AbstractIntroductionWhat is YCombinator?Why are you applying to YCombinator?What's PMAlerts?What did your YC application(s) look like?BodyWhat questions should you be comfortable answering?What's the best way for someone to support a founder who's anxious about their YC interview?DiscussionFeedbackResearchAcknowledgments

Abstract

I was recently invited to interview with YCombinator for the Sumnmer 2021 batch of founders. My application focused on PMAlerts.

After sharing this news on Twitter [1], I was blessed by the support of many generous folks. The purpose of this note is to very quickly share a bit about my YC application, PMAlerts, and YCombinator culture with those folks.

Introduction

What is YCombinator?

YCombinator is a startup incubator that invests a small amount of money in a large number of startups every year. They offer $125k for 7% of the companies they fund, but the money is the smallest part of their program. YCombinator has spent almost 20 years launching over 2,000 companies, including AirBnB, DoorDash, Coinbase, Twitch, and Reddit ~ their network is insanely special. You can learn more about YC here.

Why are you applying to YCombinator?

An explicit appreciation of neurodiversity. Paul Graham, one of the founders of YCombinator, has acknowledged that neuroatypical founders have a unique (and valuable) way of problem solving. This is unique and extremely attractive to me.
Networking. I'm a solo founder. Being able to plug into a network of world-class founders would be a game-changer for me.
Focus. My 9-5 dayjob constrains my hustle. Being able to focus entirely on building product and talking to users would be a dream come true.
Acceleration. I want to move faster with the support of founders who are driven by more than just money.
Concentrated wisdom. YC partners have experience with hundreds if not thousands of startups. They have a massive sample size of empirical data that others can use to improve their decision-making, experimental designs, and modeling of human behavior / economics. I'd like to take advantage of this.

What's PMAlerts?

PMAlerts is a social listening tool. It monitors social media for mentions of the keywords that you care about through a simple interface:

What did your YC application(s) look like?

// updated multiple times ~ YC allows apps to be updated pre-interview.

Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that you have built or achieved.
I [redacted], was pulled into foster care, got caught counterfeiting money while in foster care, [redacted], and then made my way back to public high school before being accepted into the UMass Amherst engineering program.

This gives me the "superpowers" of emotional resilience, empathy towards those in need of support, a wicked disdain for unjustified authority, and motivation to gain the influence that I need to help people-in-need at scale.

If you have a demo, what's the url?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ-PDxaaSQk

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
PMAlerts is a keyword monitoring tool that businesses use to find customers online.

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
PMAlerts monitors social media for the things you care about - including (but not limited to) existing and prospective customers who are talking about your problem space.

For example: if you're running YCombinator's Startup School, you might create an alert for "Startup School" to find and engage with people who are talking about the program on LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, HackerNews, ProductHunt etc.

Here's an example alert: https://www.pmalerts.com/alert/%22startup%20school%22

Use-cases include lead generation, topic monitoring, reputation management, community cultivation, customer service, and competitive analysis. Over 1,300 people have created alerts on PMAlerts, including employees of Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, and Pinterest. I have eight paying customers generating a total of $175/mo revenue as of 5/16/21.

Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founder(s). This video is an important part of the application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g005vkJxxhM

How far along are you?
PMAlerts is in public beta:
- 1,300 people have created alerts
- 975 people have registered
- 240 people click on their results on at least a weekly basis
- 8 people are paying a total of $175/mo

How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
I built the first version of PMAlerts as a console app in Q1 2020. I started taking it seriously in Q4 2020. This has been part-time, as I'm currently employed by Microsoft.

How many active users or customers do you have? If you have some particularly valuable customers, who are they? If you're building hardware, how many units have you shipped?
I'm measuring retention by counting the number of users who click on their alert results on at least a weekly basis. That number is ~225 this week, or about 22% of registered users. Employees of Twitter, Microsoft, and Apple are using PMAlerts.

Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate?
Using PMAlerts to drive growth for PMAlerts is working! But the tech itself is unstable, and some platforms aren't working very well (Facebook is good at detecting bots). My priority is stabilization right now. I want to improve the experience for existing customers so much that they share PMAlerts with their network over and over again.

