
Applications Are Now Open for YC Startup School – Starts in January - erohead
https://www.startupschool.org/
======
yuriy_zaremba
YC Startup School became our ticket to YC. It helped us get all our ducks in
the row and really focus on growth for the first time since we founded
AXDRAFT. We applied to YC two times before SUS to no avail, but after we got
into SUS and managed to get to 20%+ MoM growth there, we got into YC.

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.

~~~
dokein
I will say this: we did not have the same good experience.

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.

~~~
andrew_wc_brown
I would agree the noise is high and the pairing is poor. I've done Startup
School twice and will a third time with the same company.

~~~
xwowsersx
I'm a bit confused. Why are you going back a third time then?

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sillysaurusx
When you look over the site, is anyone else feeling... I'm not quite sure how
to put it... well, weird?

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/](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/](https://everybootstrap.site/)

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kcorbitt
Super excited to be running this again! One of our learnings from last year's
Startup School was that founders who signed up for our waitlist months ahead
of time were unlikely to still be working on their startup once the course
began.

By running Startup School more frequently, we hope we can help founders right
when they need it. Looking forward to this course!

~~~
runnr_az
Sweet. Personally, I appreciate it... this is totally what I need to get some
momentum going with my project.

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jsonne
I'm presently living in a fairly rural part of the US due to an illness in the
family. In the town of 14,000 I currently reside in it's pretty difficult to
network in a meaningful way and talk about my company with folks that can give
guidance and feedback. Really excited for Startup School and so grateful that
YC has put this together.

~~~
westurner
> _In the town of 14,000 I currently reside in it 's pretty difficult to
> network in a meaningful way and talk about my company with folks that can
> give guidance and feedback_

GitLab and Zapier are examples of all remote former YC companies.

"GitLab Handbook"
[https://about.gitlab.com/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/](https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/)

~~~
sfkdjf9j3j
Were those companies remote when they did YC? I can't recall exactly where
offhand but I seem to remember Paul Graham (or was it Sam Altman?) saying that
they were strongly against remote teams in the early stages. It was a few
years ago though, I wonder if their opinions have changed.

~~~
westurner
Startup School is now designed as a remote program.

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?

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ClaytonMooney
For us at Nebullam, YC Startup School was the perfect step before applying to
YC.

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!

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emlieber
Highly recommend YC startup school. Latchel went through startup school during
the infancy of our product. The accountability and direction put us on track
to predictably drive sales every week. I'm 100% certain that the startup
school experience is also what got us into YC's W19 batch. Lots of parallels
shared between startup school's structure and YC itself.

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.

~~~
ignoramous
> Highly recommend YC startup school.

+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.

~~~
sdan
Hold on.

$10k on DO?

Are you serious?

~~~
Cenk
When I did SUS it was $30K, limited to a year though.

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feedbackuser
Things which could make YC Startup School better

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.

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nectoinc
Startup school was instrumental in helping me turn an idea into a company.
Narrowing a grand vision that got me excited about working on it down to
individual MVP test to learn from reality and test traction was an experience
that made going through SUS a game changer.

~~~
runninganyways
How do you test an idea without having a patent? Weren't you worried about
somebody stealing your idea?

~~~
nectoinc
Personal opinion, but I like to know my idea is valuable before thinking about
patenting it. Of course every idea is different and every situation is
different, so if you are thinking about patenting, these guys were in our
batch and were awesome! =>
[https://www.cognitionip.com/](https://www.cognitionip.com/)

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blhack
To people who have done SuS before: are there any opportunities for in-person
meetups?

I'd love to host something here in Phoenix if anybody is interested. I can
provide the space for it too.

~~~
kcorbitt
Hey, I'm the engineer/PM for SUS!

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.

~~~
blhack
Very cool. Thank you!

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arjunpatel1026
YC Startup school was an amazing experience. The content and the other
startups in our group really helped us hone in on our communication and made
us think about the two most important things as an early-stage company:
building product & finding customers.

It helped us became aligned and accountable which ultimately helped us get
into YC!

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mcguire
Problem: Starting a business is hard, because you need a lot of money.

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.

~~~
ronanyeah
Low code development.

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idoh
Does anyone know how often Startup School runs? Is it once a year, or more
often than that?

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dhawalhs
A few reviews from last year's edition of Startup School:
[https://www.classcentral.com/course/independent-startup-
scho...](https://www.classcentral.com/course/independent-startup-school-7130)

Disclaimer: Self plug

