YesGraph

For YesGraph specifically, another strong factor was that we were a developer facing service. Our batchmates proved to be excellent early customers, giving essential feedback on the product. I talked to lots of companies about growth, and hearing their concerns and how they thought about the world was wonderful. This focused user research would be hard to replicate because the tone of willingness to help is more rare with normal use research. Also, there have been some amazing developer facing services coming out of YC. Heroku, Parse, Stripe, Docker, and more. I think it is because the partners are so much more technical than most investors, and they've built companies of their own. They know such services matter and how to support them. Another factor is Demo Day. I've fundraised enough to know that it is painful at best, and deadly at worst. Demo Day is something special, and many companies going through it don't even know how good they have it. Demo Day sets up the perfect environment to make a market with artificial deadlines with investors filtered in batch. If fundraising is a painful marathon, Demo Day is like steroids. It makes it easier to get to the finish line and is an unfair advantage over other startups. A personal emergency actually prevented YesGraph from presenting at Demo Day. Considering we raised a seed before YC, this isn't bad timing actually. We'll make it up in the S15 demo day, hopefully targeting our Series A. We have a lot to do between then and now to earn it. If you want to help us make it, go try out YesGraph. We help your app grow by recommending who users should invite. If you already are using us, tell your friends about YesGraph.