Great question. I'm a hacker, so I'd be useful from day one. Secondly, I've stuck with one idea for about four years, selling the product for 3 and a half years, so I have no problem adding features or maintaining code.
Here is what matters to me more than a specific idea:
1) I'd like to have lawyers and accountants from the beginning, versus doing it myself.
2) I'd like to start with an investment from the beginning, versus doing it with nothing, therefore being undercapitalized the entire time.
3) On a daily basis, I'd like to work with smart people, versus working with nobody else. It'd be great to have an even ownership split, and to start with each other from day one.
4) I want to afford to live (by live, I mean sustain, nothing special) in a place with other technology folks, so I never feel bored or get an ego, versus living in the middle-of-nowhere.
The reason I'm asking here is because I've considered visiting big universities or even furthering my college career just to meet people for a future project, but it would be logically crazy to do so. The problem is that a lot of CS majors aren't entrepreneurial, and sometimes even immature. News.YC is the best place to find other hackers who want to do a startup. Period. Even better than attending a great computer science school.
I originally followed pg's correct advice to leave school and release "early."
The problem is that after I released "early", I had a small userbase that I gradually grew, and while they helped me find bugs, I got stuck to a small income stream and could never find the time to expand to bigger sources of revenue considering I was fixing bugs, adding features, doing market research, and tech support.
Releasing early is good if you have the means (money, people, contacts, knowledge) to not get distracted, so it's nice that YCombinators and TechStars exist now to take advantage of your highs and give you advice.
However, creating a product while being undercapitalized is futile. From not having health insurance and getting injured for a while, to having to progressively go from a $2/mo host, to a $20/m host, getting tons of visitors to my site from my specific, paying audience--except my site used up the 15GB of bandwidth in half a day. I've also had to make a lot of 'transitional' ideas to keep it all working, all so I could have this experience on a low budget for many years. Another problem was that I was tied to an income stream and keeping up with it for the $500 or $600/mo just to keep the business expenses, keeping me away from doing 2 important things that I planned my first year, because otherwise, I'd have to fold. It's definitely been worth it for everything except money, of course.
For example, I got dozens of great reviews from different paying customers all over the world, and that was the #1 most important thing to me all those years. So I spent this summer making it run on auto-pilot, this time with my own custom software, and a better self-service (another problem is that before, I preferred to have a simple interface and have users e-mail me with questions to avoid being too public, but now, I will add tons of Q&A's so I don't have to answer questions about what the program can do and what I'm planning on adding to it.)
So, I proved to myself that I can make people happy with no investment. Now I want to do it the right way.
In fact, maybe I should do something for people my age while I can still relate--another reason I don't care about the idea is because mine currently targets adults, and having been Student Body President, founding a newspaper club, a chess club, and being in many different unrelated after-school activities when I was in high school, I found I enjoyed it all. But, there is no reason that while you're spending all your time on a project, that you have to do it underfunded, since even for a realistic web service you'd have to be able to support servers costing hundreds of dollars and not annoy users with ads until you can figure out the best way to make it work, and more importantly, start with good resources (teammates, investors, advisors, money).
"I should do something for people my age while I can still relate. You can't do something like that without an investment, since you have to be able to support servers costing hundreds of dollars and not annoy users with ads until you can figure out the best way to make it work."
You can do something for people your age, see if they relate, and then take investment when you need to scale. Apparently, it's not hard to get investors if you're so snowed under with traffic that your servers are busting at the seams.
" Apparently, it's not hard to get investors if you're so snowed under with traffic that your servers are busting at the seams."
Yes, I know the hypothetical. However, I'm talking about reality. If YCombinator is an option, I'm going to take it.
1) I'm leaving my desktop app available so my current customers, 93% of whom of 153 survey respondents say they love it, can access it. I already know I can deliver software that makes people happy enough to pay money for it. I'm just creating a free version and getting it up to distributors to see if it can make even more people happy than I can imagine.
2) Finding cofounders on News.YC for a web-based app the team agrees on.
3) Applying to YCombinator.
4) Working as long as it takes to make a lot of users happy.
PG, Max Levchin, and other investors favor teams who are dedicated and flexible versus one specific idea.
I liked the previous (~4-5 minutes in) version of your comment better. ;-)
Anyway, I also think you're right in doing all of the above. And it looks like you'll find your cofounders, judging from other responses to your comment. Good luck with that.
I'm just saying that even if the investors (including YC) say no, you can still build something, see if people want it, and then get investment. You don't really need investors to start something, nowadays, and when you do need them they'll usually be there.
"You don't really need investors to start something, nowadays, and when you do need them they'll usually be there."
Thanks, but like I said in my post, I would rather get an exciting team together, get the legal and accounting stuff out of the way, and build a trusted relationship with an investor, and put to use what I've learned over the past 4 years. And none of those people work for free.
If it's possible to take care of all that stuff right away, it makes life very easy.
I agree with nostrademons. Make YC a sideline, not a destination or starting point. There's great power in taking charge for yourself.
If you don't feel compelled, it's because your goals aren't inspiring you. You need bigger goals. Possibly getting accepted to possibly work with unknown people on an unknown web app is not interesting enough to capture your imagination.
You have to think of something you really want, something that grabs you, especially if you don't know if you could do it or if it's even possible at all.
