Let me tell you a story about my cousin, Steven. Steven wanted to become a musician. He had a rock band he diligently put together, and they actually came together and recorded an Album. When he played the album for me, he described it as a mixture of Green Day with some Linkin Park. He told me how he took the best of both bands and created his own sound.

The problem was, his music was boring, and his band sounded like hundreds of other indie bands.

Steven was just an average looking guy, his band was good but not brilliant, his music was solid, but not different. Steven believed in his band, and he was just good enough for everyone to encourage him to go on working on music, but never good enough to attract a fan base.

But Steven never even tried to build up fans. He never played his music for totally random people, and asked them for their opinion. All he did was try to get the people at the record labels interested in his music. He called and hounded, he stalked and staked out. He kept chasing those labels for years and years, and then suddenly gave up.

ANYBODY WHO CARES ABOUT GETTING A RESPONSE FROM YCOMBINATOR IS DOING THE SAME STUPID THING.

Paul did not care about the music. Paul cared about the money. Paul did not concentrate on getting his music to the people, he concentrated on getting his music to the people who would guarantee him money and connections.

You are doing the same thing with your software. Instead of getting your idea and your software to the people, you are making your idea for the person with money and connections.

If you are planning to apply for the Winter funding round if you get rejected this time, then you are going to fail at business. Let me explain what I mean:

A person who has true passion for software and for creating FUCKING great software does not care about funding. He is going to go out there and start coding. There is no software project that is too expensive to code, there are just software projects that are starting off too ambitious. If your software is too expensive it's because you have not effectively reduced the feature set to something you can actually manage!

Look at the billionaires in the world. In more cases than not, they started one small shop. They expanded the shop to a chain, and from there the money started rolling in. They do not go to an investor with an idea for a chain of shops, and get money to build that chain right away. You have to approach software the same way - reduce your idea so that you can do without external capital or influence.

If your idea needs this capital to work - then just find another bloody idea! The world is full of doable things - if you get stuck on something you cannot achieve, then you are nothing but a dreamer, and you will never be a doer.

You should not have a "backup" plan for YCombinator. When I hear the words "backup plan", what I imagine is that you guys are staking yourselves and your projects on YCombinator, and you have to "fall back" on something if it fails.

This is the absolute wrong attitude! YCombinator must be something you do on the side. If it fails, you should just continue on the way you already planned! You continue your guerilla marketing techniques; you continue your ways of making money.

This here internet is tiny. It's real tiny. Look at Alexa ranks of small insignificant sites. They are well in the top 1 million sites. It's very easy to become the 200.000 most popular site. If the internet were a country, you'd know a relative of almost everybody.

If your software is good, word is going to spread around! If word does not spread, your application is not something people want and will recommend. Learn and change! More money and more marketing are not going to help that!

Entering a program like YCombinator for marketing purposes just gives you a boost at the beginning. It does not guarantee that you will still have traffic after 6 months. It's the same bloody thing, don't you see?

If you do this on your own, your traffic grows slowly but exponentially, assuming your application is good. You have time to iteratively fix the problems that people have. After a few months, you have a really great application that does what people need.

I read YCombinator Startup News. I read that thing that Paul wrote saying that anybody who contributes regularly is going to fare better. That's shit from a bull! Anybody who is spending time posting on a site that is a collection of links to dream money instead of working on his project is never going to make money. Anybody who cares about "karma" on that site instead of spending time reaching users for his product is an idiot.