u/Spiritual_Heron_5680

I’m not going to hype this. I’ve used every major AI tool for the past two years. Most of them are just faster interns that still need you to do the real work. Grok Bot is the first one that feels different.

It has its own persistent computer. It can log into tools, work across apps and websites, keep going while I sleep, and only come back when it needs a decision. I can spin up multiple bots and they pass work between each other.

Here’s what I’m actually using it for as a founder

I give it overnight objectives - research a competitor set, draft personalized outreach in my voice, clean lead lists, or build landing page variants. I wake up to finished work instead of a longer to-do list.

I’ve got one bot that constantly scans X and the web for raw pain points in my space. Not the polished LinkedIn version, the actual frustrated posts. That’s how I’m finding problems before they get crowded.

Another one red-teams my ideas hard. I make it attack from the competitor’s perspective, a tough VC, and a technical angle, then force it to build the counters. Keeps me honest.

The most useful (and uncomfortable) one is the self-deception detector. I tell it to call out every rationalization I make about traction or progress. It does. It’s annoying and necessary.

It’s not free and it’s still early. But the leverage is real. I’m moving faster with less burnout than I was three months ago.

If you’re still only using AI to write emails and summarize notes, you’re leaving a lot on the table.

I have got the prompt/Instruction that you can use it with Grok Bot to carry out the above task, happy to share, if someone needs it...

I’m not going to hype this. I’ve used every major AI tool for the past two years. Most of them are just faster interns that still need you to do the real work. Grok Bot is the first one that feels different.

It has its own persistent computer. It can log into tools, work across apps and websites, keep going while I sleep, and only come back when it needs a decision. I can spin up multiple bots and they pass work between each other.

Here’s what I’m actually using it for as a founder

I give it overnight objectives - research a competitor set, draft personalized outreach in my voice, clean lead lists, or build landing page variants. I wake up to finished work instead of a longer to-do list.

I’ve got one bot that constantly scans X and the web for raw pain points in my space. Not the polished LinkedIn version, the actual frustrated posts. That’s how I’m finding problems before they get crowded.

Another one red-teams my ideas hard. I make it attack from the competitor’s perspective, a tough VC, and a technical angle, then force it to build the counters. Keeps me honest.

The most useful (and uncomfortable) one is the self-deception detector. I tell it to call out every rationalization I make about traction or progress. It does. It’s annoying and necessary.

It’s not free and it’s still early. But the leverage is real. I’m moving faster with less burnout than I was three months ago.

If you’re still only using AI to write emails and summarize notes, you’re leaving a lot on the table.

I have got the prompt/Instruction that you can use it with Grok Bot to carry out the above task, happy to share, if someone needs it...

I’m not going to hype this. I’ve used every major AI tool for the past two years. Most of them are just faster interns that still need you to do the real work. Grok Bot is the first one that feels different.

It has its own persistent computer. It can log into tools, work across apps and websites, keep going while I sleep, and only come back when it needs a decision. I can spin up multiple bots and they pass work between each other.

Here’s what I’m actually using it for as a founder

I give it overnight objectives - research a competitor set, draft personalized outreach in my voice, clean lead lists, or build landing page variants. I wake up to finished work instead of a longer to-do list.

I’ve got one bot that constantly scans X and the web for raw pain points in my space. Not the polished LinkedIn version, the actual frustrated posts. That’s how I’m finding problems before they get crowded.

Another one red-teams my ideas hard. I make it attack from the competitor’s perspective, a tough VC, and a technical angle, then force it to build the counters. Keeps me honest.

The most useful (and uncomfortable) one is the self-deception detector. I tell it to call out every rationalization I make about traction or progress. It does. It’s annoying and necessary.

It’s not free and it’s still early. But the leverage is real. I’m moving faster with less burnout than I was three months ago.

If you’re still only using AI to write emails and summarize notes, you’re leaving a lot on the table.

I have got the prompt/Instruction that you can use it with Grok Bot to carry out the above task, happy to share, if someone needs it...

