We are delighted to invite interested founders to apply to the YC Growth Program. The Growth Program is designed for companies with between 50 – 150 employees that are scaling rapidly. The deadline for application is February 23, 2018.
Jan 30, 2018Today, we are excited to announce the YC Growth Program, our first formal program for later stage startups. If we imagine Y Combinator as the university degree for startups, the Growth Program is grad school. The program is designed for founder-CEOs of post-Series A companies with between 50-100 employees who are in the early stages of company-building. The basis of the program is a 10-week dinner series, with each dinner focused on a specific issue that every startup has to overcome in order to scale successfully.
Dec 14, 2017Toutiao, one of the flagship products of Bytedance, may be the largest app you’ve never heard of–it’s like every news feed you read, YouTube, and TechMeme in one. Without any explicit user inputs, social graph, or product purchase history to rely on, Toutiao offers a personalized, high quality-content feed for each user that is powered by machine and deep learning algorithms.
Oct 12, 2017“Growth hacks” can be extremely helpful in driving viral growth early in a product’s path to product market fit. However, sustaining long-term growth and reaching hundreds of millions of users requires a scientific approach to growth. In fact, growth experts resoundingly say that “growth hacking” isn’t in their vocabulary or something they relate to their work. “Hacking” implies a haphazard / gut-driven approach, and the reality is quite the opposite. Startups that have seen amazing growth have developed teams and processes that are intentional, exceedingly metrics-driven, and thrive on experimentation. We talked to 25 of the experts who have driven this growth programs and have included their advice in this guide.
Jul 20, 2017We partnered up with China Tech Insights, a research group within Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) to understand how WeChat drives its 889 Million monthly active users to use the app an average of 50+ minutes, and 9 to 11 separate times, per day. This post dives into the growth strategy that led to key WeChat milestones, lessons learned and gives insight into the method behind the madness as WeChat scaled from 0 to 800M+ MAUs in less than 6 years.
Apr 12, 2017