That said, some great ideas seemed stupid to "experts" at the time; just trust your own gut feeling, not anyone else's. If you don't have a gut feeling, then you probably don't understand what people want in that area and should switch to another one (or steep yourself in the original a lot more).
"What I'd like" isn't the same as, "here's how I can make money for you". That's what it boils down to with almost all investors; minus ones who are okay with sinking in money regardless of profit to scratch a personal itch (of course they're probably going to micromanage in that case).
> it is more important to have a good team, than a specific idea or a specific market
Ideas are certainly easier to come by; executing is the hard part. But there's no such thing as a generic "good team". If they don't have a feel for the particular idea then they are not going to execute as well.
If there is a lack in passion there is a lack in results.
I'm sorry you've experienced lack of passion in the past and want to share it, but I can't help you here. I have no idea what that must be like. I'm looking to take my 4-year-old lone adventure with one product, to a great team effort on something even bigger, always forging ahead without waiting for a perfect opportunity.
No matter how many times you post, the team means more than an idea. Ideas can be changed a million times once you're incorporated, invested, have a prototype, and user feedback. PG, Max Levchin, and others prefer a team versus an idea.
Here's an example of what I mean by there being no generic "good" team:
Give me the top 5 athletes in the world. Maybe you pick Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Roger Federer, LaDainian Tomlinson, and Wayne Gretzky. Or maybe you pick Barry Bonds; or a top marathoner or sprinter or a boxer. Then I tell you we're playing basketball. And you get beaten by Venezuela.
> Again, thanks for sharing your experience.
I think you're taking what I'm saying the wrong way.
I'm pointing out that if you don't care what you work on, your results won't be as good. Thus, you should figure out what you do care about, and work on that.
I said I don't care what project I take on as long as I'm with a great group of people, but you quoted me saying that I don't care (careless). That's a big difference.
That's a misinterpretation. Maybe this quote will explain it better:
"I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." -- Steve Jobs
Except how are you going to know that until they do great work? Which is very unlikely if you're not all working on what you love. If you don't care what you work on, then you haven't found what you love -- otherwise you'd work on that.
Merely being "great" without reference to a particular context isn't very useful. Take your favorite 5 entrepreneurs, stick them in a room, and probably nothing gets done. PG and Max Levchin we know; maybe Marc Andreessen; take your pick. They probably couldn't even agree on a language, and they're all used to being the one in charge.
No, there's no "misinterpretation." I hope you respect that I choose to follow more credible sources. It's very hard to take somebody's advice who we don't know. Maybe you care to share your background? Thanks for the discussion!
I DO want to work on what I want to work on, but with investment and other people (which might not be exactly what I or my team envisioned, of course.)
That's funny, you just spent several messages reiterating that you didn't care what project you worked on.
To me, "please give me money and great people to work with" is not a convincing pitch. Plus, if I already have a group of great people working on something, why would I want to burden them with an additional person who had no particular interest in what they were working on?
On the other hand, if you were really interested in a particular problem domain and had expertise or at least enthusiasm for it specifically, then you're giving investors a more compelling reason to put their money behind you. Remember that investors aren't only the VCs and angels, they're the people you're working with. They have a lot invested, too.
I don't think that's what you said in the other posts. I find it very hard to follow your posts because you've made about 30 different points. At this time, there are more credible resources than yourself I choose to follow. I hope you respect that. If you would like to share your credentials and background like I have, then by all means.
Well Vlad you certainly know how to hijack a thread and turn it into your own subject matter. Well done boy. Waiting for the death rattle. Although our averaging and estimates on the numbers may be fair the numbers may be skewed by the fact that numbers alone mean nothing in the face of quality. As YComb gets more 'popular' the quality of applicants will improve and so I would suggest the chances have actually reduced in real terms not increased.
P.S. I am looking for co-founders with amazing hacking skills to join our application team. Any Hackers without an idea or team are welcome to contact me: colinbeattie@gmail.com. I have strong ideas to discuss and am keen to organise a team together or discuss other ideas we, as a TEAM, may propose.
I'm certain that's a bad idea. They were overwhelmed by the 400+ apps they got last time...I don't think they'd take kindly to someone gaming the system and forcing them to read an extra 20 apps (I'm pretty sure the round file would be the only one seeing all of your applications).
I went back and made it more obvious I was kidding. But is there any hacker serious about being an entrepreneur and working on a project during the Winter session and beyond?
In the last round, we got an e-mail from PG back within hours. It said, basically, "Too many uncommitted founders. Ditch some and hire them back as employees when you have money." We had submitted one day before the deadline (I'd thought it was half an hour actually...I misunderstood the deadline), and he encouraged us to resubmit if we could deal with the founder issue.
We ended up getting rejected anyway, but he turned out to be right. Basically, if there's an obvious problem with the application, he'll point it out to you. Don't expect him to write volumes or fix something that's so far out in left field that it's hopeless, though. Maybe a paragraph or so.
I also got back a long response from Trevor when I applied to SFP05. In retrospect it had a lot of good points, though I wasn't ready to hear them at the time. I doubt they have time to do that sort of detailed fixes/clarifications now, though.
I got an email from Paul and a call from Jessica, both asking why we were doing this now as undergraduates. I think it's a very good sign if you get some interaction with them before the deadline, but it's not a bad sign if you don't get any feedback.
On a serious note, can one apply as a single hacker who doesn't care about which project he takes on?