Same with us at last year at missiveapp.com, the interview was relaxed, still could not articulate what we were doing based on the questions. They even talked about some of our metrics at the end, those were wrong, like from the previous time we applied.
We were rejected, the reason: No market.
To YC's defense... they interview so many incredible founders.
We grew between 10% and 30% every months since. So in the end all good.
Our team was also rejected in 2013 with conferencebadge.com... that time we bombed the interview and were really bad. The business has now grown to 7 figures a year.
Both businesses are still managed by our small team of 3 co-founders and one employee and are quite successful. We own 100%.
What if we would have made the cut... who knows...
Missive is a central hub for all your team communications, both internal (chat) and external (emails, Twitter, Fb, SMS). We offer an email client like interface (thread based).
The key difference is we offer internal chat (no tied to external conversations) and the UI is more akin to your email client. You consume everything from an Inbox.
Missive really feels like a snappy email client, a lot of our paying users even use it alone (not in a team context) just because they like the UI. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j95F4sr5Qdw)
We were rejected, the reason: No market.
To YC's defense... they interview so many incredible founders.
We grew between 10% and 30% every months since. So in the end all good.
Our team was also rejected in 2013 with conferencebadge.com... that time we bombed the interview and were really bad. The business has now grown to 7 figures a year.
Both businesses are still managed by our small team of 3 co-founders and one employee and are quite successful. We own 100%.
What if we would have made the cut... who knows...