Are GitHub stars important for YC applications?
Hello PH
We applied to Y Combinator few days ago and we’ve had a few spikes in GitHub stars after sharing our open-source project with dev communities.
But we’re wondering: how important are GitHub stars when applying to YC?
Also curious to hear from fellow open-source builders:
How did you attract your 500 first ⭐️ without being spammy?
How do you motivate contributors when your project is still evolving?
We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks
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I think it's a combination of stars, PRs, forks that YC cares about. PRs, forks are important because it shows people are engaging with what you've build.
Stars can be farmed. I've seen people give away free swag, discounts, and credits at events in exchange for stars. Pretty easy way to get ~100-200 stars in a couple of hours.
As a OSS builder, I'm really curious about your answers. What are your hack to increase your impact ?
Warestack
@aurelia_b Curious about your two questions as well.
It's been a week since we open-sourced Watchflow (https://github.com/warestack/watchflow), the core engine behind Warestack. I know traction as important, but still trying to figure out where to promote it effectively and how to engage contributors at this stage.
In our case, Watchflow serves as a technical preview - but the full enterprise features live inside Warestack, which will go live next week. So while the OSS repo is open, teams will eventually need to register to access the complete experience. It’s meant to be both a hook and a foundation.
@dkargatzis Totally agree with you. Promotion is tough ! We’re trying to grow organically, tweaking things based on early feedback and working on backlinks when we can but it’s definitely not easy 😅
We’ve also been reaching out on LinkedIn, looking for devs newsletters, trying to find the right communities… but the dev world really has its own codes haha. It’s hard to break in when you’re not already part of it.
As Pragun Sharma said, I think he’s right about YC. They probably do pay attention to early traction signals like stars, PRs, and contributors even if it's just one data point among others.
By the way, I checked out your project and really liked it. Just starred it ⭐️
Thanks again for sharing Watchflow, let's keep in touch 😊
Warestack
@aurelia_b thanks a lot!
Definitely let’s keep in touch - I’m exploring different ways to build awareness and gather feedback, so I should have more to share soon 😉
Btw, Reddit and Hacker News seem promising channels, though Hacker News will probably need a bit of prior traction to really take off.
Thanks a lot @dkargatzis 🙌
Totally agree on Hacker News : it has potential, but definitely requires some initial traction or strong community signals to gain momentum.
Reddit has been surprisingly valuable for us lately, thanks to one of my teammates who nailed the right subs and tone.
Looking forward to hearing what works on your end as you explore more! 😊
mcp-use
We are part of the current YC batch, and our open-source library (mcp-use) has been crucial in helping us stand out.
So I'd say it's pretty important, in fact, YC has a lot of great companies that started with open source: Posthog, Supabase, Langfuse, and many others...
My suggestion is to send an update pointing out the growth in adoption of your oss project :)
btw we are launching soon! 🎉
Solodoers
considering it is an OSS project, and if having more stars and contributor helps, I believe this is a positive metric to display, yes, so it matters