Dropbox: Drew Houston recorded a 3-minute demo video and posted it on Hacker News with the title "My YC app: Dropbox, Throw away your USB drive." The video was posted in April 2007 and brought the first wave of users. just One video posted in right community.

Airbnb: Founders manually posted their own listings on Craigslist and then reached out to other Craigslist hosts who were already renting their apartments, offering to help them post on Airbnb. They did this city by city.

DoorDash: Tony Xu printed restaurant menus as PDFs, built a simple landing page, and put his personal cell phone number on it. He answered calls himself and delivered food personally. The first 100 users were people who found the site through search and got a founder answering the phone.

Stripe: Patrick and John Collison went to developer hackathons with a laptop and integrated Stripe for developers on the spot. The first users were people who watched the integration happen in person and immediately saw the value.

Reddit: Paul Graham seeded the site with content himself under fake accounts to make it look active. The early traction came from PG's existing audience of Hacker News readers.

Segment: Published their internal tracking code as free open-source on Hacker News. 400 developers integrated it in 24 hours without a product launch.

Instacart: Apoorva Mehta delivered a six-pack of beer to a YC partner using his own app. That single delivery demonstration got him into YC. The first users after that came from the YC network itself.

The pattern: none of them used paid acquisition. All of them found one specific community where the right person already existed and showed up there in person or online.

I have collected the case studies on various companies on how they got their 100 customers and how to apply their strategies to our startup, happy to share if someone needs it...

Dropbox: Drew Houston recorded a 3-minute demo video and posted it on Hacker News with the title "My YC app: Dropbox, Throw away your USB drive." The video was posted in April 2007 and brought the first wave of users. just One video posted in right community.

Airbnb: Founders manually posted their own listings on Craigslist and then reached out to other Craigslist hosts who were already renting their apartments, offering to help them post on Airbnb. They did this city by city.

DoorDash: Tony Xu printed restaurant menus as PDFs, built a simple landing page, and put his personal cell phone number on it. He answered calls himself and delivered food personally. The first 100 users were people who found the site through search and got a founder answering the phone.

Stripe: Patrick and John Collison went to developer hackathons with a laptop and integrated Stripe for developers on the spot. The first users were people who watched the integration happen in person and immediately saw the value.

Reddit: Paul Graham seeded the site with content himself under fake accounts to make it look active. The early traction came from PG's existing audience of Hacker News readers.

Segment: Published their internal tracking code as free open-source on Hacker News. 400 developers integrated it in 24 hours without a product launch.

Instacart: Apoorva Mehta delivered a six-pack of beer to a YC partner using his own app. That single delivery demonstration got him into YC. The first users after that came from the YC network itself.

The pattern: none of them used paid acquisition. All of them found one specific community where the right person already existed and showed up there in person or online.

I have collected the case studies on various companies on how they got their 100 customers and how to apply their strategies to our startup, happy to share if someone needs it...

Based on actual deal data, not vibes

1. Fintech - 25% of all deals UPI processed $2.6T in transactions in 2025. The infrastructure is built. Now the opportunity is in credit, insurance, wealth management, and B2B payments. India ranked 3rd globally in fintech funding in 2024 at $1.9B despite a 33% decline from prior years. Two new unicorns emerged from fintech in that period.

2. B2B SaaS / Enterprise software $1.1B invested in enterprise applications in 2025. The "Services-as-Software" thesis (AI replacing India's IT services layer) is the hottest specific angle. Darwinbox, the HR tech platform, is the poster child.

3. AI (application layer) $643M across 100 deals in 2025, up 4.1% from 2024. BUT: this is early-stage and early-growth stage dominant. Late-stage AI is underfunded compared to the US. The gap between US AI funding ($121B) and India AI funding ($643M) is staggering. Opportunity or warning sign depending on your thesis.

4. Healthtech TrueMeds raised $85M Series C. The sector showed resilience even when consumer categories were struggling. Health infrastructure, diagnostics, and pharmacy are all active.

5. Defence tech, $311M across 43 deals in H1 2025. This sector raised essentially nothing 3 years ago. Government procurement reform + dual-use technology interest from global defence companies = fastest-growing category by percentage in Indian startup funding.