If you are applying with the same idea as a previous batch, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea?
Product changes:
- I'm now exposing the "Listeners" construct publicly. Listeners are the little pieces of code that query (via APIs, crawling, scraping) the supported platforms. In the future, I'd like for any developer to be able to easily build a listener of their own for niche sites/forums. Listeners are listed here: https://www.pmalerts.com/listeners
- I'm also exposing PMAlerts Internals now. This lets anyone track PMAlerts KPIs, and helps keep me accountable to effective prioritization / growth / improvement: https://www.pmalerts.com/internals
- Many of my existing users reported receiving noisy results. I've since implemented thumb ratings on results so you can grade your results as either good or bad. This helps "train" PMAlerts to improve relevance over time (right now it's just me manually tweaking things on my end, but this seems like a categorization problem that ML could help with).
- One paying customer asked for a UberPeople.net listener, which I was able to spin up quickly because of the generalized "listeners" construct: https://www.pmalerts.com/listeners/UberPeople

Perspective/priority changes:
- In the short term, I think PMAlerts can make money by giving PMs an easy way to get closer to their customers, and by giving B2B sales professionals an easy way to "social sell". One long-term possibility is that PMAlerts becomes a thin layer on top of all social media sites that lets people build their own social media feeds (or maybe subscribe to others'). Another long-term possibility is that PMAlerts becomes the go-to social selling tool, and then works its way down the funnel for businesses of all kinds, tracking conversion from initial engagement all the way down to retained, paying customer - "salesforce for everyone" / "sales as a service".

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
Why: I've wasted a LOT of time building things that nobody wants to pay for. I applied to YC with one of those things in 2016: FStop.fm.

This has been a huge opportunity cost that could have been avoided if I had an easy way to connect with customers before spending too much time building the wrong product.

I'm also unhappy with the way that big tech is using their power, and I'd like to do something about it. Using their data to pull people together actually helps their MAU targets (increased relevance for consumers => increased MAU, I'd imagine). But my long-term mission is to reduce the value of their adtech by giving businesses a more cost-effective, personal way to reach their target audience via targeted selling (vs targeted advertising).

My expertise: I deeply enjoy breaking silly rules and restrictions, like anti-scraping measures that Facebook and LinkedIn use to wall their gardens. I have a decade's worth of engineering experience, PMing, and failed startups that help me empathize with folks who are trying to build things that people want. I've also had the privilege of leisure, which I've used to learn about the root causes of structural injustice, which has motivated me to work hard (on the right things).

Value confirmation: I'm seeing a strong positive emotional response from people as soon as they "get" that PMAlerts isn't just for brand monitoring or vanity searching - it's a super cost-effective way to develop new customer relationships.

What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
Using social media monitoring to generate leads is new, as far as I know. Founders currently resort to their network, cold-calling, cold-emailing, paid ads, launches, and PR to gain traction. PMAlerts gives folks a new way to get closer to a large sample size of prospects.

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
Social media monitoring competitors include Brand24, Mention, Sprout, Awario, HubSpot, Google Alerts, and Google Trends. These solutions don't seem to be leaning into the leadgen aspect of their business, but if they do, I could lose an opportunity to become the go-to customer development solution.

PMAlerts would be competing with / complementing Salesforce in the CRM space. It would be competing with Google + Facebook ads in the targeted advertising space. And LinkedIn Sales Navigator in the targeted selling space.

In all cases, social media platforms could limit my access to their data. That's what I fear most.

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
1) Social listening so much bigger than vanity searching. It's a means to a more actionable end - social listening should help users build relationships and sell solutions. We can use social listening data to build databases of qualified leads for any type of business. We can then learn how to most effectively sell against particular categories of pain / user.

2) It's hard to make the most of social listening. The most effective queries aren't usually obvious. Folks create alerts and then are immediately conditioned to ignore them because first attempts tend to generate noisy results.

For example: I want to find people who need social listening tools. At first, I created an alert for "social listening tool", but I found that an alert for "mrr $" gives me a far higher signal:noise ratio. This can be solved with improved UX and a services component - onboard new users for $x.

3) Customer obsession can be quantified. Big tech's enterprise culture is embracing OKRs like "customer obsession", and PMAlerts could be used to quantify customer obsession. Product teams need an easily measurable (and gamifiable) way to engage with customers / improve product - beyond lagging indicators like MAU / revenue.

