I was prepping my YC application. I wanted to know: has anyone already done this idea?

YC's search gave me nothing useful. So I spent a weekend scraping their Algolia API, built a local database, ran embeddings against my pitch... and found 3 companies that had tried it.

YC has funded 6,000+ companies. Only ~4% have gone public.

I built a filter for it inside ExploreYC. The list is shorter than you think. Some patterns I noticed:

- Most IPOs came from B2B SaaS, fintech, and biotech

Used the GStack by Garry Tan [https://github.com/garrytan/gstackv] from Y Combinator to build a list of issues, improvements, features, fixes everyone can work on!

If you would like to contirbute, you can find it all at: https://github.com/KonstantinMB/...

you can go onto the ExploreYC platform, put your email and start receiving emails every day with:

• newly added companies

• companies that just started hiring

how are we doing it? we are comparing the snapshot of companies yesterday vs. today and detecting the dif.

Today we are writing up an email to YC and hopefully getting their eyes on the project! I think it would be a good addition to their website and if we can get some more official or helpful APIs to hit and extract data from for YC it would be amazing!

Please help me spread ExploreYC and get YC's eye on the project! Share on X, LinkedIn, ProductHunt and let's do this together!

you can get a random read of one of Paul Graham's essays (founder of Y Combinator) ! Or browse through them from this UI

not like the original Paul Graham UI that still sits for this essays, but a new modern one inside https://exploreyc.com/founders

i play around with a lot of my ideas and see if YC already accepted people with similar ones.

the vector search on the dataset of YC companies is something I build to help me validate 10x faster and better!

check it out: https://www.exploreyc.com/validator

The YC Hiring Market Intelligence is getting daily async updates with new jobs popping up as we pull the companies every single day!

You can view pretty cool things here - average alary, equity, remote %, total companies searching for talent and a lot more..

searchable companies, a live hiring board, an idea-validator that finds similar YC bets to whatever you're working on, a gamified success-prediction tool, and email digests for new batches.
all of it is live at https://github.com/KonstantinMB/...
all of it is now in the repo, MIT-licensed: React 19 + FastAPI + Supabase, OpenAI embeddings, Perplexity for research, deployed on Vercel and Render.
why open it up: the PH launch made it clear there's an audience of YC-curious builders who want to dig deeper than what the hosted site shows them.
some of you want different filters. others want a CLI.. others want to plug in their own data sources or fork it for a different accelerator.
I can't build all of those but you can.
got a feature in mind? open an issue. want to ship it? Open a PR