The YC23 Batch has 218 startups.

It would be cool to find out which are the best ideas.

But what makes an idea a good business idea?

The first thing is the problem it solves.

And what makes a good problem for a business?

There is some consensus about these:

Pain: The greater the pain or inconvenience, the higher the value people might place on a solution.

How much would you pay to stop a really bad headache?

Urgency: The more urgent it is, the more likely people are to pay for a solution.

You are late to your first day at a new job.. Are you waiting for the bus or taking a cab?

Persistence: Problems that occur frequently or are persistent can represent larger market opportunities.

What is a better business, a pill that solves the problem or a pill that solves the symptom?

(You can see why we have some of the problems we have as a society with this alignment of incentives...)

Market size: A larger audience means a potentially bigger market.

Willingness to pay: Are people or businesses already spending money to solve this problem? If they are, it’s a sign that there's a monetary value attached to the solution.

Target Reachability: If it's a problem for a very niche or inaccessible group, it might be harder to market or sell to them.

Regulatory Barriers: It's important to be aware of these as they can impact the feasibility of your business solution.

Scalability: Ideally, as your business grows, you want the solution to be applicable to a larger audience or to more complex iterations of the problem.

SO THIS IS WHAT I DID:

I made a little script to ask GPT3.5 to answer about each company and each of these points. After justifying its opinion on each point, it required thousands of queries, it gave a score for each.

After that, I made a coefficient (not every aspect is equally important) and I ordered every company to see what are the “safest bets” in terms of problem/solution.

- As you can see, there are a few patterns:
- At the top, there are many medical companies.
- Regulatory issues and willingness to pay are the two factors that make the greatest difference between the top and bottom.
- More than half of the projects are about AI.
- Only 3 projects are about Crypto.
- The big majority of the companies seem to be great business ideas.

ABOUT THE METHODOLOGY:

- The prompts can be improved.
- Multiple Agents (marketing experts, lawyers, Medical Doctors, final users, etc) can be used to evaluate the idea.
- A better and deeper chain of thoughts can be implemented to improve the quality of the results.
- More characteristics can be evaluated: platform risk, current competitors, etc.
- The model can be upgraded to GPT-4 right now. I only have access to the 3.5 API so I couldn't use it.
- The information given to the AI Model can be much more detailed.
- The model can be used to try to identify better approaches for the same companies.

FINALLY:

YC is probably the most important accelerator in the world: Paul Graham, Garry Tan, Sam Altman, and many others at YC demonstrate every year during the last 15 years that they know how to choose great talent, with great ideas in great markets.
It is always really interesting to see their picks.