CleverDeck YC Application

Winter 2012Active

CleverDeck went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2012 batch as a Education company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Winter 2012
Industry: Education
Team size: 1
Status: Active
Launched: 2011

Founders

Justin CannonFounder

What CleverDeck does

CleverDeck is a customizable-spaced repetition flashcard application for learning foreign language vocabulary. It contains more than three thousand useful words along with images, native speaker audio, and example sentences.

CleverDeck's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

CleverDeck, Winter 2012 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

CleverDeck

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Customizable flashcards for language learning

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built CleverDeck, a flashcard app focused on helping people learn foreign language vocabulary. It combines spaced repetition with native speaker audio, images, and example sentences for over three thousand words. Users customize their decks to focus on what matters to them.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We currently split our time between San Francisco, CA, USA and Istanbul, Turkey. After YC, the company would be based in San Francisco.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We chose to be in San Francisco after YC to be at the center of the startup ecosystem and close to potential investors. Istanbul is convenient for the founder personally, but SF is better for scaling the company.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real CleverDeck YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from CleverDeck's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like CleverDeck would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.