Courtesy of Pedro Góes
From left to right: Mauricio Giordano, Vinicius Figueredo Neris, and Pedro Góes are the founders of InEvent.
- Y Combinator is the startup accelerator that launched companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase, and Instacart. It's notoriously hard to get into.
- Below is a successful application from the Brazilian engineers who founded the event-marketing startup InEvent. They submitted the application in 2019.
- The founders had applied unsuccessfully in 2015. This time around, they could highlight the company's growth and increased revenue.
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When Pedro Góes and his cofounders at InEvent first applied to Y Combinator - the super-selective startup accelerator that launched Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase, and Instacart - they didn't get in.
But in 2019, they felt they had a more compelling case.
In their application, the InEvent team pitched themselves as the "Salesforce for events." They'd designed a platform to help companies organize conferences and other live experiences, and their client list included Santander, Coca-Cola, and Amazon. Since they first applied in 2015, they wrote in the application, InEvent's revenue had increased from $8,000 to more than $1 million.
Perhaps most impressively, they achieved this progress without raising outside capital.
InEvent was accepted to Y Combinator's summer 2019 batch.
Góes' cofounders at InEvent, Mauricio Giordano and Vinicius Figueredo Neris, were all trained as engineers and were based in São Paolo, Brazil. They'd started building the company as college classmates. Góes, who is InEvent's CEO, told Business Insider that they applied to Y Combinator the second time with plans to expand the business globally.
The team's goal was to become a "commonplace solution" for event planning, Góes said, so that a marketing manager at any organization wouldn't think twice about using InEvent.
At the time, InEvent kept running into the same problem: Potential clients were wary of signing on because they weren't sure the team or the technology was credible. If the product was going to be collecting people's personal data, companies (understandably) wanted to ensure that it was completely secure.
Góes knew that Y Combinator's stamp of approval would make InEvent seem much more trustworthy both to potential clients and to potential investors. And in fact, Góes said, after InEvent went through Y Combinator, some VCs who initially passed on the business expressed interest in investing.
As of January 2020, according to Góes, 2.9 million people had registered for 19,700 events through InEvent.
Góes' best advice for Y Combinator applicants (the accelerator is currently accepting applications for its summer 2020 batch) is simply to "be an expert on something." Whether your company focuses on travel, fashion, or personal finance, use your application to show how well you know that area.
Beyond that, Góes encourages founders to tell Y Combinator exactly how they'll benefit from the accelerator's resources - a strategy that applies just as well when you're writing cold emails to hiring managers or other people in your professional network. Góes said, "It puts the other person in a better position to help you."
Read InEvent's original application to Y Combinator below.
(Note: This is an unedited copy of the application, though we've redacted phone numbers and email addresses. The parentheticals throughout are instructions found on the application.)