Thanks to my YC application advice post, I got a ton of inbound requests for mock interviews. I love helping people and really appreciated all those who mock interviewed us, but I didn’t want to get too distracted from work, so I decided to put them all on one day to minimize distraction during the rest of the week. Interestingly, by sticking them all together I picked up patterns very quickly. Here is everything I said more than once — my lessons from 6 hours of mock YC interviews yesterday:
- They have only 10 minutes to evaluate you, they will avoid asking anything insignificant and instead expect you to address the major concerns they have. Figure out what those major concerns will be (they’re usually obvious) and be ready to address them.
You’ll walk in and they’ll immediately ask “Where are you going to get so many pans?”, which happens to be the obvious problem with your otherwise impeccable business plan.
- You probably have something special about what you’re doing that isn’t obvious; bring it up
we’re actually getting the pans for free by re-treating discarded pans that owners presume no longer work
- it’s not always about having the right answers but instead about being thoughtful/flexible
- flexible — this means responding to the market and not being too headstrong. If you have a cool idea, you throw it at the market, and the market dictates something else, then you should change your product accordingly. This is the flexibility/agility you’ll need and the one YC is looking for.
We began with general kitchenware but after launching we learned that pans had significantly more demand on both sides — owners wanted to get rid of them and everyone else wanted to get them for cheap.
- Usually, “advertising” is the wrong answer to “how will you get customers?”
- Figure out how to get customers for significantly less than they are worth to you and you’ve figured out a good customer acquisition strategy.
- Demonstrate that you are clever enough to fabricate an advantage over anyone else despite capital disadvantage, and that you’ve spent time thinking about these things
- If you’re creating something they may have heard many times before, make clear what makes you different
- Do not hide things, address concerns upfront. These concerns won’t go away if you get into YC, think about them.
- Have a few things that you need to get across and make sure they come across no matter what (usually the answers to those concerns + reinforcing why you’re such a strong team/well poised). It’s even okay to make a complete non-sequitur; you have 10 minutes, no time for segues
- Try to deliberately incorporate a few things about yourselves as a team into the conversation, otherwise they will still want to get to know you a bit at the end and will truncate the conversation early to get it in.
By the way, I founded a company called Watchsend (YC S13) — we’re a new kind of software analytics service that shows you videos instead of charts and graphs. Try us out!
