Hola there!
Welcome to One Azzy, a newsletter written by me and sent out only once a month. In it you will see the most interesting stuff I find about Marketing and Startups from every corner of the internet.
Today’s edition is a a ghost track. A “hidden” newsletter in between One Azzy’s monthly newsletters.
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Hola there!
If you read my previous newsletter you noticed that there were no startups news in it. Well, this month my startup news are this 👇
Ok, so a little bit of context first.
What is YCombinator (YC)?
YC is an American a startup accelerator that provides seed funding for startups since 2005. Over 2,000 companies (including Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Reddit and Coinbase among others) have gone through their program. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over US$300 billion as of January 2021.
I guess you could say we aimed high. Sí, we definitely did.
So what is my* Startup about?
(not my, but our Startup, we are a team of 3 people at the moment)
Our startup (I'll keep the brand name as a secret for now!) aims to help parents automatically organise all their family memories.
Picture all your Photos + Videos + Voice messages + Notes about your family beautifully automatically organised on your personal drive.
So you don’t have to be like this 👇 everytime you actually think of organising all your family memories.
How did this start?
By March 2021, I was 4 months pregnant of my baby twins. Pandemic times hit and while I was working from home I asked my mom about her time when she was pregnant and she could barely remember anything (I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, so I definitely did not judge her! Love you mamá 💖).
I asked other moms-to-be and they all had the same issue. Most of those memories were lost. So I came up with this idea: a voice diary for mums-to-be. I wrote a tiny bit about it and I did a bit of a (super rough) mock-up design as well.
I inmediately forgot about it as soon as I realised I had zero tech skills to build it on my own and I knew no one who could build it. My beautiful baby twins were born in July 2020 and time passed by.
On January 22nd I went for brekkie with my friend Elena, who happens to be a very talented videogames designer. We started talking about side projects and I shared with her my idea. She loved it and told me she could actually build it.
We did the market research and found out that moms liked this idea but were not very fond of paying for it (oopsies). So we asked more questions to them (and to ourselves since we are both busy mums) and we realised there was this big pain that was driving all of us nuts and we were all more than happy to pay for it.
All our current family memories are mixed up with random screenshots, whatsapp memes and pictures shared by others. We hate it, but we simply don’t have the time to organise it all.
We want something that actually organises all our family memories (photos, videos and whatsoever) for us.
We analysed the competition and realised there was an interesting gap in the market we could cover, so we decided to go for it.
By March 16th, we applied to YCombinator full of hopes and with nothing but an idea.
In the previous batch 319 startups got in from around the world (I couldn't find the total number of startups that applied, but rumours say it was around 5K and this latest batch was above 7K).
On Saturday, 8th May, we received final feedback 👇
We unfortunately didn't get in. It wasn't a shock for us, our startup idea is still in its infancy and we didn't have at the time anything really exciting to share with YC other than our idea. Despite the rejection, we are glad we applied. We got a few key learnings from it:
YC application forces you to get straight to the point. It helped us synthesize and focus on what was key (what are we building, who is it for and why will it work)
YC appreciates the use of plain language to describe your idea and how it works. It helped us ensuring we were conveying our idea in a powerful yet simple way.
YC does not want to see long Business Plans: "We make funding decisions based on our application form and personal interviews. We love demos, but we never read business plans." And guess what, their application form is like going through a Business Plan that you actually want to read. I will share our YC application with you in my following newsletter 😉
YC alumni are genuinely golden people. We didn't know anyone from YC, so I started sending DMs to people I found that went through YC before, asking for feedback. Every single one replied back and helped me refine our application. Brilliant busy founders stopping at their day to day job to help some unknown founder like me. It was an amazing and inspiring experience and I learnt a lot from each one of those interactions. I would love to be able to give back one day just like they did with me.
What’s next then?
We keep working on our startup. We are currently building the prototype 📱 and further analysing what our core target wants.
Seriously, how do you even have time to build a startup?
I currently work on our startup at night and during the weekends when my babies are 💤. I have always underestimated the importance of sleeping, until I became a mum of twins. For three months and sixteen (very long) days, my husband and I barely slept. Having no sleep had a terrible impact in my mental and physical health. However, going through that tough time gave me some kind of "superpowers". I feel I am now more productive with my time than I have ever been.
To be continued… 💪
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Azahara (aka Azzy)