
YC Startup School: Build Sprint and Equity-Free Grants - todsacerdoti
https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-yc-build-sprint-and-20-equity-free-grants/
======
artembugara
I started Startup School about 7 months ago and went from side-project to a
full-time cofounder [1]. I (23M) am a first-time technical entrepreneur, and I
cannot emphasize enough how beneficial YC's resources are for those who just
start.

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.

[1] [https://newscatcherapi.com/](https://newscatcherapi.com/)

~~~
onion2k
_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._

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.

~~~
read_if_gay_
I need a thing to exist (calorie counter), but I also talked (if only
superficially) to other people like me about the issue. I still got a lot of
insight out of that. You wouldn’t expect the number of tiny, innocent
assumptions you make that hold for yourself but are utterly not the case for
others.

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.

~~~
artembugara
Same, we fixed our own problem. Still, talked to others to understand if there
is a demand. Because there is always a chance that it is only you who have
such issues.

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kcorbitt
Hey HN! Really excited to launch the YC Build Sprint. We've been working on
this for the last month. The main goal here is to help founders get as much
done as possible in a 4-week period. We've found that time pressure can be
really helpful for productivity, even if it's external (and even somewhat
contrived).

~~~
kanobo
Thanks kcorbitt! Apologies if this is not the place to report this but invited
co-founders get an 'Invite not found!' error after clicking on the invite link
in the email and after filling out the profile.

~~~
erohead
Could you email startupschool@ycombinator.com? We can help out!

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tpae
In my opinion, Startup School is kind of a waste of time.

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.

~~~
brainless
I am a founder who has been trying for many years. I have a set of mental
issues including insecurity (which is way better now) and I totally depend on
peer group of founders to help me along.

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.

~~~
skinnymuch
Where is the community in PH? Also everything that is top ranked on PH has a
majority of vague or empty positivity. Being positive is good, but not the way
PH and Yourstack are.

~~~
brainless
PH Makers, it is not as matured a community but it is getting there. I am not
talking about PH ranking (homepage).

~~~
skinnymuch
Ah okay. So the wip.chat and makerlog clone? Based on principles. I don’t
know. Don’t feel right using the bigger corp copying product.

------
jb775
YC needs a version (or sub-section) of startup school that's focused on
generating quality startup ideas. I feel like that's a huge aspect that isn't
really talked about. This "Build Sprint" is an example...they jump right to
"let's figure out how to get your first customers", and assume everyone is
ready to go with a million-dollar idea.

~~~
grey-area
There are no million dollar ideas.

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...](https://www.starletters.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/mariachi.png)

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_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7p9n1j/photo_of_jeff_bezos_in_1999_think_about_this_the/)

But most people don't want to do the work so they look for million dollar
ideas.

~~~
jb775
I'm not discounting moonshot business ideas. I'm saying there's a bunch of
capable people out there that may not have any idea what exactly to build. And
I'm saying people like that could benefit from active discussion on ideas of
what to build, and people that already have ideas of what to build would
benefit from discussing their startup idea & business plan with others prior
to diving in head first.

I'm basically saying mix wisdom of the crowd with the startup-idea generation
process.

~~~
grey-area
Quite sincerely, I'm convinced YC and other VCs don't do this because they've
observed that ideas truly don't matter very much. And if you can't even come
up with an idea what hope do you have of finishing the work, why not become an
employee (which is fine)?

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.

~~~
bobwernstein
if ideas don't matter, explain Uber and the dozens of copy cat apps that
launched right after all over the world. Why didn't they launch before Uber
was even thought of by the founder?

------
waprin
Really cool idea! I'm working on a project that could really, really use 4
weeks of focused effort, and I think that's enough time to accomplish a lot
but short enough it doesn't feel overwhelming to zone in on it for that long.
Looking forward to be a part of it!

~~~
droobles
I'm in the same boat, this looks exciting!

------
kanobo
I'm not very familiar with Startup School, can students who participated
recently chime in about the amount of value obtained and time commitment
involved? Is it possible to complete outside of PST business hours or are
there real-time components? Thanks!

~~~
tuxxy
I try to participate in Startup School each time it comes around. I find it
incredibly good practice for "the real thing".

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.

------
abetusk
I'm kind of at a loss for what they expect the "sprint goals" to be.

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?

~~~
victor9000
While the selection criteria seems pretty subjective, if you want a chance at
winning the $10K grant then your work should focus on business growth. They
mention examples like launching V1, but the criteria has no real focus on
product progress or technical achievements.

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...](https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1YSvivbXQGTH8bHLTfIwjzNwkUGcwZfuXZJrsL2EFF2k/mobilebasic)

------
100-xyz
I have registered for this, set a goal of 150 registered users and 2 paying
users and then panicked. Here is the relevant blog
[https://toonclip.com/blog](https://toonclip.com/blog)

------
RSchaeffer
Does anyone know how frequently these are offered?

~~~
sah2ed
IMHO, YC tends to launch these kinds of programs around summer.

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.

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-fellowship/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-
fellowship/)

