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Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

Sounds more like a "how to build a web app" course. [0]

Building a startup involves a lot of "soft skills" that not all developers are familiar with: marketing, talking to customers, overcoming all sorts of psychological blockers/fears about putting yourself, your ideas, and your product "out there" for all people to judge.

When I saw the title, I hoped that it would focus on those aspects of building a startup, sort of like the 30x500 course by Amy Hoy. http://unicornfree.com/30x500

[0] There's nothing wrong with doing a course for how to build web applications. I just don't think it's the same thing as building a startup.

EDIT:

It seems the official name of the course is "Startup Engineering", which makes a lot more sense than the submission title: "How to build a startup".

Please fix the title of the submission so that this comment might be deprecated.

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Also took this class at Stanford - extremely valuable, and it does devote a significant portion to marketing and discovering what is valuable to build.

Things such as ways to create extremely minimum viable products, how to generate, and quickly validate ideas are all covered - so it definitely covers more than just the things you note.

Hm, interesting. Though the skeptic in me wonders how much of the course is focused on these aspects? A lecture or two? vs a week or two?

It looks like weeks 8 (Founding: Conception, Composition, Capitalization) and 9 (Business Scaling: Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation, Accounting) cover the crux of the business stuff.

I've mentioned this in a couple comments below, but I think that this class teaches you a lot more than that. I took the class when it was offered at Stanford and one of the most valuable things I took out of the class was how to build APIs for different business functions. Being able to automate huge parts of your business, regardless of what industry you're in, is a huge advantage. Think about an energy company building APIs to monitor consumption and efficiency at client sites and adjusting their work accordingly -- that's huge. This class does a lot more than teach you how to build webapps; it teaches you to think in an automation mindset and happens to teach you a lot of useful skills along the way.

Sure, but my main point was about the types of things taught in the class: mostly technical things.

Most developers are already good at these things (or can learn them fairly quickly). The hard part of building a startup, at least for developers, is actually learning how to run a business and grow it. How to acquire users/customers, how to market, how to take care of all the "nasty but necessary" paperwork.

The class is the sequel to the class by Peter Thiel that covered those things. Unfortunately that class isn't available online, to my knowledge - but the Stanford students who first took that and then this would be learning both.

As somebody who is already reasonably good at the soft skills, I have really been looking forward to this class as a primer and entry point (though clearly not a silver bullet) to learn the technical skills.

There are some good notes for Peter Thiel's class here: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

Give me the specs for a $19.9 ebook on that, please :) I've been of the mind to write something like that for a while.

Haha, a book would be nice, but I think really the only way to learn this is by experiencing it. The book should be more of a guide about how to put yourself in the environment that forces you to learn this stuff.

Yes, I agree you can only actually learn by doing. No amount of book-reading will equal your first startup in terms of practical knowledge and how to apply it. That said, one's own startup is necessarily narrow in scope and there is a ton that the active practitioner can learn from anecdotes from other startups, especially across different markets and industries, and with different talent and network constraints.

My signup page, FWIW: http://dontkillyourcofounder.com/

"Running Lean" (O'Reilly) is excellent and Ash has a bunch of useful videos as well. I think it's currently the best "business side of a startup" book out there.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCimRGeoiwUPmIddym-HdaCg

"The Lean Startup" by Ries is also good but RL is more condensed (lean?!) imo

"Startup Owner's Manual" is also good and they have a course on edx iirc

Edit: It's a udacity class, close enough. Link:

https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245

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