Last week at Wasp: 1. We published a demo note-taking app called "Thoughts": https://wasp-thoughts.netlify.app (code: https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/tree/master/examples/thoughts). 2. We had an open source contributor, who contributed only once in the past, present us with a 10 page LaTeX proposal (that he has been secretly working on on his own) for a new design of Wasp language!! It has formal grammar definition, implementation suggestions and more! Crazy, I can't remember last time I was so positively shocked 😄! Here is a link to it on github https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/issues/109#issuecomment-841235518 . Made my week!

Do you work fulltime on Wasp? I was reading your blogpost on the Y Combinator program, what does that mean in practise for you?

Yes, both brother and I are full time on Wasp now! YC invested 120k USD and coached us for three months both regarding the product and future fundraising. Since Wasp is open source dev tool, we are not aiming to start monetizing right away -> instead we plan to raise capital to sustain us for the first year or so, until we start monetizing.

Wow, thats awesome! Do you need to report to them regularly to show progress for example?

@Maikel no, it is not required, we have complete control over how we do things. Although, it is considered a good manner and practice to send monthly updates to investors, in order to keep them excited and enthusiastic.

Something that makes me curious is that Wasp is open source and that you receive funding. I didn't know that this was possible. How does that work also with regards to the (future) investors? Are you also developing products extending Wasp which will be not be open sourced?

Same as any other open-source company, and there are plenty: Terraform(Hashicorp), Docker, RedHat, MongoDB, Elastic, DataBricks, ... . Open source is free, and you sell either additional products on top of it or you offer services like enterprise support and consultancy. The main idea is: if you have an open-source solution that is valuable enough and is catering to big enough market, there will be a lot of value to offer on top of it, and you will be in best position to capture that value and therefore monetize it. We are not yet developing any products on top of Wasp, first we are focusing on the open-source part of it, but idea is to offer additional products on top of it - we will probably start working on those in a year, once open-source core is stable.

Thanks for all the detailed info, I am now considering applying as well.

Cool! YC is not the only startup accelerator, there are many -> if you are considering driving your project as a startup, there are many avenues to try, and a lot to learn. Most important thing is to have a vision of how you could build a big business on top of your project (big == 100M revenue per month). YC also has a startup school which anybody can participate in, and it has great resources and videos, so consider taking a look at that: https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum . What is the project you are working on btw? Oh, and of course, if you can avoid raising money and instead being profitable on your own, often that is a better way to go - less stress and more control - but if you can't and need capital to become profitable, then it makes sense to consider raising capital (if you have a business case and ambition for it).

The project that I am working on is the flow based programming project of which I posted some video's here in this channel. The business vision part is something I surely have to work on. So far I could fund my own development because I receive some subsidy in a form of "tax discount" which helps a little bit