Y Combinator announces YC Launch, a way for its portfolio to advertise to the public TechCrunch
Y Combinator Announced YC Launch, a platform where anyone can sort the accelerator startups by industry, batch and launch date to discover new products. The popular accelerator, which has seeded Instacart, Coinbase, OpenSea and Dropbox, invites users to vote for newly launched startups “to help them climb the leaderboard, try out demos products and learn about the founding team.”
In a blog post announcing the news, Y Combinator said that the program has been around for years but is only available to insiders of YC founders.
Y Combinator is using Launch to target founders, developers, investors, and job seekers looking for the “Stripes and Airbnbs of the future.” Meanwhile, the founders of Y Combinator can launch any day at any time. YC Communications Director Lindsay Amos said YC founders are currently engaged in an announcementable ramp-up via Launch Before Launch Day. For me, it makes the biennial event a more regular one.
“We do this to solve a problem every founder has: reaching out to early customers and investors,” Amos said by email.
Launching YC is like Y Combinator’s strategically sound answer to one of the loudest criticisms of its model in recent years: as its cohort size has increased, it’s harder than ever to stand out in a group. As it is becoming more and more difficult to stand out inside YC and with the importance of distribution for early stage startups, YC offers a way for startups to make more noise a little can make the program’s cost of equity more attractive.
From my perspective, it looks like accelerators are doing a not-so-subtle swipe at Product Hunt, a site of nearly a decade – and Y Combinator alumni – that’s the right place for people founders launch their products and services. user. Unlike Product Hunt, Y Combinator doesn’t have a comment section but they are taking feature requests. For now, Launch will only be available to recently supported YC companies and product updates from YC alumni.
In response to a question about the overlap between the two organizations, Amos wrote that “we encourage YC founders to launch on multiple platforms – from YC Contacts to Product Search to Hacker News to launch YC – to reach customers, investors and candidates. “
