I think if you want to get into YC you have to fulfill one of the three criteria:
1. You are hugely changing the world
2. You can completely disrupt an existing industry
3. You can be a billion dollar company
Good apps do fulfill all the three, however I think yours wouldn't be able to fulfill one of these unfortunately.
Let look at the points:
1. It looks like you have a cool app, but it's not much different to other dating sites. You will probably be a good dating website, but not "change the world"
2. You are not specifically in an industry like taxis, golf or cars. You are in the dating industry, which has 1000s of established competitors
3. I'm confident you probably can be a $50M company, but not "billion-dollar" company. There are 1000s of established competitors already in the market and it will be very hard to be 10x better than everyone else. It's also hard, because dating websites were competitive 10 years ago. Nowadays you might get a market share in the super competitive Dating-space as a viral mobile app like Tinder, however as a website it is just impossible.
Didn't want to shoot you guys down, but hope I could give you useful feedback so that you know what is important to focus on.
I love your feedback, I do agree that there is a lot of competition in the online dating market but still I believe that the way it is done currently will be disrupted. People are just used to the current way of browsing a catalogue of images and brute forcing their way to get some one reply to their messages.
I think you can monetize pretty early with your model, so once you rake a few thousand dollars in per month and show that it will be in the ten thousands in three months, you can easily get Angel investment.
Once you have decent traction, nobody cares about the "billion-dollar" startup anymore and everybody invests ;)
Comments
I think if you want to get into YC you have to fulfill one of the three criteria:
1. You are hugely changing the world
2. You can completely disrupt an existing industry
3. You can be a billion dollar company
Good apps do fulfill all the three, however I think yours wouldn't be able to fulfill one of these unfortunately.
Let look at the points:
1. It looks like you have a cool app, but it's not much different to other dating sites. You will probably be a good dating website, but not "change the world"
2. You are not specifically in an industry like taxis, golf or cars. You are in the dating industry, which has 1000s of established competitors
3. I'm confident you probably can be a $50M company, but not "billion-dollar" company. There are 1000s of established competitors already in the market and it will be very hard to be 10x better than everyone else. It's also hard, because dating websites were competitive 10 years ago. Nowadays you might get a market share in the super competitive Dating-space as a viral mobile app like Tinder, however as a website it is just impossible.
Didn't want to shoot you guys down, but hope I could give you useful feedback so that you know what is important to focus on.
I love your feedback, I do agree that there is a lot of competition in the online dating market but still I believe that the way it is done currently will be disrupted. People are just used to the current way of browsing a catalogue of images and brute forcing their way to get some one reply to their messages.
Hey thanks!
I think you can monetize pretty early with your model, so once you rake a few thousand dollars in per month and show that it will be in the ten thousands in three months, you can easily get Angel investment.
Once you have decent traction, nobody cares about the "billion-dollar" startup anymore and everybody invests ;)