Startup School's “Aspiring Founders” track is reopening as a continuous course | Hacker News Reader

Startup School's “Aspiring Founders” track is reopening as a continuous course

blog.ycombinator.com

63 pointstodsacerdoti5 comments

Hey HN! We've decided to make Startup School available to folks who aren't currently working on a startup but are thinking about starting one in the future. We ran a similar course last fall which went well, so going forward it's going to be a permanent offering. Happy to answer questions!

Does anyone who has done the previous iteration of this course have any takeaways? I am interested in working through it and would be interested in the last class saw it as time well spent.

I found there were a bunch of good nuggets of practical knowledge that I didn't know and were very good to learn. In general, the lessons are practical and aren't "fluffy", even for topics I thought might be (like generating startup ideas).

The biggest takeaways for me were:

1) Find people with a problem and have constant communication with them (while solving said problem)

2) Launch early and often. MVP can and should suck.

3) There is no "one big release". This one was super valuable to me because I always thought you basically had one shot to get traction and you failed if you didn't. Realistically, if you do rule 2, you have ample opportunity to continue changing/growing/launching.

Good summary. 3 is hard for me to swallow, because I've painfully learned it the hard way (3 times) to not rely on a one-time big release to carry my products to victory.

1st product - great initial traction (HN front page for a few hours, featured on Product hunt, reviewed by a youtuber with decent following). What you might call a big release, but then I did nothing and it fizzled out. It now gets no traffic what so ever.

2nd product - did the same as my 1st, got no traction on launch day. I've just left it on the back burner. Haven't done much since.

3rd product - decided to share before doing a big release and luckily it's turned out better so far (getting organic traffic), but I still got drawn to trying a big release. Launch day came and went and you wouldn't even notice if you glanced at user sign-ups.

To be honest, it's hard not to get your hopes up though that your HN or reddit post will go viral. That's not typically how it works though, at least from my experience.

I don't think YC / Startup School is bad/wrong/evil, but I believe it comes up extremely short in preparing aspiring founders to meet the complex challenges of our time in a life-honoring way.

What does life on Earth want the next generation of founders to learn, cultivate, value, experience? I don't have the answers. But I think we need to move beyond the existing monocultural startup education to help founders understand the inner dimensions of life, the sociopolitical context of their innovations, and so on.

I wrote some thoughts on the topic here:

https://aandrewdunn.medium.com/the-path-of-the-humane-techno...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com