It’s 1:57 AM Sunday morning, I’m launching Duckity on Tuesday. I don’t even know how I got to YC’s site, I was likely geeking around the internet. Thing is, 2 days remained for applications to close, way enough time to fill out an application form, so I went ahead and did it. At the time of writing, I’m only missing to fill up the founder video and the product demo video. I’ll do those either tomorrow or on Monday.

Now, I’m biting my nails out of anxiety right now. A bit of context, I’m living with my parents, they have told me they’ll kick me out when I turn 21 (March 26th), and this startup is all my plan for life. If it fails? New startup. And the next one. And the next one. Until one makes it. And when one takes off? To the moon, Mars, Venus, wherever I make it reach. And then, it’ll be time for the next one.

Thing is I have no plans on how to fund myself once the limit comes. I don’t really know how my parents will behave about it. And I just really hope I don’t have to get a job, because my life is going to be startups.

So, back to YC. I applied, not because of avoidance, but because I get easily distracted when anxiety comes up. Either way, distraction or not, YC application is almost complete, and I’ll complete it before the deadline. I’m finishing this Duckity guide, and YC did make me think about lots of things. I’ve been watching some videos of their Startup School, and it has left me thinking even more.

I’ve been working on Duckity for almost a year and a half now. In that period of time, not all of it has been productive work (in fact, most of it, until I got a therapist). That was no more than 4 months ago. I built Duckity as I would have built my other apps, which works great yet is missing the startup side of things.

For example, until about a month ago I knew nothing about marketing. I knew nothing about landing page copy. I didn’t know cold email outreach was a thing. I didn’t even have a logo, leave alone a landing page. I’ve been learning a lot about it for the past month or two.

Something that relieves me is that I seem to fit everything they mention they look for in a startup. Resilience? I’ve promised myself to launch no matter what, and I’m keeping up with it. How to make money? I have my plans. How to get users? That’s why I’m launching in two days. I’ve been able to fill out practically every question they asked in their application form, except for the equity and legal entity part which I haven’t thought of yet because it’s all a one man job up to now.

I wanna dump some thoughts on it before I eat my fingers off. So basically, I’ve been working on the product under anxiety for way too long, which means I’ve been detached from the company part of the company for quite a while, and now I’m starting to remember everything I had thought of when I was starting out because launch day is coming.

They asked for a pitch of the product, obviously. I don’t have a polished salesy one, so I dumped what’s in my head. You’ll ask me, “you don’t have a polished pitch two days away from launch?” Yessir. Thing is the anxiety about the birthday deadline has been eating up part of my mental bandwidth, and I’m launching anyway because no point in not launching. I have a working product I can sell.

The pitch I have in the application at the time of writing is this:

Duckity protects applications’ login forms, signup forms, and other sensitive forms and actions without having to ask users to click on buses. Instead of prompting them with puzzles, Duckity sends over a cryptographic challenge that’s meant to be automatically solved. The challenge is completely invisible and it’s just math, so it works in any platform without the user having to do anything. Instead of using hashcash or other probabilistic proof of work algorithms like competitors do, Duckity uses VDFs, which give you more predictable amounts of work (and therefore delays) that other algorithms don’t give you, therefore making tuning the protection for UX way easier. Captchas are usually bad at customization, too. You usually have to trust some black box AI with “99.9% accuracy guarantees” which in practice are unverifiable, and they give developers a “confidence score” without much guide on how it’s calculated, so decisions on what to block are mostly a guess. Duckity is cryptography and waiting to slow down bots and make scaling attacks costly instead of trying to guess who’s a human and who’s not. VDFs are at the core of Duckity, then developers can create and customize policies which define not only how hard & slow those challenges will be to solve, but also at the rates that can be issued and settings that allow a single attacker trying to pass as many to be correlated across identities. The idea behind that is that you usually don’t really care if it’s automated automated access or not, rather whether it’s doing what a normal person would be allowed to do. What’s the issue with an agent sending messages to someone’s friend on behalf of the human? Not much. It’s an issue when an agent or bot is used to mass spam people. But it would be a problem if a person did that mass spamming by hand too, so no point in just saying bots = bad, humans = good. Duckity makes it hard to scale automated attacks by both using cryptography and by allowing developers to define what allowed usage looks like. I believe that’ll be more useful as more people transition towards delegating more work to AI.

You may be thinking “holy yap”. Yeah, me too. That’s a mix of how the thing works, what it does in theory (i.e. my original pitch), and the direction I figured out I’d go as I wrote it down.

I don’t use AI agents, yet that last line is quite interesting. I hadn’t thought of it until I was writing down the pitch. I have been told a bazillion reasons why it won’t work by my parents. Bazillion falls short, even. But everyone has excuses not to do things. That’s why I’m launching anyway, and not like those opinions have any weight anyways. My parents aren’t gonna be using Duckity, they barely even know how it works.

YC guys also mentioned “we’ll see” and “we’ll figure it out” as really nice things for a founder to have. This person, let’s call them X, is struggling with what career they’ll follow. They have no clue and their parents are pressuring them a lot. So I told them “let’s start a company”. Yeah, I’m learning myself, yet we’ll figure it out. I didn’t even know what company to start, I just knew we’d do something to get moving. They like seals, find them cute, and I’m a programmer, so it had to be an app. They suggested a seal-related game, I’m down for it, and after a while they suggested to make a seal restaurant game, something like some other videogames they play. So we got to work, I told them we’d get something ready to publish in a month or less and set the release date to Nov 14th. We work on it at night once every three days, and we have some stuff working already. It’ll be ready for that date.

I’m sharing that experience because it’s literally what YC says to like. Even if YC doesn’t pick me, and I’m planning for them not to, I’m launching Duckity. I’m gonna make it work, and it WILL work. Launch date is on Tuesday and I’m launching anxiety or not. If you’re some YC guy reading this, hi! And if you’re not some YC guy reading this, also hi!

Ultimately, everyone has a reason to say no. Actually doing things is what really matters, and trying and learning everything you can and getting better every second. I have no proof in the startup world, yet no doubts either. Good luck with whatever you’re building!