Hey r/SAAS,
I just got accepted into YC's upcoming S26 batch as a solo founder.
I know a-lot of people here are interested in YC, so I figured I'd share my story and a few things I learned.
I'm 27, Syrian / American, grew up in the Middle East, and moved to the US for engineering school.
Before this company, I built and sold two bootstrapped startups:
The idea was really simple tbh.
I was signing up for B2B software and kept getting onboarding flows that asked me questions like:
All information that could usually be extracted from my work email domain.
So I built an API that could take a domain and return structured company and brand information.
Nobody cared. For a while, it was completely dead.
Then something interesting happened, large companies (fortune 100s) started signing up.
They'd try the API, get frustrated, send me long emails explaining everything that was broken... and then keep using it. Instead of churning, they'd complain (alot)
Looking back, that was probably the strongest signal I got during the entire journey. If people are spending time telling you why your product sucks instead of simply leaving, they probably want it to exist.
Over the next year the product became dramatically better, customers started sticking around, and growth slowly began to compound.
Today the company has:
I got here completely bootstrapped!
I'm always a fan of bootstrapping, however I got to the point where I had to keep telling customers "no" to new features that were extremely expensive to build (data products are not cheap).
I realized I needed funding, so I applied to YC with a ton of revenue, I spent a week on the application and I got an interview pretty quickly and with high hopes I went through it.
I got rejected.
My initial thought after the interview was
"well, I think they're wrong"
I never questioned my own product or skills, I had paying customers! Literally 100 of them!
So I worked hard and doubled my revenue over the next 3 months, I reapplied and this time only spent 20 min on the application.
Got interviewed and went in with the belief of "this company will be successful no matter what, it's just a matter of how fast, and YC will be a gamechanger"
I got in!
- Be extremely concise.
- Show your ambition, there needs to be legible paths to $10B in ARR
- Bottom-up approach, don't say "X% of Market", show the actual number of customers needed across cohorts to hit billions in revenue.
- Explain why you will win against competitors, you can do this by reframing competitors into different markets or showing head to head differentiators.
- Reapply, I have 7 friends who went through YC, none of them got in on their first try, most were on their 3rd / 4th across years.
I'm building the future of realtime data for AI via API with context.dev
Right now we have 12+ APIs including best in class apis for data extraction, brand data & more.
Let me know if you have any questions!
PS: No AI was used in the writing of this post.