List of YC interview questions

I went through my files and found a list of 121 YC interview questions I had compiled with the help of friends to prep for a YC interview some time ago.

These questions are grouped into 7 areas, all equally important:

1) Customer;
2) Founders;
3) Market;
4) Traction;
5) Problem;
6) Product;
7) Development

They seem easy, but are tough. If you can't articulate your answers directly and concisely to most of them, you’re probably missing something important about your business. Much more than questions to ace a YC interview, they are an extremely valuable tool for examining your business from a different angle and practicing conciseness while delving deep into strategy.

I also built a Michael Siebel AI Voice Agent you can use to practice.
👉 Click here and practice with the AI Voice Agent

And I also organized the questions in this Sheets where you can write your answers
📄 Download the question sheet here

If you find this useful, feel free to share.

Enjoy

List of YC interview questions

Customer

1. How do you know they need it?
2. Who needs what you’re making?
3. What are they doing now? What, exactly, makes you different from existing options?
4. How will customers and/or users find out about you?
5. Who is going to be your first paying customer?
6. What makes new users try you?
7. Who is your customer?
8. Who is the ideal first customer?
9. How will they know if your product has solved the problem?
10. How often(frequency)does your user have the problem?
11. Who is getting the most value out of your product?
12. Are they willing to pay?
13. How easy is it for your customer to find your product?
14. Which customers should you run away from?
15. Why do the reluctant users hold back?
16. Who needs what you’re making?
17. Where do new users come from?
18. How will customers and/or users find out about you?
19. Who would use your product?
20. How will customers and/or users find out about you?
21. What has surprised you about user behaviour?
22. What resistance will they have to trying you and how will you overcome it?
23. How are you understanding customer needs?
24. What do you understand about your users?
25. How are you meeting customers?

Founders

1. What have you learned so far from working on it?
2. What does each founder do on the team?
3. What’s the worst thing that has happened?
4. What’s an impressive thing you have done?
5. What’s the funniest thing that has happened to you?
6. Tell us something surprising you have done?
7. What domain expertise do you have?
8. What systems have you hacked?
9. Why did your team get together?
10. How did your team meet?
11. Are you open to changing your idea?
12. Who is “the boss”?

Market

1. What makes you different from your competitors?
2. Why isn’t someone already doing this?
3. What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
4. How large is the market that you are going after?
5. If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
6. What competition do you fear most?
7. How big an opportunity is there?
8. Who are your competitors?
9. Why isn’t someone already doing this?
10. Who might become competitors?
11. How do you know people want this?
12. What do you know about this space/product others don’t know?
13. How much money could you make per year?

Traction

1. Have you raised funding?
2. What are you using to measure how users are interacting with your product?
3. What 5-10 metrics are you measuring to understand how your product functions? Why those metrics?
4. When you build a new product or feature, what is the metric that will improve because of that feature/product?
5. What number do you track to show how well your company is doing?
6. What is your top level KPI(revenue,usage)?
7. What are the underlying metrics that contribute to achieving your top level KPI(newusers, retention of users, content created => DAUs at Social Cam)?
8. Which of these metrics are you trying to move this development cycle?
9. How many users do you have?
10. What is your burn rate?
11. How do you know customers need what you’re making?
12. What’s the conversion rate?
13. In what ways are you resourceful?
14. What is your distribution strategy?
15. What is your user growth rate?
16. Who is going to be your first paying customer?
17. How long can you go before funding?
18. How will you make money?
19. How much does customer acquisition cost?
20. How many users are paying?
21. What is your growth like?

Problem

1. Why did you choose this idea?
2. What problem are you solving?
3. What problem will be solved at the end of what you are doing?
4. What do we expect the result to be?
5. Can you state the problem clearly in two sentences?
6. Have you experienced the problem yourself?
7. Can you define this problem narrowly?
8. Who can you help first?
9. What can we address immediately?
10. How do we get the first indication this thing is working?
11. Is the problem solveable?
12. Why did you pick this idea to work on?
13. What do you understand that others don’t?
14. What are the top things users want?

Product

1. What are you building/doing?
2. Does your product actually solve the problem? Be truthful. How and why not?
3. Which customers should you go after first?
4. How do you find people who are willing to use your“bad”first versions of your product?
5. Who are the most desperate customers as how do you talk to them first?
6. Whose business is going to go out of business without using you?
7. Are you discounting or starting with a super low price? Are you consider this approach? If so, why?
8. How does your product work in more detail?
9. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options?
10. How is your product different?

Development

1. What part of your project are you going to build first?
2. How long is your product dev cycle? What is causing it to be that long?
3. Who is writing down notes at your product dev meeting?
4. Which category does each of your brainstormed ideas fit: New features/interactions on existing ones; bug fixes/other maintenance; A/B tests?
5. How easy/medium/hard are they to do?
6. How can you restate the hard ideas (disaggregate idea into smaller ideas)?
7. What parts of hard ideas are useless or hard? Are there other options?
8. Which hard idea will improve act the KPI the most? Which medium? Which easy?
9. What is the spec for the product/feature we want to build?
10. What parts of hard ideas are useless or hard? Are there other options?
11. Which hard idea will improve act the KPI the most? Which medium? Which easy?
12. What is the spec for the product/feature we want to build?
13. Will you reincorporate as a US company?
14. Where is the rocket science here?
15. Who would you hire or how would you add to your team?
16. What problems/hurdles are you anticipating?
17. What is the next step with the product evolution?
18. What obstacles will you face and how will you overcome them?
19. What are you going to do next?
20. What part of your project are you going to build first?
21. What’s the biggest mistake you have made?
22. If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
23. Who would be your next hire?
24. Will your team stick at this?
25. Who in your team does what?
26. How do we know your team will stick together?