Hacker News Reader

Comment by adelevie | Hacker News Reader

I know YC doesn't like to accept applicants who are still in school (and who aren't dropping out). Makes enough sense, considering students at all levels can expect to spend ~40-60 hours/week on their studies. But what about part-time/evening students? The commitment for them might be much lower, say ~10-20 hours/week.

Should students in this latter category even consider applying if they have zero intention of dropping out of school?

View on HN

Apply for practice and to think through the questions, but realize that you are up against thousands of smart people who can give every waking moment of their life to their company and you can't right now.

I'd rather not waste the YC partners' time :)

Maybe in my case, school is a bit less of a zero sum game. I'm working on a legal research tool (prototype: http://dokket.aws.af.cm/about) that serves an under-addressed market (communications law). Think MarketBrief (http://marketbrief.com/), but instead of the SEC, the focus is on the FCC.

Not-so-incidentally, I'm about half-way done with law school in a part-time/evening program in DC.

Interesting idea, I happen to have an interest in communications law, but I never would have thought to pay for a service similar to MarketBrief for that space in order to keep tabs on the industry when I was at Twilio. In fact, there are a lot of analysts in the space so I am a bit surprised you consider it underserved.

Would this be a content site, or would you have a paid subscription model or deeper analyst pieces, or something else? What is to stop the FCC-focus from just being a niche channel on marketbrief itself?

I emailed you a more complete answer, but while you're here:

I'm focusing on building the dataset and alerts system, so it's more of a subscription service--for now at least. Looking ahead, there's a wealth of information buried inside these documents that I'd like to leverage.

Yes. Here's why: if your startup succeeds, your views about staying in school may evolve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com