I got a merged PR into a YC startup before they ever replied to my job application

I applied to a YC W25 startup the normal way. Filled out the form, wrote a decent cover letter, hit submit.

Silence.

While waiting, I found their open-source repo on GitHub. Read through the codebase out of genuine curiosity I wanted to understand what they were actually building.

Found a bug.

Fixed it.

Opened a PR.

It got merged in 2 days.

They still hadn't replied to my application.

Here's what that taught me about job hunting in 2025:

A cover letter tells someone what you claim you can do.

A merged PR shows them.

One of those gets read. The other gets filed under "maybe later" -which is just "no" with extra steps.

I'm not saying cold applications are dead. I'm saying they're the last resort, not the first move. If a company has a public repo, you have a backdoor that most applicants don't even think to try.

Read the code deep and find something small but real.

Fix it and Open a PR.

Now you're not a stranger in their inbox you're someone who already ships for them.

The reply came eventually, by the way. But by then, the maintainers already knew my GitHub handle.

That matters more than you think.

Have you ever landed something through a contribution instead of an application? Drop it in the comments curious how many people have done this.