Revenue: I wish. We're in a highly regulated environment and we didn't raise enough money to get a broker dealer license so we had to defer revenue because we couldn't afford it as well as the legal and compliance costs.
Traffic/Traction. Wow, Two different things. We're an investment marketplace for agriculture and agtech (http://agfunder.com). Listed companies have raised $10.5M since Feb2014, we have another $2M in live deals, and about $12M in deal flow coming on in the next 4 weeks. So in that respect traction is huge, this is not being funded by thousands of investors but by VCs in Silicon Valley family or in Russia, offices, strategics. In our case the LTV of a customer is in the hundreds of thousands so we don't need traffic in the millions. We average about 5,000 uniques per month, and we have about a 1% conversion rate, of which 0.25% are investors.
Sold previous startups: No. I wish. I wouldn't be living off my credit card right now.
Apple/Facebook/Google: No.
KickStarter: No, family then advisories, and then friends of friends got us this far but it has been very very painful and it seemed like just when we were on deaths door (Maxed credit cards, zero sleep for 2 weeks) that we had a stay of execution.
Ivy: Yes. I have a PhD from Yale and have published in Nature, Harvard Business Review, and most recently TechCrunch so I had a lot of social proof to work with (That said I have ADD and dyslexia and I didn't graduate from high school so don't let a poor start hold you back). I'm sure this played in, but it is possible to build up your CV. I think YC (and frankly everyone else) wants to know that you are someone who is capable of doing something extraordinary. You need to give them data points. Start with some baby steps and leverage your way into something bigger. I submitted several articles to TC before one was accepted.
Traffic/Traction. Wow, Two different things. We're an investment marketplace for agriculture and agtech (http://agfunder.com). Listed companies have raised $10.5M since Feb2014, we have another $2M in live deals, and about $12M in deal flow coming on in the next 4 weeks. So in that respect traction is huge, this is not being funded by thousands of investors but by VCs in Silicon Valley family or in Russia, offices, strategics. In our case the LTV of a customer is in the hundreds of thousands so we don't need traffic in the millions. We average about 5,000 uniques per month, and we have about a 1% conversion rate, of which 0.25% are investors.
Sold previous startups: No. I wish. I wouldn't be living off my credit card right now.
Apple/Facebook/Google: No.
KickStarter: No, family then advisories, and then friends of friends got us this far but it has been very very painful and it seemed like just when we were on deaths door (Maxed credit cards, zero sleep for 2 weeks) that we had a stay of execution.
Ivy: Yes. I have a PhD from Yale and have published in Nature, Harvard Business Review, and most recently TechCrunch so I had a lot of social proof to work with (That said I have ADD and dyslexia and I didn't graduate from high school so don't let a poor start hold you back). I'm sure this played in, but it is possible to build up your CV. I think YC (and frankly everyone else) wants to know that you are someone who is capable of doing something extraordinary. You need to give them data points. Start with some baby steps and leverage your way into something bigger. I submitted several articles to TC before one was accepted.