4) Consumer-first can be a winning long-term strategy. My competitors are focused primarily on B2B enterprise contracts because that's where the money is. But social listening can be a consumer product. It just needs to be packaged up in a brutally simple way that feels familiar. This is why I'm mimicking the UX of Twitter - I want users to feel like they could visit PMAlerts just as often as they visit other social media sites. Not only for work, but for pleasure too. This way, users pollinate the tool across orgs/employers.

5) Social listening can be a marketplace / platform. My competitors are focused on listening to mainstream social media because they seem to care mostly about macro trend analysis. But social listening can be actionable and tactical. In my opinion, effective use of social listening has you engaging with the results you capture, not just passively reviewing them. And this engagement can be improved by reducing the cost of developing special-purpose niche listeners. A "listener store" could give devs across the globe a way to monetize their scraping skills for a wide variety of use-cases.

6) Social listening can lead us to a healthier form of social media. It can wrap around all social media / niche communities and deliver a simple, ad-free experience on top of a subscription model. The algorithms that power news feeds could focus entirely on user delight, without having to compromise the user experience for advertisers. This would also prevent things like Cambridge Analytica from happening.

How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
A monthly subscription fee that users pay to keep their alerts listening.

Paths to $100M ARR:

- 17,000 users paying $500/mo
- 42,000 users paying $200/mo
- 83,000 users paying $100/mo
- 300,000 users paying $30/mo

There are:

- 21M software engineers who want to get closer to their customers
- 10M big tech workers who want to get closer to their customers
- 1M PMs who want to get closer to their customers
- 150,000 SalesForce customers who pay for enterprise CRM
- 2.5M active Etsy shops who would benefit from social selling
- 150,000 users paying for LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Gumroad creators, crowdfunding efforts - anyone with a business or value to provide - could accelerate their revenue growth / PMF with PMAlerts. TAM seems at least as big as Slack + Salesforce.

If PMAlerts becomes a thin layer on top of all social media that delivers a composible social media experience - circumventing ad-driven social media feeds - I see $10/mo * 10% of say 1B social media users = $1B ARR.

100,000 people paying $100/mo to generate leads = $120M ARR

How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
- Push alert notifications into Teams, Slack, Discord so one person's engagement turns into an entire team's engagement.
- Integrate into ecommerce platforms to help sellers "social sell".
- Use PMAlerts to find and engage with people who talk about revenue, selling, SaaS, etc.
- Act as the "salesforce" for small startups - manually creating alerts and personally pushing users to product.
- Apply to SMM / PR / PM positions specifically to demo PMAlerts to hiring managers / teams that budget for social media tools.
- Create shareable "topic pages" with PMAlerts (a topic page for a YCombinator startup, for example) that gives folks a single place to see what people are saying about the startup across the whole web.
- Create educational materials (video, blogs, books, a podcast, etc).
- Sell consulting services to businesses who are new to social media monitoring / social selling.
- Produce sketch comedy routines where the PMAlerts "bot" (a human with a big robot helmet) sneaks into meetings / eavesdrops on customer conversations and then runs like mad across various scenes (subway, city, park, etc) to to share the latest details with you, the user.
- Produce a video series where early-stage startups are brought from 0 to 100 paying customers by using PMAlerts to find + talk to customers.
- Offer an API that devs can use to build on top of social listening capabilities
- Cold-call PR / marketing agencies to sell them a whitelabeled PMAlerts subscription (that they can offer to their customers)
- Expose the PMAlerts API to developers who want to build on top of social listening capabilities (doing to social media what Stripe did for transactions - ditch the linkedin and twitter api keys, use PMAlerts for everything).

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.

FStop.fm connected models to photographers, but if I had to try again, I'd make it the easiest way for businesses to get creative work done. "Project management for creative teams". MVP done, 50k+ users from my original attempt in 2016. I applied to YC twice with this idea.

GuardMyPad.com is a SaaS home security solution built on WebRTC that lets people recycle old devices into motion-detecting security cameras that record media into their cloud storage accounts / local device storage. The MVP for this was finished in 2017, but I never brought it to market because I didn't know how. My mission with this was to give lower-income folks a free way to recycle their old tech into a "better than nothing" security solution.

