Do you think like a YCombinator Partner? Judge this application and know in 10 days!
Update: We did not get selected for YC interview. This does not change anything for us, except that we have to miss working along side some really smart people. But as they say, not all path breaking companies go to YC 😉. We will work hard to become one. Thanks to everyone for your support!
Before we start.
PS: We have no intentions to disrespect or disregard YC’s selection process. This is just an attempt to hack our way into YC 😃
Let’s admit it, getting into YCombinator (YC) is extremely hard. It’s even more difficult to compete with other startup founders who have strong relationships with YC partners or portfolio companies. That’s a natural advantage and no one can do anything about it, right? May be, but being hustlers throughout our lives we thought of hacking the system to make it a level playing field for us. Our obvious disadvantages are- being new to valley ecosystem, not knowing many YC portfolio founders & just a week old product launch(my team is not yet in valley and I’m taking care of pitching to investors and mentors while delivering the orders walking 5–8kms everyday 😎). The only ray of hope is the idea we are working on and our vision to help humans build better social connections through everyday gifting!
When I started showing the product to friends, mentors and a couple of YC alumni, they said that it is a very “YC-style” idea and we have a good chance to get into YC (if, of course, right people read it & we are able to get good referrals/recommendations). I thought “OK”, but how do we solve this problem? I thought let’s do something “YC-style”, let’s hack the system and make the right people read our application 😃! So here it is, for the first time in YC history (correct me if I’m wrong), we are PUBLICLY sharing our application before getting a Yes/No from YC partners.
To know if you can think like Sam Altman, Paul Graham and the likes, just go ahead and vote on our application. And if you vote correctly (no matter what you select), there is a surprise for you which you will receive on 10th April (yes, along with our acceptance/rejection letter from YC). So it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose, you win if you judge correctly 😊.
Here is the application-
COMPANY
Company name:
Vidzy Inc, Hackernews username: rabigupta
Company url, if any:
If you have an online demo, what’s the url?
Describe your company in 50 characters or less.
Gift anything to anyone at the push of a button.
What is your company going to make?
A mobile app to help people gift anything to their loved ones at the push of a button with personal touches like video wishes, surprise add ons and flawless delivery.
Which category best applies to your company?
Consumer
Which program would you like to be considered for?
Both YC Core and YC Fellowship
Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?
New Delhi/Bay Area, India/US & US/Bay Area, USA
FOUNDERS
Satwick Saxena, Akshay Gupta, Ashish Kumar, ME 😋
Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founders. (Follow the Video Guidelines.)
Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.
3 of the co-founders previously built and exited from a company called iCouchapp. iCouchapp was a mobile app (consumer facing app) platform for TV channels in India with 1.5Mn+ monthly active users and $75k in yearly revenues. iCouchapp worked with 4 out of the top 5 TV networks in India.
There were lots of ups and downs during 3 years of our first startup journey. Here is one of such incident where I realised that one of our greatest strengths is our “team”:
At one point we totally messed up during a live TV show (second screen experience), as the demand spike was unimaginable. It was a big TV show and the TV channel gave us a warning but next day our servers crashed again and everything stopped working. It was really embarrassing for all of us and it took a toll on the team. But instead of fighting or blame gaming, we pulled 3 all-nighters and changed the whole architecture of platform. It worked during the next week’s episode, but the TV channel had lost their biggest sponsor because of our mistake. We lost the client that day! We got tons of learning from that incident, but best part was that our team held together.
How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
3 out of 4 co-founders are college mates and have known each other for over 13 years. The 4th co-founder is known to all of us for 3 years (He joined our previous startup as head of operations). We get along awesomely well and have complementary skills with never die attitude. We always try to take a “data-driven”, “first-principal” approach without allowing ego to come in the way! We respect each other’s way of thinking and diversity helps us in seeing a problem from different angles, but our final decision is always in total alignment.
PROGRESS
How far along are you?
Product-
1. Mobile app V1.0 is live on both AppStore and PlayStore.
2. Vendor management platform is also live.
3. Partnership with India’s largest beer chain to allow beer gifting- already gone live. Other vendors like flowers, gourmet pop-corns, and one merchandiser are on-board as well (India will just be a test market for sometime).
