Ask PG: What percent of YC S2012 class are teams without an idea
I was curious as to how many teams (or percent of class size) in YC S2012 are ones that applied without an idea. I would wager that it is far far more important that you intimately understand a market or have at least demonstrated the capacity to do so, than to have an idea. In the end, users is just another word for audience. Before you can acquire users, you need to build with an audience in mind. It may not always be your intended audience that adopts your product, but being audience-centric prepares you for catering effectively to whoever does end up using your product. Were I designing the application for no-idea applicants, I would put a bunch of questions related to a certain audience and the pains they experience and ways in which that audience can be served better. An idea is just a hypothesis (a question with direction). Understanding the audience is observation. It's more important to be good at observing because it leads you to know when your hypothesis is wrong and to new hypotheses During the application process, he tweeted that just under 14% had no idea: https://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/184079333323837440 To be honest, after a few months of quasi mentoring (As I have been less active in creating something) I can tell you this. 100% of founders have no idea. Does it make anyone else nervous that YC might be rejecting applications that have good ideas with less than stellar founders while accepting 'superstars' without ideas? It seems to me it'd be quite difficult for YC to keep those good ideas from slipping out while trying to help their no-idea founders come up with a product or business... This is already true: Graham tends not to pay too much attention to a candidate or team’s business plan—it’s likely to change during the course of the program anyway. Instead, he zeros in on the character and intelligence of the applicants. After one team’s presentation, Buchheit says that he would use the product. But Graham is skeptical. “Are these guys winners?” he asks. “It’s all about the guys.” The group is not accepted. from: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_ycombinator/all/1&#... This seems ridiculous to me (applying to YC without an idea). Why? Most of the sorting process was about the founder, not the idea, and according to pg a lot of people changed their original idea anyway.