6. Climate / Clean tech Gruhas Proptech (Nikhil Kamath's fund) is the highest-profile climate-focused fund. Blume is increasingly active here. Speciale Invest's Fund III covers space, defence, robotics, and semiconductors Rs 600 crore.

Dead or dying (for now) - Pure edtech, crypto consumer apps, food delivery with new models, B2C subscription apps without strong retention data.

I have almost finished building the case studies & Database on Indian VC's with their list of backed companies, happy to share if someone needs it...

I went through every YC-backed SaaS company failure post-mortem I could find from 2019 to 2025. found around 30+ documented cases & in most case its the same pricing problem that have killed them

Pricing was not too high or too low. It was flat monthly pricing that did not scale with customer value.

The problem. one SaaS company charges $99/month per account. one customer uses the product lightly and logs in twice a week, does basic tasks, gets moderate value while second customer uses the product heavily, 8 people using it daily with one account, automating processes that save 20 hours per week, deeply integrated with their stack.

Both pay $99.

second customer is getting 10x the value and paying the same as first customer & Eventually, 2nd customers internal team founds out their are underpaying for the tools that could have cost them $3,000/month human workflow, sp They may negotiate their next contract renewal with the SaaS providers Or they may build it internally considering their prices are low

The various SaaS companies have failed because of this pricing model which did not capture a proportional share of the value delivered.

The companies that survived from the same batches of YC have shared a different pricing structure few includes, the usage-based pricing, seat-based scaled to company size, or outcome-based pricing. Something that went up as the customer's usage and value went up.

PG's essay, How to Make Wealth have describes this precisely, The companies that create the most value charge proportionally to the value they create. Most SaaS founders read that and apply it to the product or any features they build. Almost none apply it to the pricing model.

how to fix, before your next pricing page update, calculate the average annual value your product creates for your best 10 customers. Then calculate what you charge them. If the ratio of value to price is 10:1 or higher, you are leaving significant money on the table and your best customers are likely your biggest churn risk when they do the math themselves.

before you see your API cost soars, do calculated the value-to-price ratio for your best 10 customers and and if it is higher than 10:1, do raise your prices or switch to usage-based pricing...

I went through every YC-backed SaaS company failure post-mortem I could find from 2019 to 2025. found around 30+ documented cases & in most case its the same pricing problem that have killed them

Pricing was not too high or too low. It was flat monthly pricing that did not scale with customer value.

The problem. one SaaS company charges $99/month per account. one customer uses the product lightly and logs in twice a week, does basic tasks, gets moderate value while second customer uses the product heavily, 8 people using it daily with one account, automating processes that save 20 hours per week, deeply integrated with their stack.

Both pay $99.

second customer is getting 10x the value and paying the same as first customer & Eventually, 2nd customers internal team founds out their are underpaying for the tools that could have cost them $3,000/month human workflow, sp They may negotiate their next contract renewal with the SaaS providers Or they may build it internally considering their prices are low

The various SaaS companies have failed because of this pricing model which did not capture a proportional share of the value delivered.

The companies that survived from the same batches of YC have shared a different pricing structure few includes, the usage-based pricing, seat-based scaled to company size, or outcome-based pricing. Something that went up as the customer's usage and value went up.

PG's essay, How to Make Wealth have describes this precisely, The companies that create the most value charge proportionally to the value they create. Most SaaS founders read that and apply it to the product or any features they build. Almost none apply it to the pricing model.

how to fix, before your next pricing page update, calculate the average annual value your product creates for your best 10 customers. Then calculate what you charge them. If the ratio of value to price is 10:1 or higher, you are leaving significant money on the table and your best customers are likely your biggest churn risk when they do the math themselves.

before you see your API cost soars, do calculated the value-to-price ratio for your best 10 customers and and if it is higher than 10:1, do raise your prices or switch to usage-based pricing...

I went through every YC-backed SaaS company failure post-mortem I could find from 2019 to 2025. found around 30+ documented cases & in most case its the same pricing problem that have killed them

Pricing was not too high or too low. It was flat monthly pricing that did not scale with customer value.

