The Scariest Fun : notes from a web startup

Sorry for the lack of posts, but we've been spending a lot of time writing our applications for Y Combinator and Tech Stars. Paul Graham is right - writing is harder than programming. Or at least less fun and more exhausting.

We're very glad to be done so we can focus on programming again. We obviously really hope to get into a program, but, even if we don't, writing the application was definitely valuable. We ended up talking a lot about the details of our idea, and I feel like we both have a much better picture of our goals as well as the problems we face.

A word to the wise: look for word-count limits before you write essays. We had copy/pasted the YC application questions into Google docs initially, to make it easy to collaboratively edit the answers. After we had written the app and were ready to paste it back into the web form, we noticed the instructions requesting all answers to be under 120 words. Whoops.

It definitely took us some extra time, but I'm making myself feel a little better by convincing myself we got better answer this way. It's kind of like sketching something that's going to be cropped - you'll get a better drawing if you can continue drawing off the borders and then crop afterward instead of stopping your pencil right at the border. Plus, if we get an interview, we can talk about interesting stuff that didn't make the final cut for the application.