Regardless of YC involvement, you can still be demoing to investors in March. It takes a little more effort--and you'll have to do the demo about 30 times to reach the same number of investors--but you can actually start a company without YC. ;-)
YC's value, as is repeated often, is in the advice and contacts. Finding 30 investors that will sit through your demo is something most developers don't know anything about. GGP is conspicuously silent on how to pull off that trick without YC.
> There's a difference between "Getting into YC would help my business" and "I need to get into YC to start my business".
"YC's value, as is repeated often, is in the advice and contacts. Finding 30 investors that will sit through your demo is something most developers don't know anything about. GGP is conspicuously silent on how to pull off that trick without YC."
It's not as hard as you think. The difference YC offers is that you're already at stage two of the VC or angel process: Vetted candidate. You get to do a one hour presentation for one member of the VC firms, maybe a partner, instead of having a ten minute phone call to make your pitch. You still have to meet the investors you want to talk to...but they are actively looking for deals in the valley every day. Go to events and you will meet them. If you build something popular, some will even come to you (maybe the hungrier ones...Sequoia isn't Googling for new investment ideas).
"Are you suggesting in retrospect that you'd have preferred a different strategy?"
Not even a little bit. But we were moving full steam ahead whether YC was involved or not. As others mentioned, we were launched, we were selling products, and we were developing the connections we needed to get to where we wanted to be. YC just accelerated that, gave me the impetus I needed to get moved to the valley, and gave us a chance to hone our message and our product under the discriminating eye of a lot of smart people. Well worth the time, effort, and equity.
But there would still be a Virtualmin, Inc. without YC, and it would still be building products that people like.
A few alternate strategies, some taken from books I've read, others from people I know:
Build a prototype - of anything, really, as long as it's impressive. Show it to industry contacts. Have them tell you "this is interesting, but it's not really what we need right now. However, if you could solve this problem for us, we'd pay you money for it." Get them to pay up-front to fund development. Build the product with their money. Sell product to other customers. Reinvest the profits. (my day job, also Sun Microsystems and Franz Inc.)
Find a group of passionate enthusiasts. Write software for them, and charge money for it. Partner with a business that benefits from what you're doing. Always look for underserved markets, and then opportunistically go after them with cheap products. Iterate quickly. Take over the world. (Microsoft)
Build website. Convince friends to join. Serendipitously discover that friends tell all their friends about it. Overload servers. Charge money for premium features to keep servers running. Make modest profit off of it. (LiveJournal, Flickr).
Same as above, but provide ways for people to make money off your product (selling services to each other, for example). Take a cut of their revenues. (EBay, PayPal, Second Life, Microsoft).
'"You can do it too!" works better when they aren't telling you to pursue a different strategy than they did with no specifics.'
I didn't think I needed to do so, since I assumed everybody here has read all of pg's essays, seen Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start, and read a few other useful books about startups. While everybody who's built a business (I'm on my second) has at least a few things to teach others in the same boat...I didn't want to clutter up the post with a bunch of random rants. I respond to posts here with specific advice whenever there's a question I feel qualified to answer.