YC Startup School: Build Sprint and Equity-Free Grants
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
The most important thing which is told to you over and over again while you are doing Startup School is "talk to your users (potential users)". Talk to them before writing the first damn line of code. Only after you have 20-100 people who told you "yes, that is my problem which must be resolved" start working on your solution to this particular problem.
Still, about 80% of people who I met over SS weekly sessions completely neglected those rules. They were building to build not to solve the problem.
Also, AWS credits saved us thousands of $. I did not know about these credits until I randomly clicked on a "deals" tab of SS interface.
This "Build Sprint" is truly a great idea that will finally highlight the success of those teams who listened to YC's advises.
Finally, I think because of SS is free many people do not value their advises. However, SS literally has 99% of what you need to know to build a 100k-1M ARR business. That's why I think SS should be somewhat paid/exclusive to make people value it.
This is good advice if you want to 'do a startup', and maybe that's the sort of person startup school attracts, but it seems incongruous with the majority of founders I know who started by solving a problem they had themselves. They built something because they needed it to exist, and a business grew out from that.
Building to distract yourself from more important work on your startup (eg testing your assumptions) is a bad idea but building because you actually need the thing to exist isn't.
For example, the fact that I live with my partner and many of my potential users don’t means they can apply a fundamentally different process to tracking calories than me. You are not going to realize stuff like that on your own.
So even if you’re mostly just fixing your own problem, just talking to a few people and making minor changes accordingly can make your product useful for a way bigger audience. Or maybe better stated conversely, not talking to others will narrow your products’ audience down immensely.
If you have the capacity and the will to build for yourself, you should already have the drive to push your idea forward. You don't need validation from them to make it work.
I hate getting judged by a "panel of experts" and their "opinions" destroying the wills to continue. Self-confidence and constant iterative validation are a big part of the founder's success. YC's model of "only the top 1% gets funding and support" has stopped producing unicorns. It exerts bias and provides false validation to the founders leading them into a false sense of security.
Resources are great, but I wouldn't waste time on a program like this. Especially they pick only 20.
If you have some kind of traction and experience, the video conferences felt pretty awkward because a lot of the founders were completely inexperienced and would try to be helpful by giving you "advice" they'd read in a blog somewhere or really obvious stuff.
Just for reference, last 2-3 weeks were a complete blank. I spoke to a few founders for motivation but I could not drive work.
If you have the capacity to work without any support, good for you. I am not in these networks for YC validation though. I am there for the peers, they help immensely. In fact I want to create an alternate place for founders, but many already exist and I am a part (PH, IH, Makerlog) of them too.
There are only difficult decade-long slogs through the hard work of building a company, which may or may not one day yield a million dollars.
Take spacex for example, which started like this and 20 years later is aiming for Mars
https://www.starletters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/maria...
Or Amazon, which started like this and took a long long time to become one of the biggest companies in the world
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7p9n1j/photo_of_jeff_...
But most people don't want to do the work so they look for million dollar ideas.
A billion dollars, on the other hand...
However, coming up with ideas is far, far easier than executing on them. If you're in a situation where you can't generate ideas, I would recommend reading/watching various advice on the subject in the YC library and elsewhere, to try and get closer to the right mindset to be open to opportunities. Then pay attention to all the little things you ignore day to day. Every time you find yourself getting frustrated with a company or process, that could be an opportunity in disguise. It's also beneficial to broaden your work experience. Go work in a different field or a field at an intersection with yours and pay attention.
Be Mindful of The Living Force as you go through life :)
There was an article [0] shared here last month that I found useful for weighing the relative importance of ideas vs execution.
IMO, there are many many million-dollar-ideas (million with an m, not billion) out there, that are enough to make a bootstrap startup out of.
Many people see these ideas, but don't develop them because the problems are "body-building hard" instead of "ideas hard". Working 9-5 at $BIG_CO is neither kind of hard most of the time, and most people prefer that.
[0]: https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/2017/05/26/hard-is-not-def...
'Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.' - Ronnie Coleman
I'm not sure if it's just healthy body healthy mind, or building up discipline, or something else.
I'm not much of a body builder compared to most, mind you, but I keep at it.
Mind sharing how you are able to sustain the habit?
I currently jog fairly consistently but only on week days. I’m able to jog for ~25 mins 3 to 5 times a week and make it a point to rest on weekends.
I got a boxed set of portable weights just as the lock down was about to be enacted but have not been able to lift regularly. Now, it takes an enormous amount of mental energy to get myself to lift even on weekends that I’ve simply abandoned the weights.
I haven't lifted in a while, but I've done marathon training before and the hook is quite related. Each week, if you push yourself hard enough, you will make more or less linear progress.
Just like running, the first 2-3 weeks of regular lifting are a big slog to get through, but then your body starts learning/adapting, you start demonstrably and rapidly improving, and it becomes fun.
