YC W23 Week 1: Go smaller, not bigger
Hey everyone!
I just started building my product in YCombinator and wanted to build in public and share some of the learnings we had from week 1.
Excited to hear any feedback you all might have.
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How exciting!! Congrats and thank you for sharing this info with us!
When YC recommends you narrow the niche and go find people to try your product, do they insist on them having to be paid customers? I’ve read that they recommend that model (as opposed to a fermium or free trial) and it makes sense so that you are getting feedback only from people willing to pay… But I would find it awkward to reach out to my personal network and ask them to try it but then ask them to pay.
Yeah YC definitely recommends trying to get revenue as early as possible (especially in this market), but the advice should be company specific.
I agree it can be awkward to ask people in your personal network. The mindset that I've been taking is to only approach people if I legitimately think that I can solve a problem of theres. For example, with this product, that problem would be improving developer velocity.
By doing this, I learn either 1) it's not a big enough problem that I'm solving or 2) the product is not a good enough solution yet, and it might make sense to continue to iterate on it.
Asking them to be a design partner could also be a good approach if they're a very close personal contact.
Subscribed to the newsletter. Your code review tool is head on the pain points. I had received some PR from tools that make code review easier on an open-source project repository I am working on - https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server
Would love to explore Backprop as well. All the best!
i have adjacent app not related to PR but i am curious about the problems you are facing with respect to PR. Can you elaborate.
Eshan,
First of all, congrats on getting into YC! It's a huge achievement and you should be incredibly proud of yourself (and team). Thank you for also sharing your YC learnings especially with boot-strappers so we can get some insights into what lies on the other side of the grass.
I find the learning on focusing on people who will absolutely love the product very important. Hyper-personalization is indeed a key pillar of building the initial set of users.
Feedback on Backprop:
[The initial notification feature]: It's a much better improvement on internal tooling that exists in most big tech companies. At my work-place for example, we have to individually ping devs for code review (I know, it sucks!). The only notification we get is after comments are added and/or when a PR is actually merged. Based on the notification feature alone, you are already ahead of the game!
[Commit check-points]: I'm struggling to see the benefit of this feature. Usually, other devs are only interested in the final PR and most don't care about the preceding commits (most of those are git squashed anyway). However, maybe it's because I've personally never had to look at a peer's previous commits because admittedly, I only care about the final PR. This feature could be useful for other people though.
3 [Dependency Graph]: This is a game-changer. I'll give another internal example in our team. Usually, for every feature, we have to create a separate branch. For example, let's say I'm working on a project X (main branch). Everyone on the team creates a user branch off of it. Then for every feature, every user then creates separate feature branches. We then push feature changes to the user branch and then create PRs from user --> main. At this point, you can already see why having a dependency graph is important. You're already ahead of the curve. Teams would be able to purge unnecessary branches easily and an individual can easily see the various dependencies that exist in the repo. Love this feature!!
Miscellaneous:
Have fun at YC and I really hope your product takes off. All the best mate!
Thanks for all the feedback! This is super helpful. And glad you found the VR article helpful as well :)
Yeah the initial inbox and notifications is something I've always wanted with Github. Something to help add more transparency as to what the state of PRs are on my team and which need my attention.
The commit checkpoints is designed to help with stacking PRs. That's a workflow where developers put up changes on a feature in smaller individual steps. So while one is up for review, they keep working on the following set of changes. This way the reviewer can review code in smaller pieces as opposed to the whole change at the end, and also the author can incorporate feedback earlier on.
Right now most developers that we've spoken with do this by having lots of branch offshoots and doing a lot of rebasing, so we wanted to create an easy way to do this in a single branch. But this is good feedback that we can add some more product education and tooltips to make it simpler to understand when first using the product!
Congratulations!!
Thank you for sharing such high-value information!
Open sourcing the key insights!
Love from South Korea!
Congrats on getting to YC!
That´s such a hard thing to do you should be proud.
I am very interested in learning more about your journey. I have been learning to code for quite a while now and I am actually about to finish my classes as a full stack developer, and would like to understand how the pro's do it at Y combinator. I've seen the backprop site and it looks amazing even though you have only worked on it for a week.
May I ask how did you build the site so fast and what technologies you used for the front and back? I am eager to learn more and grow in this industry.
Also, created an account on backprop.io to check out the features. Comments:
call to action works great, it is clear.
the site looks AWESOME for only a week of work. Kudos!
The permissions screen when connecting github is somewhat confusing (maybe it is because i am not so exprienced yet in software development), but it seems kind of scary when it asks permission to access all your files in github. If you could add an extra screen reassuring users all their files are safe that would be awesome, at least in my opinion.
I did a quick google search, backprop.io did not appear. It is not critical at the moment because you are just launching i guess, but wanted to point it out.
Anyway, great work , the problem seems like a real painpoint, and I've heard many people complain about it before. :)
Thanks for the feedback! Great to hear you liked the landing page, I actually had a designer friend of mine put together the initial rendering, and then it took a day or two to implement using React + Chakra. The product itself though I've actually been working on for a bit longer as a side project, but we decided to start working on it full time only for a few weeks now.
Great point on the Github permissions, we'll be taking a look to see if we can reduce the scope that's necessary. I agree that it's a lot to ask upfront!
Wonderful to hear about the power behind React and Chakra, as the have been part of the curriculum at school :)
I don't if I count as user (yet) but happy to help you with the allimportant talk to users part at YC.
Also, may I ask how did you build a backend so fast ? Did you use Node.js or Django for example ? Or maybe another framework that suits your project better ?
Finally, followed you on twitter so that I can keep learning about your journey and learn valuable knowledge in the process ;) Please keep us posted!
Following! Great write up :)
Thanks for starting this thread Eshan. Subscribed, looking forward to more learning. Great website by the way.
Also, how did you decide to go ahead with a dark theme. Did you consider a lighter theme for your website ?
Hey! thanks for the positive feedback and for subscribing :)
We went with the dark theme because software developers tend to prefer dark theme to light theme (also we ourselves love using dark theme products).
But will look into supporting a lighter theme at some point in the future!
thanks for sharing. Interesting product as well.
Thanks for sharing, some insightful tips in there.
Looking forward to more content, subbed to the newsletter!
Hi! Do you have any paying customers yet? We're quite in the same stage as you seem to be with an early beta product out in the market. We have 3 exciting meetings lined up with leads who are interested in our product. Now the thing is, our product isn't completely ready yet (a part of it is but not completely) but I'm still trying to convert them into paying "pilot pool customers" who'll help co-develop the product.
Have you managed to pull off something similar? I.e. getting someone to pay you a monthly recurring sum for co-creating the product.
Thank you for some other informative blog. https://insulin-store.com/