Wednesday, October 21, 2026

The latest from Y Combinator

YC Deals gives startups access to discounted tools and services

YC Deals offers YC companies discounts and special services from companies that want startups to use their products early. The program is designed to help founders access “best in class” tools while staying within a startup budget. Attendees of qualifying YC events can also sign in to access exclusive offers, and students have a separate YC Events Deals program.

Why it matters: Access to startup-focused discounts can help early-stage companies keep operating costs down while equipping themselves with useful tools and services.

YC Deals

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YC Events Deals for students

Advice for early-stage founders

• Start with the problem, not the feature. Talk to people who recently experienced the problem. Ask what they did, what it cost them, and what they tried before. Look for repeated, urgent behavior—not hypothetical enthusiasm.

• Build the smallest useful product. Aim for one clear job completed well. A manual or imperfect workflow is acceptable if it helps you learn whether users will use—and eventually pay for—the solution.

• Prioritize by evidence. Rank work by customer impact, frequency of the problem, and how directly it supports your current goal. Defer ideas that are interesting but unsupported by user behavior.

• Treat selling as discovery. Explain the product plainly, ask for a commitment, and listen carefully to objections. A “no” can reveal whether the problem is weak, the target customer is wrong, or the solution is unclear. The supplied product-building advice also recommends buying your own product and competing products to experience the journey firsthand. Source

• Design distribution early. Decide where your first users already gather and make reaching them part of the product plan. Direct outreach, partnerships, communities, and useful content can all work—but choose a channel you can operate consistently rather than trying everything at once.

• Turn feedback into a learning loop. Watch users complete key tasks, review support requests, and follow up after changes ship. Separate requests for features from evidence of an underlying need, then measure whether the change improved the user’s outcome.

A reported YC example—not a universal formula: In a Y Combinator profile, Nowadays’ first technical hire described operating with founder-level ownership: building core processes, tackling problems directly, and continuously learning independently. The broader lesson for founders is to create a team where people can identify important problems, make informed decisions, and act quickly—without confusing autonomy with a lack of feedback or priorities. YC source