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Timeline and process

After you submit your application, you should hear from us within a couple of weeks. Select teams will be invited for an interview. If you don’t get in, we encourage you to reapply as your business develops.
Applications accepted all year round
Founders onboarded every two months
~10% acceptance rate
Tips on writing a great application
Be clear about how many you have spoken to
  • We put a very high emphasis on customer discovery. Give evidence that you got in front of real people and asked them about their problems. Explain in detail how many of these conversations you’ve had and when they were.  
  • Bonus tips: It is not enough to have only spoken to people you already know. Surveys are less compelling than conversations and should have hundreds of responses at a minimum.  ‍
  • Great: Since starting the business 3 months ago, we have had 30+ minute conversations with 40-50 potential customers (nurses). We did this by walking into physician offices in 3 different cities and asking to speak with the nursing staff.  We also attended a two-day nursing conference in Chicago and began engaging with users on reddit (r/nursing).  ‍
  • Average: We know we’re onto something because we’ve spoken to many potential users (lawyers), and several said they were willing to purchase once the product was available.  We are now iterating the product and think we can charge $200/month for it.  ‍
  • Disappointing: This market is growing by 12% annually. Our survey of 30 potential customers (teachers) indicates that this is a big problem for them.
Before you apply to any accelerator or incubator, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how the program can help you. Do some research on the different types of programs, their focus areas, their requirements, their benefits, and their alumni. Align your goals with the program’s mission and values, and show how you can contribute to their community. Be specific and realistic about what you expect to gain and what you can offer.
Useful resources
How To Perfectly Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup With Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel
Be clear about how the founders know each other and for how long.
  • Have you built anything (a company, product, project) together?  Were you in a band or sports team together?  Are you spouses or family members? Help us understand whether you have been under pressure together, how you dealt with conflict, and how you helped each other grow. ‍
  • Great: We met each other during the first year of university and always worked with each other on school projects.  In third year, we became co-leads of an 12-person student-design team that designed, built, tested, and competed internationally.  We’ve had many all-nighters and have seen each other at our best and our worst.  Through it all, we have gained a deep respect for each other.
  • ‍Average: Though we’ve never started a company together, we were both on the engineering team for Product X at Company A. ‍
  • Disappointing: Both founders studied computer science at the University of Waterloo.  
Before you apply to any accelerator or incubator, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how the program can help you. Do some research on the different types of programs, their focus areas, their requirements, their benefits, and their alumni.
Good to know
How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas
Don’t use buzzwords or jargon, seriously.
  • The fluffier your answers, the more suspicious it seems.  If you use 50 words when 10 would do, your application will suffer. Aim to make your application understandable by children and seniors.
  • Words like “platform” and “solution” don’t paint much of a picture.  If we cannot clearly visualize what your product is, your application will suffer (especially true for software companies).
  • ‍Great: Our AI agent offloads and automates time consuming work that government relations professionals must do every day.  They select topics that they or their clients want to monitor, and our software watches, parses, categorizes, and surfaces relevant discussions from all public feeds of all levels of government. The user receives a daily email digest with summaries and links to full transcripts, as well as trends of how this information plays into broader trends.  Normally this is all done manually by teams of junior staffers but our product only costs $300/month. ‍
  • Disappointing: We’ve built an AI-driven engagement solution to seamlessly reinvigorate abandoned cart opportunities through hyper-personalized, trust-centric outreach. By leveraging cutting-edge behavioral analytics and deep machine learning, we create contextually responsive engagement for e-commerce leaders.
Before you apply to any accelerator or incubator, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how the program can help you. Do some research on the different types of programs, their focus areas, their requirements, their benefits, and their alumni. Align your goals with the program’s mission and values, and show how you can contribute to their community.
Useful resources
How to Apply And Succeed at Y Combinator
Don’t provide top-down analysis
  • Figures from market reports are not compelling.  It is rare that we are excited about a market that is “X billion dollars” or “that has a Y% CAGR”.  These can be part of your pitch, but not the full story.
  • Instead, explain to us how many potential customers exist and how you segment them.  Explain how much you aim to charge them for your product.  Explain why you think you can convert more of these people to customers than anyone else.  Leave it to use to multiply these numbers to understand your revenue potential. ‍
  • Great: Based on IRS data and industry reports, we believe there are 900 thousand tech sector small businesses that could benefit from our product. We plan to roll-out state-by-state, and starting with the largest companies. We plan to charge $50 per month, leveraging our integrations with popular project management tools to convert 20% of leads—outperforming competitors. ‍
  • Average: Our target market includes about a million small businesses that could benefit from our service. We plan to initially focus on tech companies and aim to charge around $40 a month. ‍
  • Disappointing: Our potential customer base is approximately 30 million users according to a recent report. The market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 15% over the next five years. Similar products average around $30.

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