
Startup School 2017 First Lecture - tempw
https://www.startupschool.org/
======
xiaoma
I was wondering what the acceptance rates were for this MOOC. I understand
it's difficult to deal with large numbers of applicants and that it's just not
feasible to give every single applicant personalized feedback.

From the other side, I've been working on my goal for much of the past year
and a half if I include collaboration attempts with offline businesses in my
market that ended with job offers but no collab. I understand the long time
span looks bad. I understand that it's minus that I'm a solo founder. It's
just that I've gone a long time without a real salary or even insurance, I
deeply believe in the value of what I'm working on and am beginning to have an
idea of how much longer and harder the path is without mentorship from people
who have done it before.

I see a tremendous value in YC and have already benefited from its free
content. That said, estimating the EV of applying, has to include an
assessment of likelihood and the costs of time and distraction as well as the
tremendous upside.

Knowing the acceptance rate would be helpful in calibrating how to approach
future applications, both for me and others who weren't selected.

~~~
jaoued
We've applied along with 50k applicants ([http://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-
school-online-registrati...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-
online-registration-and-deals/)) and we are in this batch along with 3000
other startups coming from all corners of the world (startup founder track).

In our case, we've built MyAppConverter about three years ago, starting from
native iOS to native Android code conversion and now building an online mobile
application porting platform. We've applied and we feel so privileged to have
been selected because it costs us nothing except our time we have to put in
(watching lectures, online group sessions, tutor/advisor sessions and
assignments). We do not have to move to SV (as yet) and yet benefit from
shared valuable experiences amongst YC fellows as well as from other
entrepreneurs.

~~~
Void_
Hey man, we're in the same group (62), can't wait to learn more about your
business!

At first I thought everybody got in, but now I see I was pretty damn lucky
with my product Median (www.median.tech), since I'm solo.

This MOOC is just the best, I didn't expect there would be so much community
around it. As a solo founder, I'm very grateful be in a group with other
founders from all around the world.

~~~
jaoued
That's really cool. We've built the first online mobile application porting
platform.

We currently offer two options: Self-Service Option (99$ USD) (recommended if
you have in-house Android experts): You use our UI porting platform to port
your entire iOS UI elements (storyboard and xib) to native Android UI (xml).
Before you purchase this, you get to view it online (we use appetize.io to let
our customer to view online the Android UI output before purchasing the
Android source code). We offer this at 99$ USD per porting session. The output
you pay for is a full Android UI source which you can start from (to edit in
Android Studio) to complete manually the app and get the final Android
application. That means you can hire any expert Android developer to do this
manual work, yet still saving you some time, effort and money. If you are
looking at this option, it is a self-service. Just login to myappconverter.com
and upload your iOS storyboard project and follow the instructions. We do
offer 15 days free support on our UI output products. Fully Managed Porting
Service Option (Starting from 3000$ USD) (recommended if you don't have any
Android experts): You really want to use our accredited experts engineering
team at MyAppConverter to take the UI Android and complete the work to deliver
you a full working Android application. In this case, once your upload your
entire iOS project, you ask us for a free/no-obligation quote. For that quoted
price, you will get a full working native Android app and its Android source
code. The way we work is that you will be receiving a series of apks for you
to test and you report all issues/bugs through our bug tracking portal; you
will typically get the first UI based apk, then the next one will be including
some logics and more functionalities, until the final apk represents the fully
working & tested app on Android. On average, the porting timeline is around 3
to 5 weeks. We tend not to take porting projects in excess of 5 weeks work to
minimise customer delivery risks. This is the full turnkey option and yet
fast, efficient & price competitive. We have both our in house resources also
a handful carefully selected and accredited freelancers. Let me know if you
need further information.

The UI porting is around storyboard and xib . We port this instantly with our
porting tool to native android.

We are three co-founders based out of London and Casablanca.

Median looks really cool.

------
nhorob67
Interesting how Moskovitz just glosses over a "lifestyle" business. I started
a business 2 years ago, am the sole employee, and it'll make $400-500k in
revenue in 2017 with 20-40% net profits.

I don't think I recreated the wheel here. I'm making a software product that
businesses want to buy.

~~~
dawie
I am a big fan of "lifestyle" businesses. Why are your margins so low, if you
are the only employee?

~~~
nhorob67
I've had a consultancy do all the development so far. They are good, but not
cheap.

Hoping to bring that in-house later this year.

~~~
mattfrommars
Want to build an outsource agency?

~~~
anthonys
That's what I am working on this very minute!

------
dang
Something else that's just out is the list of future speakers:
[https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-online-first-
lec...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-online-first-lecture-and-
speaker-list/)

(via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045559))

~~~
throwathrowaway
The startup school's About page says there are office hours every week

> Class Office Hours will also be held each week to give live advice and
> feedback to the class.

but that schedule only has office hours planned for weeks 2, 5 and 9. Is one
an update of the other? Are there any office hours the first week?

~~~
sandslash
Sorry about that. Initially we were going to have on-stage office hours every
week, but we have since changed the format for the course. Those office hours
in the most recent blog post are current; we'll update the site now.

Apologies for the confusion!

------
inputcoffee
This is an interesting talk, but it is substantially similar to the previous
one that was already out there.

Which makes me think: it would be interesting to have a diff tool for videos,
but it diffs a representation of the content not specific video frames.

Customers might include all the students of Udacity, Coursera, EdX and
Startupschool.

