Personally, I think one of the best ways to prepare is to look for common trends in other successful applications. I helped write a VentureBeat article on this very subject [1]. As part of that article, we (Lollipuff, YC W13) released our entire application [2], and of course YC provides plenty of application advice too [3].
I thoroughly enjoyed reading through some of the old applications. Here's Drew Houston's app for Dropbox back in 2007 - everything is plain and concise.
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Personally, I think one of the best ways to prepare is to look for common trends in other successful applications. I helped write a VentureBeat article on this very subject [1]. As part of that article, we (Lollipuff, YC W13) released our entire application [2], and of course YC provides plenty of application advice too [3].
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-y-c...
[2] https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-ex...
[3] http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
I thoroughly enjoyed reading through some of the old applications. Here's Drew Houston's app for Dropbox back in 2007 - everything is plain and concise.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html