Joel, thank you so much for your feedback and questions! We took your question + questions, which we found online and made answers to all of them! It helped us a lot! The interview went nice and easy, none of the questions we received was unexpected or difficult. We wouldn’t achieve it without your help!!!
Now regarding your suggestions:
1. > pitch deck
You were 100% right! The YCombinator partner, Tim Brady, was waiting for a pitch from us... We made a small one with the structure you have proposed, that saved us! We read many articles on YC interviews and all of them “no pitch needed”. Good, that we listened to your advice!
2. > Our big mission is to build an ecosystem around visual quality
For avoiding questions that you have (Why ecosystem? Why visual?) we simplified our mission. The call supposed to be and actually was only 10 minutes, so made every our sentence crystal clear. For Flawless App we set up the mission to “help mobile team released polished app faster”. It worked perfect, no follow up questions on this.
3. > How do you expect to help "fix"?
You are right, developers should fix visual bugs by themselves. Flawless App helps to detect those bugs very fast and reduce back-forth communication with designer\QA\product owner. As the end result, yeah, it’s about improving visual accuracy & consistency and saving developers’ time. We reframe our value proposition as well, thanks for this clarification.
4. > IMHO try to aim toward product managers and project managers, because they are more likely to value the visual accuracy, and also more likely to understand paying for software that helps achieve it.
100%!!! We got this question :) So we mentioned, that with Flawless App product managers can be sure that the final app will look as expected design, and the project will be delivered on time (less unexpected visual fixes, less back-forth communication).
5. > What are your cohorts, and how are they different? E.g. what kinds of reactions are you getting from actual product manager customers/prospects vs. actual engineer customers/prospects?
Luckily, we didn’t get such question and I don’t have an answer for now. We still figuring out many things with analytics. Cohort analysis is not there yet :( We’re getting really a lot of feedback from engineers and as I see, they are more engaged with Flawless that PM. However, we have purshases from product managers. I need to look more at our data and figure this out! Good task for us.
6. > Do I understand correctly that you have more than 1 million lines of code, and have been working together on approximately the same kind of idea since April 2015? What happened to that time and code?
This question was very well explained in our emails to YC and YC partner didn’t ask it. To give you more details: We started working on 1st Flawless at the hackathon in 2015. Back then Flawless was a collaboration service for designer & developers, which automatically generated guidelines and made design/implementation comparison. We released that product and tested it with our users. Feedback & analytics & competitors` research showed, that we need to pivot. The release of the 1st product took us 13 months!!! (Please, don’t ask me why it was so long, we were first-time founders and made many mistakes). Then using existing technology, we adapted old product to the new concept only in 14 days. Every 2 weeks we were releasing new builds, talking to users and adding new features. The new concept (new Flawless App) is the current product. So we cut functions for designer & dev cooperation and made the comparison the stand-alone product. For a long time, we were in testing mode. We were polishing current Flawless App and adding requested features (comparison of a long feeds with scrolling, support of horizontal comparison etc). Finally, we made a product we are proud of (and released it publicly).
7. > Can you be prepared to talk about these (InVision tools/Marvel)? Be honest about your current status.
Yeah, we have integration concepts, which are actually designed and shared with InVision Hear of Partnerships. Anyway, such integrations will not happen soon, so we didn’t mention this in the talk.
8. > Recently we launched a separate page for enterprise sales (http://flawlessapp.io/for-teams), so we'll be able to build a funnel for bulk sales. Who is doing the funnel building, and how? How are you finding prospects, attracting them, and converting them?
We had a panic attack from your question. As we are doing only cold emails for getting enterprise sales and it doesn’t really work...Mobile agencies don’t answer on our emails so far… Well, people leave an email for enterprise sales but it happens magically now :) We wrote a BS answer for this question: “We are gathering analytics right now and will have full data to make decisions in approximately a month”.
9. > What happens when developers change from Xcode to React Native?
Developers can use Flawless App even if they use React Native. They need to have iOS simulator, that’s the main requirements.
10. > two growth path possibilities… YC may have totally different perspectives, of course.
YC partner was interested in getting recurring revenue (subscription), which means service for all mobile team. We have a concept for such service, which will be a comparison on real devices, as well as comparison inside iOS simulator.
11. > I pay approximately ~$500/year/seat for JetBrains tools, or ~$10/month/seat for many kinds of dev tools. Think about this order of magnitude.
That what YC partner wanted to hear :) Our current sales looked so small! Anyway, it’s normal to start small, but it’s important to have a plan how to grow. We got a question on how we will get users and we provide a well-prepared answer to that.
12. > What happens when you estimate bottom-up?
That is the right approach, we didn’t have time to make that estimation so fast. Well, we had a top-down answer and decided to tell it with confidence in case it will be asked :) Luckily, we didn’t get this question.
13. > What are broader strategies for growing above and beyond this one tool?
We made a small list of tactics, which we told the YC partner (as he asked us):
13.1 Where do new users come from? How do users find out about you?
We got users from Blablacar and BuzzFeed by writing cold emails. We also work with iOS newsletters, articles, tweets from opinion leaders, designer recommendations, cold sales in Twitter, Linkedin.
13.2 What is your distribution strategy? How will you grow?
Distribution via website and Setapp. We’ll keep working on content-marketing, cold sales will add education materials and newsletters to get leads. Referral system for current users and will engage with more opinion leaders. Then test different paid acquisition channels. Not the best answer, but better than nothing :)
14. > Here are some challenging questions that may help you prepare:
We almost died after 59 questions which we wrote answers to. So we talked about answers to challenging questions you mentioned, but we weren’t prepared to answer clearly on them in 20 seconds. Again, this time we didn’t receive this questions, but it’s a good task for us to prepare for them!
15. > I have a project team of 50 people, with 10 iOS devs, 10 Android devs, and 10 React devs, I would buy it for all the iOS devs.
As we saw from YC interview, they want sales… And we really want to improve Flawless App for the community, but we can’t do this fast without funding. If you feel that Flawless App can bring value into your development process and help your developers work faster. I'd really appreciate if you support us! So, we can send a follow-up email to YC with a good social proof - we got additional sales just after our call!
Thank you again for all your help!!! You did so much for us already. let me know if I can help you back somehow :) Many love from small Ukrainian startup!