Karma is a public notebook / collaborative self-education platform (like Roam, but social). I'm using this to internalize a lot of YC / Startup School lectures, eg https://www.karma.fm/p/yINKGvw/how-to-sell-by-tyler-bosmeny https://www.karma.fm/p/vszjKtl/do-things-that-dont-scale---paul-graham

CondoGrades is meant to give power to residents/owners who have fallen victim to incompetent HOAs / property management companies / abusive landlords. It would begin as Yelp for condos - "get paid to grade your HOA". Renters and homeowners would get paid to provide data that CondoGrades sells to home buyers / real estate agents. Landlords would pay for the ability to respond to public renter feedback.

Tweet.fm is a voice-based twitter alternative built on subscriptions (no ads).

Rolo is an omnichannel CRM solution - connect your Rolo account to all social media + email channels, and have one place to communicate with customers on whatever channel they prefer (Twitter DMs, emails, Facebook messages, etc).

Kanban is like a public Trello that allows people to contribute to projects via small tasks, and get paid for closing out those tasks. "Public project management" positioned to support the growing needs of decentralized projects. (PG's talk on "solving email" by treating it like a TODO list is what inspired this - step 1: forward emails into a spam-detecting Trello-like interface so you never have to visit an inbox again, step 2: evolve from private, personal task management to collaborative project management).

Docs.fm is a simple docs-tracking utility that automatically reminds product teams to review / QA / sign off on their technical documentation. This is a huge problem for product teams - technical docs tend to go stale because our systems don't make it easy for PMs / EMs / SWEs to form a healthy documentation habit. Docs.fm is the habit-forming solution.

Unionite is a universal unionization platform / "nonviolent resistance as a service".

BitSpend is a simple tax calculator for crypto holders who spend their holdings and need an easy way to calculate their cost basis / tax liability. It just needs your public wallet address(es) and your income bracket. Then, you tell it when you spend, and it spits out the lowest possible tax liability based on when your crypto was purchased (first in, last out to minimize tax). All in a format that's easily attachable to your state/federal tax returns.

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.
Alerts for "app sucks", "app blows", "shitty app", etc is a fun way to find problems that need solutions.

Body

What questions should you be comfortable answering?

// The purpose of this list isn't to "rehearse" - it's to get comfortable speaking concisely.

