r/ycombinator

What’s the threshold you’d need to hit to go all in on your startup?

Example: say you hit $5k MRR within 2 months of launch. Drop everything and run or wait for those month 4 retention numbers?

I've been trying to join early-stage startups, but I've had very little luck so far.

I've looked on Wellfound, LinkedIn, YC jobs, and a few other job boards. I've also tried reaching out to founders by email and Discord, but most either aren't hiring yet or never reply.

I have 4+ years of experience working with React, Next.js, Node.js, and React Native.

If you've successfully joined an early-stage startup, how did you find the opportunity? Are there any communities, websites, Discord servers, Slack groups, or other places where founders are more active and open to talking with developers?

I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!

Micheal and Dalton always use an example of discovery, event planning, and marketplace apps as common tarpit ideas. One that sounds appealing and attracts many investors but have fundamental problems or hidden complexity that traps founders.

I understand what makes some ideas a tarpit idea. What I don't understand is what lets some ideas in a tarpit-prone category actually escape it and become successful?

What did apps like Tinder, Strava (social app for runners) and Radiate (social app for festival goers) do differently to succeed?

Is it because they each launched targeting a very specific niche first and then expanded from there?

For example, Airbnb focused on finding cheap accommodations for sold out conferences. That was the specific wedge they focused on and they later on expanded from there.

Another example is Discord which sounds very tarpit like to me with strong competition (WhatsApp, facebook/messenger, Skype, Slack, etc.). Yet, it became wildly successful. I am assuming they managed to find a niche (online gamers) and that helped them succeed.

Hi y’all! I’m doing the fast hackathon and just wanted to connect with other ppl also doing it and hoping to find some teammates. if you are registered, I have a few really interesting ideas and would love to team up if you would want to work together on it. Please pm me and also they unfortunately closed registration and are super strict on not allowing ppl that didn’t register on time unfortunately .

A bit about me: I’m interning at Laminar, started an underwater vechile team, and play hockey. in terms of hackathons i placed 1st at hack Davis and 2nd at makemit x harvard

Hi, so I am a full stack engineer at a high frequency trading firm at India (2025 grad). I had a few interviews in pipeline, including citadel securities, and a few YC startups.. but I was confused about the viability of those.

to be honest, I am quite interested in building infrastructure for AI related workflows. It requires quite in depth knowledge of latency management and scalability.. and I love building infrastructure and softwares from ground up.

However, looking a bit closer at them, a lot of these yc startups are betting that claude and open ai won't come up with harnesses that will ruin their moat.

however the compensation is attractive enough for me to not ignore them completely.

Has anyone made a successful switch from HFT's to YC? How was their experience with the team.

Hi everyone,

I am a SWE and have known that 9 to 5 isn't where I want to stay at. I at least want to try my everything before I throw in the towel and stick with it.

But over the past 3-6 years of building side projects, marketing, reading/learning and trying to apply it to real work, Ive had no success. It has been really frustrating, and have come to a point where I think Im not capable of making it on my own and need to learn from someone who has gone through what I want to experience.

So, I wanted to ask if there is anyone who is open to give a short coffee chat, nothing serious but just a casual talk and connecting, it would be a great learning opportunity for me if I could hear your experience or hear some pieces of advice/mentorship. Please let me know if it could be possible and thank you all for reading.

If this post is against the guidlines, I will remove the post - thank you!

The founder is a crazy guy, he always talks about that if a applicant cant take the lead early in most games and keep going to win, or quits for aome reason, or tries to pad his kd, he gets rejected. He starts a game every round we hire and puts all applicants in ot (who doesnt want to do it gets rejected right away), and yeah, this is how I met CoN actually. Crazy man and wildest story I got so far while working in startups.

I’m a software engineer with 4+ years of experience, mostly working across full-stack, backend, and blockchain/crypto.

I’ve been looking for both freelance opportunities and full-time work, and honestly, it’s been surprisingly difficult to find anything.

I’ve applied, reached out, networked, and tried different approaches, but the response rate has been extremely low.

Curious to hear from other engineers:

• Is freelance work particularly slow right now?
• What’s actually working for you when it comes to finding opportunities?

trying to understand the current market and figure out what I might be doing wrong

for the ones building on somewhat sensitive proprietary tech- which software stack have you had good experiences with for cloud storage, files, planning and more. something that’s failure proof in emergencies, recoverable but also secure even as you scale. companies I previously worked at managed their own infrastructure (they were dealing with confidential rather sensitive information out of EU) but currently the maintenance would overweigh what makes sense for me.

out of the blue I could only think of microsoft but I find their one drive app is rather brittle. thanks!

For anyone who interviewed for South Park Commons Fall 2026 (Round 1 or Round 2), have you heard anything back yet?

Curious if anyone has received next steps, an acceptance/rejection, or any update from SPC.

Hi, applied before the deadline for F26 (early decision for P27 to finish my PhD).

I know YC states that Early Decision gets treated the same way as any other application, but curious to hear people's *personal experience* whether interviews for that arrived later or not...

At least it would make sense as such, since you're not in a rush to buy SF flight tickets :)

And yes - haven't (yet) received the interview invite nor any LinkedIn "SF snooping around" views, so call it cope if you wish :D

Disclaimer: I don't work for YC; I don't speak for them. I just wanted to write this so folks here can understand why some people get funded and others don't.

I applied to YC four times before getting in. Nothing in my background is particularly remarkable. I worked in tech, went to decent schools, no medals or famous mentors. What changed on the fourth try was that we had grown from $10k to $100k ARR in two months and signed a large customer, in an industry that does not move that fast.

That is the whole formula as far as I can tell: Evidence of exceptional ability. Everything else is downstream of it.

