We tried to hustle our way into YC after we got rejected
I don&#x27;t want to be a jerk to kids in their early 20s who are bootstrapping their startup idea, but reading this account would actually confirm for me why this team wasn&#x27;t ready to be accepted into YC or a similar program.<p>A big part of the onus of the original product, at least, as it was launched, was that it was &quot;watermark free&quot; and the way it was &quot;sold&quot; to end-users was that it was a free service. Now, I can understand the initial rationale here -- you want to get users, you start with free, and assume you&#x27;ll pivot to paid options&#x2F;add-ons at some point or get sponsorship or other revenue streams, or pretend it&#x27;s still 2009 and that startups with no revenue can obtain ridiculous valuations and then be acquired by Yahoo  or whatever.<p>The problem is, it&#x27;s no longer 2009 and investing strategies have changed. Revenue has replaced users as the important growth metric for lots of investors. (There are exceptions, I&#x27;m aware, but this is a general trend we&#x27;ve seen over the last few years. Don&#x27;t worry founders, the pendulum is bound to go back in the other direction in another few years.)<p>Now, I don&#x27;t know what the team&#x27;s original business plan was for this service, but based on the YC letter, it appears that they said &quot;we&#x27;ll start charging eventually&quot; and that led to the question about why you aren&#x27;t already trying that now, when you have 35,000 MAU. A fair question -- and one that really represents more of a question about business plan rather than lack of MRR.<p>But the team read this as &quot;if we can show MRR, we can prove we&#x27;re ready&quot; -- except that wasn&#x27;t and isn&#x27;t the problem here. Yes, it&#x27;s impressive that the team was able to hack together a payment gateway and offer a pro product in a weekend and obtain $500 in revenue (should be noted that this isn&#x27;t recurring and it won&#x27;t be clear what the actual recurring revenue is for several months), but the fact that it was done so haphazardly, and honestly, for what looks like the wrong reasons (it wasn&#x27;t about &quot;this is best for the business&quot; it was about &quot;this will get us into YC&quot;), is the biggest red flag.<p>If you want to change a fundamental part of your product (no watermarks) and make it a pro feature to entice users to pay, you&#x27;re welcome to do that. It may or may not work for existing users, and it&#x27;s possible there are better ways to extract revenue&#x2F;add value. The truth is though, this was an idea done at the last minute to try to secure placement in an accelerator, it doesn&#x27;t appear to be born out of actual business rationale for the product.