I wish it had shareable urls for the rejection. Anyway, I'll copy paste here:

    Idea: Startup incubator incubator. Our customers would be people like Paul Graham before he started YC. We would've helped him start YC.

    Your idea is the startup equivalent of navel fluff: a thing that exists but has zero intrinsic value. YC already solves the problem you’re vaguely describing. Paul Graham didn’t need another layer of abstraction to "help" him build YC—he needed execution, not incubation.

    Market Problem: Who’s your customer here? Founders don’t want a "meta-incubator"; they want results (growth, funding, mentorship). Would Sam Altman have used your service before YC? Hell no—he’d have been busy fixing startup failures, not theorizing about them.

    Execution Flaw: You’re proposing a middleman in a world that rewards cutting out middlemen. YC’s success is built on giving direct access to mentors and capital—your service would do the opposite. How do you plan to add value above YC’s existing network? Magic and good intentions?

    Team Flaw: Startups hate "helping founders" as a business model. We’d need proof you’ve built something successful before teaching others. Your pitch reeks of "we want to help help people help people." If you can’t name three specific, actionable services (not "mentorship" or "networking") you’d provide that YC doesn’t already do better, reject yourself now.

    Fix (If Possible):

        Stop chasing meta-ness. Found something real people pay for now.
        Pick a single niche YC can’t/won’t serve (e.g., pre-product-market-fit NFT startups? Ethical AI accelerators?). Stop trying to "solve" incubation itself.
        Demonstrate you’ve built something, not just dreamt of platforms.

    Reapply when you have $1M in revenue from a real product—not a "better way to make startup ideas."

I went in expecting this to be a "roast me" style AI wrapper. Pleasantly surprised to see it be more concrete and actionable.

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).

very good playground to test ideas though it can be used as a 'gospel' to benchmark ideas.Brutally honest.

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.

Pretty funny. And I agree that the UI is pixel perfect haha

Utterly brilliant and not without utility as a means to test your proposals.

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...

It's so brutal and has biases and stereotypes like no other place I have tried.

Love this. Any chance you could share the prompt?

would someone pay for something like this?

Very good way to intercept YC Startup ideas :D

yc rejection simulator would be state of the art application flaw detector at scale that helpful both for founders and VCs

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