YC interview questions
YC partners move fast and interrupt. Rehearse concise answers to the classic product, traction, market, and team prompts so you walk in ready, not rereading notes.
Questions in this pack
110 prompts · speak first, then refine from your notes
1 · 90s
What are you making?
2 · 120s
How does your product work in more detail?
3 · 90s
What's new about what you make?
4 · 90s
What exactly makes you different from existing options?
5 · 90s
Who needs what you're making?
6 · 90s
What are your users doing now instead of using your product?
7 · 90s
What are the top things users want?
8 · 60s
Do you have a demo?
9 · 90s
What part of this are you going to build first?
10 · 90s
What is the simplest version of your idea?
11 · 90s
Where is the rocket science here?
12 · 90s
What is the next step in the product evolution?
13 · 90s
What are you going to do next?
14 · 60s
Is this a vitamin or a painkiller?
15 · 90s
How do you know your product is working?
16 · 90s
What problem are you solving, and why is it important?
17 · 90s
How do you know customers need what you're making?
18 · 60s
Have you experienced the problem yourself?
19 · 90s
Why is now the right time to solve this problem?
20 · 90s
Why is this a need-to-have and not just a nice-to-have?
21 · 60s
How many users have ever engaged?
22 · 60s
How many currently active users do you have?
23 · 60s
How many users are paying?
24 · 60s
What is your total revenue?
25 · 90s
What are your total costs, fixed and marginal?
26 · 90s
What is your acquisition funnel conversion rate?
27 · 60s
What is your customer acquisition cost?
28 · 90s
What are the growth rates of users, revenue, and costs?
29 · 60s
What is your burn rate?
30 · 60s
How long can you go before funding?
31 · 60s
Have you raised funding?
32 · 90s
Are users coming back repeatedly?
33 · 60s
What's the churn rate?
34 · 60s
What's the average revenue per user or average selling price?
35 · 90s
What's your pricing strategy?
36 · 60s
Are customers willing to pay?
37 · 90s
What is your top-level KPI right now?
38 · 60s
How many people are in your target market?
39 · 60s
How big is the market in dollars?
40 · 60s
How fast is the market growing?
41 · 90s
Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors?
42 · 90s
Which competition do you fear most?
43 · 60s
How many users do your competitors have?
44 · 60s
How much are your competitors making?
45 · 90s
How much time and money do users in your target market waste before switching to you?
46 · 90s
What are some trends in your target market and related markets?
47 · 90s
Why isn't someone already doing this?
48 · 90s
What are the key things about your field that outsiders don't understand?
49 · 90s
What do you understand that others don't?
50 · 90s
What is your unfair advantage?
51 · 90s
Won't a big company just launch this as a feature and kill you?
52 · 90s
What is stopping other people or large companies from copying you?
53 · 90s
How do you get users?
54 · 90s
Who is going to be your first paying customer?
55 · 90s
How do users know they need this?
56 · 90s
How will users find out about you?
57 · 90s
What makes new users try you?
58 · 120s
What makes new users reluctant to try you, and how will you overcome that?
59 · 90s
Where do new users come from?
60 · 90s
What is your distribution strategy?
61 · 90s
How are you meeting customers and understanding their needs?
62 · 90s
What has surprised you about user behavior?
63 · 90s
What do you understand about your users?
64 · 90s
Who gets the most value out of your product?
65 · 90s
How do you plan to scale user growth?
66 · 90s
How will you make money?
67 · 90s
How much money could you make per year?
68 · 120s
How does this become a billion-dollar company?
69 · 90s
If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you expand into?
70 · 90s
How big an opportunity is there?
71 · 90s
What is the long-term vision for the company?
72 · 90s
Why will you succeed?
73 · 60s
Are you open to changing your idea?
74 · 90s
If your main assumption is wrong, what then?
75 · 90s
What milestones or revenue targets do you have for the next few years?
76 · 90s
Why did you choose this idea?
77 · 90s
Why are you uniquely qualified to work on this?
78 · 90s
What domain expertise do you have?
79 · 90s
Why do you want to dedicate your life to working on this?
80 · 90s
Why did your team get together?
81 · 60s
How did your team meet?
82 · 90s
Who in your team does what?
83 · 60s
Who is "the boss"?
84 · 90s
How do we know your team will stick together?
85 · 60s
Who would be your next hire?
86 · 90s
What else have you created together?
87 · 60s
How have you divided equity among the founders?
88 · 90s
How do you handle disagreements within the founding team?
89 · 90s
Have you considered what happens if one founder wants to leave?
90 · 90s
In what ways are you resourceful?
91 · 90s
What's an impressive thing you have done?
92 · 90s
Tell us something surprising that has happened.
93 · 90s
What's the biggest mistake you have made?
94 · 90s
What's the worst thing that has happened?
95 · 90s
What have you learned so far from working on this idea?
96 · 120s
What obstacles will you face and how will you overcome them?
97 · 90s
What keeps you up at night?
98 · 90s
Six months from now, what's going to be your biggest problem?
99 · 120s
Tell us about a tough problem you solved.
100 · 90s
What systems have you hacked?
101 · 60s
What's the funniest thing that has happened to you?
102 · 90s
What will you do if we don't fund you?
103 · 60s
Would you relocate to Silicon Valley?
104 · 60s
Will you reincorporate as a US company?
105 · 90s
What is the biggest reason you might fail?
106 · 90s
Someone just showed us an idea like this right before you. I don't like it. What else do you have?
107 · 90s
Why do you want to join YC?
108 · 90s
What do you want to get out of Y Combinator?
109 · 90s
Have you applied to YC before? If so, what has changed since then?
110 · 90s
What will you do with the money YC invests?
Walk in ready, not rereading
Import exports from Notion, Obsidian, Goodnotes, OneNote, and other revision tools — or paste and go. Interviewer turns them into spoken packs timed for real interviews.
Import your notes