5. In SF/Bay Area we have started taking orders and we are doing procurement and deliveries ourselves to learn directly from customers.
6. We have already seen 200+ gifts sent in past 5 days by 50+ users, totalling transactions worth $1,000+.
If you’ve already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?
2 months of development & partnership work
Which of the following best describes your progress?
Launched
How many users do you have?
50+ transacting users
Do you have revenue?
Yes
How much revenue?
$1,000+ in 5 days
What is your monthly growth rate?
(in users or revenue or both)
Since we launched a week back, our daily data has looked like this:
Day 1 (India/Delhi): 30 orders worth $100
Day 2 (India/Delhi): 66 orders worth $200
Day 3 (India/Delhi): 100 orders worth $400
Day 4 (San Francisco): 10 orders worth $150
Day 5 (San Francisco): 15 orders worth $200
IDEA
Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you’re making?
Humans thrive by building & maintaining social connections. Existing social networks helps us in maintaining basic social connections but nothing more than that. There are so many important people in our lives who we want to actively remain in touch with and show a prosocial behaviour. We currently do it via occasional coffee/beer meetings, festival gatherings, get-togethers and dinner parties but it’s very difficult to maintain this with everyone. And as we move on, in lives, it starts becoming more and more difficult to show our loved ones that we care!
We are facing the same problem in our lives. Since we became entrepreneurs (it’s been 4 years), we have lost touch with our old friends and close family members. It’s not that we didn’t want to, but we couldn’t. It’s just so difficult to keep up with their whereabouts, their kid’s birthdays and special events happening in their lives.
Other big problem we face is to show kind gesture to people who help us achieve small and big things in life. Our investors, mentors & bosses who take out time to help us solve our problems. But gifting them anything (as a gesture) is so “awkward”, “difficult” and “embarrassing”.
We did a small test by talking to a friend who runs a beer chain in India. We asked him to allow our friends to come and enjoy “gifted” beers as a gesture of friendship (we paid him upfront). It “worked” and our friends asked us if they could do the same with their friends as well. Other hack we did was to use on-demand services to send coffee to our girl friends and close friends to see their reaction & validate the idea. The response was magical! That’s when we realised that the idea of “casual” gifting can be huge. We launched the beta and the interest we are getting from people is really encouraging.
Before launching in San Francisco city, we talked to lot of our friends, entrepreneurs and people (who are in a relationship) about gifting and whether they would be interested in trying the app out, if it was available. Most of the time we got a “definitive Yes” from them. When we launched the app we already had a list of 35 friends in San Francisco who wanted to give it a shot.
After personally gifting to 10–15 of our early customers I realised that we have the potential to become a new kind of social network!
What’s new about what you’re making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn’t exist yet (or they don’t know about it)?
1. The simplicity of gifting/sending anyone in your contact book, anything; without even knowing their address is completely new. Karma tried something similar (in terms of not knowing recipient’s address) back in 2012 but Facebook bought it and killed the whole idea.
2. We all want to build better social connections but it’s really hard. Party goers are able to build better connections because they meet, drink and hangout with important people everyday. We occasionally try to meet for coffee/drink/dinner but it’s not practically possible to do this with all the people who we want to remain in touch with. Casual gifting will help people achieve this goal and will make everyone a better social person.
3. Today, people only think about gifting during special occasions (for special people) and once they start looking for things online it becomes a nightmare. There are numerous gifting websites & apps, some do flower gifting (Bloomthat, a YC company which tried gifting but shifted back to flowers), some do hand-picked product gifting (Aha! app), some create their own gift boxes etc. But there is no trigger to use these gifting apps on a regular basis.
4. We want people to gift almost everyday and hence we would be able to make gifting a habit, cut down costs, increase our ARPU and use user’s desire data to bring partners & vendors on-board.