The problem. one SaaS company charges $99/month per account. one customer uses the product lightly and logs in twice a week, does basic tasks, gets moderate value while second customer uses the product heavily, 8 people using it daily with one account, automating processes that save 20 hours per week, deeply integrated with their stack.

Both pay $99.

second customer is getting 10x the value and paying the same as first customer & Eventually, 2nd customers internal team founds out their are underpaying for the tools that could have cost them $3,000/month human workflow, sp They may negotiate their next contract renewal with the SaaS providers Or they may build it internally considering their prices are low

The various SaaS companies have failed because of this pricing model which did not capture a proportional share of the value delivered.

The companies that survived from the same batches of YC have shared a different pricing structure few includes, the usage-based pricing, seat-based scaled to company size, or outcome-based pricing. Something that went up as the customer's usage and value went up.

PG's essay, How to Make Wealth have describes this precisely, The companies that create the most value charge proportionally to the value they create. Most SaaS founders read that and apply it to the product or any features they build. Almost none apply it to the pricing model.

how to fix, before your next pricing page update, calculate the average annual value your product creates for your best 10 customers. Then calculate what you charge them. If the ratio of value to price is 10:1 or higher, you are leaving significant money on the table and your best customers are likely your biggest churn risk when they do the math themselves.

before you see your API cost soars, do calculated the value-to-price ratio for your best 10 customers and and if it is higher than 10:1, do raise your prices or switch to usage-based pricing...

Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi were 22 years old when they entered YC Winter 2017.

They had already built and sold Pagar, one of the largest payment processors in Brazil. They were not rookies. They had processed $1.5 billion in transactions.

But they entered YC with a VR company idea.

Three weeks into the batch, Henrique went to the Consumer Electronics Show. He walked around for a day and came back to Pedro with one conclusion, they knew absolutely nothing about the VR market.

They were surrounded by people who had spent careers in hardware and optics and manufacturing. They had none of that knowledge.

They could have pushed through. They had $125,000 in YC funding. They could have shipped something.

Instead, they sat down and asked one question, what problem do we actually understand better than anyone in this batch?

The answer was sitting right in front of them. They tried to get a corporate credit card during the batch and were denied because they were international founders with no US credit history. They looked around. Every founder in the batch had the same problem.

They pivoted to Brex in week three. A corporate credit card built specifically for startups.

Three weeks to recognize a dead end & One conversation to find the pivot and The rest is a $12 billion company.

YC was not betting on the VR idea. They were betting on two founders who had already built a payment company from scratch as teenagers.

I have gone deep down and wrote up case studies on Pivoted founders, which has the early stories of founders who got rejected are underrepresented in the startup conversation, happy to share, if someone wants it...

Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi were 22 years old when they entered YC Winter 2017.

They had already built and sold Pagar, one of the largest payment processors in Brazil. They were not rookies. They had processed $1.5 billion in transactions.

But they entered YC with a VR company idea.

Three weeks into the batch, Henrique went to the Consumer Electronics Show. He walked around for a day and came back to Pedro with one conclusion, they knew absolutely nothing about the VR market.

They were surrounded by people who had spent careers in hardware and optics and manufacturing. They had none of that knowledge.

They could have pushed through. They had $125,000 in YC funding. They could have shipped something.

Instead, they sat down and asked one question, what problem do we actually understand better than anyone in this batch?

The answer was sitting right in front of them. They tried to get a corporate credit card during the batch and were denied because they were international founders with no US credit history. They looked around. Every founder in the batch had the same problem.

They pivoted to Brex in week three. A corporate credit card built specifically for startups.

Three weeks to recognize a dead end & One conversation to find the pivot and The rest is a $12 billion company.

YC was not betting on the VR idea. They were betting on two founders who had already built a payment company from scratch as teenagers.

I have gone deep down and wrote up case studies on Pivoted founders, which has the early stories of founders who got rejected are underrepresented in the startup conversation, happy to share, if someone wants it...

