YC Applications Open Today, Our Successful Application and Video
withkash.comThanks for sharing your application with us. It's great to analyze a well thought out and well worded application.
I've posted some links below that have helped me understand their process in a little more depth, especially the interview. These links have been posted at some point on HN, but I'm just putting them here for anyone's convenience. I hope you find them useful:
http://old.ycombinator.com/howtoprepare.html
http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/
https://www.aptible.com/blog/y_combinator.html
http://yourstory.com/2014/10/guide-list-y-combinator/
The last one is especially helpful, it should answer just about any question and has other examples of great applications.
We totally used iPaulGraham for interview prep. It was great to get us in shape for the interview, but none of those q's came up in our interview.
I think it would be fun to chew through the application too, including the business, and we all appreciate its detail.
In quick serve restaurants, for example, the average margin for a retailer run between 1 and 4%, and credit card fees often eat up to 1-2% of total revenues. Often, a reduction of fees by 25% would increase the bottom line by 25%.
Isn't that crazy? Main street is mostly one-location restaurants! And food service is effectively the lowest-but-positive margin business. It's like the only thing you can't make in China and ship is burritos.
There are so many startups chasing so many one-location restaurants. Loyalty cards, payments, jobs, delivery, backend business services like payroll and benefits, etc. Everybody else who's even slightly higher margin scales radically and just does these tasks they've always been doing in-house. Can all of these B2B startups succeed chasing the same low-margin businesses?
It's one thing if you're making AWS and your customer is Netflix. They're a huge, high-margin business—they can afford big B2B. But here, you're trying to compete exceedingly few payment providers compete in: fees. And you're asking for the lowest fees from the lowest margin business.
Wouldn't it just make more sense for the restaurant to be cash only?
Thanks! That's part of our business that has evolved over time. Majority of our customers are not restaurants. In fact, we've learned the pain is massive even in e-commerce and for larger traditional retailers.