As you might have guessed from the name, this site grew out of our yCombinator rejection. Like about 375 other applicants, we didn't even make it to the interview stage.

I sat around feeling bummed for about an hour, read some of the forum posts, and then decided that there was something I could do about the situation. As I see it, there are 5 main reasons to go to yCombinator:

1. Money. The $15k or so that yCombinator gives can be useful for some people.

2. Connections. They're very good at making introductions to investors, and give you instant credibility.

3. Advice. They've been through the startup experience before, and have seen numerous startups succeed or fail.

4. Marketing. "A yCombinator startup" seems to get instant attention on certain venues, particularly with the influential early-adopter market.

5. Camaraderie. I suspect that a large amount of the success of yCombinator startups is simply due to having a bright, passionate peer group, all going through the same experience. Some of PG's comments have suggested this too: when groups have worked off-site they "looked like the plant that just didn't get the miracle gro".

I can't do anything about #1 or #2. I'm hungry for #3, but there are other sources of information out there. Get a few dozen people that are starting or have started companies together, and a few are bound to know the answer you're looking for. I can do something about #4 and 5, and that's what inspired this site.

This is basically a place for startup founders to show off their work, get quality feedback, and then release it for the world. When you register your startup, you're randomly assigned to a group. It tries to put startups in the same city together, though there's a random factor so you don't end up with 7 startups in one city and 1 by itself. (In the future, I'd also like to add the ability to pick your group.) If you have not launched yet, all your feature announcements - and the existence of your startup at all - will only be visible to your demo group. Once you have launched, they become public for everyone to view, letting you gain some publicity.

I was inspired by organizations such as the Grameen Bank and the Harry Potter fandom. The Grameen Bank lends money to groups of people, never to individuals themselves. This produces strong peer pressure to repay the loan. Similarly, it's much more difficult to give up on the startup dream when you'll be letting down the 7 other startups in your group. When I add karma, there'll be both a group component and an individual component, fostering a sort of "coopetition" between and within groups.

As for Harry Potter - in fandom, there's a "social price" to membership. You have to write fics. When you join, people want to know what you've written, and they want you to comment on the stuff they've written. Similarly, the hope is that the social price here will be that you keep pumping out features and gaining users. The site is open to anyone actively involved in starting a startup: the one requirement is that you do things and don't just talk about them.

There's a lot more I'd like to add to this site: karma and stats are high on my priority list, as is Markdown for comments and announcements, and it could use a bit of a UI makeover. I'll try to keep up on feature requests and bugfixes, but I do have a day job, and this is a side-project aside from our main startup. Please bear with us; this was done on a very tight timetable (2 weeks from rejection to site launch), and hasn't had too much testing.