Question	Key points	Potential follow-ups
What are you working on?	PMAlerts is a keyword monitoring tool that businesses use to find customers online.	How are users using it, actually? Doesn't this already exist?
Why are you working on it?	wanted an easy way to find customers and test for PMF too much passion is lost to the build trap	why not usertesting why not google ads
Who are your competitors?	listening: mention (750k customers), brand24 (fb pages and hashtags only), awario, google alerts, talkwalker, sprout social, hubspot, hootsuite - none have niche listeners, none are focused on leadgen / sales. sparktoro - audience insights crm: salesforce / social studio sales: linkedin sales navigator, google/fb ads leadgen: leadfuze, optimonk	why aren't they going in this direction
Why aren't they doing what you're doing?	high-touch technically challenging expensive (niche listeners, services component) not obvious that social listening gives you a lower cac than direct ads
How are you growing?	case studies launching on hackernews social selling w/ shareable dashboards
What can you teach us about your customers?	most are builders they want to focus on providing value and solving problems, not persuading. Want to abstract outreach away. Interesting minority use-case is feed building / self-education / topic monitoring
How are they using your product?	brands, topics, features, product types observing, engaging publicly, engaging privately
What unique insights have you captured?	Social selling is huge
What's your churn look like?	90% of users who have created alerts have churned, but 10% use it at least once every week
Where are your users coming from?	hackernews, direct outreach, word of mouth
What are you measuring?	most important thing is result clicks
Why don't you have a cofounder?	not a lot of lifelong connections it's like a marriage, can't just wing it or force it. needs to emerge from an organic relationship with aligned core philosophies
Why aren't you full-time on this?	Getting there -> solve my own problem launch stabilize grow to $1k/mo focus full-time
What are your primary risks/obstacles?	data access competitors pivoting into customer development / leadgen / crm macro economy / cyber risks personal health "creepy" feeling from people getting sold based on their behavior
What's the biggest difference between you and your competitors?	my "job to be done" is more sales oriented than marketing or branding awareness I'm building it to be a platform more than a product I'm targeting sales professionals and founders / pms who want to engage with prospective customers
Who needs what you're building? How do you know?	Pre-PMF startups B2B SaaS sales / founders CAC is too damn high (hundreds to thousands of dollars)
Tell us about your paying customers.	Six are builders Two are researchers None are using it for social selling, but all have been excited w/ case studies
Why aren't other customers paying?	I gave it away for free in exchange for free QA My focus has been on stabilizing the MVP
How are you dividing your time?	Stabilization Case studies
What's stopping someone else from copying you?	Leadgen is more consulting than saas Ponds are tricky to target Spears are tricky to develop Platform engineering
What's your path to $1B?	Become an effective social listening platform Become the world's most delightful social selling platform Become the world's most delightful CRM platform
What's your "why" beyond money?	Healthier social interactions More efficient innovation Harnessing of others' passion
How big could your TAM be? Napkin math.	CRM is a $50B industry 100,000 people paying $100/mo is $120M ARR That's Linkedin Sales Navigator - I'm doing that, but for the whole internet - 21M software engineers who want to get closer to their customers - 10M big tech workers who want to get closer to their customers - 10M professional salespeople - 1M PMs who want to get closer to their customers - 150,000 SalesForce customers who pay for enterprise CRM - 2.5M active Etsy shops who would benefit from social selling - 30M SMBs in the US alone - 150,000 users paying for LinkedIn Sales Navigator 100,000 people paying $100/mo to generate leads / social tickets = $120M ARR Right now I give awareness, but if I qualify leads, and then work my way down the funnel to become a Sales and CRM solution... $40B industry
What's your "edge" market, and how fast is that edge growing?	social selling is a new category - but "smart ads" growing by 20% per year. hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on targeted advertising every year. Expect a small percentage of that to shift towards social selling as relative value increases
How will your customers find out about you?	Social selling Organic Educational materials Workplace app integrations Niche listeners ecommerce integrations
How might your business expand?	listening -> social selling -> crm -> sales as a service
What has surprised you about user behavior?	most stop at vanity monitoring most are delighted by social selling
What kind of traffic are you getting?	1,500 uniques/mo, organic/direct
What is your short-term growth strategy?	learn how to social sell work with YC founders medium-term: onboard specialized sales professionals to help my customers
How do you know people need your product?	clicking on results every day paying
What are your biggest weaknesses?	no sales experience
Why YC?	PG's comments on asp directing evolution of tech
What are your costs?	Very roughly $1/user/mo for the metal, costs will be service component
How do you win this space?	Systematically lower the cost per acquisitions in segments experiencing the thinnest margins, where even slight reductions in CAC are noteworthy
What industries experience the highest CAC?	saas telecom banking/insurance real estate marketing agency
Who spends the most on google adwords?	insurance ecommerce telecom
Who spends the most on facebook ads?
Why is now the time for this idea? Why hasn't anyone done this before?	it costs a lot services component means margins will be thin
What are you going to do with the money?	Runway for cost of living as I go full-time on experiments and bizdev
What is your growth rate?	Currently at ~$175/mo, one new customer per month organically right now (stabilizing).
What's your CAC?	TBD
What's the strongest aspect of your business?
What's the weakest?
Talk about how quickly you're learning.	niche needs - relevance improves selling - emotional resonance
How could this work without multiple founders?
Briefly talk about the concrete events that have occurred, the actions you've taken, the results you've seen, and the lessons you've learned
talk about your traction
talk about how you're testing your hypothesis that social selling is more efficient than traditionals

What's the best way for someone to support a founder who's anxious about their YC interview?

Ask a lot of questions as quickly as you can over a span of ten minutes
Interrupt the founder - even if it feels abrasive.
Keep the founder on topic - no rambling allowed. Quick and concise answers only.
Dig into the product, pain point, strategy, users, etc
The YC interview is not a formal / traditional pitch - it's a rapid-fire conversation that focuses on users, their needs, the market, and the strategy.
This quora question gives you a good idea of what the interview is like: https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-interview-with-Y-Combinator-It-seems-like-a-short-interview-10-minutes-What-happens-during-that-time-and-what-happens-after

