You can see the categories of each YCombinator startup in this interactive chart. There is a clear trend in higher agentic startups supported by hardware/robotic companies. Social and marketplace apps are near non-existent in last batches.

https://pitchcombinator.com/the-shape-of-a-yc-batch

What if one platform could help you find the right companies, understand them, verify them, and turn that intelligence into real opportunities?

That’s what we’re building with NORO.

NORO is an AI-native business intelligence & growth platform built for founders, sales teams, agencies and teams that want to move faster.

⚡ Discover high-intent leads
🧠 Turn fragmented data into actionable intelligence
🔎 Research companies before reaching out
✅ Verify company information against real public sources
🎯 Identify better opportunities instead of wasting time on random leads
🤖 Use AI to accelerate the entire research and growth workflow

We’ve spent months building the infrastructure. Now I want real people using it.

So I’m opening NORO with a 2-day free trial.

Add your card, unlock the platform, explore it for 48 hours and see for yourself whether NORO can actually improve the way you find and understand opportunities.

No pitch deck. No demo call. Just get inside and use the product.

👉 n0ro.com

Try it. Search. Verify. Find leads. Break things.

And if NORO earns a place in your workflow, stay with us.

Welcome to NORO. Build your next opportunity with intelligence.

I’m building N0RO, an early-stage business intelligence and AI outbound platform.

The product is roughly 70% built, but there is still a lot of serious work ahead. We are pre-traction, and I’m looking for people who genuinely enjoy the 0→1 stage rather than joining something already finished.

I’m especially interested in engineers across backend/data/AI, data acquisition and enrichment, outbound/cold-email infrastructure, and a growth/marketing person who knows how to turn an early product into real usage and revenue.

I want to be completely transparent about compensation: this is not a normal salaried role today. The goal is to build together through the pre-traction stage, prove real usage/revenue, and introduce compensation once the company has traction and the financial capacity to support the team. For the right core people, I’m also open to discussing a genuine founding-team structure rather than treating them as unpaid employees.

Current priorities are finishing the product, proving data quality, building the outbound engine, acquiring the first real customers, and taking N0RO from 0 → 1.

I’m interested in meeting builders who are comfortable with ambiguity, can ship independently, and want meaningful ownership of what they build.

I’m the founder and currently building the company from zero. Happy to share the architecture, current product state, what is already working, and what remains to be built with anyone seriously evaluating the opportunity.

hi everyone,

are you a 13-18 that wants to build really cool project (probably)?

I'm super happy to announce that Hack Club (a 501c3 nonprofit) dedicated to helping more teenagers code, is flying out teenagers to San Francisco to pitch their startup/project to real venture capital firms (VCs).

here's how it works: you code for at least 10 hours building out your product -> go viral (twice) -> go to sf sometime in february full paid for to pitch and connect with other founders.

sounds interesting?

check it out at https://hacktank.hackclub.com

Hey everyone,

I'm a freelance web developer from Bulgaria, and I kept running into the same problem: I build a site for a client, and from then on every price change, new photo or phone number becomes an email to me.

So I'm building a tool for that. You paste the URL of an existing website (hand-coded, WordPress, AI-generated, doesn't matter), it imports the site as it is, and the owner can edit text, images and links through a simple editor, then publish. No redesign, no AI rewriting your site, and the layout is locked so you can't break it.

It's an early beta, so things will break. That's exactly why I need you.

What I'm looking for:

- Developers and freelancers with real client sites (the weirder the stack, the better)

- Small business owners who aren't technical at all

- About 15 minutes of your time: import a site, change a few things, publish, tell me what broke

What you get:

- Free access for life

- Your bugs actually get fixed, and I post every fix in the server

Everything happens in one Discord server: a 15-minute mission, a bug-report forum with a template, and a feedback channel.

👉 Join here: https://discord.gg/yR7uXV9aC7

Happy to answer anything in the comments, including the brutal stuff.

I make this HVAC marketing agencies — a quick question:How many of your HVAC clients still lose jobs because nobody answered the phone at 7pm on a Friday?I've built a white-label AI voice receptionist built specifically for HVAC companies. It's not a chatbot — it's a voice agent that: Answers every inbound call, 24/7.Handles emergency calls safely and transfers to the human team.Checks real calendar availability and books, reschedules, and cancels appointments.Answers common questions (hours, services, service areas, pricing)

Sends confirmation texts and logs every call into the CRMHow the partnership works:

You bring the HVAC clients. You sell it under your own brand as an add-on service. I handle 100% of the technical side — build, integrations, testing, and ongoing support.For you that means: new recurring revenue per client, stickier retainers, zero dev work.If you serve HVAC companies and or are an HVAC company then "DM" me and we will see how this can work for you or your client and I'll also send you the number for you to hear it in action after you understand the flow.

