We learned of the application about 1 week before the deadline. We threw it together in an afternoon, spent a couple days editing, and turned it in just before the deadline. We basically thought "What the hell?" the worst thing that can happen is we don't get accepted, and then we will have only wasted the time we spent preparing the application. We had no demo and barely a coherent idea, so we focused our application on how awesome the founders were. We basically wanted to show that we were smart and we could build things, we figured that would get us to the interview round (and buy us some time to formulate our idea.)

You should apply even if you have to put the application together today. Just for the experience. At worst, you'll waste an afternoon. At best you'll get in, like we did (Cloudant YCS08 - Boston)