A live session with founders who have been through YC, where we go line by line and refine what actually matters, before you submit.
Limited seats available
$499
One-time. Before the deadline.
HireCade runs this session independently. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or run by Y Combinator, and no outcome in the application process is promised.
Y Combinator reads thousands of applications and spends minutes on each one, so applications are judged on clarity: what you are making in one line, the problem and who has it, why this team, why now, and whatever traction exists, stated plainly. Vague, over-explained answers get filtered out before the idea is understood.
It is not that founders have bad ideas. It is that their applications do not communicate the right things clearly. The founders who get interviews are often not the ones with the best companies. They are the ones who best answered the questions YC actually cares about.
That is a writing and judgment problem, and it is fixable in an afternoon if someone shows you which sentences are doing work and which are padding. It is close to unfixable on your own, because your draft always reads as clear to the person who wrote it.
It is not that founders have bad ideas. It is that their applications do not communicate the right things clearly. YC reads thousands of applications. Reviewers spend minutes, not hours, on each one. If your answers are vague, over-explained, or focused on the wrong things, you get filtered out before anyone sees your potential.
This session is a focused, live review of your YC application with founders who have been through the process. We go line by line, not to polish your grammar, but to cut what does not matter and sharpen what does. You leave with a clearer, stronger application that answers what YC is actually evaluating.
Deadlines make this worse. Most applications are written in one pass in the last few days, which is exactly when an outside reader is most valuable and least available. The session exists to be that reader while there is still time to act on it.
If the honest answer is that there is not much to write about yet, the application is not your problem. Building is, and the Founder Bootcamp is the 3 month version of fixing that: an MVP, first users, and early revenue, which is also the raw material a good application is made of.
We work through the application in the order a reviewer reads it, and stop on every answer that is doing less work than it looks like it is doing.
Part 1
By the end: One sentence that survives being read quickly, in isolation, by someone who has never heard of you.
Part 2
By the end: A problem statement a reviewer believes, because it is specific enough to be falsifiable.
Part 3
By the end: A team answer that reads as a reason, not a resume.
Part 4
By the end: A why now answer that explains the window, instead of describing the weather.
Part 5
By the end: The strongest true fact about your progress, stated first and without hedging.
Part 6
By the end: A submit-ready application that is shorter than the one you arrived with and says more.
The exact wording of the form changes between batches, so these are the areas the application covers rather than a transcript of the current version. The mistakes in the third column are the ones that show up in almost every first draft we read.
| Application question | What a strong answer contains | Most common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| What are you making? | One plain sentence naming the product and who uses it, with no category jargon and no vision statement. | Two paragraphs of positioning that leave the reader unsure what the product does. |
| What problem are you solving, and for whom? | A specific, credible description of the problem and a named kind of person who has it today. | A market-size framing that describes an industry rather than a person with a problem. |
| Why did you pick this idea? | The concrete thing you saw or lived through that made this obvious to you before it was obvious to others. | Passion language with no origin story and nothing only you would know. |
| Why now? | A change in technology, cost, regulation, or behaviour that was not true a couple of years ago. | Naming a trend everyone already knows about, with no link to why it opens a window for you. |
| How far along are you? | What exists, what people do with it, and the single most convincing number, stated first. | Burying a real user or a real dollar under a paragraph about the roadmap. |
| How do you make money? | The mechanism, the price, and whether anyone has paid it yet, in that order. | A list of future revenue streams instead of the one you would actually charge for next month. |
| Why this team? | Evidence: what each founder has built or shipped, and how long you have worked together. | A biography of job titles that could belong to any team building anything. |
| Who are your competitors, and what do you understand that they do not? | Honest naming of real alternatives, including the spreadsheet people use today, plus one sharp insight. | Claiming no competitors, which reads as not having looked. |
Plan for a few focused hours to write a first draft and several passes after that, spread over more than one day. The writing is quick. The thinking behind the one-line description, the why now answer, and what you lead with is what takes time, and it is much faster once someone has marked up your draft.
The common failure is writing the whole thing the night before the deadline, in one pass, with no external reader. Every weak answer in that version is weak in the same way: it explains context that the reader does not need before it says the thing the reader is looking for.
Write the draft early, get it reviewed, then spend the remaining time cutting. Applications almost always improve by getting shorter, because shorter forces you to decide what the single most convincing fact about your company is.
The HireCade YC application review is $499, paid once, for a live group session led by founders who have been through the YC process. You bring a draft, we review it line by line, and you get a recording afterwards. It is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator.
Seats are limited because a group review only works if every application in the room gets read properly. If you want the session, book before the seats for that round are gone rather than in the final days before the deadline.
You have never applied to YC before and want to make sure you are not making the mistakes everyone makes the first time.
You have applied before and did not get in. You want a fresh perspective on what is holding your application back.
You have something to show and want help presenting it in a way that actually resonates with how the application is evaluated.
Book before the batch deadline
Seats are limited. Do not leave your application to chance.
