Short Story YC Application

Summer 2019Active

Short Story went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2019 batch as a Consumer 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 2019
Industry: ConsumerApparel and Cosmetics
Team size: 120
Status: Active
Launched: 2019

Founders

Samuel HoffstaetterFounder
Isabella SunFounder

What Short Story does

Short Story is a style discovery platform to help petite women find clothes that fit. The average American woman is 5'4" and petite, yet this remains an enormously underserved segment. We’re a team of curators passionate about finding style, quality, and fit for petite women. Our mission is to remove the “ugh” from the shopping equation and support petite women in telling their stories, stylishly and confidently.

Short Story's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Short Story, Summer 2019 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Short Story

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Modern ecommerce for petite women

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

We built Short Story, a style discovery platform designed to help petite women find clothes that fit. The product curates and recommends apparel tailored to the needs of the average US woman who is 5'4" or shorter, a segment underserved by existing retailers. Our platform combines human curation with machine learning to surface styles that balance fit, quality, and aesthetic preferences for petite women.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and Short Story is based here. After YC, the company will continue to operate out of San Francisco.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is a hub for tech talent and early ecommerce innovation. Being here puts us close to engineers, investors, and customers who appreciate fashion innovation. It also allows us to recruit the right team to scale the product.

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 Short Story YC application?

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