeed, it must have a culture that reflects what it wants to achieve. This is one of my areas of expertise. I've spent the past decade focusing on Y...