YC Invested. Summer 2020 Batch.
by RichardBack in March we heard from Y Combinator that our application was successful, our interview was sound and that we were accepted into YC's Summer 2020 batch.
Demo day is 5 days away and we can now (at last) announce YC's investment in the open. We are now focussed on our new product Plum Mail.
Plum Mail makes use of our passwordless authentication technology and actually it's central to Plum Mail's vision.
Please check out Plum Mail and hop on the waitlist which, I am delighted to say, is growing nicely!
YC has been an incredible journey. This was the first fully remote batch at YC and the partners have been fab to work with. We have both learned so much and met some brilliant people.
We are more than happy to chat about applications and interviews with anyone applying to YC's next batch. Ask us anything, if we can answer it, we will.
Richard and Peter
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What do you think from your experience the product should be like to be accepted? I mean does it have to be something completely new or just a well-made product overall? Maybe some product categories are more preferable than the others?
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You need to demonstrate that people want it. YC's mantra is 'Make Something People Want'. Whether it's a new idea or you're simply replicating someone elses idea (but doing it 10x better) the best way to get your product into great shape is to find people that want it and shape features around them.
So, a very basic product concept with genuine user interviews where users say - yes, this solves the problem I've got, when can I have access to the product?' is a stronger hand than a product which is very well built, has lots of features and you've spent months developing it but has no user insights.
Does that make sense?
As a secondary point, reading between the lines, your question assumes it is only the product that is important when the partners consider your application. You and your co-founding team are also a large part of the application's success.
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Congratulations on the launch! I've always had the problem of organizing my email thread recipients, so I'm excited to see where this goes.
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Hi y'all. We are launching Plum Mail on Product Hunt today.
If you like what we're doing please check it out! We'd love an upvote.
Thanks so much for your support. Don't hesitate to ask me for the return favour.
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Congratulations! I’m building my product using YC SUS. Hoping to get a lot of value before applying. My question is, what’s your approach to getting customers to wait for your release? What’s the process for signing them up?
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We also graduated from SUS, at the time I struggled to engage with it (some of the video calls we had were quite poor quality) but having been through YC's process there are so many similarities with SUS. I totally get it now.
SUS is a very good way to prepare for YC and I think graduating from SUS before you apply is a good move. Mention that in your application. Take the video calls, engage with them, don't be afraid to politely encourage others on the call to move the conversation on if it's stuck on a particular point. Some people to like to talk and dominate sometimes! haha.
The approach for getting anyone to sign up to anything is to build something they want. That probably sounds too simplistic but it isn't.
We currently have an email address which is: [email protected] and we're asking people that like what we're building to email that to get a place on the waitlist.
It's working well. When people email they are writing a little something about why they would like Plum Mail and this is enormously insightful.
What's your product? Is it here on IH?
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Thanks for the advice, I'll make sure to take the program as serious as possible and get the most out of it. It's great to see that you all took that same approach and got great results.
Our product is on here.
We're an online driving platform working with delivery companies & independent drivers across the country to meet a rapidly growing need to hire/contract reliable drivers.https://www.thedrivingbureau.com
I have some perspective clients, but we haven't collected credit card information but they are ready to jump on board.
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To be direct, if you can convert those customers, get the revenue and get their positive engagement with your product then that traction will be a great strength in any YC application or interview.
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Nice work guys! I look forward to seeing the roadmap.
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Thanks so much! Yea me too. I have so many feature ideas that you can build in Plum Mail that you just can't offer in a traditional email client. They need an upvote system really. We used Nolt before, might use it again unless you happen to know of a good alternative?
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I'm applying to YC and I realize that at least one of the founders should be a technical founder. As of now, I'm the only person working on my idea and I have only very basic programming experience—past the MVP, I will need to find a co-founder to work with for the programming aspect of the product.
However, I'm hesitant to do that right away because (due to the very unusual circumstances of today) I wouldn't be able to spend a lot of time in person with this co-founder. I feel like jumping into a co-founding relationship right now would cause issues with trust, productivity, synchronization, etc.
My question to you is whether it's a better idea for me to ramp up my programming self-teaching starting now, or whether I should adapt to the circumstances and find a technical co-founder now? Thanks and congratulations on Plum Mail, it looks super cool!
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This is tricky! YC aren't going to check your coding 'certificates' as such but the reason I think they are keen for you to have a technical founder on the team is so that you can move quickly, build things, iterate and make impressive progress.
If you entered into YC with the view that you needed to hire a programmer then that will take weeks and slow you down so so much.
However, there are solo founders that I know need extra coding help. Usually they're great at one aspect but not the other, maybe they're great at backend but not front end.
