How Two Developers Got Into Y Combinator

It was early 2024, and I was sitting in our apartment in Barcelona, staring at my inbox. Morning light came through the window. My coffee had gone cold, but I kept refreshing the page anyway, even though I already knew what I’d find.

Nothing. Zero responses – not from yesterday, not from the day before, not from the entire week before that. We had sent hundreds of cold emails over the past month. Not a single person had replied.

My co-founder Veronica and I had just won a hackathon a few weeks earlier with lingo.dev, a localization tool we’d built for developers like ourselves. About twenty people were actually using it, and some of them really loved what we’d made. They’d message us saying how much time it saved them, how they wished they’d had something like this years ago. That felt good. But we had no idea if any of this could become a real business – something that could pay our rent, something we could work on for the next ten years.

I remember one morning around that time, walking to a café near our place while the streets were still quiet. I was thinking about how we’d spent the last five years following Y Combinator from afar – the startup accelerator behind Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox – reading Paul Graham’s essays, watching the YouTube lessons and podcasts. We’d always said it would be cool to apply someday. But “someday” had always felt far away, like something that happened to other people.

That morning, something shifted. We realized we could build almost anything when it came to software – we’d proven that to ourselves already. But what we wanted now was different. We wanted to build something that mattered, something that could grow and help thousands of developers, not just twenty. And if we were serious about that, we needed to figure out whether lingo.dev had real potential or whether we were just two builders tinkering in Spain.

So we decided to learn how to sell.

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