Tell HN: Catch.com raises 7m. Didn't get in as solo founder (S08), kept pushing

116 points

15 years ago

It's been such an incredible journey, HN has been such a huge source of inspiration.

I still vividly recall some my of earliest conversation on HN and what a transformative effect they've had on me (thank you Paul Buchheit!) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157432

It was early 2008 and I had just moved to San Francisco. I was working on Catch.com with the idea of making it easy for people to capture what matters to them and let them recall the interesting ideas, notes, places, images that they had captured. I had a basic web and Android app with a fairly goofy name (3banana), but it worked.

I applied as a solo founder to Y Combinator for the Summer '08 class with high hopes. Then I get this email:

  Date: 10 Apr 2008 03:13:28 -0000
  Subject: YC Funding Application (aschobel)
  
  We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally.  ...

Ugh. I was pretty devastated, but fortunately had enough money to bootstrap my baby for a bit longer. I knew in my heart that the time for Catch.com was right, folks we moving to smartphones in droves and that enabled a huge part of the vision.

A few weeks later I hit uninteresting roadblock, a recruiter for a hot startup contacted me. I ended up interviewing and getting a job offer for a role where I could impact millions of users.

Should I keep burning money and follow my dream or join this startup with a ton of traction? To the dismay of my parents I turned down the job and pushed forward with a renewed sense of purpose.

Later that summer I met my co-founder Steve. We connected right away and I knew this was something special.

The Catch.com story continues, we raised a bit of money and made a bet on Android. We grew pretty quickly with Android and everything transformed when we change the name to Catch.com in Fall of last year.

It's humbling to see how far we've come and the huge opportunity in front of us.

It would have been so much harder to get to this point without the HN community, you are a beacon of hope.

Be determined and trust your gut.

Thank you HN & PG,

Andreas

Oh, and a bit of celebration: http://mashable.com/2011/02/15/evernote-competitor-catch-com-raises-7-million/

Yay! :P

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