Also, on the co-founder front, you're intuition is spot on is my feeling. I am so fortunate that my co-founder and I have known each other for 15 or so years. We are good friends, he knows my flaws. Building a startup is high energy. There are highs and lows that will test your relationship. You need to have a strong relationship with your co-founder for all the reasons you say there.
Honestly you should probably do both of those things. You only stand to gain by learning more coding and it's so easy to access online learning these days at places like codeacademy. And, even if you become the technical co-founder with your newfound knowledge of programming you'll probably want a non-technical co-founder!
There are lots of jobs in your startup that definitely don't need programming skills like sales, marketing, relationship building, having meetings with potential investors, sorting out all kinds of weird legal company stuff oh and working the Indie Hackers forum of course ;-)
Does this help?
If you would like to sign up to our waitlist for Plum Mail, please do. Email:
[email protected]
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Congrats! What's been the biggest source/driver of waitlist signups (IOW, where are they coming from)?
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Thanks. Trying really hard to get to the kernel of value that Plum Mail offers as quickly as possible and sharing that with people you think will care. A lot of targetted manual sharing.
Indie Hackers is a great source of conversation, we're launching on Product Hunt tomorrow, you've got Hacker News, SUS, Betapage, Betalist and a load more.
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Oh, one more question, if you have time:
How did you decide to have people send you an email rather than providing a form for getting on the waitlist?
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This is a bit counter-intuitive. We can very easily (like 3 minute's work) add a sign up box and we nearly did yesterday but when people sign up for the waitlist using [email protected] you know they've put in that extra effort to join the waitlist because it's a manual step for them.
Also, people are writing interesting things about why they would want to use Plum Mail.
I say this is counter intuitive because we've deliberately added a little friction into our sign up flow for the waitlist. But this I think helps ensure the users that are signing up are really genuinely interested and it's not a throwaway gesture.
As we continue to validate Plum Mail, there is no point optimising for a vanity metric. We need to optimise for honest, meaningful feedback.
So, the fact people are making the effort to email us and sign up the waitlist is now a very positive signal.
That's how I've interpreted what's going on anyway, do you have any thoughts? Have I misjudged this at all?
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This may be of interest. I've met some really cool female founders this summer: https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/female-founders/
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Thank you!
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I was wondering if this ^ was the reason :-) It hadn't occurred to me to do it this way until I saw your landing page. But it sounds like it's worked well for you. So thanks for the answer because it adds another tool to the toolkit in the future!
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You're welcome. As you know we popped Plum Mail on Product Hunt for their last cycle and the waiting list has gone bonkers with sign ups! Some have not written anything about why they want to use Plum Mail but the majority have and it's so (so) useful to see the comments. Sometimes people say which feature they are looking forward to using and others resonate with the problem we're solving. Being honest with you, this is the first time we've taken this approach. With DID.app, we used a form and yes we had loads of sign ups but zero insight.
If we sacrified a percentage of conversion by not having a form input then I'm totally happy with the upside which is the insight.
Might not work for every idea or everyone but anecdotally it's been an interesting experiment and these were the results for us.
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Thanks. It's actually quite informative to see this list, even if it might seem like the 'usual suspects,' heh. I'm always curious to see if other folks have any kind of direct pipeline into a channel of targeted customers. It's good to see that early traction happens lots of different ways :-)
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oh man totally forgot Reddit, Quora, Hashnode, Dev.to etc. If you're building something that resonates with a niche then there will be more targetted channels available to you. However, these will take more work to get into.
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Thanks for this! Yeah, my own list is quite big. And it sounds like, from your experience, it's not a bad plan to go after them all.
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Hi Richard. Congrats on getting into YC and all the best for demo day! I am planning to apply to the next batch. How can I reach out to you? I'd like to get some advice and just hear what your experiences have been like.
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Hey Makulis, we can have a video call tomorrow if you like. Say 15 minutes.
One thing I've learned during this remote batch is you gotta get good at video calling!
Or; please email me ([email protected]) - we can set up a call there.
And also don't forget to sign up to our Plum Mail waitlist by emailing [email protected]
Thanks!
Richard
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I sent you an email from [email protected]
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Thanks. A video call will be great! I'll drop you an email and you can suggest a time. I'm pretty much available the whole day tomorrow. I'm in South Africa, so we'll just need to take the time zones into consideration.
I'll definitely sign up. I like what you are building.
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Cheers! Looking forward to connecting with you later today.
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@richardesigns congrats on getting into YC and getting through it. I look forward to seeing what you accomplish.
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Thank you, :-)
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