How to improve your Y Combinator application
By: Joe Robbins
Tags: Startup, Business, Venture Capital, Ycombinator, Accelerator

Y Combinator is the best startup accelerator in the world. It’s no surprise that getting accepted is more competitive than getting into Harvard, Stanford, or MIT.

Twice a year, there are roughly 30,000 applications for less than 150 spots. Meaning the acceptance rate is under 1%!

So what can you do to improve your chances?

Read successful applications

One of the best things you can do is learn from the people that got in. It’s a bit tricky to find past applications because companies aren’t required to publicly post them online.

Lucky for us, after a lot of searching, I found about half a dozen companies that were nice enough to put their applications out in public:

Take your time, read through them, and make some notes. Also, please give a big thank you to each of these companies for putting their applications online for us to learn from.

Listen to the YC Partners

The partners at YC (the people who make the decisions) don’t hide what they want to see in applications. If you google search most of the partners’ names and “how to get into YC” a video or an article will pop up detailing what that partner wants to see.

Another great source of information detailing what the partners are looking for is the Y combinator blog.

The blog has great advice on starting a startup, so even if you don’t get into YC, I’d recommend bookmarking this page for when you need business advice.

Get right to the point

“Brevity is the soul of wit” - Shakespeare

I think this is the hardest thing to get right in the Y Combinator application.

One thing the application is testing for is your ability to concisely and persuasively get your point across. This is an essential skill that founders need, and it makes sense that YC values it so highly.

Why is this such a challenge?

Well, look at some of the past successful applications. Compare the answers Flex gave to the ones that Dropbox provided.

Dropbox gave much shorter answers than Flex. Does that mean one is better than the other? No, they both got in, which is the measure of success here.

Even though Dropbox’s answers were much shorter, there is one major thing in common.

Both of the applications answer what the question is asking and nothing more.

When the application asks what your company will make, don’t get into the details of your marketing plan or try to convince them that you’re the next Google/Uber/Amazon. Just stick to what your company is going to make.

I know this sounds easy, but trust me, this is where most founders go wrong.

Before you submit your application, go through each question, and ask yourself — “Did I answer more than the question was asking?”

Use a bottom-up, not top-down approach to estimate how much your company can make.

YC wants to see that you are obsessed with your target customer.

A bottom-up approach starts by identifying your target customer and then extrapolating, while a top-down approach begins with the total market size and then thining it down. It’s no surprise that YC prefers the bottom-up method because it starts with the customer.

Here’s a bit of a break down between the two approaches:

A top-down approach starts by determining your total market size, and then you assume a percentage of the market you’ll get.

For example, let’s say my company sells brewed coffee. A top-down approach would say that the US market size for coffee is ~88 billion dollars.

I plan only to locate my coffee shops in California. We’re going to be the In-N-Out Burger of coffee shops.

California accounts for ~12% of the US population, so my total market size is about 10.7 billion dollars (assuming an even distribution of coffee drinkers and no tourism).

I’ll be conservative and say I’ll only capture 1% of the market. So my company has the potential to make 107 million dollars per year.

A bottom-up approach starts with the customer and then works it’s way up. Let’s say I find out that every day *1 million cups of coffee are sold in California. That’s 365 million cups per year (366 if it is a leap year).

My company believes it can sell 1% of those cups of coffee at $3.25 per cup (it’s artisanal single-origin coffee). So our potential market is 11.9 million dollars per year.

If you’d like to do some more research on the two approaches, here are two great articles on the subject:

*I made up these numbers.

Do a rough draft on Google Docs (or any other word editor)

Don’t edit your application on the Y Combinator website. It’s hard to catch mistakes in the small word boxes that YC gives you to fill in.

Create a separate google doc to spell check easily, edit and allow friends to review your work.

This will save you a lot of time and errors.

Application Red flags

Application red flags to watch out for:

Answer all of the questions! Roughly half of the 30,000 applications get thrown out because the founders didn’t completely fill out the application.

Your equity should be evenly distributed. A big red flag is one founder having much more equity than another founder. Large differences in equity are common causes of disputes between founders and disputes between founders are among the most common reasons startups fail.

Summary

1) Read past successful applications

Take notes on how past founders wrote their applications.

2) Listen to the YC partners

Google search for the plethora of content YC partners have written and recorded about what they look out for in applications.

3) Get right to the point

Make sure you answer the question being answered and nothing more.

4) Use a bottom-up market analysis

When estimating your market size use a bottom-up approach, not a top-down one.

5) Do a rough draft outside of YC’s website

Create a separate document for your YC application and then copy and paste the answers in.

And most importantly!

Good luck to everyone applying to YC. Whether you do or do not get in I wish you the best on the crazy roller coster ride that is starting a business.

You got this!