My YC Interview Experience (W21)
I interviewed with YC for the W21 batch during the Coronavirus pandemic. I was rejected. The experience was unique and helped me think about our product in a different light. I would highly recommend applying to anyone who is hoping to pursue their goal of entrepreneurship further. If not for the YC brand, apply to see what people, who look at thousands of companies every quarter, think about your product and (if you get the chance) have them dump on you and your product for 10 minutes.
You can also take a look at this article at: https://hershalb.com/my-yc-interview-experience-w21/
TLDR;
- Get as much user feedback as possible
- Understand your distinct advantages within the competitive landscape
- Determine the pros/cons for your methods of monetization
Overview of Our Product
This may seem like a shameless plug, but I am adding this section here to help explain the critiques of our product. Feel free to skip this section, but you might miss out on a few details that might help describe their objections and an awesome product (okay that was the shameless plug).
Problem 1: Sharing Music is Annoying
After graduating college, my friend and I decided to stay connected by sharing music with each other, but we quickly realized that the process is pretty irritating. Songs that we sent to each other over iMessage/Messenger got lost in chats and there was no easy way to save the music for later. The process was made even more vexing by the difference in our choice of music provider, he used Spotify and I used YouTube (don’t make me explain this).
Problem 2: Cross-Platform Music
Relatively a smaller problem given the amount of music that exists on providers such as Spotify and Apple Music, but we realized that it was hard to track our favorite songs from multiple platforms. Sometimes songs were only available on certain platforms like SoundCloud, but it wasn’t possible to have one place to listen to your favorite songs from both Spotify and SoundCloud combined.