Linear progress is easy to track with runs when you push yourself hard enough as you say, but not so much with weights because it comes with it’s own tending. For instance, to really see results rapidly, your diet has to change such that you are getting certain amounts of protein and other nutrients to build muscle mass.
I have tried to copy the discipline I’ve inculcated from running regularly for weightlifting, but I’m not able to sustain it because in addition to it using up fast-twitch muscles, it also comes with a change in dietary habits that go with that kind of workout.
At the time I was training, I was aiming for a marathon time that qualifies you for the Boston Marathon, as an example. (that's much more about muscle development than other forms of running). You can't consistently run a sub-7:00 mile for more than 3 miles without having a pretty regimented diet.
If you don't increase your protein intake dramatically, you'll get injuries while pushing for that pace, and if you can't push, you will plateau.
But you're right that you can go pretty far (maybe a month) without changing your diet in running training, depending on where you're starting from.
It's a little awkward now because I have to schedule an appointment for the gym and I can only get access 3 times a week, and it's the building gym so there isn't a huge variety of equipment, but I'm making do.
God willing, I’ll try out the same-time same-days tip this weekend and see if I can sustain it for a month. If I can’t make it work, I’ll trial the gym membership tip.
Thanks!
I'm not exactly sure how it will play out, and it sure isn't easy. But I'm chipping away at it day after day and I'm confident I can make a living at it.
I'm basically saying mix wisdom of the crowd with the startup-idea generation process.
What matters is the journey and how you react to the multiple problems along the way (99% of people give up too early, too much grit is required). Usually by the end of that journey your initial idea has changed beyond recognition, even if there are some common elements between the idea and the endpoint.
To come up with some examples:
Apple: Computers for everyone -> Phones for everyone
Amazon: Buy books online -> Logistics, Free Delivery + Cloud Compute
Airbnb: Airbeds in living rooms -> Online bookings
SpaceX: Greenhouse on Mars -> Reusable rockets
Very few ideas survive contact with reality unscathed.
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/library?categories=Startup%20Ide...
I'm not quite ready to start my own venture just yet, but I like to "practice" by coming up with an idea, setting goals, moving towards them, doing interviews, etc. The startup school is a really nice program to follow along with and have conversations with other founders during. I'm basically using it to war-game a startup launch myself. The idea being that when the time comes that I decide to jump in on something I'm very passionate about and put skin-in-the-game, it should all feel familiar (if not just a tiny bit more comfortable).
Of course it's not a substitute for the real thing, but I think it's brought immense value to my skillset.
If you're a first-time founder, startup school is tremendously beneficial in terms of support from the community (though, indiehackers might be better), content, network (pioneer.app likely better at this), and motivation. I fully recommend it. I am not so sure of the value-add otherwise but it continues to attract energetic and optimistic people.
YC's Startup Library is strikingly good which is (was?) central part of the curriculum. Startup school arranges weekly / bi-weekly AMAs by YC alumni and other industry experts which are of great value, too. Not sure if they're continuing to do that.
The founders you meet during the course open up avenues for collaboration. It is also a great place to get feedback on your startup's progress, refine your pitch, discuss your concerns and roadblocks (which sometimes result in unsolicited but welcomed help), get exposure for your work (however limited).
Getting the most out of the program depends on one's ability to get things done, to stay motivated, focused, and honest.
> Is it possible to complete outside of PST business hours or are there real-time components?
Yes, there are no real-time components. They also match founders for weekly meetings depending on the day and time you choose in addition to other criteria.
Startup school is more hands-off than Pioneer. The latter gamifies building a product that might motivate people and create a sense of achievement. The former is more on-your-own kind of a thing.
That said, I haven't been through a Pioneer program myself but know founders who have and liked it.
If you want to see what we've been working on the past 8 weeks, you can check us out on the chrome store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewalkchat/denbp...
Would people who've been through this program be willing to share what their sprint goal was along with how mature their project was, what kind of experience they had and whether they achieved their sprint goal?
In fact, it seems like simply running a successful marketing campaign for your preexisting product would set you up for success in this "sprint".
More specifically, the selection criteria reads:
A panel of qualified judges determined by Sponsor (YC) in its sole discretion will select as the Winners the Participants with the twenty highest-scoring Submissions from among all eligible Submissions received by the Submission Deadline based on the following criteria:
* Participant’s revenue or prospects for revenue in the near term (25%)
* Participant’s business growth as measured by an increase in users, increase in revenues, progress in bookings or improvement in the Participant’s objectives (“Business Growth”) (25%)
* Scalability of Participant’s business (25%)
* Feasibility of implementing Participant’s proposed business objectives (25%)
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1YSvivbXQGTH8bHLTfIwj...
The first iteration of this was launched in July 2015 and it was called the YC Fellowship. Participation was accomplished remotely via video chat and grant money was $12000.