When we applied to @ycombinator , we had $800 in monthly revenue. We were running free tests, and people kept asking if they could pay us. So we started charging right before the application. W27 applications close Nov 2. Someone on my team asked me this week what YC looks for. I think YC invests in team and traction, and maybe more in the team. Here's where I'd put the effort: 1. Fill in the achievements part properly. It's a required field anyway, so link it to what you're building. For us that was my time at Retool and the team's experience scaling a technical product for non-technical people. 2. Tell the story behind your traction. $800 a month is a small number. Users asking to pay for a free test says a lot more. 3. Put most of your prep into the team part. I don't have data on this, but from the stories I've heard, the team matters more than traction a lot of the time. If you're waiting for bigger numbers before you apply, I wouldn't. Apply here: ycombinator.com/apply. The on-time deadline is Nov 2, 8pm PT.

We killed our old referral program when Floot changed. The old bonus just didn’t make sense for how people build now. So I’m bringing it back, way simpler: Every friend you bring who upgrades = half a month free for you. That’s it. The credit goes straight to your next payment or auto-reload, or you can turn it into AI or hosting credits. Building is better with friends. Bring yours 👇 floot.com/dashboard/referral…

Your app looks great when everything works. But that’s the only way you’ve ever seen it. Nobody clicks through to the failed save, or loads 500 items into a list to see if it holds up, or checks what a brand-new account with nothing in it looks like. Your users find those for you. Today we’re launching Floot Examples. Connect @floothq to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to “create examples for the Home page.” You get your real page in each of those situations (loading, empty, failed, a very long list) as cards next to the preview, and you can open any of them and click around. The data behind them is staged, so nothing touches your database. Your AI looks at them too. After a change it opens an example, takes a screenshot and checks the result, instead of telling you it’s fixed and hoping. Vibe coding brings your idea to life. Craft is caring about the parts nobody demos, and Examples puts those in front of you. How it works, with clips of each step: floot.com/docs/getting-start…

You built the app that runs your business with AI. Right now, anyone can find it on the internet and open it. That changes today. Introducing Internal publish. Put your app online without opening it to the world. Your app keeps its URL. You choose who gets in. Everyone else stays outside. And there’s no login system to build. Floot checks every request before it reaches your app, protecting pages and APIs alike. Access is enforced at the platform level, so you don’t have to rely on your app’s login code to keep it private. Open Publish, choose Internal publish, and invite people by email. They receive an invite, sign in to Floot, and they’re in. Custom domains work too, and you can make your app public at any time. What would you build if it didn’t have to be public?

We started Floot with two engineers and a belief that anyone should be able to ship a real app. The product has grown a lot since then, and so has the team. Today we're excited to welcome Joanie Lam as our first Founding Designer. Joanie started out designing graphics for her family's fashion business, sharpened her craft at J.Crew and Gap Inc., and has since designed tools in aerospace, NASA, and nonprofits. At Floot we're building the full system around AI that helps people ship real apps. Most of our users aren't engineers, so how the product feels matters as much as what it does. Every screen, every interaction, every moment where someone isn't sure what to do next is a design problem before it's an engineering problem. Until now, we've been solving those problems as we go. Joanie is here to solve them on purpose. When we talked, what stood out to me most was how driven she is by impact. That's the mindset we want: real products, built for real people, that actually work. She's also a new dog mom to Pom Pom, a Pomeranian mix with a 24/7 snack habit, and spends crab season catching Dungeness crab in San Francisco. Welcome to Floot, Joanie!