Show HN: I Made YC Rejection Simulator(yc-sim.vercel.app)
yc-sim.vercel.app
Show HN: I Made YC Rejection Simulator
https://yc-sim.vercel.app/
15 comments
I wish it had shareable urls for the rejection. Anyway, I'll copy paste here:
Idea: Startup incubator incubator incubator. Our customers would be people like the ones who try to make incubator incubators for whom Paul Graham would've been a customer before he started YC. We would've helped them help him start YC.
Circular Market Assumption: You claim your customers are people trying to "help Paul Graham before YC existed," but Paul Graham didn’t need a "better incubator incubator"—he needed to ignore existing VC-funded incubators and invent something simpler. Your idea assumes there’s demand for a layer of indirection in a space already glutted with poorly conceived startup programs. You haven’t even demonstrated that your hypothetical users exist. (Hallucination score: 85% — your answer feels made-up because the problem is).
Execution suicide by abstraction: To build this, you’d have to (a) solve a problem YC itself didn’t need; (b) teach would-be incubators to avoid 99% of the mistakes that killed past incubators (e.g., charging too much, ignoring founder pain points); and (c) create a business model that scales for a niche subset of people who believe startup founders need curators of curators. Good luck getting founders or LPs to pay for this. Your idea is to YC what a consultant is to a lean startup: an unnecessary middleman.
Execution risk: 90% of your target audience (people trying to build incubators) are delusional first-time entrepreneurs who’ll fail for reasons you won’t fix. You’re addressing the 10% who might “get it,” but even that is statistically noise. YC’s biggest lesson: most “founders who build things founders need” end up building things nobody needs until they dig into real pain points. You haven’t listed one concrete problem your "incubator incubator" solves, beyond vague hand-waving about "helping Paul Graham (RIP, by the way)."
Solution: Stop. Build a real startup that solves a direct pain point. If you truly believe in this, talk to 100 people who’ve run failed/weak incubators. Find the specific failing they all have in common (e.g., “they can’t close mentorships,” “their demo days suck”) and address that. Until then, your idea is a philosophy assignment, not a business.
Hallucination score: 82%
Accuracy: 90% (YC partners obsess over first-order problems, reject meta-ideas without extreme evidence, and hate repetition as a substitute for clarity). You’re not the exception.
—Yours in brutal honesty,
Paul Graham’s GhostI went in expecting this to be a "roast me" style AI wrapper. Pleasantly surprised to see it be more concrete and actionable.
this is actually a helpful little utility for someone applying to yc, or trying to raise.
when refining a pitch, it takes a lot of, well, pitching to discover what's wrong with your message, or where it's falling flat.
the more you can simulate this pushback from different angles, the better your pitch will be when you eventually present it.
when refining a pitch, it takes a lot of, well, pitching to discover what's wrong with your message, or where it's falling flat.
the more you can simulate this pushback from different angles, the better your pitch will be when you eventually present it.
You ask it for negative feedback, and it generates a negative feedback text. There's nothing helpful there — it's a catastrophizer's Swiss Army knife.
Solid businesses with a real chance at an upside don't need much convincing or fielding criticism. If you have a profitable company that needs to scale to do more business, just walk into a bank... If it's a pie-in-the-sky app idea that could maybe be monetized after market capture, then I don't think anyone needs imagined negative feedback at that point.
It's good satire, though.
Solid businesses with a real chance at an upside don't need much convincing or fielding criticism. If you have a profitable company that needs to scale to do more business, just walk into a bank... If it's a pie-in-the-sky app idea that could maybe be monetized after market capture, then I don't think anyone needs imagined negative feedback at that point.
It's good satire, though.
Most founders don't have access to experienced VCs or YC partners who can poke holes in their pitch before the real thing. Even solid businesses with good fundamentals can struggle to communicate their value effectively.
Sure, if you're an established profitable business seeking straightforward financing, you might not need this. But most YC applicants are early-stage founders trying to articulate vision, potential, and execution capability. This tool might be able to refine that message.
Sure, if you're an established profitable business seeking straightforward financing, you might not need this. But most YC applicants are early-stage founders trying to articulate vision, potential, and execution capability. This tool might be able to refine that message.
I'm not sure what your point is. If you already have a successful co that doesn't need to raise, then yeah you probably don't need to practice seed stage pitching.
Also:
> If you have a profitable company that needs to scale to do more business, just walk into a bank.
Where they'll ask you to put up all your personal assets as collateral in exchange for a 20% loan on your existing accounts receivable
Also:
> If you have a profitable company that needs to scale to do more business, just walk into a bank.
Where they'll ask you to put up all your personal assets as collateral in exchange for a 20% loan on your existing accounts receivable
My point is that narrative-driven funding is very often the wrong approach. Before people polish their storytelling and pitch decks, they should look at the fundamentals of their business. Then, they probably won't need the whole startup theater to try to get funding. Moreover, if the fundamentals are so bad they can't be funded, it's a signal about the business, isn't it? Maybe that doesn't apply to some one-off unicorn businesses, but it applies to the 99%.
