Applying to Y Combinator was one of those things I had had in the back of my mind for a long time.
For anyone who does not know, Y Combinator is one of the most important startup accelerators in the world. Some huge companies have gone through it and, for many founders, getting into YC is a kind of validation stamp on the potential of their projects.
If you get in, they offer you investment, bring you into a multi-month programme in San Francisco, surround you with very strong founders you can learn a lot from and help you focus your company better so it can go as far as possible.
I applied and got rejected. To be more precise, I did not even make it to the interview. And although it bothered me at first, today I know that the whole process helped me a lot.
It forced me to think deeply about what I was doing wrong, how I was presenting my idea, who I was selling to, how much importance I was giving to the product compared with marketing and, above all, whether I was moving at the speed required to build a startup.
In this article, I share my experience applying to Y Combinator, the idea I presented, how I tried to differentiate myself from other projects and the most important lessons I took from the process.
What Y Combinator Is and Why So Many Founders Want to Get In
The model of what is often considered the most prestigious and selective startup accelerator in the world is to invest in startups at very early stages.
Sometimes these are companies that already have a pool of users, and other times they are little more than an idea with a team behind it.
The appeal is clear: YC provides funding, but what really matters is everything it offers around that.
During the programme, you spend several months working alongside other founders, partners and investors, you receive constant feedback, they help you understand your market better, push you to speak to customers, prepare you to raise investment and force you to move fast.
On top of that, being part of Y Combinator gives you access to a network that is very difficult to build on your own. That is why the competition is brutal.
They receive thousands and thousands of applications in every batch, and the acceptance rate is extremely low. In fact, people often say that it is harder to get into Y Combinator than into some elite universities. I knew it was not going to be easy, but even so, I thought I had a chance.
The Idea I Applied With: A Crypto-Friendly Bank
My thesis was a crypto-friendly bank designed to solve a very specific problem: today, many companies related to crypto have huge problems accessing traditional banking services. Not because they are doing anything illegal, but because banks see them as high-risk clients.
An exchange, a derivatives platform, a Web3 company or any business that touches crypto forces the bank to carry out additional checks: more compliance, more monitoring, more regulatory risk and, ultimately, more work. That is why many banks prefer not to complicate things.
It is cheaper for them to reject this type of client than to create a specialised department capable of understanding and managing them properly, which, in my opinion, opens up a very interesting business opportunity.
My initial idea was not to start directly as a bank, because building a bank from scratch is extremely complex. The strategy was to begin with a crypto payment gateway with very low fees.
For example, offering companies a 0.1% fee compared with the 3% they might pay with other processors. If a company goes from paying 3% to paying 0.1%, the difference is huge.
Then, on top of that base, the idea would be to gradually build financial services: accounts, deposits, transfers and payments between companies. Basically, to create the banking infrastructure needed by companies that are currently underserved by the traditional system.
So, although Y Combinator rejected me, I still think the thesis is good, because the market, the problem and the opportunity exist and have not been properly covered.
Applying as a Solo Founder
One key point in my experience is that I applied alone. I am a solo founder and, on top of that, I have a technical profile.
That has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that I can build the product because I do not depend on someone else to launch a first version. I can code, iterate and test quickly.
The disadvantage is that many accelerators and investors tend to prefer teams with several co-founders. In their eyes, a team helps distribute pressure, combine skills and reduce certain risks.
Even so, I did not want that to stop me. If the idea was good and the application was presented well, I believed I had a chance.
How I Tried to Differentiate My Application
One of the things I was most clear about was that I could not submit a generic application. When thousands of startups apply at the same time, you need to stand out somehow. If you do the same as everyone else, you become one more applicant and, if that happens, you are out.
In the application there was a section where you had to send a video introducing yourself, so I thought about doing something different from most people.
My name is Hugo Pino and I thought: “It is embarrassing to be called Pino and not know how to do a handstand.” So I decided to record the video doing a handstand against a wall.
The idea was to play with an English phrase related to turning the banking industry upside down. Something like “I want to turn the banking industry upside down”, while I was literally upside down.
Was it silly? Yes. But there was intention behind it. I wanted that, if someone was reviewing dozens of similar videos, they would at least remember mine. I do not know if it worked. Probably not enough, because they did not accept me, but I still think the logic was good: differentiation matters a lot.
Differentiating Yourself Is Not Optional
One of the lessons I have internalised the most is that, if you do not differentiate yourself, you do not achieve anything important.
If you do exactly the same as everyone else, you get similar results to everyone else. And in startups, that is usually not enough.
There is a very well-known book, Purple Cow, that talks precisely about this. If you see a normal cow in a field, it does not catch your attention. If you see a purple cow, you remember it.
