I think we believe the same things here, and are talking around each other.
Spending time thinking about our business for us included talking to customers and asking hard questions. Only after understanding our customers could we build anything at all--for an enterprise product like ours, it's impossible to iterate in a vacuum.
Working on your company should always be the answer, but before we could ship code, we needed to know where we were going.
As PG points out, "The biggest mistake founders make when applying is to confuse us. Half the time when I'm reading an application I'm thinking 'I have no idea what this person is even talking about.' I suspect this often the writer's own confusion showing through."¹
Trying to explain our very-difficult model helped us to both understand it and define for ourselves.
Admittedly, it was a bit weird to just start making money without knowing where the future of the company was going. The YC app itself forced us to talk through these things; but maybe this problem is unique to our company.
Spending time thinking about our business for us included talking to customers and asking hard questions. Only after understanding our customers could we build anything at all--for an enterprise product like ours, it's impossible to iterate in a vacuum.
Working on your company should always be the answer, but before we could ship code, we needed to know where we were going.
As PG points out, "The biggest mistake founders make when applying is to confuse us. Half the time when I'm reading an application I'm thinking 'I have no idea what this person is even talking about.' I suspect this often the writer's own confusion showing through."¹
Trying to explain our very-difficult model helped us to both understand it and define for ourselves.
Admittedly, it was a bit weird to just start making money without knowing where the future of the company was going. The YC app itself forced us to talk through these things; but maybe this problem is unique to our company.
¹ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4694322