I'm a YC alumni, ask me anything?

EDIT: Thank you to all who asked questions. I'll monitor this thread and answer a couple more over time but I hope this was helpful. Best of luck!

Hello!

I figured since this subreddit is slightly having more activity than usual, I would love to do a simple AMA, answer questions that might help others to know/understand more about YC from a founder's point of view.

Feel free to ask me anything you're curious about. I will answer most questions as best as I can.

Background: I applied and got in on my first try as a solo founder in S20 batch. We were the first fully remote batch during the COVID craziness. I feel extremely lucky to have gotten in, especially as a solo founder.

Answering some common questions:

What was your idea/company? We were building a compliance automation platform (alternative to Vanta, SecureFrame, etc.).

Did you have revenue? Yes, when I applied, I had $900 MRR. When I got the interview request, I was already at $2k MRR. When the batch started, we were already at $5k MRR.

Did you have someone review your YC application? Yes. This was the key to helping me write it out better and remove fluff that was unneeded. I highly recommend that you have your application reviewed. I had 7 people review.

Did you have recommendations from YC alumni? Yes! Reach out to other YC alumni to help you review your application and ask them if they'd be open to recommend you. Some will not, others will be happy too. I had three recommendations from YC alumni.

What is it like to be a solo founder? Incredibly lonely and hard to be honest. I really wish I would have brought on a cofounder who would compliment my skills and share the burden early on.

What ended up happening to your company? We shutdown in 2022 after running out of capital. We raised a small round post-YC and then ended up pivoting to building a developer tool. That ended up being way too hard and costly.

Why did you pivot? Long story short - our sales stagnated for a couple of months, we got worried and started searching for other problems we could solve based on past developer experience our team had. We took too long to build an MVP, didn't end up getting any customers to stick with us which resulted in us shutting down.

Was YC worth it? You get exactly what you put in. For me, it was definitely worth it. I met so many amazing founders and investors that I previously had no access to. I highly recommend it.