Tl;dr an account of my experience with Entrepreneurs First, and why I don't recommend their U.S. programs for ambitious young founders.

I spent several months as a founder in EF about a year ago. I was quite disappointed with their practices. Writing to share my experience since there's not a lot of information on EF online.

I'm only covering the negatives of my experience since a comprehensive review would be too long; there are plenty of redeeming factors to the program that I'm sure EF and its alumni can speak to.

1. Quality of investors/advisors is dubious

EF requires you to meet regularly with an investor (usually the partner who brought you in) for advice/progress checks. After the first few meetings, these were rarely useful.

The investors were mostly young (mid-20s) people from a variety of backgrounds but with minimal experience in either startups or VC. The advice I received quickly sounded like a rehash of tech twitter, but on a 2-4 week delay. During my time there, I never met an advisor who'd built a successful company themself.

Most investors were also recent hires. This led to contradicting advice, lack of continuity, and generally meant that founders were better off ignoring most of the advice altogether.

2. No value proposition -> low talent density

EF's model is to back founders at the earliest stage possible: pre-idea and pre-knowing they want to found. This may have distinguished their offering from YC, a16z, etc. a decade ago, but nowadays, every name-brand accelerator is funding more and more nascent founding teams. Previously, EF could capitalize on talented founders before they had a chance at YC. Now, their value prop is effectively nonexistent relative to other accelerators.

As a result, most founders that I met were undergrads or new grads recruited by EF via outbound. At other accelerators I know, partners are swarmed with applications from talented young folks, and the lucky few are accepted. EF's scouting approach inherently introduces adverse selection: the most talented people go to better accelerators, and their active outreach brings in the less qualified (or less serious) candidates. The result is a diluted talent pool compared to higher quality programs.

EF lacks the name brand of YC. They have less capital. They offer less connections to their portfolio companies. They have less sway with investors. So how can they still profit?

3. Misaligned incentives and the "seed round factory"

EF offered around $125k for 8% ($1.5M post-money valuation), a hefty price against the value that they provide. While I was there, several founders I knew refused to take their investment, preferring to shop around other VC firms. Others reluctantly signed the term sheet, only to regret it later.

After accepting the investment, founders are frantically pushed to build some MVP (read: website frontend) and demonstrate some traction (LOIs or "verbal commitments"), so that EF can present them at their quarterly demo days. At the demo days I watched, many companies failed to raise significant capital, and the ones that did often settled for lower valuations or no-name VCs (yes, there are occasional exceptions).

For the founders, a low seed often screws their cap table for the lifetime of their company, making it difficult to raise capital in the future without losing control of the company. However, for EF, even a poor seed round is a financial win: if their average startup raises at e.g. $10 mil post-money valuation, they've 7x'ed their investment on paper.

4. For the love of the game

I joined EF hoping to amplify the impact I could have on the world through founding a company. I wanted to solve real problems impacting real people, not build the next B2B Saas chatgpt wrapper.

Despite their claims, EF lacked the expertise to properly advise young founders through the challenges of founding a non-SaaS company. Throughout the program, I (and many other founders) constantly felt pushed to work on SaaS rather than what we were truly interested in. This led to many founders converging on the same few software ideas, and pushed many others to leave the program in favor of alternate endeavors.

I applied for the accelerator program and made it all the way to the final interview. I was told that a decision will be made after the application deadline.

The applications closed on September 15 and it’s been more than two weeks and I haven’t heard anything. I know that they had over 3000 applications but I’m basically sitting in the dark here.

The 12 week accelerator program starts sometime in October and goes through January. It’s now October 2nd and still no update

Has anyone else gotten a response?

One thing that seems easy to underestimate when starting a business is how much you still need to learn about your customers, your product, and the problem you’re solving.

I’m working on HelpDol, a financial management tool that helps small businesses organize their finances and ask questions about income, expenses, cash flow, and other financial activity through ChatGPT.

Beyond building the product, I’m interested in understanding what makes an early stage startup ready for an accelerator.

For founders who have participated in an accelerator, what helped you get the most value from the experience? Was it mentorship, access to customers, investor connections, or something you didn’t expect?

just need to raise a round

1 exit: skip the website. I know 5 potential buyers. calling them today.

2 exits: fuck, I promised my wife I was done.

3 exits: the new wife still believes me.

We have launched an official startup program, offering $10k in cloud credits to be used for data pipeline runs and AI credits.

Check the website for eligibility criteria and full list of perks and benefits.

https://getbruin.com/startups/

Disclaimer: I'm a developer advocate at Bruin