~~~
bootload
_" it would be interesting to have a diff tool for videos"_

    
    
        videoA -> transcriptionA
                    |
                    V
        videoB -> transcriptionB
                    |
                    V
                   diff

~~~
rahimnathwani
That seems too granular, as an additional 'uh' or 'and' would cause a sentence
to be seen as different.

It might work well if you can first pair up the similar sentences from A and
B, using word-level edit distance, or mapping to a lower-dimensional space
using sentence embedding?

~~~
bootload
_" seems too granular,"_

Probably right. I used the term diff as a concept not implementation.

------
CalChris
A couple of the slides are titled: _Getting your first 100 users._ I think
that's probably a strong attraction/benefit for YC. Its alumni seem almost to
be a keiretsu from the outside, offering connections and first sales to their
newly hatched brethren.

~~~
Gargoyle
True. But when I was reading the Techcrunch reports on these last Demo Days,
every time I read one of the batch had some dozen or two customers I couldn't
stop thinking "How many of those are just other YC companies?"

In other words, there's a bit of a discounting in effect now too.

------
TuggaRoo
Great resource - looking forward to future videos. It does feel like there's
an assumption that everyone who wants to build a startup is trying to build
the same kind of startup. Lifestyle businesses and social entrepreneurship
ventures are kind of glossed over, but are legitimate - they require passion
and hardwork without the hope or promise of big payoffs. I'm wondering if this
series will be appropriate for people who are interested in those types of
startups - I guess we will see.

~~~
arikr
This lecture series is definitely aimed at the "startup = growth" type of
startup, so much more relevant to companies that want to get huge.

~~~
mifeng
As a former founder I do think there's truth to Altman's advice to tackle
big/hard problems rather than small/easy.

Rationale:

\- you develop unique expertise and skills that are more valuable (ie more
acquihire rationale) if things go south

\- easier to fundraise and recruit

\- optionality: downshifting to solving a smaller problem is easier than
leveling up to solving a bigger one

~~~
TuggaRoo
But not all huge problems have to = huge financial gain

------
searchhn
Teams actively pursuing a startup and who have been chosen for founders track
get split into groups, with a group advisor and a Mattermost room.

It will be of great help for the folks who applied and did not get selected to
have access to an official 'Mattermost' room to build a community of like
minded individuals keen on entrepreneurship to share information and motivate
ourselves.

------
xiaoma
I see there's now an update form in the MOOC now. It has four fields—metric,
value, growth and notes. Are there any pages on the site offering guidance on
how to get the most out of the MOOC?

In what cases should the primary metric be "other"?

~~~
compumike
(Advisor for #group87 here!)

You should talk to your advisor (possibly one-on-one) about selecting the
right metrics. Many groups are not focused on the right things at the moment,
and that's OK but something we should talk about and fix!

If you have revenue>0, you probably want it to be revenue. Similarly, if you
have revenue==0 && users>0, you probably want it to be active users. (Not
cumulative registered users, but daily or weekly actives, for example.) You
should probably only be using "other" if those two don't apply.

Think of it this way: at the end of the 10 weeks, what metric will you really
care about showing 10 weeks of growth in? For example, having 10X-ed your
revenue is much more impressive than 10X daily active users, which itself is
much more impressive than 10X people manually seeing a demo of your prototype!

~~~
xiaoma
Unfortunately I wasn't selected, which is why I've asked here. I know I had
some poor focuses in the past (e.g. trying to do a collaboration with an
offline business in my industry to bootstrap an online one) and I'm trying to
get some advice here on HN.

I have a free product launched (and then pulled because my API provider
dramatically increased prices). I'm about 3/4 of the way to building a paid
content-based product to ideally fund development of the free one.

So basically my most promising avenues I see are to

    
    
        1) focus 100% on the paid product
        2) eliminate the API provider as a dependency and go all out on the primary free product (risking running out of cash in a couple of months)
        3) try to raise 12k in funding so the runway extends to the end of the year.
    

My current choice is to focus 100% on the paid product. It's not clear how to
put that into a growth goal though.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14048063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14048063)

------
klunger
Does anyone know if they will be doing this again? We found out about it too
late to do try and apply. I looked through the FAQ on the website, but did not
see anything about whether this was a one-off or if they would do it again.

~~~
giarc
Try searching HN history. They did some Q/A type sessions about it. I believe
they wanted to see how this went and were hoping to make this a regular thing.

------
good_vibes
Thanks for the rejection. I realized I didn't need this after all.

