Also even if you have a cofounder - it really matters for YC what your guys accomplished, strong technical experience doesn't matter much, i believe they are looking for stanford\mit grads or somebody with a strong\successful business experience so that they can make a safe bet.
YC is not in the business of 'safe bets'. You need only look at the backgrounds of many of YC's most successful companies to see how wrongheaded that perspective is.
Full disclosure: Several friends have done YC, none are Stanford/MIT, all first time founders.
Well, I was looking for a co-founder, but I did not find the right fit. Nowadays it does not make sense to give out 50% of the company to a random guy, that's why I hired a business developer and offered an option.
no sane developer would trade his idea he spent several months working on for just 15k, even if it's YC. That's not how investor's market is right now.
Yes single founder is definitely an issue for them,
However I am surprised they didn't even invite you to the interview. Are you currently in US? Could be a reason.
Anyway looks like you are doing great, if you ever want to do something together - let me know, I'd love to know more about how many people you guys have and for how long have you been operating etc.
I am getting a sense that you either should have a strong founders team or a lot of traction\revenue with an opportunity to become very big. In your case maybe having a team of people also "too late for YC", and you can become successful on your own.
I also heard that they don't like video made of pieces, who knows what some alumni might not like when he sees your application.
Thanks for the feedback. I would love to learn more about your product.
Lmk if you want to meet for a coffee in SF downtown.
Yeah, I live & work in San Francisco at Rackspace co-working space on Folsom. It's a great place to be. Definitely recommend to everyone.
Always glad to share about myself & Appodeal.
I've been working on it for almost a year now.
There is a team of 12 super strong developers in Russia & Ukraine, that have been working with me for 4 years already. Very loyal. I myself have a strong technical background and remote teams management experience.
Business & sales team consists of me, my operating director and a first sales guy we are going to hire next week and we are all here in SF. So we have a pretty strong tech team (because we don't compete for developers with Google/Facebook). And we have business presence in SF as well.
Traction is pretty good too. We've launched in January and already have $200K monthly revenues and some net revenues as well. Each day we receive 15-25 new sign ups and retention is close to 100%. We are about to launch aggressive marketing this month.