5. Also, we don’t want to limit gifting to “only coffee” or “only beer” or “only hand picked physical gifts”. To begin with we can not have all the partners/products on board, that’s why we have a small “MAGIC BOX” which sits on top of our gifting tab. Users can see popular and available categories but once a while if they have a unique gifting idea, they can just type it in the magic box. We then try our best to find and deliver the gift if it’s legit and feasible. Yes, like “Magic” but for gifting.
Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
Gifting companies including gift card companies are not our competitors. We believe our competition is Amazon gifts (in terms of product choices) or companies like magic and on-demand chat based services like WeChat, AI services like Facebook “M” (the virtual assistant) or any on-demand commerce company for that matter. These guys can shift focus towards gifting once they see an opening.
What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?
Gifting is not about a unique, funny looking, out of the world gift. Gifting is not only about a special occasion. Gifting should not feel awkward.
Gifting should be so simple, fun and cool that one could even gift her boss or investor a “beer” or “wine”, without thinking twice about it! Gifting should feel like you already read the recipient’s mind before gifting. Gifting should be a tool to build better social connections.
Gifting on our platform is like- You thought about a person, a colleague, an investor, an old friend or your lover, recorded a video wish saying you are thinking about them and sent a cool gift which they liked! Gifting someone takes less than 20 seconds on our app.
How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
(We realize you can’t know precisely, but give your best estimate.)
We charge a commission on every sale. We sell at a premium because of gifting gesture but we will be able to do it at scale because gestures like coffee gifting starts with only $10.
Gifting in US is a $300Bn+ industry and in India it’s about $30Bn. Out of this 60–70% is gift cards (and that’s also because people have no better alternative).
Typical ticket size of a gift on our platform will vary from $10 (for coffee/beer) to $200. Here is how our estimates look-
Today: Gifts sent till today= 200, average ticket size= $6, total sales= $1000+, our margin (minus product cost)= $400.
Month 3: Gifts sent/month= 3,000, average ticket size= $10, total sales/month= $30,000+, our margin= $9000/month.
Year 1: Gifts sent/month= 70,000, average ticket size= $25, total sales/month= $1.7Mn+ our margin= $500,000.
Year 1 consolidated: Gifts sent= 250,000+, total sales= $5.6Mn+, our cut= $1.6Mn+
How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won’t be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
We do have a chiken-and-egg problem because of the marketplace/partners restraint. This is our plan:
1. Launch in major cities- San Francisco/Bay area (US), Mumbai/Delhi/Bangalore (India).
2. Allow users to gift anything and fulfil it via fleet on street/buying it from vendors (in real time)/shipping or delivering the gift through courier or fleet on street.
3. Excite users by scalable ideas like Beer gifting.
4. Delight customers to drive repeat buying and help spread the service via word of mouth.
5. Use return gifting as a mean to generate additional order for (almost) zero additional effort.
6. Start giving first two gifts for free. Every user will bring in two more users and return gifting will allow us to make money per free gift order.
LEGAL
👍
OTHERS
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.
(The answer need not be related to your project.)
Few interesting insights I got while understanding user behaviour of our potential customers:
1. It’s interesting to find that most people would value something that is “cool” a lot more than something that is “nice”.
2. People seek “social validation” way more than they seek “personal happiness”.
3. When people think of Gift they mostly think of “birthdays”, “anniversaries” and “how hard it is to find a unique gift”.
4. There is no word for casual, day to day things we do for our loved ones everyday. It’s either a “gift” which sounds formal or it’s “give” which sounds charity. What about buying a coffee for your friend, or buying nice dinner for your family? “Gesture”? Maybe.
CURIOUS
What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator?
Some friends (who have previously been a part of YC) told us that our idea has potential to grow at crazy YC growth numbers. We know that our idea has the potential to become a billion dollar idea and with the help of YC we will be able to achieve this target faster.
How did you hear about Y Combinator?
You’re kidding right? (Well, I wish we could have written that in application 😜)
Time to judge our YC application:
If you like what we are doing, you can help us by supporting the idea, recommending this article or if you are a YC alumni you can probably refer us to YC partners 😃. Thanks for reading 😊!