I keep seeing the same posts: “I built an AI wrapper for X.” Cool. So did 4,000 other people last month. Meanwhile there’s a real problem staring us in the face that many of us are ignoring to solve. Let me explain

Small and mid-size companies are drowning in AI agent chaos. They spin up 8-12 different agents (sales, support, ops, finance) and then spend hours every week manually checking what those agents actually did, fixing broken handoffs, and praying nothing got charged twice or sent the wrong email.

Look at the data from Gartner. Enterprise SaaS spend is shifting hard toward usage and agent-based pricing (Gartner already has it at 40% by 2030). AI infrastructure funding is still flying. But the layer that sits on top simple visibility, audit logs, and one-click kill switches for non-technical managers is basically empty.

Most tools either require an engineer or dump you into a wall of logs nobody reads. Target customer is the ops or finance lead at a 20–200 person company that’s already paying for 3–5 AI tools. They’re not technical. They just want to know “did the agent actually book that meeting or did it hallucinate the calendar invite again?”

Current solutions is failing because they’re either pure developer tools or overbuilt enterprise platforms that take six months to implement. MVP is dead simple, connect the agents you already use (via API or browser extension), show a clean daily digest of what each one did, flag anything weird, and let a non-tech person pause or approve actions. Charge $49–99/month per company.

Validation plan, talk to 20 ops people this week. Ask them to show you the last time an agent screwed something up. If three of them offer to pay for a waiting list, you have signal.

I’ve spent months looking into this because i keep seeing the same question over and over again here on Reddit and X that keeps coming up from founders in YC, Techstars, Speedrun, Antler and similar programs i.e “How do we sell to startups in other accelerators?”

Many have found stuck inside their own network or may be some accelerator rules wont allow. I wanted the real answers, so I researched what actually happens when companies try to cross over, i have talked to people on both sides, and mapped the patterns, No, This is not a success story. I’m just a founder sharing the findings so others can test them. Nothing is guaranteed, but feel worth testing...

Here’s what keeps showing up as worth testing if you are from the Startup Accelerators program

- Getting a real relationship going with the other accelerator’s team,

The people who handle founder resources or partnerships. Goal is simple, understand if there’s mutual value in making your product easy for their cohort to try.

- Getting visibility on their internal tools or resource list

Almost every accelerator has some internal Notion, Airtable or spreadsheet of recommended stuff. Landing there creates ongoing exposure without you having to chase every founder.

- Offering something actually useful to the batch

A short session, limited office hours, whatever format helps them. Accelerators open up more when it feels like you’re adding value instead of just selling.

- Warm intros through shared investors or mentors

There’s more overlap between programs than most founders realize. A low-pressure ask through those connections can surface conversations cold outreach never reaches.

- Targeted messages to individual founders

When the batch list is public or available, short notes that actually reference what they’re building land better than generic pitches.

Though for above strategies to test, Timing also matters. Early weeks of a batch, right after Demo Day, or when an accelerator shifts focus usually create better windows.

None of this is automatic, but doable, if done well, Relationships, timing, and whether your product is genuinely useful still decide everything. But these are the concrete places to start if you want to test cross-accelerator sales instead of staying stuck inside your own network.

I’m sharing this freely so other founders can take it, run their own experiments, and improve on it.

If you’ve tried any of this (or been on the receiving end), drop what actually worked or completely flopped. The more real data the better the learning many founders will apply.

Been going through YC application breakdowns, partner interviews, and every piece of public guidance YC has published about what they look for. Spent about 40 hours on this over the last month.

The question that quietly kills most applications: "Why is now the right time for this company to exist?"

Not because founders can't answer it. Because they answer the wrong version of it.

Most answers I see in shared applications treat this as "why is this market big right now?" YC is not asking about market size. Markets are always big. The question is about timing specifically, why did a window open recently that makes this company uniquely possible or necessary right now?

There are three types of answers that actually work based on what I've read from YC partners:

A specific technical change in the last 12-24 months. A specific shift in user behavior or expectations. A specific regulatory or structural change in an industry.

Every good "why now" fits one of those three buckets and names something specific. Not "AI is advancing." Which AI capability, at what cost, enabling what specific function.

The applications that get rejected on this question are the ones that describe a slow-moving trend as if it's a sudden window. "Remote work is growing" is not a why now in 2026. "The specific API that makes our product viable dropped in cost by 80% fourteen months ago" is a why now.

