Ah! My first submission was for w09, I thought that I re-submitted my apps for each of the next cycles, making this my 10th. I'm at 6? Will update the title.
Should have made it: "From someone who has been applying for 5 years"
I've had a mix of of mcu/mikeurbanski accounts online for years, when I finally decided to pick one I settled on mikeurbanski. A rename would be useful, but the two accounts have diverged in the past year.
Applying to YC actually forces you to think about the things that you need to do to make a project work.
If you keep at it eventually you become more capable, start to find traction on your own, and you find that you've gained most of the skills that you thought you needed something like YC to teach you.
I spent my 20's grasping for something that was just out of reach, and I'm better for it.
If I had to guess why they were rejected I'd say that it's because they're typically:
#1: Consumer focused
#2: Unsexy/unknown markets
Were they wrong to reject them? Probably not. Traditional gaming isn't a market that many take seriously.
I'm still implementing many of the ideas that have been submitted to YC. I'll release the apps and write retrospectives as we push out features in the future.
The API was just a feature. The actual product was a multi-merchant market place w/ a shipping estimator that was a 1-1 implementation of EasyPost (YC S13).
Unfortunately, and I say this from excruciating experience, this isn't a complete/accurate representation of all M:TG cards.
I spent the summer of 2011 scraping Gather to build out a product catalog and API for a start up that didn't start. I really wish that I had taken the time to put the data out as a torrent.
M:TG has 20 years of strangeness to take into account when creating a data model... And Gatherer has its own issues. For example, the way symbols are represented in card text is inconsistent. (e.g. The tap symbol can be represented as both "ocT" and "{T}", and the representations for mana symbols have evolved inconsistently as well.)
Wizards of the Coast are the only ones who can build this API legally. They hold the copyright on all of the data related to M:TG and I truly wish that they would open up it up so that we, as a people, wouldn't have to spend hundreds of hours recreating the wheel. Poorly. [0]
Fortunately, I stopped what I was doing and started on a board gaming "thingy" with friends instead: http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/
[0]: That isn't to say that the mtgapi.com guys/gals did a shoddy job. It's just a big task that WotC should be forward looking enough to do themselves.
While I have WotC on the line... Why wasn't the D&D 5th Edition SRD hosted on GitHub during development?
We've made the decision to run our company like a free software project and have been actively ignoring buyout/funding offers since before we launched.
We'll keep applying to YC, but, considering they didn't even read our last application, I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll get to keep running our company our way for the foreseeable future.
There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.
I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating.
Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum?
When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets".
Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else.
There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.
We're "profitable". We're really happy with how the new site turned out. Having enough to keep the lights on an pay some friends to help out with the writing after only a month is a huge accomplishment.
I'm pretty curious about MoD too! We'll see what happens.
We don't make board games, we're just wildly passionate about them. Paul & Quinns started Shut Up & Sit Down so they could have fun reviewing and writing about board games. They just had a hard time figuring out how to make it sustainable.
I've been playing with technology surrounding gaming for the last three years or so(and gaming since I was little) so it was natural for us all to team up and build something together.
We're doing the same thing. Our team is located in NYC, London, and Aurora, IL.
We launched our little meta-board gaming company at http://susd.pretend-money.com a little over 1.5 months ago. And we're already profitable!
We made a conscious decision to forego taking money from advertisers/investors, and even dodged a pre-launch acquihire offer, in an attempt to create something that's 100% our vision (unless YC wanted to fund us.) Our plan is to grow slowly, keep up the quality, and use the money that we're making from the show/blog/podcast to fund even more ambitious community/tech projects.
AND!
Board Games are Big Business!
Board/card/traditional gaming (whatever you want to call it) has been exploding in America over the last 10 years or so. It taps into that primal need for people to sit around together and ACTUALLY interact with each other.
http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down