Got funded by YCombinator… Fellowship

After interviewing for YC, I go to a bar and drink for several hours with SF friends, while I wait to hear from YC.

YC said they'll email ("Sorry") if you don't get in, or call you if you are accepted into YC.

I had interviewed with YC once before (six months prior), and I got the email… so I hope my phone rings this time.

I've flown to California from Ireland for the interview. I've given them a virtual US number (you have to give them a US number), so I try to make sure I have WiFi to actually receive the call. I occasionally check my email in between pitchers.

Bummer. I see a new email from someone at YCombinator.

But I don't get a "yes" and I don't get a "no".

They like my enthusiasm, and they're doing a new experiment called the YC Fellowship. They'll write a $20k check. They tell me this by email, so I've been programmed to think of it sort of as a "no". But hey, it's YC, and it's money! I didn't know the Fellowship existed until I read this; I never applied for the Fellowship, I applied for "YC". I don't even know how to react. I order more pitchers. I lose my jumper.

YC Fellowship is a new program they're trying for the second time; this time they give cash and take some equity (1.5%) – but only if the exit is >$100 million. No pressure. It's a clever, founder-friendly instrument:
https://blog.ycombinator.com/fellowship-v2/
OK, sounds great actually. Having got all the way to YC interview, I'm bummed I've missed out on getting into "real" YC, but I'm elated at the YC encouragement and injection of cash. ($20k is material for me, since revenue is like $100/mo.) It's the biggest validation I have so far that I'm not wasting my time.
Kevin Hale will lead the program and have a call with me a few days later.

I create a Delaware C company, and now I'm on the road to building a unicorn, surely?

I return to the bar, but they haven't seen my jumper. A mystery.

The YC vote of confidence makes me double-down on the vision they're excited by: "AdWords for Podcasts". Podcasting is woefully behind video/display ads, so the area is ripe for disruption. Midroll will find advertisers for you… but you'll have to do host-read ads, and they'll only represent you if your podcast has something like >50k downloads per episode. What about all the indie podcasters with 2,000 listeners each? And why do I as a listener in Ireland keep hearing ads for services only available in America?! It seems like a motivating problem to solve, and the right amount "hard".

The YC Fellowship kicks off with a few days in YC in Mountain View, so they fly me all the way out to California again… then every body flies home and the program is remote. During the Fellowship, I work from home: I drink pre-workout and code a lot.

Thing is, I'm still a solo founder learning to code. Each week of the fellowship, I'm supposed to be focusing on growth, but I find myself spending my time fixing bugs and losing all my time just trying to keep the product from falling over. I conclude I'm not as good a coder as they think I am.
I'm spend time learning about adding an index to the database to speed up queries, or de-duplicating IP addresses to make analytics more accurate, or wondering why my Heroku bill is a multiple of my revenue. Now I feel the pain of being a solo founder, because when I'm busy fixing some deployment issue or whatever… nobody is doing anything else to grow the company.

I feel like there are way too many basic things to do before I actually grow fast, and perhaps YC have over-estimated my ability to execute, or over-estimated the state Awesound is in currently.

The Fellowship is to end with "Virtual Demo Day". As the weeks go by, I do convince some more publishers to sign up, and I get some sort of a growth chart, but many of these new podcasters are signing up on the free plan… Far from unicorn I feel.
Getting to sufficient scale where Awesound can sell dynamic, targeted ads across a long tail of podcasts… that feels far away.
I check the maximum daily dosage of pre-workout, and consume exactly that.