In a saturated environment, being good is not enough. You have to be memorable. That is also why I tried to include small differentiating details in the application.
For example, I created an analytics dashboard and placed the Y Combinator partners in an aesthetic inspired by Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles. It was a visual joke. Something creative. A small detail that did not take too long to prepare, but that could make someone remember my application.
As I said, my goal was for the application not to look like just another one. Although the result was not what I expected, I am still convinced that, in these processes, differentiation is key. So what I would change if I could go back in time is not the intention, but the execution.
The Feeling Before the Rejection
When I submitted the application, I felt quite confident. I had worked on the idea, prepared the video and reviewed the application. I even hired an English teacher to improve the way I explained the project and to practise for a possible interview.
Because YC’s process has several stages: first they review your application and then, if they are interested, you move on to a very quick interview of around ten minutes, where they ask direct questions and decide whether you get in or not.
I was already preparing for that interview. I thought what I was presenting was strong, so I had the same feeling you get when you leave an exam thinking you have absolutely nailed it.
However, I failed. I did not make it to the interview. I was rejected in the first stage.
How I Think the Selection Process Works
I do not know exactly how Y Combinator’s review system works from the inside, but from what I have read and heard, several people review the applications and then score them. The best ones move on to the interview and the rest are left out.
My feeling is that my application may have landed somewhere in the middle. It was not bad enough for them to think that what they had in front of them made no sense, but it was not good enough to stand out among the best either.
Maybe they gave it a six when the cut-off was an eight; maybe the idea was not understood as well as I thought; maybe the market seemed interesting to them but not the execution; maybe the fact that I was a solo founder weighed against me; or maybe there were simply hundreds of applications better than mine.
The important conclusion is different: if I did not get through, it is because it was not good enough. And that has to be accepted.
The Rejection Forced Me to Review My Attitude
When I received the rejection email, it annoyed me. I am not going to pretend otherwise. I genuinely thought I had real chances.
After the first reaction, once I had cooled down, I tried to look at it differently. What can I learn from this rejection? What was I doing wrong? What could I improve next time? And from all those questions, important lessons started to appear.
Some of them have to do with Y Combinator, and others are much broader and can be applied to any startup that wants to make the leap. Let’s look at them.
Lesson 1: Packaging Matters More Than I Thought
I am technical. I am a programmer. And for a long time, I had a very product-focused mindset.
I thought that if you build a good product, marketing comes on its own. But it does not work like that. The product matters a lot, but the packaging matters too.
How you present it, how you explain it, what narrative you build, what feeling you create, what problem you communicate, what opportunity you make people see… A good product explained badly can look mediocre, and an average product with a powerful narrative can seem much more attractive.
You see this everywhere. In the supermarket, for example, you can buy “fitness” cereals, with protein, no sugar and fibre, and pay three times more than you would for normal cereals.
Why? Because of the packaging, the perception, the way they make you feel when buying them. For many reasons.
Well, something similar happens with startups. Having a good idea is not enough. You have to sell it well, and I think one of my mistakes was not explaining my thesis with enough strength.
I knew what I wanted to build, but perhaps I did not communicate it in as clear, ambitious and attractive a way as I should have.
Lesson 2: Marketing Is Not Secondary
Another important mental shift was understanding that marketing is not something you think about at the end, once the product is polished.
It is not “first I build, then I will sell”. That may work in very specific cases, but it is not the norm. Even when a product is excellent, marketing still exists.
Sometimes marketing comes through word of mouth, other times through podcasts, recommendations, press visibility… There is always a channel through which people discover, understand and want a product.
An excellent product can make users talk about it, but for that to happen, someone first has to find it, try it and understand why it is special.
My mistake was focusing too much on improving the product and too little on selling it. Something that, today, I have learned can be extremely dangerous.
You can spend months building something nobody has asked you for, or you can create features your ideal customer does not even value. If you are not able to show them how you can help them and create a need for them, nothing else matters.
Lesson 3: You Need to Build With Real Feedback
For a while, instead of going aggressively into the market, I locked myself too much inside the product. I analysed it, overanalysed it and told myself it was not ready yet. That I had to improve this, that a certain feature was missing, that the product was not good enough.
It is a very demanding mindset, but it can become a trap because, if you do not speak to real customers, you do not know what to improve. You are just imagining while trying to put yourself in their shoes. And very often, you imagine wrong.
It has happened to me before. Build, build, build, launch, and then discover that the market is not interested in what you have made.
Now I see it very clearly: you need to speak to customers earlier, get fast feedback and improve from there. Not from a cave, not from insecurity and not from perfectionism.
Lesson 4: I Was Speaking to the Wrong Customer
This was one of the most important lessons. Because I did not feel the product was good enough, I was not going to my ideal customer.
