Raised a little over $1M as a pre seed after getting rejected from YC 3 times. AMA

[loujohn]

@yhong Your website if fire

 

[yhong]

@loujohn Thank you!

 

[sweetheart1]

@yhong

https://www.saluslabs.ai

maybe side question, why you did not add your team info in the website, is there a reason for that?

 

[yhong]

@sweetheart1 That’s not a bad idea haha. I kinda just threw it together without a whole lot of thought

 

[mercychild]

@holysoul93 We haven't raised yet, but we're about to close our first round. We've learned a LOT, a small part of us wants to wait for the status of YC this time around after going leaps and bounds further than we were before but we may have to make a decision before we hear back. Very weird situation to be in compared to our first application last cohort. Happy to answer any questions on how other accelerators do their interview processes as well as VC's. It's very rarely what's advertised. We've been interviewing and accepted into YC's main competitors as one of our funding options.

www.bindr.dating

 

[nicolellm]

@mercychild I guess, YC is not the end. We just sent our application for W2024. If I may ask, how much traction is enough for a B2C Startup to raise funds.? As a B2B2C, we are raising but got advised not to raise unless we have a paying pilot partner. Although we have about 300 on the waitlist and 2 LOIs.

 

[ddhurley]

@yhong Congratulations on the revenue numbers and the successful round!

Few questions:

1) If you are doing 400k in revenue, why do you need to raise? What is your cost structure?

2) Some companies are in the space, including YC startups. What are you doing differently?

3) What is the team profile?

4) You say you do enterprise. How much of your revenue comes from services/consulting vs product subscriptions?

5) How plug and play is your solution vs deep integration with custom software?

6) Isn't a large part of your product a UI on top of LangChain and similar LLM frameworks?

 

[yhong]

@ddhurley

1. I didn’t need to raise, we were profitable. But money in the bank is helpful. Plus this lets me pay myself too. Moreover I should clarify, the $400k i the annual contracted value. It’s dispensed in different intervals (monthly, quarterly,etc.). We are around 70% gross margins.
2. Glad you asked about the YC companies! The main difference is that they more or less are only usable by indie hackers. There’s a lot of reasons for this which I’m happy to break down over DM. But our product in a nutshell let’s you build and manage (grab data, do redactions, fallbacks, etc.). It’s kind of like the AWS of LLMs
3. Were a team of 10. Most of my engineers are in Sri Lanka. Everyone is an engineer but two people (our sales hunter and content writer)
4. I’d say it’s probably 70/30 services to product. But that ratio is complicated since even the services side can break down oddly — for example, we get paid to run educational sessions as a part of the contracts to use our product but we also give carte Blanche access for the company to build whatever they want.
5. So partly, but it’s a bit more than that. Under the hood we’re using a couple of different frameworks and yes we’ve built a UI builder on top of this. But we also deal with things like auto deployments, handling infra with fallback keys, caching, data syncing, etc. the idea is we want to automate away a lot of the random infra components

 

[yhong]

@ddhurley Oops forgot to answer the plug and play. It can be both. At the end of the day we produce a series of APIs that you can build around. But you can have deeper intergrations like connecting your DBs and such

 

[tay86]

@yhong I'm not sure I understand your product. What are you providing that Azure or OpenAI don't already provide. It seems like you're white labeling what Azure Enterprise already offers. I get consulting on it. But what are you possibly doing different than Google or Microsoft?

 

[tay86]

@yhong Ok, I don't know what the infatuation is of coming onto a forum and lying about raising capital or getting selected by YCombinator. I don't know if it gets one's rocks off or something but it's sad really.

There is no way what this guy is saying is true or makes any sense. Build Generative AI for the enterprise? Are you a consulting firm? Because there is nothing you can build that would be better than OpenAI, Azure, AWS or Google. They are literally generating billions of dollars from this as we speak. Low code AI/ML as a service is a thing they all offer. Again, what are you building that could possibly compete with the big 3/5 (FB and Apple) hell, even Tesla.

Some more nonsense. The post this guy uses literally looks like the low code tooling from Azure ML. Like you just stole the design and are saying it's yours.

Next, generative AI has been out for months, not years, how can you be generating millions y-o-y when the thing you're are advertising to came out 8/9 months ago in full force? It makes no logical sense.

Meaning, prior to this year nobody used or thought of GPT or LLM's where that important. So you wouldn't of been making money from the endless AI shops and data science teams that most enterprise organizations posses.

You're trying to advertise a PAAS but there is no god given way you have a PAAS on the scale of the aforementioned. And, the only way you would have a product that could make millions and billions is if you did have a PAAS. Otherwise you're just consulting and white labeling someone else's product. and that is not a million/billion dollar business.

This reeks of BULLSHIT

 

[613jono]

@yhong Calling YC and people responding to you "stupid" gives me a hint why you were rejected. It's how you come across.

I looked up your company. Your product has changed over the last 6 months, going from DeFi security tool to Enterprise LLM / GenAI management platform. The first one was in the toxic and dying market. The second idea is in a hot market, making it much more attractive to investors.

 

[yhong]

@613jono Moreover when someone says raising $1M is low. Yeah that’s stupid. It’s an extraordinarily elitist statement. Especially given I know people that struggle to raise more than $25K. That’s not a knock on them too, but it’s one of respect. Getting anyone to give you their money is hard. And comments like these are not helpful to any founder