A Satirical 'Revenue Larping' Site Is Trending on Hacker News. How Should You Report Revenue on Your YC F26 Application?

The joke that should make every YC applicant a little nervous

Climbing the Hacker News front page today is a site called LARP, which bills itself as "revenue infrastructure for serious founders." The bit: it pairs you with another founder, you wire each other $10,000, and you both "book" $10,000 in revenue. Cash never moves. Your ARR goes up and to the right. It is satire about wash trading and round-tripping, and it aims most of its fire at the AI industry's circular financing, where chipmakers invest in labs that then spend the money on chips and cloud credits, and each leg gets counted as revenue somewhere.

If you are filling out a YC F26 application right now, the joke lands a little too close to home. The single most common way founders quietly torch their credibility with YC is not fraud. It is reporting revenue that does not mean what they are implying it means. Here is how to report revenue on your application so it survives contact with a partner who has read tens of thousands of these.

What does YC actually ask about revenue?

The application is blunt. It asks how much revenue you are making, how many users or customers you have, and how fast that is growing, and it wants a specific number and time period. YC evaluates on growth and traction, so the revenue field matters. But partners are reading for signal, not for the biggest number you can assemble.

Two things they infer almost instantly: is this real, recurring, paid usage, and how fast is it growing. Everything below is about not fooling yourself, or them, on either axis.

Report net revenue, not GMV

The most common inflation is not lying, it is confusion. If you run a marketplace or process payments, the money flowing through your platform (gross merchandise value) is not your revenue. Your revenue is your take rate. YC partners including Michael Seibel have hammered this point for years: report net revenue. A founder who writes "$500K/mo" that turns out to be GMV on a 3% take, so roughly $15K real, reads as either naive or slippery. Neither helps you.

MRR is the honest unit, so annualize carefully

$10K per month is $120K ARR. That is standard and fine. What is not fine is annualizing a spike: one great week, a single enterprise pilot, or a launch bump multiplied by 52. The LARP site's punchline, "annualize the annualization," is exactly this move. If your revenue is lumpy, report MRR and show the monthly series. Let the growth rate carry the weight.

What counts as revenue, and what YC will see through

Pilots, LOIs, and "signed" deals are not revenue

A letter of intent is not a customer. A signed pilot that has not paid is not revenue. You can absolutely mention them, but label them honestly: "3 paid pilots at $2K each, plus 2 signed LOIs." Partners respect this, because it shows you know the difference. Blending them into one big revenue number signals the opposite.

Friends-and-family revenue is the real-world larp

The satire works because a mild version is everywhere. Your first customers are often your former employer, your co-founder's old boss, and three founder friends who pay you to be supportive. Having them is fine, everyone starts somewhere. But partners can smell revenue that came from your network rather than the market. If most of your MRR comes from people who know you personally, say so, and put the spotlight on the one or two customers who found you cold. That is the number that actually predicts growth.

Does YC verify your revenue?

Increasingly, yes, and always at the moment it matters most. In the 10-minute interview it is common for a partner to ask, on the spot, to see your Stripe dashboard or your analytics. If you are accepted, diligence is real, and founders have had offers pulled for material misrepresentation. The asymmetry is brutal. A slightly smaller honest number costs you almost nothing, because YC funds pre-revenue companies every single batch. An inflated number that later unravels costs you the batch and your reputation in a small, tightly connected world.

Remember what YC is optimizing for. Airbnb (W09) famously got in with tiny numbers. Plenty of teams in the current S26 batch were pre-revenue when they applied. Growth rate and founder quality beat a big, mushy revenue figure almost every time.

How to report revenue in a way that actually helps you

A few concrete moves:

• Lead with MRR and monthly growth, for example "$8K MRR, growing about 20% month over month for four months." Paul Graham's long-standing bar for early growth is roughly 5 to 7% per week, and honest growth is far more persuasive than a big static number.
• Separate the buckets: recurring revenue, one-time revenue, paid pilots, and LOIs. Never merge them into one figure.
• Give the denominator: "$8K MRR from 40 paying customers, 2 of them acquired this week with no intro."
• If you are pre-revenue, say so and show usage instead: weekly actives, retention, week-over-week growth. Pre-revenue with real retention beats fake revenue every time.

Pressure-test your numbers before a partner does

The uncomfortable core of the LARP joke is that the fake version and the "strategic partnership" version are, in its words, separated mostly by vibes, scale, and whether a bank structured it. On a YC application you do not get that cover. The fix is boring but reliable: only report numbers you would be happy to defend live, with your Stripe dashboard open on the screen.

This is exactly where an outside read helps. Before you submit, have someone who has actually sat in the YC interview seat look at how you framed revenue and traction, the way YC alumni reviewers do on YC Roaster, and ask the questions a partner will ask. What is recurring? Who is really paying? What is the growth rate, honestly? If your numbers survive that conversation, they will survive the interview. If they do not, it is far better to learn it now than in minute six of your F26 interview.

The founders who get into YC F26 will not be the ones with the most impressive-sounding revenue. They will be the ones whose small, real number is obviously real, and obviously growing.