I've put together a framework for answering all 7 core YC questions in a way that aligns with what partners actually say they want. Not what the question sounds like on the surface. What they're actually filtering for underneath. happy to share if someone wants it

the narrative i always hear, brian armstrong saw the future of money before anyone else and boldly built the infrastructure for it.

what actually happened is a thesis for all of founder who building the great stuff

in 2012 armstrong was just an airbnb engineer doing a side project on nights and weekends. he noticed that bitcoin tools were all built for developers, long wallet addresses, desktop clients, sketchy intermediaries. normal people couldn't figure any of it out. so he built a simple hosted wallet and applied to YC with it. called it bitbank. most of his own batch thought bitcoin was a phase. not even a smart bet, just a phase.

YC funded him anyway. he launched during the batch. people signed up. and to his surprise they all left.

this is where the real learning for any founder starts, his response was not to pivot even not to rebrand and even not to do a big redesign sprint. he just called the people who bounced and asked them what was missing.

and they all said the same thing "i would've stayed if i could buy bitcoin inside the wallet."

that's it. thats the eureka moment for brian, the wallet existed but there was no way to actually get bitcoin into it. the whole core loop was broken at the most basic step and he didn't know it until he made those calls.

so then he did what he wanted to do, he spent months on banking partnerships and regulatory compliance to build a buy button. thats actually boring but painful, slow work that every other competitor was quietly skipping because it was such a nightmare. he and fred ehrsam (who he found through a reddit post, not some fancy network at that time) ran the whole thing out of an apartment, doing everything themselves, while bitcoin was still something most serious people thought was a toy.

when the buy button launched, the product finally closed its own loop. organic growth kicked in. signups were compounding fast with almost no marketing spend.

and now it gets told as a visionary crypto bet.

the thing that gets me is, in the moment, none of it looked visionary. it looked like a guy with bad retention numbers making phone calls. it looked like months of tedious compliance work in a category most smart people thought was wrong. the "vision" part got added to the story later, after the outcome was already known.

the boldness wasn't in seeing the future. it was in doing the unsexy work when the easier move was to just ship something else and tell yourself the market wasn't ready.

i'm building something right now and i keep coming back to this story whenever i want to do the fun thing instead of the right thing. the right thing is almost always more boring. it's usually the thing you've been avoiding because it's slow and painful and doesn't make for a good tweet.

i keep this story in my head for the "nothing is working" weeks. it usually means something specific is broken. go find out what it is before you decide the whole thing is wrong.

the narrative i always hear, brian armstrong saw the future of money before anyone else and boldly built the infrastructure for it.

what actually happened is a thesis for all of founder who building the great stuff

in 2012 armstrong was just an airbnb engineer doing a side project on nights and weekends. he noticed that bitcoin tools were all built for developers, long wallet addresses, desktop clients, sketchy intermediaries. normal people couldn't figure any of it out. so he built a simple hosted wallet and applied to YC with it. called it bitbank. most of his own batch thought bitcoin was a phase. not even a smart bet, just a phase.

YC funded him anyway. he launched during the batch. people signed up. and to his surprise they all left.

this is where the real learning for any founder starts, his response was not to pivot even not to rebrand and even not to do a big redesign sprint. he just called the people who bounced and asked them what was missing.

and they all said the same thing "i would've stayed if i could buy bitcoin inside the wallet."

that's it. thats the eureka moment for brian, the wallet existed but there was no way to actually get bitcoin into it. the whole core loop was broken at the most basic step and he didn't know it until he made those calls.

so then he did what he wanted to do, he spent months on banking partnerships and regulatory compliance to build a buy button. thats actually boring but painful, slow work that every other competitor was quietly skipping because it was such a nightmare. he and fred ehrsam (who he found through a reddit post, not some fancy network at that time) ran the whole thing out of an apartment, doing everything themselves, while bitcoin was still something most serious people thought was a toy.

when the buy button launched, the product finally closed its own loop. organic growth kicked in. signups were compounding fast with almost no marketing spend.

