Hive YC Application

Summer 2014Active

Hive went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2014 batch as a B2B 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: Summer 2014
Industry: B2BMarketing
Team size: 65
Status: Active
Launched: 2014

Founders

Patrick HanniganFounder/CTO
Ian RobertsFounder

What Hive does

Hive is the industry-best marketing platform for event marketers. Our platform powers marketing for 1500+ of the most iconic event, festivals, venues, promoters, and event-centric brands across North America. We help our clients sell out their shows and make their events unforgettable - by helping them grow their customer base and personalizing and automating their email, SMS, and ad campaigns. Hive integrates with 25+ partners like Ticketmaster and Shopify, ingesting rich customer data in real-time. With this data, event marketers can segment their audiences in powerful ways and send timely, customized messages to their customers.

Hive's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Hive, Summer 2014 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Hive

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Marketing automation for event promoters

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

We build a marketing automation platform tailored specifically for event promoters. Our product helps marketers automate and personalize email, SMS, and ad campaigns to grow ticket sales and engage attendees. It integrates with Ticketmaster, Shopify, and over 25 partners to pull in live customer data and power audience segmentation and messaging.

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

We live in Kitchener, ON, Canada and the company is based here with remote team members.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We started here because of our personal ties and the strong local tech community. We continue based here for those reasons but support remote work to access talent elsewhere.

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 Hive YC application?

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