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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Awesome news. If you haven't done startup school, I'd highly recommend it. We got paired with lots of people from our local city (which surprised me since I didn't know there was this much activity around here).

Seriously startup school is great. Cannot recommend participating enough.

And also: do it no matter what stage you are at. Full disclosure: the project that our team was working has been put on hold by us[1] (and going through SuS helped us realize we might be chasing the wrong thing), BUT the experience of going through it pushed me towards working much harder on a project which had previously just been on autopilot.

[1]We'll probably pick it back up eventually.

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Oh getting paired with locals is very cool! I did it a couple years ago, and it was worth it -- but I wish some in my group had been from around my city, Austin. My project ended up shipping (https://www.currentkey.com), and it was nice to be accountable to a few other people through an important stretch and have regular reality checks. I'd strongly consider doing this again for my next project (a mobile game), especially if I could be paired with locals.

If I had one regret, looking back on the experience, it would be a mistake I made: forming an LLC far before I needed to, largely to be seen as a 'company' by YC. You can (and I'd say in some cases should) validate your project, esp. if you're a solo founder - by launching an app as an individual developer vs a company account. I know YC itself is only interested in companies, but they should appreciate that if this school is open to all -- all people don't need a company to have a profitable project.

I think it’s more of creating a LLC is such a low threshold that it shows you haven’t seriously thought about your business and the liability that can occur if you release without a corporate entity for your own protection.

Yup. That was of course a big reason I incorporated, but Apple's EULA on its own (and probably the play store's too) is likely sufficient protection for many indie devs. (Many thousands of indie devs launch profitable apps without incorporating.) Anyway, I'm not blaming anyone, I just think that step of mine may have been premature.

I'm working on a startup (https://www.cloudternal.com) in Austin. If you want to connect, my email is in my profile.

Thanks for saying hi, and done!

So happy to hear you had a great experience! We've added a new concept of "company stage" to improve the relevance of curriculum content and group session matches, hopefully that will make your point of "do it no matter what stage you are at" even more true. :)

Would you consider adding a feature to clear past metrics from the charts on /updates? I signed up for the SUS 2018 course with a startup that looked very different from my current project, so my metrics these days look like a bunch of primary-colored snakes chasing some dots.

Yeah, that's a common feature request. For now, if you send an email to startupschool@ycombinator.com we can clear those out manually.

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