Y u no like us?
What we learned from the Y Combinator interview
If you’ve read about the (infamous?) Y Combinator interview you’ll know that they are a bit atypical: 10 minutes, no pitch, no slide deck, no suits — all for 120k and a few months at arguably the world’s best startup accelerator.
When we received an interview, we expected to work hard preparing for these 10 minutes, but what we didn’t expect is how much we would learn about ourselves, our progress, and what was next for us.
First, we were reminded that we were doing a lot of things right. We validated that the problem we were tackling was real before we ever built anything. We built a product around what real users told us that they wanted. We first launched with an open source MVP to accelerate learning, before building our own product. Most importantly, our solution was working. Our traction was showing that we were providing a useful solution to the problem and in just 9 months, we had captured nearly 50% of our initial target audience. All of this got us really excited. People liked our product! Our customers (university departments) were coming to us to get involved! And our high-quality, organic content was pulling in new users directly from Google search.
We were ready for the validation questions because we had great metrics to back us up. But you also have to prepare for the scary questions. The ones you never want them to ask. The ones they most certainly will.
Preparing for these scary questions is what made the interview process so valuable to our team. Taking a step back to work on simply explaining what we had done and what we needed to do next, couldn’t have come at a better time.
How do you replicate and scale this? — that was the scary question. We had just reached critical mass at our first university, and had been focusing on refining UX and launching our mobile app. While we had some ideas about how were going scale, we didn’t have a concrete answer yet.
As soon as we got back to our room that day, we started drafting experiments to help us determine how to were going to expand to the next university. This was the most pressing risk, the most pressing unknown in our model. Nothing else is more urgent.
Exercises like these take you out of your routine, and force you to step back to see the big picture. Re-evaluate what you have learned. Find the scary questions. These are what you should be working to answer next.
