Applications Are Now Open for YC Startup School – Starts in January
startupschool.org
startupschool.org
The software behind SUS is amazing. Even now after YC, I report our metrics to SUS software, because it keeps you accountable and shows you very clearly how you are doing.
I recommend YC SUS to all startups that ask me for advice and if you want to get into YC - start with SUS.
My cofounder and I are starting a healthcare B2B SaaS company and were 1-2 months in when we tried Startup School. We got paired with people for the first three weeks who were purely in the idea phase and had no product, no sales meetings, and no prior experience. We also got paired with people in the wellness rather than healthcare space, for example those that were looking to sell some random supplement (which generally have little evidence of benefit). As a result, doing the weekly meetings was more of an energy drain rather than a social-pressure-as-a-motivator service.
The forums were full of people asking for technical co-founders or for basic advice that was covered in the lectures. The software also did not give any great insights (i.e. you can replicate all the features with a simple weekly checklist of "What's your sales target / quantifiable metric?" and "Have you hit it, or what have you done to hit it?").
This doesn't invalidate all the hundreds or thousands of people who had excellent experiences. Just wanted to illustrate the other perspective.
I agree that the forums are worse-than-useless. They were mostly about "try my app" with no replies, or endless arguments between people who were setting up an "unofficial Startup School Slack" and and "unofficial Startup School Discord".
If there is one thing they should do this year differently it would be start an official Slack (and yes it should be Slack) for people who want it.
I have a more positive outlook on the group sessions though. True that sometimes they were energy draining, especially when you were having sessions with people that hadn't been able to put any work in since week 1. But that's due to life factors, etc, many of the groups had people occupied with their FT jobs, and I was slammed with my FT job for a core chunk of SUS too, where all of a sudden a week went by and I didn't really have an update.
However, the accountability was good, and I would push myself to try to have something for an update. Since then I've actually adopted this habit to publishing updates on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoWGysmHaCM).
Another positive of the group sessions regardless of who made it there (I had some where it was just me and 1 other person), was that it formed a habit of practising your pitching. Even though pitching regularly is well championed by YC, it's hard to practically force yourself to do that unless you're pushed into that role. The group sessions had value there :)
When I did the first Startup School I made a number of mistakes. The most costly was that I didn't launch early enough. When I did eventually launch my product, I launched with too many features and I found it difficult to explain to my beta testers. It was "cool" but my users found that it changed their workflow too much and they didn't want to make the investment to see if it was worthwhile. I got disheartened and gave up.
The funny thing was that I was aware that what I was doing was considered "common startup pitfalls" even as I was making the mistakes. From talking to other founders, it seems that a lot of us only learn by making the mistake for ourselves.
At the most recent Startup School, I started again with a new idea. I was determined to build something that solved a specific problem that was easy-to-explain and I wanted to launch quickly. I'm still very early-on in the journey but I have customers, revenue and growth.
I would particularly recommend solo founders to give Startup School a go. As a solo founder, the weekly updates with peers really helped keep me honest with myself.
edit:
Old (failed) Startup: https://pin.gy
New Startup: https://www.todesktop.com
edit2: If you watch one SUS video ever then watch this 16 minute video from Sam Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJKucu6HJc
From someone who vividly remembers the early days of YC, it's bizarre (not necessarily in a bad way, just bizarre) to see everything reduced to “what you get”, “success stories”, and 6 boxes with phrases like “Ideas” and “staying alive”, each with an icon.
I think YC's competitors in the early days had sites that looked structurally similar. At the time, it was easy to feel like "Heh... these guys are just trying to mimic the form, but they don't have the substance. YC's the substance."
So now I'm just feeling very 32 rather than 21. Guess that's what happens when time passes.
(To clarify, it's certainly a slick website. I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing anything; certainly not something as trivial as the form factor of a website. I just meant that even https://www.ycombinator.com/ in its new form still retains much of the minimalism of the original site. So it was just interesting to realize that "Well, webdev looks like startupschool.org now. Even YC is doing it.")
Anyway. It is exciting that startup school is a thing now. I remember making a post like "Let's start a hacker school!" back in 2008 or whatever, but at the time even pg said that explicitly replacing universities was probably going too far with the idea. Nowadays we have lambdaschool, startup school, and YC is basically going door to door. Neat.
EDIT: Ah, someone linked to what I was trying to put into words: https://everybootstrap.site/
By running Startup School more frequently, we hope we can help founders right when they need it. Looking forward to this course!
GitLab and Zapier are examples of all remote former YC companies.
"GitLab Handbook" https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
"The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work: Lessons from a team of over 200 remote workers" https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/
It'd be interesting to hear from them about building all remote team culture with transparency and accountability from the start vs also-remoting-now. Are text-chat "digital stand up meetings" with quality transcripts of each team member's responses to the three questions enough? ( Yesterday / Today and Tomorrow / Obstacles // What did I do since the last time we met? What will I do before the next time we meet? What obstacles are blocking my progress? )
Or are there longer term planning sessions focusing on a plan for delivering value on a far longer term than first getting the MVP down and maximizing marginal profit by minimizing costs?
Startup School helps you A) focus on the metrics that matter B) remain accountable to those metrics, week-after-week c) meet peers with incredible skill sets and companies, to share your ups and downs with
I highly recommend applying!
Even if you don't intend to apply to YC, you'll be able to apply startup school's concepts to help grow your business.
+1. YC partners usually say that startupschool is pretty much what YC is but without the cohort dynamics, demo-days, and office hours. Plus, it's free. And to make the deal ridiculous, on top of the cloud credits ($10k on DO, $3k on GCP and AWS), they grant no-strings-attached $15k to startups they think are promising.
$10k on DO?
Are you serious?
1) Using a better video conferencing tool like Zoom instead of the existing tool. I (and our cohort) consistently had bad experience and it drained out the energy to communicate with fellow participants in an useful way.
2) Connecting with participants who can be complementary (based on startup stage / startup vertical) instead of random grouping based on geography/time zone.
3) This one is debatable. Personally I would like to Stick with the same cohort every week. (Maybe if there is a request to change, we could get transferred). Instead of explaining your startup idea every time to a new cohort (imho, startup pitching practice is not the most important thing), we could talk about weekly progress / practical problems / solutions with earlier context when we have the same cohort. It also helps in growing the accountability to the cohort. I am sure regular YC is operated that way.
I'd love to host something here in Phoenix if anybody is interested. I can provide the space for it too.
A tool to host/announce local meetups is on our shortlist of features to build. You can kind of approximate it with the software right now (the directory lets you filter for nearby companies and message them) but it's not easy to do.
It helped us became aligned and accountable which ultimately helped us get into YC!
Solution: Venture capitalists.
Problem: Attracting VC attention is hard.
Solution: YC.
Problem: Getting into YC is hard.
Solution: YC Startup School.
I can hardly wait to see the next step.
Disclaimer: Self plug