Y Combinator is one of the most competitive startup programs in the world. Getting in is not just about having a great idea. It is about communicating that idea, your traction, and your team in a way that cuts through thousands of other applications.
A live review with founders who have been through the YC process gives you an outside perspective that is impossible to get from reading guides or asking friends. We know what the application is testing because we have been evaluated against the same criteria. The session is direct, practical, and focused entirely on getting your application into the best possible shape before you submit.
Most of the weak answers we see are symptoms of something upstream. If the traction answer is thin, the fix is users, and recruiting people to interview is faster than waiting for organic ones. If the product answer is thin, the fix is shipping, which is what our product build service and the digital marketing course exist for. Come back to the application once one of those is true.
After the session, the useful next step is rehearsal rather than more editing. Founders who get interviews have to explain the same answers out loud, quickly, to someone interrupting them, so practise that with mock interviews or on the community with founders who will push back.
HireCade runs this session independently. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or run by Y Combinator, and no outcome in the application process is promised.
What founders reach for around this session: the programs that build the thing you are applying with, free tools for drafting, and the products you will need once you are hiring.
3 months, a cohort of 4, and an MVP with first users at the end.
Distribution, so the traction answer writes itself next time.
Build with large language models, RAG, and agents.
Useful if writing clearly in English is part of what slows the application down.
For founders who want a strong fallback while they build.
The full catalogue in one place.
Map the product and the story before you try to compress them into a form.
Prototype the demo you want to point at in your application.
Get a second reader on your draft between sessions.
Tighten the founder background you are about to describe.
How good interviewers probe answers, which is how the YC interview feels.
Practise explaining your company out loud under time pressure.
Keep technical recall sharp if you are the one building.
Writing on building, hiring, and early-stage decisions.
Get the next version shipped while you wait on a decision.
Recruit the users you need to interview to make the traction answer real.
Unlimited jobs and candidates when you start hiring.
Pre-vetted engineers for the build you cannot do alone.
Pay international contractors compliantly before you have an entity everywhere.
Employ people in other countries without setting up local entities.
Hiring, screening, building, and employment products.
You should have a draft ready. The session is a review, not a writing workshop, so the more you have written, the more useful the feedback will be.
Even a rough draft is fine. Rough answers are often more useful to review than polished ones, because the polish is usually hiding the sentence that needs to change.
It is $499, paid once. That covers the live group session, the line-by-line review of your application, and a recording sent afterwards so you can work through the feedback again while you edit.
Seats are limited, because a group review only works if every application in the room is read properly.
Generic advice covers what YC says it looks for. This session covers your specific application: your wording, your framing, and your blind spots.
It is the difference between reading a book about interviews and doing a mock interview with someone who has hired people before. Guides tell you the criteria. A reviewer tells you which of your sentences fails them.
No. This is an independent review service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or run by Y Combinator, and nobody involved is speaking on YC's behalf.
The session is led by founders who have been through the YC process and have been evaluated against the same criteria you are about to be evaluated against.
Founders who have been through the Y Combinator process lead the review. They read your answers the way a reviewer with limited time reads them, and tell you where attention drops.
The feedback is direct. If an answer is not working, you will be told why in the session rather than left to guess after it.
Sessions run ahead of the application deadline for the batch you are applying to, with enough time left to act on the feedback and rewrite.
Deadlines move between batches, so we confirm the exact date and time when you reserve a seat. Book early rather than in the final days, when there is no room left to rewrite.
Any stage is fine. YC accepts pre-product ideas as well as companies with significant revenue, so there is no stage at which the application stops being a writing problem.
What matters is how you present where you are and where you are going, which is exactly what this session works on.
Yes. You receive a recording after the session so you can revisit the feedback as you finalise your application.
Most founders use it the same way: rewrite once from memory, then replay the section about their own answers and cut again.
Yes. The review is about how clearly you communicate the company, not about your code. Non-technical founders usually get the most value in the team and traction answers, where the instinct is to over-explain.
If the gap is that nothing is built yet, that is a different problem from a writing problem. Either get a first version built or be straight in the application about what exists today.
Set aside the live session itself plus a proper rewrite afterwards. The rewrite is where the value lands, and it usually takes longer than the session.
Come with the draft already written. Founders who arrive with notes rather than answers spend the session writing instead of being reviewed.
No, and be sceptical of anyone who does. Selection is entirely YC's decision, and no review service has any influence over it.
What the session changes is the thing you control: whether your application says what you meant it to say, clearly, in the few minutes a reviewer spends on it.
They solve different problems. This is a single live session at $499 that sharpens an application you have already drafted. The Founder Bootcamp is $999/month for 3 months of building, with a cohort of 4, weekly live sessions, and a working MVP, first users, and early revenue at the end.
If you have a company and a deadline, take the review session. If you do not have a product yet, the bootcamp is the more honest starting point.
Tell us about your company and where your draft stands. We will confirm the next session ahead of the application deadline, the seat, and payment.
$499, one time, recording included.
Seats are limited so every application gets read properly.
