Colophon

cockroach.fyi tells a founder what to read and watch next for the stage they're actually in. You describe your situation; it hands back a short, ordered path through 18 Paul Graham essays and 25 official Y Combinator videos — start here, then this, this when you're ready — with one blunt line on why each one, for you, now.

The one rule

No invented content. The model never writes a link or a title. It can only emit IDs from a hand-verified catalog of 43 items; the app resolves those IDs to real, checked URLs, and an ID the catalog doesn't know simply doesn't render. A hallucinated link isn't a moderation problem here — it's a type error. A script re-checks every URL and confirms every video's channel is literally “Y Combinator.”

Why “cockroach”

The startup you want to be is a cockroach: default alive, hard to kill, able to survive on almost nothing. That's the idea behind Paul Graham's Default Alive or Default Dead? and the ramen-profitable ethos this whole thing is built around — so the site runs the same way. No accounts, one small database, a bill of roughly nothing a month.

How it's built

Next.js and a streaming Gemini model do the selecting and sequencing. Postgres holds your conversation (against an anonymous ID your browser keeps — no login, and “Start over” deletes it), the shareable roadmap permalinks, and the rate-limit counters that keep a public URL from running up an API bill. That's the entire backend.

The point

The best startup advice ever written is already free, on paulgraham.com and YC's YouTube. The hard part was never access — it's knowing which piece matters right now. So everything here links straight to the source.

So far: 2 roadmaps built · 3 click-throughs sent to paulgraham.com and YC.