4 Crucial Keys to Get Into Y Combinator
For the past few weeks, we’ve been learning from the founders of Airbnb, Plaid, and other awesome YC companies over not-so-secret dinners. We’ve tapped into an amazing knowledge base and network of YC partners and companies. And we’ve shared the turns of start-up life with other YC founders. Here’s the story of how we got there.
Why we wanted to do Y Combinator
This is a question I’ve heard from lots of folks over the past few weeks. It was actually not a deliberate step for us. We were at the early idea stage when we applied and were planning to start the company on a very different timeline. My co-founder, Nicky, and I held key product and engineering roles at IFTTT and wanted to wrap up some projects before embarking on Kraftful.
Our YC application was super last minute and mostly completed on a breezy Bay Area beach. Our application was so rushed that looking back, I realized that I just wrote “no” in response to “when will you have a demo?” 😅
Even though we didn’t plan to do YC, in retrospect, it should have been an obvious priority.
After talking with dozens and dozens of smart home companies, we saw a clear pattern: their mobile apps are built by agencies and dev shops without the incentives or expertise to deliver the best user experiences.
Agencies rarely build user-friendly smart home apps. They respond to clients’ demand for innovation by coming up with novel designs that might look cool, but users don’t know how to use. They are funded by project volume, charge a lot upfront, don’t support frequent updates, and often can’t specialize in smart home experiences because their business model requires taking on almost any project that comes their way.
We realized that we could turn this model on its head.
Kraftful provides apps that are optimized for the best smart home experience with a flat-rate pricing model, ongoing support, and frequent app upgrades. We give hardware companies the experience of having their own Silicon Valley product and engineering team for their digital user experience.
We think there’s a huge opportunity to solve for user experience in the smart home, but there is no way to do so operating as an agency or a dev shop. Instead, we need to be a venture-backed business that can operate at scale. YC was the best way to get there.
The venerated Y Combinator interview
Because we were at the early idea stage and started putting together our application hours before the deadline, we were by no means prepared when we got an email at 11:00 p.m. on a Tuesday evening saying, “Your application looks promising and we’d like to meet you in person.” Around midnight, Nicky and I were on the phone nervously laughing when we realized that our interview date was only six days away. Worse, it was on the same day as the IFTTT board meeting, where I was supposed to present our product teams’ progress.
For the next week, we spent every night after work prepping for the notoriously intense YC interview. We were fortunate to get lots of great advice from friends who had gone through the process. We did many, many, many practice interviews. With each practice round, we refined our pitch and our vision for Kraftful.
On the day of our YC interview, Nicky picked me up in the alley behind the IFTTT office. After what surprisingly felt like my best board presentation to date, and with a much-needed coffee, we drove down to Mountain View. I was really worried about being able to keep my board presentation and the YC prep in my mind at once. But in hindsight, the board meeting probably just gave me a good adrenaline kick before the interview.
We were interviewed by Michael Seibel, Kat Mañalac, and Rujul Zaparde. They clearly didn’t get what they needed from the interview and called us in for a second round of questions a few minutes later.
We were back in SF, waiting for dinner, when my phone rang. I rushed outside to answer and Nicky swears he saw me through the window bouncing up and down while Michael gave me the good news.
How we got in
We will never entirely know why they took a chance on Kraftful, but here’s what I think made the difference, based on what I know about YC a few weeks in:
- Preparation. We spent every second we had in the days leading up to the interview to prep and it paid off. The interview is very different from an investor pitch. It’s 10 minutes long. You get a ton of questions in rapid succession. Partners will often interrupt your answers. In fact, if your answer doesn’t include what you want to convey in the first 15 seconds, you probably blew it.
- We’re 100% focused on our customers’ problem. We didn’t start Kraftful with a technical solution in search of a problem. We heard from hardware companies about the same problem from lots of different angles. Hardware is hard. So smart home companies need to focus on building great devices, and mobile apps get fewer internal resources. As a result, a lot of smart home apps are not as user-friendly as they should be. Their low downloads are followed by poor ratings — even the Nest app only has two stars in the App Store.
- We understand our customers. We’ve talked to product owners and executives at countless major hardware brands to understand their motivations, frictions, and internal processes. Though most have unique challenges as companies going through digital transformations, we know some from personal experience too. Before IFTTT, we built products at hardware+software companies (Apple and Carbon), where software always came second.
- We’re genuinely excited to help our customers be successful. Our customers want to engage their users with digital experiences but often don’t know where to start. Our goal with Kraftful is to make digital interfaces more user-friendly and accessible so that more people can enjoy the benefits of a smart home. We’re 100% aligned with our customers’ success and can’t wait to see what our world looks like when it’s more connected and a little more delightful.
It has been a pretty wild journey so far and we’re only getting started!
