Trendpop YC Application

Winter 2021Acquired

Trendpop went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2021 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 2021
Industry: B2BAnalytics
Team size: 10
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2021

Founders

Jonathan Ben-tzurFounder

What Trendpop does

Trendpop is the leading analytics and insights platform for short-form video marketing. We’re on a mission to help anyone go viral on social video platforms. We’re a deeply technical team that has taken a data-first approach to this problem: our core engine has collected over a billion social video posts that are analyzed with state-of-the-art algorithms to understand the recommendation algorithms that power virality. Trendpop was co-founded by Yoav Zimmerman (CEO) and Jonathan (Yoni) Ben-tzur (CTO) in August 2020, raising money from YCombinator (W21) to build Trendpop and growing to profitability in 12 short months. In January 2022, Trendpop was acquired by Collab, a veteran company in the digital creator space and an official TikTok creative and marketing partner. Today, Trendpop powers the TikTok marketing programs of top major record labels in North America and is quickly expanding to new markets in the film, television, beauty, and DTC eCommerce industry. Trendpop is currently used by leading marketing and A&R professionals in the music industry (both indie and major) to help their artists go viral on TikTok and hundreds of brands and creators who consistently win on social video.

Trendpop's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Trendpop, Winter 2021 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Trendpop

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Discover trends as they happen

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

We built Trendpop to analyze short-form social videos and surface trends in real time. Our platform collects over a billion social video posts and uses algorithms to decode the recommendation engines that drive virality. This helps marketing and A&R professionals understand what's working and go viral on platforms like TikTok.

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

We live in San Francisco, and the company is based here as well.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where our network, early users, and technical talent are. It's the natural hub for social video marketing and creator economy companies like Trendpop.

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 Trendpop YC application?

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