[blauwbilgorgel]

Sorry to hear you did not get in. Must be very disappointing. I'd have a deeper look at the feedback though, and assume good faith in the rejection. From the rejection:

Unfortunately, we were unable to get to believing that you had a strategy for supplanting Yelp as the top Google search results — having worked on SEO extensively in the past a better product often times isn’t enough.

I read this not bluntly as: You should be able to beat Yelp, else you will fail, I hone in on: 'unable to get to believing that you had a strategy'. From an outsider perspective this is unfortunately what happened: You did not have a solid enough online marketing/acquisition strategy (social, search, advertising, partners, email etc.), or failed to convey it during the interview.

I don't think yCombinator failed to see the market potential, in my view they are actively looking for potential (from SF-based sleeping bag site to world-wide bed and breakfast replacement). I also do not think you were invited to make them seem more outsider-friendly, only to have you be rejected for being an outsider. It is about the online marketing strategy. In their (and my) experience, just having a better site is not enough. For an online directory company, SEO should be in the companies DNA. Preferably a founder has knowledge on SEO and can weave marketing opportunities into the decision making process.

If you think back to the interview part about online marketing, do you remember there being confusion? Or not having a concrete answer at-the-ready? Did your pitch include a slide on marketing strategy?

Also, the questions they asked like: How are you different from competitor X? Were these questions unprovoked? If so, enhance your pitch by listing your competitors, and their differences, pro's and con's compared to your company. This preemptively clears away such doubts.

Take a look at Mint's pitch deck: http://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-dec... They make you believe they've done their market research and have a solid customer acquisition strategy from the get-go. Perhaps you can use it to improve your pitch.

I'll have a deeper look at your website and perhaps will send you over some on-page SEO issues to fix or ignore. But strategy/conversion/campaigns will contribute a lot more.

Also, your site already looks great, you've told us you have decent numbers, a nice community, a great team, so probably: you will get there, wherever 'there' is.

[mkempe]

Wouldn't the point of YC's investment and share have been to help and teach them how to work out SEO (in addition to other things) so that they could beat Yelp? (if truly Yelp is a competitor)

Isn't the point of YC to pick and help startups that will elucidate a path to rapid, lasting growth?

That reason for rejection doesn't make sense, unless one is to believe that nobody can ever build a successful specialized directory because Yelp is already and will always be king of the world. Did YC invite them because they were somehow going to be the New Yelp?

[blauwbilgorgel]

If they got in YC, then sure: The network and possibly external SEO companies and designers will help them.

I find this discussion somewhat tiring. It seems that people want to talk about age discrimination, about like-ability, about luck, about SEO being a dirty thing, about 10 minutes being too short for an interview, about outsiders not making it in, about Yelp not being a competitor to online service directories etc.

If they asked: where do you see yourself in 5 years? What is your long-term strategy to entrench yourself in the rankings? And did not receive a satisfying or believable answer, then no amount of help and teaching will suffice. Else YC could better buy that company, outsource some SEO and design and do it themselves. Then they don't have to do it by proxy with 2-year-old founders.

Crude: It does not matter what the point of YC is. The people at YC decide that, not us. What YC does with companies they accept has no bearing on what YC does not do with companies they rejected.

The reason for rejection does not make sense to you (and probably to Yogatrail, because they do not focus on the feedback). It probably made sense to YC, else why take such a decision? Again crude: Why is it relevant that you can not find reason in the rejection?

>unless one is to believe that nobody can ever build a successful specialized directory because Yelp ...

This is not the reason. The reason was that the company was unable to make YC believe that they had a solid marketing strategy and knew what they were doing, now and in the future. Then it does not even matter if they have the best strategies in the world, the take-away is that they failed to convey these strategies. What is more likely: That YC failed to understand what it takes to build a successful online business? Or that these founders kinda flunked the interview?

You have to be aware of Yelp if you are doing this. You have to discuss where you differ and what your plan is to take over their Yoga-services niche. After the latest search engine updates, thin content directories suffer. You have to be aware of this and make others believe you have the strategy to insert more quality content into your sites, to save that channel, and to open up other channels, so one channel can not break your entire business. Educate yourself, especially if you are an online business. Like design, not everyone is naturally good at it, but it helps to familiarize yourself.

>Did YC invite them because they were somehow going to be the New Yelp

At least a similar potential. If Yelp is totally unrelated, then you should be able to convince them of this. But IMO Yelp is not unrelated to an online services directory. Yelp has unique problems like Google taking their traffic with their own rating system, and they adapted well. If Yogatrail will face similar problems in the future, no one can tell, but if I were to invest money into a company, I'd want to know they have a strategy ready for when this happens, that they are aware that this can happen, that they know the webmaster quality guidelines and don't make million dollar SEO blunders. You can't really help and teach preparedness like this. Help and teach yourself: convince YC you know your stuff. You can't change it if YC does not get it. What you can change is your pitch: You did not get YC to get it.

[larrys]

"I don't think yCombinator failed to see the market potential, in my view they are actively looking for potential "

Much of life as we know does have a luck factor involved.

Who is to say if they had spent the money (could afford to) to fly all three people out and not been near the last interview whether the outcome would be different?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Thing is you never know about the minor details that lead to, or prevent success.

When I was younger I once spent my own money to fly out to a trade show, stay at a hotel, walk the floor and as a result landed a job that I wasn't really qualified for that I would have never gotten by resume alone (that I am pretty sure of). [1] Perhaps the person was in a particularly good mood that day perhaps I just said and did the right things. I could spin this story a dozen ways (depending on the point I was trying to make).

My general rule though has always been to "spend money to ensure success". The downside of spending money is very clear (it's finite, the amount of money that you spend and of course the time in this case. Ok sure there is opportunity cost as well.). The upside is unlimited. As a generality people tend to focus on the upside and not the downside in decisions.

[1] There was also quite a bit of leg work upfront prior to doing this as well.

[ritchiea]

It seemed to me their rejection grew out of Aaron Harris's experience with Tutorspree: http://www.aaronkharris.com/when-seo-fails-single-channel-de...

[Theodores]

Thanks for the link.

TL;DR: In a nutshell their business came from SEO and that was it, no other channels. Google changed the game and they no longer got business through organic search results. They tried to get other leads, however, the quality from things like PPC wasn't the same - no conversion. Aside from these problems they were also in a business that did not scale very well - too many locations needing too many resources. They could not afford to grow, threw in the towel and handed money back to investors.