and now it gets told as a visionary crypto bet.

the thing that gets me is, in the moment, none of it looked visionary. it looked like a guy with bad retention numbers making phone calls. it looked like months of tedious compliance work in a category most smart people thought was wrong. the "vision" part got added to the story later, after the outcome was already known.

the boldness wasn't in seeing the future. it was in doing the unsexy work when the easier move was to just ship something else and tell yourself the market wasn't ready.

i'm building something right now and i keep coming back to this story whenever i want to do the fun thing instead of the right thing. the right thing is almost always more boring. it's usually the thing you've been avoiding because it's slow and painful and doesn't make for a good tweet.

i keep this story in my head for the "nothing is working" weeks. it usually means something specific is broken. go find out what it is before you decide the whole thing is wrong.

the narrative i always hear, brian armstrong saw the future of money before anyone else and boldly built the infrastructure for it.

what actually happened is a thesis for all of founder who building the great stuff

in 2012 armstrong was just an airbnb engineer doing a side project on nights and weekends. he noticed that bitcoin tools were all built for developers, long wallet addresses, desktop clients, sketchy intermediaries. normal people couldn't figure any of it out. so he built a simple hosted wallet and applied to YC with it. called it bitbank. most of his own batch thought bitcoin was a phase. not even a smart bet, just a phase.

YC funded him anyway. he launched during the batch. people signed up. and to his surprise they all left.

this is where the real learning for any founder starts, his response was not to pivot even not to rebrand and even not to do a big redesign sprint. he just called the people who bounced and asked them what was missing.

and they all said the same thing "i would've stayed if i could buy bitcoin inside the wallet."

that's it. thats the eureka moment for brian, the wallet existed but there was no way to actually get bitcoin into it. the whole core loop was broken at the most basic step and he didn't know it until he made those calls.

so then he did what he wanted to do, he spent months on banking partnerships and regulatory compliance to build a buy button. thats actually boring but painful, slow work that every other competitor was quietly skipping because it was such a nightmare. he and fred ehrsam (who he found through a reddit post, not some fancy network at that time) ran the whole thing out of an apartment, doing everything themselves, while bitcoin was still something most serious people thought was a toy.

when the buy button launched, the product finally closed its own loop. organic growth kicked in. signups were compounding fast with almost no marketing spend.

and now it gets told as a visionary crypto bet.

the thing that gets me is, in the moment, none of it looked visionary. it looked like a guy with bad retention numbers making phone calls. it looked like months of tedious compliance work in a category most smart people thought was wrong. the "vision" part got added to the story later, after the outcome was already known.

the boldness wasn't in seeing the future. it was in doing the unsexy work when the easier move was to just ship something else and tell yourself the market wasn't ready.

i'm building something right now and i keep coming back to this story whenever i want to do the fun thing instead of the right thing. the right thing is almost always more boring. it's usually the thing you've been avoiding because it's slow and painful and doesn't make for a good tweet.

i keep this story in my head for the "nothing is working" weeks. it usually means something specific is broken. go find out what it is before you decide the whole thing is wrong.

I see the same thing every batch. after Founders hit submit(YC Application), then spend the next few weeks refreshing their inbox every 10 minutes or completely freezing up. Both are a waste.

Here’s the actual playbook that works, so you can use it today.

First, change your head. Act like they already said no. Seriously. Ask yourself right now, If the rejection email came in this afternoon, what would I do next? Then go do that exact thing. This one mental switch kills most of the anxiety and puts you back in control.

Your only real job while you wait is to keep building the company. Talk to users every single day. Ship something, even if it’s small. Grow the numbers that matter, active users, revenue, retention, signed pilots, whatever your key metric is. YC partners care a lot about whether you moved forward after you applied. Showing real progress is stronger than any polished answer you could prepare.

If something genuinely big happens (not “we had a good week”), you can send one short update. Keep it short and put real numbers in it. Something like, “Since applying we grew weekly active users 40%, signed three paying customers, and hit $X monthly revenue.” One clear update is enough. Don’t send five tiny ones. That just looks desperate.

