Preflight YC Application

Winter 2019Acquired

Preflight went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2019 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: Winter 2019
Industry: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 5
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2018

Founders

Mustafa BayramogluFounder

What Preflight does

PreFlight is a No-code web testing tool for anyone. Preflight is 20x faster than writing Selenium and Cypress tests. Maintaining Selenium/Cypress tests is also a big challenge. Preflight solves this problem by understanding how users understand any page and adapt to the changes and update the selectors if the test passes. It's also super easy to set up end-to-end tests that depend on each other with Preflight's Workflow feature. You can orchestrate which test should run after another. Creating API tests has never been so easy. Preflight prepopulates API tests from UI tests' network calls. So, you can set up API tests in minutes.

Preflight's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Preflight, Winter 2019 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Preflight

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

No-code Web Apps testing for everyone

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

We built Preflight, a no-code tool that lets anyone create end-to-end web app tests without writing Selenium or Cypress code. It's about making tests 20x faster to write and easier to maintain by automatically adapting selectors when pages change. We also added a feature to chain tests with workflows and an easy way to generate API tests from UI network calls. It's for product, engineering, and design teams who struggle with flaky, hard-to-maintain tests.

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

We live in Chicago, IL and some of our team works remote. After YC, the company would remain based in Chicago with a distributed team.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Chicago gives us access to engineering talent and a good cost base. We also have team members already here and remote so keeping it based here fits our current setup.

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 Preflight YC application?

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