I'd say people are better off going with fundamentals. Because if your fundamentals are bad, but let's say you manage to enthral the investors with your confidence, charisma, and selective optimism, they may fund you, but your negotiating position will be incredibly weak. If they stagger the funding over milestones, upsetting your investors for any matter - product related or not - will mean game over. If they want a lot of equity, you will have to say yes, as they'll still be the one investor tentatively interested, etc. It's a bad deal. It's risking a lot of structural damage to a new business.
With good fundamentals, all of that doesn't apply. If you start a company, get some cash flow going, and show profit, investors will start chasing you. Whatever funding you would have gotten through the usual Silicon Valley venture pitching, you will now get on actually good terms.
> they'll ask you to put up all your personal assets as collateral in exchange for a 20% loan on your existing accounts receivable
Has this happened to you? My experience is that banks offer almost up to 1:1 debt to (company) assets, so long as the business model is clear and profitable. If someone's trying to fund an unprofitable business (like I said, for market capture, for example), then there will be problems. But in that case, the fundamentals aren't great.
I'd say people are better off going with fundamentals. Because if your fundamentals are bad, but let's say you manage to enthral the investors with your confidence, charisma, and selective optimism, they may fund you, but your negotiating position will be incredibly weak. If they stagger the funding over milestones, upsetting your investors for any matter - product related or not - will mean game over. If they want a lot of equity, you will have to say yes, as they'll still be the one investor tentatively interested, etc. It's a bad deal. It's risking a lot of structural damage to a new business.
With good fundamentals, all of that doesn't apply. If you start a company, get some cash flow going, and show profit, investors will start chasing you. Whatever funding you would have gotten through the usual Silicon Valley venture pitching, you will now get on actually good terms.
> they'll ask you to put up all your personal assets as collateral in exchange for a 20% loan on your existing accounts receivable
Has this happened to you? My experience is that banks offer almost up to 1:1 debt to (company) assets, so long as the business model is clear and profitable. If someone's trying to fund an unprofitable business (like I said, for market capture, for example), then there will be problems. But in that case, the fundamentals aren't great.
It's so brutal and has biases and stereotypes like no other place I have tried.
I like this a lot! The UI was such tat it almost felt like I didn't leave hacker news.
But for the record, YC is actually a lot more polite in their rejection letters (don't ask).
But for the record, YC is actually a lot more polite in their rejection letters (don't ask).
This is cool and actually useful. However I would love the opposite as well, to draw a vision of how the idea might work and what it might become.
dog walking marketplace -> act 1 - you start in SF, where people love dogs as much as kids (and think that's ok), after some cold start issues you get to 100k WAU WAU
act 2 - people don't just use your app to coordinate about dogs, they also start renting each others stuff and use your payment features for convenience
act 3 - expanding in major US cities was harder than anticipated, but investors love the idea (networks effects baby) and so you can buy a super bowl ad and reach 100M dog owners and walkers in one afternoon. You're engineers did a good job and you can sign everybody up with not issues...
dog walking marketplace -> act 1 - you start in SF, where people love dogs as much as kids (and think that's ok), after some cold start issues you get to 100k WAU WAU
act 2 - people don't just use your app to coordinate about dogs, they also start renting each others stuff and use your payment features for convenience
act 3 - expanding in major US cities was harder than anticipated, but investors love the idea (networks effects baby) and so you can buy a super bowl ad and reach 100M dog owners and walkers in one afternoon. You're engineers did a good job and you can sign everybody up with not issues...
very good playground to test ideas though it can be used as a 'gospel' to benchmark ideas.Brutally honest.
Utterly brilliant and not without utility as a means to test your proposals.
Pretty funny. And I agree that the UI is pixel perfect haha
Love this. Any chance you could share the prompt?
The applicant has submitted the following application:
Provide a harsh and direct rejection explaining why this idea won't work (unless for the real good idea), pointing out potential flaws, market issues, team problems, or execution challenges. Be specific and refer to details from their application. Your tone should be direct, blunt, and slightly condescending (or like Paul Graham that obsessed, counterintuitive, and logical) but provide real constructive criticism with solutions. Keep your response under 300 words.
Provide a harsh and direct rejection explaining why this idea won't work (unless for the real good idea), pointing out potential flaws, market issues, team problems, or execution challenges. Be specific and refer to details from their application. Your tone should be direct, blunt, and slightly condescending (or like Paul Graham that obsessed, counterintuitive, and logical) but provide real constructive criticism with solutions. Keep your response under 300 words.
Very good way to intercept YC Startup ideas :D
we added new features: problem and solution scoring
would someone pay for something like this?
yc rejection simulator would be state of the art application flaw detector at scale that helpful both for founders and VCs