Discussion

Feedback

A grand technical vision and strategy would be nice to have
More clarity on competitor shortcomings / $B opportunities is important
More clarity on growth strategy - technical perspective (integrations), hustle perspective (salesforce for SMBs), platform perspective (marketplace, embeds, integrations)
I need to understand more about my space, its history, the acquisitions within it, and the strategies that others have used leading up to those acquisitions (eg Hustle -> Hubspot)
I need to keep my answers super short and concise
I need to come up with a rough TAM (a conservative estimate of 10% of 100,000 available PMs paying $100/mo = $1M/mo)
I should look at Kissflow's monetization strategy
PMs do pay for UX research (my peers pay for very expensive UserTesting.com) - I should consider how that willingness to purchase might be leveraged for listening
Listening isn't a new technology - I need to consider what my competitive advantage is, and whether or not it will last
Improving relevance might be achievable through emotion filtering, niche content sources, ML/AI, or a combination of these
There very well may be a services component to this - worth running experiments with an "uncomfortable" consultation fee. Note that SuperHuman offers consultation for free, but they have an insane LTV
How can PMAlerts increase addiction, lovability, integration, LTV?
I need to remain focused on PMAlerts, but be open to talking about other, tangential/adjacent opportunities
PMs can be targeted with niche solutions built specifically for their company
It's ok to take a few seconds when responding - don't BS, keep it brief and straightforward.
Be direct if you don't know something - but share how you'd get to the answer
Consider sketching out ideas - sketchnoting - to clarify your thinking
Metaphors can be handy
Consider substack / newsletter integrations - monitor newsletters for mentions
Vanity searching is probably low ROI...
Think hard about the cofounder challenge
Do week sprints - alternate between product and users
Find the weakest areas of my game and poke at them
Users should be #1 - get more, talk to them
Reach out to all users and dissect the value they're getting
Write usefully - make strongest statements you can, that you can back up
Think in terms of risk reduction
"Doesn't this already exist?" You rambled here
"why not full time" - answer from a position of strength, confidence, planning, targets
Market size - napkin math this.
- To reach 100M ARR, I need 300,000 people paying 30/mo
- There are 30 million SMBs in the US alone
- 20 million software engineers - maybe 2M PMs.
- Right now I give awareness, but if I qualify leads, and then work my way down the funnel to become a CRM solution... $40B industry
- Salesforce, hubspot
Experiments to run:
- Using PM
- Linkedin
- Leadgen
- Launches
- WeWork
Get good at speaking clearly and concisely about growth and strategy
Consider reaching out to insurance / real estate agents
Need to understand what people are looking for, who can give it to them, and how to connect those dots
Consider the auction potential - finding people who need stuff, qualifying them, and then selling them to the highest bidder.
- Will need to figure out what people are willing to bid on - and prevent recycling leads across buyers
Consider rating these leads' likelihood to purchase based on various heuristics, track conversions down the funnel for qualitative analysis along the way
High energy, confidence, enthusiasm is important.
Try to stay focused on concrete, knowns. Not hypotheticals.
This is the place where anyone with anything to sell can consistently count on getting qualified leads
Targeted sales instead of targeted ads
Consider asking competitors why they aren't chasing this angle
Keep it short and simple, based in concrete, specific reality - not hypotheticals

Research

Paul Graham's essays: link
- http://www.paulgraham.com/ace.html
Startup school: link
Youtube videos
Misc resources
- https://dayvough.substack.com/p/yc-s21-interview-with-shipmates
Martin Gontovnikas drove growth for Auth0 - $xx,000 LTVs - and offered $50 to interview people without ever pitching product. Just got them to talk about everything related to authentication. "how do you learn?" after talking to 8 people, you see patterns and then strategy and personas is based on the patterns that they see. (interview)

Acknowledgments

Evan Conrad of Room Service / StreamBus for encouraging me and for reviewing my app.
Keith Axline for the constant support.
John Coogan for the super thoughtful and pragmatic feedback
Natwar M. for taking the time to challenge me and my strategy
Wess Daniels for the constant support / brainstorming / optimism
Greg Barisia for the optimistic enthusiasm, exploration, and even cold calling :p
Jack Dishman for the brainstorming, strategy thinking, mock interviewing support, and thoughtful feedback
Nader Khalil for the actionable interview feedback and willingness to case study the leadgen aspect of pmalerts
Ben for the real-world use case, poking holes in my thinking, and willingness to explore
Tim Griffin for the mock interview and extremely candid feedback / suggestions