The Muse's Successful Application to YC W12

[jl]

"We didn't think we were what YC was looking for..."

I'm so glad you took the time to apply! Your idea was slightly different back then, but I remember how impressive you were during the YC interview. As you said in your application:

  Among the members of the founding team we have domain 
  expertise in recruiting; in content creation and promotion; 
  and in directly engaging with women ages 20-­35. What's 
  more, we've been working in this specific field (job 
  opportunities and career advice for professional women) 
  for the last year, and the response from women has been 
  unbelievable. Our user testimonials sometimes verge on 
  the fanatical.

We could tell when we met you that you really understood the business you were in. You were exactly what YC looks for.

[KMinshew]

Thanks so much Jessica- we're so glad we did. YC was an unbelievably valuable experience. To the commenter below who asked how YC changed us & our company, there's not much that's more useful to an early, growing company than getting to spend time with people like Jessica & PG, and having their regular/honest feedback on what's working (and what's not). I'll try to write more about that here later.

[canistr]

Don't want to sound like a downer, but I'd also love to see applications where the founders weren't your typical white MIT, Harvard, Yale graduates/PhDs who worked at McKinsey GoogleBookSoft.

[beambot]

We (Lollipuff) released our application. We were undergrads at Nebraska, Iowa State, and Idaho: https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-ex...

(Though I did a PhD at GT, and David worked at Google post-ITA acquisition. :-/ However, our CEO did neither.)

[btrautsc]

White, male, southeastern state school, to quote a VC "literally no fucking pedigree", no engineering backgrounds... we just participated in demo day. YC has been incredible for us and the partners have been amazing to work with.

Hustlers. Recruited PhDs & MSs with great experience/ backgrounds and empowered our team (hire smarter than yourself). Build a product that makes sense and people are demanding you take their money for... we are not perfectly outside the norm, but I would assume we're pretty unusual (at least in education/ experience/ skillset). You can email me any questions re YC.

[untilHellbanned]

yeah, i'm very surprised and disappointed how much YC has allowed itself to be gamed just like any other industry they seek to disrupt.

[OoTheNigerian]

Take it easy people. If what people get after publishing their applications is divertory criticism, it would discourage others from doing same.

Today is the deadline for YC. The idea is to give applicants final ideas to help in their application. That's what this thread should be about.

Ladies, thanks for publishing.

If there are international applicants that have been successful, please share. If you are ok sharing privately, I'd really appreciate it. My email is on my profile.

[Asparagirl]

Huh, their careers page has several "jobs" available for people to write articles for them... unpaid. You know, the old "it's good exposure" bait for people who don't know any better.

[KMinshew]

Hi Asparagirl, there are 4-5x the number of people who ask to write for us compared to the number who ultimately get to, so clearly there's some value there :)

The reality is that most of our writers are also mentors to other people, and they really enjoy it. Writing for The Muse is their way of scaling that mentorship to a broader audience.

[LukeWalsh]

The biggest thing that stuck out to me was how long some of your answers were. Everyone seems to always point to Drew's application with all of the short concise answers but it looks like thats not the only way to put together a winning app!

[icedog]

Since today's topic on HN is usability testing. I'm a bit confused by the connection between the goal stated on the YC application and thedailymuse.com. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anywhere that says this is a resource for women or "non-traditional candidates". How are you targeting this demographic without being discriminatory in your job applications?

[acav]

When we applied to YC in 2011, we originally focused on professional women as that is where we saw the biggest need for our content, although 90% of our content was not gender-specific. Very quickly we watched our demographic grow to be 30+% men, and we made the decision to broaden our focus, while continuing to focus on our core: careers. One reason we made that decision is because one of the things we originally wanted to combat was women not feeling welcome in the workplace, so the idea of men not feeling welcome on The Muse (since they were actively using it "in secret" as they said) didn't feel in line with our principles.

More info on that change here: http://www.themuse.com/advice/join-our-new-journey-updates-f...

[thejteam]

Out of curiosity, if the founders are reading this thread, how did YC help you to improve your company? Specifically, did they help you in any way that you couldn't have done without them?

[muglug]

Kathryn talked about the YC influence at the female founders conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoF10tFmNmY#t=360

[spada]

Their traffic saw a massive drop in 2014. Google algo change screw them over?

[acav]

We've actually seen 30% UV growth from Jan to March - some of that growth has been search given, though there are other channels driving it as well. In Jan we merged thedailymuse.com into themuse.com (under http://themuse.com/advice) so all of our products would live in one place

[acjohnson55]

I got a kick for a second imagining the band Muse as a YC company.