Brother and I made it into YCombinator with what started as a side-project after a year of trying!

The project
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Wasp (https://wasp-lang.dev) is an open-source language for developing full-stack Javascript web apps. It is kind of like a web framework, in the sense that you capture high-level stuff with Wasp and then you implement the details in existing technologies (right now React, Node, Prisma and JS ecosystem in general), but it is actually a standalone domain specific language.

Journey to YC
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Brother and I started thinking about the idea 2 years ago, and after working on it for about a year as a side-project (researching the space, talking with potential users, building a prototype), we realized it will take our full-time dedication to make something serious out of it, so we quit the current job and went all-in into Wasp, bootstrapping ourselves while working on it.

Due to the nature of Wasp (open-source, web framework / language), we were aware that we will need to raise funds at some point if we want to survive, so we immediately applied for YCombinator (top startup accelerator in the world) and got invited to the USA (we are from Europe) for the final on-site interview!
We didn’t pass the final interview and got feedback that we are too early, which made sense at the time, since we had only a very basic prototype.

We decided to continue working on Wasp for some longer time and continue applying to YC and talking with other interesting accelerators/investors, and see where that gets us - if nothing else, we will learn a lot on the way :)!

Finally, by the autumn 2020, we were in a position where we had released an early-alpha version of Wasp, managed to build an initial community (>50 people on Discord, 500 Github stars, also got a lot of upvotes here in r/javascript) and made it to “Product of the day” on the Product Hunt.
With all that we applied for the YC for the third time and made it in.

Interesting fact is that if you applied to YC previously and got rejected, that is actually a plus when you apply the next time (shows persistence). Also, we had our own small startup before and we worked in a couple of startups so knowledge from those experiences probably helped us when presenting Wasp.

Current vision and monetization plan for Wasp: like Ruby on Rails but for JS and beyond. Managed(paid) hosting, possibly additional products on top (e.g. visual editor).

What now?
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It is still just the two of us and Wasp is in early stage (alpha), but we are super excited about the opportunity we got with YC and we are doing our best to bring Wasp to the next stage!

Right now we are focusing on two things: building community and developing Wasp (toward beta). Building community means finding developers who like Wasp and talking with them, having them try it out, listen to their feedback and fix Wasp based on that. Developing Wasp mostly comes down to adding missing features and fixing or restructuring existing ones, and there is a lot of both to work on.

Building a side project with Wasp?
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Shameless plug: We're looking for the first 10 full-stack web apps to be developed with Wasp! If you have a side project or a prototype (Wasp is in Alpha so not fit for production) in mind you'd like to build, tell us more about it here.

It will be a bumpy ride, but we'll provide you full support, you'll have a direct channel to us and your feedback will heavily influence what features we'll be focusing on next (pretty much the ones you tell us you need :)).

We will also showcase your project on our page and you will be among the ten people to receive a special Wasp T-shirt and get eternal bragging rights that you were among the first to build their app with Wasp :).