Founder's Log #7: We applied to YC, again!

Literally a few hours before the S25 deadline, we applied to YC for the 2nd time.

When we applied to the X25 batch, we didn’t have much of a plan. We had a rough idea of what we wanted to build and a few experiments we’ve done to convince ourselves that the idea is viable. But after submitting the application we started making good progress. We built a reverse proxy to capture data for ML, built a few PoCs and signed up a few customers within a couple of weeks. Being able to submit an update to the YC application every week became a target.

For the S25 application, we wanted to have a product demo. Something YC partners will be able to sign-in and play around with. We’ve built a PoC that can query events (or logs) using natural language so we thought of hosting it as a demo behind a sign-in screen.

But it’s a waste of time to build something specific for a YC application.

Instead of building a demo for YC, we focused on building something that we’d be able to give to our customers. But we set our deadline to be the YC application deadline (13th May, 8pm PDT).

Just a few hours before the S25 application deadline, we managed to launch our first version of the Felk Console. It’s capable of using natural language to query events captured by Hky (our reverse proxy), displaying events flagged as anomalies by the ML models and manually overriding the anomaly flag for human-in-the-loop ML training. Not much, but it’s something we can use to get customer feedback from.

Fingers crossed, our 2nd application is more successful than the first 🤞.