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).
Work. Go to trade shows. Hang out on Internet forums with people in your target market. Make friends with folks.
It doesn't work so well for me, because I'm 2 years out of college and not in a particularly client-facing job. However, the OP is 36 and in a big company. You ought to have some sort of professional contacts by then, right?
I appreciate that you mean well; it seems that you're advising people on how to do something you haven't done, however, which is the same situation as at the top of the thread.
My impression is that the best way to meet investors is to live in Silicon Valley. That sounds like it's leaving out a lot of steps...
'"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.
"You haven't explained how your start-up succeeded without YC."
Nobody asked.
I'll take your response as somebody asking.
In both cases, I made myself a recognized expert on an Open Source project that I liked a lot and that I liked the people involved (Squid in the first case, Webmin in the latter...though the first also included a huge amount of Webmin-related work and inspired the second). And then I founded companies built on making some Open Source project easier to use, more powerful, better documented, and more popular. The first never really made it out of the "consulting business" stage, though I constantly tried to convert it to a product business...had I been in the valley, I would have been able to make it work the way I wanted it to. It was a hardware based business, and for that you need volume, which I didn't have the capital to deal with--closing a big sale in the server appliance industry can cost tens of thousands of dollars before seeing any cashflow from it. So, stay out of hardware if you don't have the capital to see it through. Even then, you probably ought to stay out of hardware. So, the first one did not succeed without YC, by my standards, but did buy me a 350Z and keep me in food and houses for 7 years.
The primary thing worth learning from the first business (which I built without not only YC but without any outside investment for involvement) was that you can't do it alone. Get a partner, get to the valley (I don't even bother saying get to a "startup hub" because nobody is doing deals in Boston), get to work.
As for the second, here's what I know so far:
1. Start or join, very early, an Open Source project.
2. Work on it for several years. Get millions of downloads and millions of users.
3. ...
4. Profit!
"> seen Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start
I hope you're kidding about that. "
Of course not. Guy's a great motivator. Can't start a business worth crap (see Truemors), but he has a lot of good stuff to say about marketing, salesmanship, morale-building, and lots more. Some accidental experts really do have good advice.
So in your opinion would YC be better off doing both batches in Silicon Valley? My impression is people would be better served living there and flying to Boston for Demo Day 2 than vice-versa.
> but he has a lot of good stuff to say about marketing, salesmanship, morale-building, and lots more
you're trolling, and its annoying. You asked a question that was impossible to answer (at least succinctly since there are entire books written about the topic).
Getting into YC isn't even an answer in itself, other people here are just trying to tell you it is possible to do without YC. You know, people did start companies before YC.
The statements most commonly described as "platitudes" are short proverbs and aphorisms which are intended to motivate or encourage another person, but which are in reality overly-simplistic or cliche; for example, "You will succeed if you try hard enough"
> You asked a question that was impossible to answer
Wrong again -- funny, because he answered it above, describing what he actually did for years before YC.
It's disappointing how much knee-jerk reactionism there is when people perceive something as raining on their fantasy parade. Critical investigation will help people succeed. As a result of my not accepting the original platitude, the poster supplied much more informative answers.
There's a difference between "Getting into YC would help my business" and "I need to get into YC to start my business".