Don’t waste weeks preparing for an interview that might never come. Know how to explain what you do in 60 seconds without confusion. Know your main numbers cold. Have a working demo ready if they ask. That’s it. Then go back to talking to users and shipping. Real movement beats perfect answers every time.

A few practical rules that save people from stupid mistakes:

• Check your email (and spam/promotions folder) once or twice a day, not every hour.
• Make sure every founder can jump on a call if the invite comes.
• Never email YC partners trying to push them. It never helps.
• Stay focused on customers, not the application portal.

If the interview invite actually lands, read your own application again so you don’t contradict what you wrote. Pick a time when the whole team is sharp. Keep building until the call.

If they say no and most people hear that remember this, about half the companies in every YC batch applied more than once before getting in. Save your application. Use any feedback they give you. Make real progress over the next few months, then apply again. Rejection is normal and its not the your dreams end.

The waiting period is not empty time. It’s free extra runway to get stronger. The founders who keep talking to users, shipping, and growing their numbers whether they get in this batch, the next one, or never.... still end up ahead.

I see the same thing every batch. after Founders hit submit(YC Application), then spend the next few weeks refreshing their inbox every 10 minutes or completely freezing up. Both are a waste.

Here’s the actual playbook that works, so you can use it today.

First, change your head. Act like they already said no. Seriously. Ask yourself right now, If the rejection email came in this afternoon, what would I do next? Then go do that exact thing. This one mental switch kills most of the anxiety and puts you back in control.

Your only real job while you wait is to keep building the company. Talk to users every single day. Ship something, even if it’s small. Grow the numbers that matter, active users, revenue, retention, signed pilots, whatever your key metric is. YC partners care a lot about whether you moved forward after you applied. Showing real progress is stronger than any polished answer you could prepare.

If something genuinely big happens (not “we had a good week”), you can send one short update. Keep it short and put real numbers in it. Something like, “Since applying we grew weekly active users 40%, signed three paying customers, and hit $X monthly revenue.” One clear update is enough. Don’t send five tiny ones. That just looks desperate.

Don’t waste weeks preparing for an interview that might never come. Know how to explain what you do in 60 seconds without confusion. Know your main numbers cold. Have a working demo ready if they ask. That’s it. Then go back to talking to users and shipping. Real movement beats perfect answers every time.

A few practical rules that save people from stupid mistakes:

• Check your email (and spam/promotions folder) once or twice a day, not every hour.
• Make sure every founder can jump on a call if the invite comes.
• Never email YC partners trying to push them. It never helps.
• Stay focused on customers, not the application portal.

If the interview invite actually lands, read your own application again so you don’t contradict what you wrote. Pick a time when the whole team is sharp. Keep building until the call.

If they say no and most people hear that remember this, about half the companies in every YC batch applied more than once before getting in. Save your application. Use any feedback they give you. Make real progress over the next few months, then apply again. Rejection is normal and its not the your dreams end.

The waiting period is not empty time. It’s free extra runway to get stronger. The founders who keep talking to users, shipping, and growing their numbers whether they get in this batch, the next one, or never.... still end up ahead.

Patrick and John Collison first came to YC's attention when Patrick was still a teenager.

Their first YC batch was Winter 2007, a different company entirely, called Shuppa and then Auctomatic, a tool for power sellers on eBay. They won a startup competition. They sold the company in 2008 for approximately $5 million. Patrick was 19.

They could have stopped there. They had already had a successful exit before most people have finished college. but They did not stop.

They watched developers around them struggle to accept payments online. Every company building anything on the internet had to integrate with five different vendors, navigate months of paperwork, and still end up with an API that was painful to use.

Patrick and John had a different idea. What if accepting payments took seven lines of code? What if the documentation was written for developers by developers who cared?

They applied to YC again. This time as Stripe(stripe that we all use now) in Summer 2009.

PG was direct about what had changed: the founders had already proven they could build and sell a company. The new idea had a specific insight. The timing was right as e-commerce was growing fast, & They got in.

Stripe now processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually & It is valued at $159 billion.

Two batches. Two completely different companies. The second one changed how the entire internet handles money.