What we learned from getting rejected by Y Combinator
6 months ago, I published our successful application to Y Combinator that landed us an interview in the Valley. Shortly after, I published our unsuccessful interview at Y Combinator where we were ultimately rejected.
6 months later, we were invited again for another interview with our startup Sniply, and I just sent out this bittersweet response:
Are we making a huge mistake? Potentially, yeah.
It’s YC season again and a lot of rejection letters were sent out. I’m no stranger to YC rejections and I wanted to share our rejection experience and how that impacted the way we see our startup.
After we got rejected last cycle, we worked really hard to try again for YC. We considered all the things that YC might want to see in a startup and worked our asses off for 6 months straight. All so that we could get another shot at YC.
The result? We ended up building a startup.
We thought we could get into YC if we had promising traction, a great product, cool customers, healthy revenue, and all that jazz. So we went after all that — and we ended up making decent progress in those areas.
We worked hard, and we finally got another interview, but ultimately we decided for ourselves that this was not the right time for us to do YC. We found to courage (or stupidity) to ask ourselves whether this is really the right thing for us, right now. Our conclusion was clear.
We realized that all along, we were applying for the sake of getting in, hoping that YC would solve all our problems. We realized that we were caught up in what everyone else was doing instead of focusing on our own startup. We believed that getting into big accelerators and raising a ton of money was the only way to build a successful startup.
When it came time to interview again, we realized that we’re actually comfortable with our startup and where it’s at right now. We’re happy with our current rate of growth and we’re happy with building things at our own pace, for now. We made decent progress without a million dollar investment and we wanted to keep trying to do our own thing for a while longer.
For 6 months we worked so hard to improve all our metrics because we thought it would strengthen our YC application. Now we finally realized that we wanted to get in because everyone else wanted to get in. We never stopped to think whether this is the right time for us to go through an accelerator and what that means for our startup.
We realized that it really shouldn’t be a race to get on TechCrunch or investment from Sequoia. There’s a lot of pressure in the startup world to hack growth, get into accelerators, raise a lot of money, and get acquired. Through actually building up our startup, we found pleasure in growing at our own pace, doing things our own way, and figuring stuff out along the way.
Could we have gotten in if we interviewed? Who knows. It’s extremely tough, so probably not. But if and when we apply again, it won’t be for the sake of getting into YC. If and when we do apply again, I hope to think that it would be because we’re ready for it and decide for ourselves that it’s the right time to do so.
YC rejections can be discouraging but it definitely isn’t the end of the world. The success of your startup shouldn’t be defined by whether or not you get accepted into an accelerator. We got rejected, we worked hard, and we made progress. Although we worked hard for the wrong reasons at first, we managed to discover something quite liberating along the way.
Are we making a huge mistake by not trying for YC? Maybe. Would we apply again in the future? Maybe. Are we going to keep working our asses off and continue carving out our own path? For sure 100%
You started a startup because you love what you do. Don’t ever let the startup world take that away from you. Define your own success and define your own happiness. Startups are supposed to be fun — let’s not forget that.
