My YCombinator Startup School Study Plan

My last “school” experience was a while ago. Back then, I was good at managing all my school work in my head. Also, I didn’t have any other responsibilities and my memory was probably better…

Nowadays, I’m looking to create habits and processes that will help me chip away at reaching a goal in a simple and incremental way. So, here’s my grand “Study Plan” for Startup School 2018.

I’m writing this for two reasons. First, I’m quite capable of self directed learning but I’ve never had to do it in a structured environment like a MOOC, so I want to create a plan that keeps me on track and accountable. And second, I want to show y’all how I’m setting up my daily workflow! Obviously, I’ll be doing it Sunsama since that’s where my daily workflow lives.

overview of my work + startup school workflow in sunsama

The first thing is figuring out what we’ll be doing and what my goals are. Taking a look at the syllabus and schedule it looks like I’ll need to spend about two hours a week on lectures and one hour a week on group office hours. I’d also like to set aside sometime each day to interact with the community of founders I’ll be a part of. I’ll plan to set aside 20 minutes a day for that, so that I can learn and engage without getting distracted by push notifications in the forums. And finally, the most important part of Startup School, is the weekly progress report. Each week I’ll submit an update on how Sunsama progressed on a single core metric ($MRR). And obviously, the big goal here is: growing my startup. Here’s how I’ve planned out each part:

Growth & Accountability

The most important part of YC’s Startup School is the weekly check in with our advisor/moderator. Each week, we’ll be checking in on how we worked towards improving our core metric and what our results were. In our case, our core metric will be $MRR.

In order to stay organized and accountable each day along the way I’ve created two tasks for myself.

1. A weekly recurring task on Sunday that reminds me to “Submit Weekly Check-In”
2. A standalone task called “Week 1: Metric Journal”. This will be my daily journal / running notes for my thoughts, ideas, and learnings for what I try to do to grow our metric each week. I’ll check in on this task each morning to set my focus and then just bump it forward to tomorrow (or just let it rollover automatically). This may change, but right now I’ll create a new task for each week but I could easily just create one task for the whole ten week program.

preview of what I am trying in Week 1 to increase MRR

Making Friends

One of the big perks of the Startup School program is the online community of ~15,000 other teams. I want to participate and learn from the community but I also don’t want to get sucked in to responding to notifications in the forums all day. I’ve created a daily recurring task for myself where I can write down what I learned from the community on that day so that it sinks in and so I take the time each day to learn from my peers.

what I learned in the forums today!

Coursework

I am going to set aside two hours a week to watch and take notes on videos. I’ve created a weekly recurring calendar event in Sunsama, tagged it to my #yc-startup-school channel (with a nice yc orange) and I’ve added a playbook to each event in this series so I’ll hit the ground running with a nice template for my notes.

playbook I’ve got for course notes

I am going to break my lecture notes into two sections. The first section, “Notes”, will be for nuggets I want to capture. Since the lectures are all recorded I probably won’t take copious notes, just things I want to easily find later. The second section, “How can I apply this to grow my startup…”, is the more interesting section. I’m guessing the lecture content will probably get my gears spinning with new ideas for how I can continue to grow Sunsama so I’m setting aside an explicit section where I’ll try and digest the lecture and make it actionable.

I’ll also use the Action Items section on each calendar event to capture any discrete items I want to do or any mini-assignments suggested in the lecture e.g. “review lecture slides”, “draft startup story”. These will automatically get piped into my task list in Sunsama.

Conclusion

At this point, I’ve feel like I’ve basically got my startup school workflow on autopilot. With a few tasks and calendar events it should be easy to stay focused on growing my metric and capturing what I’m learning from lectures and the community without too much work.

If you want to set this workflow up for yourself with Sunsama, it should be pretty easy. If you’re a fellow Startup School founder, just holler and I can hook you up with a Student Discount for Sunsama.

I’d love to hear about how you guys are planning and organizing your study and staying on top of your metric!