My real target is medium-sized companies, businesses that bill several million and need a serious solution for crypto payments. However, I was talking to much smaller businesses, such as retail shops or digital product sellers. People who did not represent my target market.
Why was I doing that? Because it was more comfortable, less scary and I did not yet feel I had the authority to approach larger companies. But that was a mistake.
If you speak to the wrong customer, you receive the wrong feedback. And if you build based on that feedback, you end up creating a product for someone who is not your ideal customer.
For example, I added features designed for more crypto-native, anti-bank users who wanted to control their own wallets and operate in a completely decentralised way.
But that is not my target customer. My customer is looking for simplicity, wants the funds to be custodied, wants to operate easily and solve a business problem, not live constantly worried about twelve seed words. That difference completely changes the product.
Lesson 5: Speed, Speed and Speed
Another key lesson was speed. In a startup, moving fast is vital.
Not only building fast, but also deciding fast, responding fast, testing fast and learning fast.
In the Y Combinator application, there was a question related to artificial intelligence. They asked you to share a conversation with an AI tool that you were proud of, to see how you used it in your day-to-day work.
I saw it and thought I could not be bothered to answer it. Also, many of my conversations with ChatGPT were in Spanish. So I did not complete it. Looking back now, I think that was a mistake. AI is at the centre of the current startup ecosystem.
If YC asks you how you use AI, ignoring it can cost you points. Not answering a question like that is shooting yourself in the foot.
Since then, I have changed the way I work. Now I try to use artificial intelligence more in English, improve my communication in English and create technical content to reach a more global audience. Because if you want to play in an international market, English is not optional.
Lesson 6: Think Bigger
Another lesson I take from this is that I need to think bigger. Not only in terms of product vision, but also in terms of who I dare to sell to.
Sometimes what you feel is not exactly impostor syndrome. It is more a feeling of “I am not good enough yet”, “what I have is not perfect”, “I cannot go and speak to that company”, “I am not in a position to ask for a meeting with someone big”… A lot of self-imposed barriers that lead nowhere.
If you wait until you feel ready, you arrive late. A startup is not built by waiting for emotional permission. It is built by going into the market, speaking to people, receiving rejections, adjusting and trying again.
You do not need to have the perfect product. You need to solve a real problem well enough and improve from there.
Lesson 7: Adapt the Narrative to the Moment
The last major detail I would change in a future application like this is the narrative.
Right now, artificial intelligence is the big topic in the startup ecosystem. That does not mean you should force AI into every product, but it does mean that, if AI has a real or potential role in your company, you need to study it and explain it.
I did not do that in my application. Not because I do not believe in AI, because I believe in it a lot, but because it was not going to be the immediate focus of the product, so I did not give it importance.
Now I think that was a communication mistake. It is not about lying or disguising the company. It is about better explaining where the product could go and why it fits with current market trends.
Investors do not only buy what you have today. They buy the narrative of what you could end up building.
What I Will Do Differently in the Next Application
I am clear that I am going to apply again. Not because I desperately need to get into Y Combinator, but because I want that opportunity. I want the environment, the networking, the partners, the founders, the pressure and the intensity.
The money would be useful, of course, but right now it is not the most important thing. I am alone, my expenses are low and I can keep building for quite a long time. What attracts me most is being surrounded by very good people and accelerating my learning.
That said, for the next application I will change several things. I will explain the thesis better, make the narrative stronger, show more real traction, speak to bigger customers, use AI better as part of the process and the product and, above all, arrive with more market feedback.
Not just product. Product plus distribution, plus marketing and plus sales. That is what I want to correct.
Why I Do Not See the Rejection as a Defeat
The fact that Y Combinator rejected me does not mean my idea is bad or that I cannot build it. It means my presentation was not strong enough.
Sometimes you need a slap of reality to correct things before it is too late. In fact, I am convinced that, if they had accepted me, I would have continued dragging bad habits with me, such as focusing too much on the product, not enough on distribution, having an unclear narrative and too little contact with the ideal customer.
The rejection forced me to look directly at all of that. And although it hurts at first, I know the lesson is very valuable.
Conclusion: Applying to Y Combinator Helped Me Even Though I Was Rejected
My experience applying to Y Combinator did not end the way I wanted. I was rejected before the interview, but the process gave me something important: clarity.
It made me see that having a good thesis is not enough; you need to know how to sell it. Building a product is not enough; you need distribution. Improving features is not enough; you need to speak to real customers. Differentiating yourself creatively is not enough; you need to differentiate yourself strategically.
And, above all, wanting to build something big is not enough. You have to act like someone who is building something big.
So I am going to keep trying. With Y Combinator and without Y Combinator, because, in the end, building a startup is about exactly that. You fall, you get back up, you get rejected again, you adjust, you learn and you keep going until something works.