YC Applications
The actual YC applications real founders got in with — reproduced in full.
14 pieces
Everything in YC Applications
- 14MimirS15
Their YC application hoped Google would buy them. HackerRank did, and Google was already using Mimir.
28 Sept 2026Three Purdue students applied to YC in 2015 to put automated CS courses into high schools.
- 13FlexS16
Her YC application called Softcup a competitor to watch. By August she owned it.
25 Sept 2026Flex applied to YC in 2016 with one founder, $225,000 raised and nothing shipped.
- 12Athens ResearchW21
He got into YC solo with 70 users and an open-source Roam. Within four years he had sold a beet-meal business to Bryan Johnson.
22 Sept 2026Athens Research got into YC W21 as a one-person, open-source Roam alternative: 1,800 GitHub stars, 70 users, $800 in a good month.
- 11Make SchoolW12
They applied to YC as a game publisher. The thing they actually built was idea number six on the 'other ideas' list, and it became a college.
20 Sept 2026MakeGamesWithUs got into YC W12 to match coders with artists and publish their games.
- 10OpenPhoneS18
They applied to YC with $320 of monthly revenue and a video call that never connected. Seven years later they dropped the word “phone” from the name.
12 Sept 2026OpenPhone's S18 application shows 1,500 users, 32 paying customers and $320 of revenue in the last month.
- 09The MuseW12
They told YC they wanted to corner careers for women. Eleven years later they bought that market back.
10 Sept 2026The Muse's W12 application names one wedge: a community of job-seeking women, built to rival The Ladders.
- 08CruiseW14
They got into YC by refusing to solve the hardest 10% of driving. In 2015 they abandoned the constraint themselves.
2 Sept 2026Cruise applied to YC's Winter 2014 batch with a bolt-on box that deliberately solved only 90% of driving and left the rest to you.
- 07Prolific
They named Scale AI as something that could be built on top of them. Then they became it.
31 Aug 2026Prolific applied to YC in 2019 already profitable, 13 people, no funding taken.
- 06Keywords AI
The router was the pitch. The logs turned out to be the company.
30 Aug 2026The application says it plainly: no one is combining LLMs yet, and this is the future of LLM usage.
- 05Standard Treasury
They named the regulators as their biggest fear. They were right, for the wrong reason.
22 Aug 2026Asked who they feared, the application skips every competitor it has listed and names the regulators.
- 04CommandBar
“We don’t have any unique advantage” — they wrote that, and got in anyway
21 Aug 2026Three weeks full-time, no revenue, four unpaid pilots, and a product called Foobar.
- 03Mixpanel
Mixpanel named the competitor it feared most, in writing
20 Aug 2026Two students from a discrete math class pitched YC on one sentence: stop tracking page views, track what people actually do.
- 02GitLab
GitLab — YC Application (W15)
28 May 2026GitLab applied to YC in 2015 already at ~$1M revenue, growing 60% a month — and turning down a $10M acquisition offer.
- 01Dropbox
Dropbox — YC Application (S07)
28 May 2026Drew Houston got into YC with a screencast and a few paragraphs — and most of the company is already visible in the answers.
Get Makersfuel in your inbox
Makersfuel is the MakersClaw newsletter: a five-minute briefing for founders building with AI, with the tools, resources and reads worth saving, and what actually happened. Five mornings a week, Tuesday to Saturday.
Double opt-in. One click in the confirmation email, then Tuesday to Saturday. Unsubscribe from any issue.