Look at who actually gets funded and it tracks. The new grads who get a check on an idea that is a few days old are usually graduating from an Ivy while sitting first chair in a national orchestra, or they spent their undergrad doing real research alongside a Nobel laureate. I know these types because they were in my YC section. The idea did not get them funded (many ended up pivoting lol). The proof that they can do hard things at a level almost nobody reaches got them funded.

The other end of the distribution follows the same pattern. The team that gets in on their seventh application is not there because attempt seven had a better idea. They finally hit traction on something that had been pressure tested for years and now genuinely needs capital to move faster. The traction is the evidence.

To be clear, the idea does matter. But it is a filter, not the thing most rejected applicants are actually failing. If you are early and getting rejected, the instinct is to assume the idea was the problem and to go looking for a better one. Don't do that. Just keep working on the business, and eventually the business itself will be the evidence.

Just ask yourself what you can point to that makes it obvious you operate at a different level than the average applicant. If the honest answer is nothing yet, that is the actual work in front of you.

Go build the evidence for your exceptional ability and the funding will follow.

I'm building a startup in a large, mature industry that has historically been pretty slow to adopt new technology.

We're still very early (went full time in May), but one thing I'm struggling to calibrate is just how slow everything moves. We've had promising conversations and people willing to talk, but getting the right people on a calendar can literally take weeks. My sense is that enterprise sales cycles in this industry are measured in many months, not weeks.

There's another wrinkle: a big part of what we're building is automation. Some of the organizations we'd ultimately need to work with could benefit significantly from the technology, but it also changes how work in their industry gets done. I suspect some will inevitably view that as a threat rather than an opportunity.

The optimist's interpretation is that these are exactly the characteristics that create a big startup opportunity: legacy technology, entrenched workflows, and an industry that hasn't been forced to modernize yet.

The pessimistic interpretation is that we're signing ourselves up for extremely slow feedback loops, long sales cycles, and selling technology to organizations that may be structurally resistant to what it enables.

For founders who've built in legacy B2B industries: how do you distinguish between a market that's ripe for disruption and one that's simply too slow/resistant for a startup?

And how did you think about speed when even getting customer conversations takes weeks, let alone getting someone to actually adopt something?

Edit: I'd say we have a very strong founder-market fit (convos with early investors support this). Both my cofounder and I observed the same problems we are solving for while working for Amazon. Now trying to build the neutral solution for all marketplaces/commerce. This credential has been a huge factor in getting responses in LinkedIn DMs from other players in the space. (And no, Amazon is not the slow moving player I'm referring to above).

Most CCTV AI today detects objects and predefined events.
Godseye is different.

Our model continuously watches what is happening over time, identifying abnormal behaviour and situations as they develop rather than reacting only after a predefined event has already happened.

Think of it as having a security expert watching thousands of cameras simultaneously, 24/7, without fatigue or distraction.

When something genuinely concerning develops, Godseye can independently trigger an SOS and route it to the appropriate response team.
And it runs at the edge, using existing IP/RTSP cameras, with low latency and minimal cloud dependency.

CCTV cameras already see everything.
The missing layer is intelligence that actually watches.
We’ve built the core model and are now expanding deployments, compute infrastructure, engineering and enterprise sales.

We’re looking to connect with AI/Computer Vision investors, security-tech investors and strategic partners interested in what we’re building.

I keep hearing that the first few customers are the hardest, but I’m curious if founders found the opposite once the initial network/referrals dried up.

What actually changed for you as you moved from early customers to consistent growth?

Share your experience so that others can learn from the same.

I'm Ankush, co-founder of Construct. We go live on Product Hunt on August 23rd, and I'd rather explain what we built here than just post a countdown.

What it is: a team of AI agents that gets a real computer instead of just a chat window. Every agent gets a browser-based cloud desktop with a browser, terminal, files, email, calendar, and memory that persists. You hand it work, maybe close the laptop, and it keeps going in the background as it runs on the cloud. You can open the screen any time on anydevice to watch it or take the control back or guide it.

Why I built it: my last dev tool got to 30k users and was acquired. Engineering was never the bottleneck. The difficult part was that I was also the ops team, and doing invoicing, CRM, support, and follow-ups on top of shipping, it wrecked me. Hiring was the obvious answer but the runway math said no.

If this sounds useful, please do follow the page so PH pings you when we go live. We really want this product to succeed with as much support as possible, we really want to take this full time and build a real useful product for SMBs and solo entrepreneurs like myself.

https://www.producthunt.com/products/construct-computer

Happy to answer anything about the build, the architecture, how we manage infra and any quirky question y'all might have.

Cheers 🍻

Example: spacex - does elon possess all knowledge of mechanical, chemical, rocket science and all the stuff?

Hi YC gurus!

My cofounder and I are working on are a pre-launch, AI platform targeting companies wanting to switch to open-source models for their generic LLM use and trying to crack real 0-1 conversations with potential customers. Trying to score actual calls where we learn something.

What I've tried so far:

• Cold emails
• Linkedin DMs
• Local events in the Amsterdam area

So far not getting much love, only managed to have a couple of conversations with companies that have spend >$10k per month on LLM. Cold outbound is barely landing and I can't tell whether that's my targeting, my copy, or just inbox saturation. So, question to founders who've done successfully recently:

1. Did you bring in outside help — fractional GTM, sales consultant, agency that books discovery calls, a research firm for recruiting participants? Which ones, what did it cost, and would you do it again? I'd take specific names or the opposite ("don't bother").
2. If you did it yourself, what's the actual stack in 2026? Where does AI genuinely help — list building and enrichment, personalisation, call notes — and where did it make things worse?
3. Are paid conference booths worth it at this stage?
4. What channel gave you the highest ratio of *useful* conversations per hour spent?

I am trying to figure out whether hiring someone for this makes sense or if it's a waste of time, we suck it up and keep trying?