Awesome lectures & futile interactions, our experience with Y Combinator’s Startup School.
Our team recently went through Y Combinator’s Startup School online programme.
This article is a brief rundown of our experience with YC’s Startup School.
A brief overview of Startup School
Y Combinator’s Startup School is an online entrepreneurship programme for early and mid-stage startups looking to improve their knowledge on building a company while interacting with other entrepreneurs.
The programme is divided into two parts:
- The online lessons presented by Y Combinator staff or accelerator alumni. The lessons cover the most important steps of building a startup from legal and fundraising to finding product-market fit and conducting PR campaigns.
- The “groups”, each composed of roughly 10 companies of which the team members have weekly video calls or “office hours” to discuss their progress and exchange advice. Every week, as part of the group work, we had to input our progress on three metrics.
- Number of active users
- Weekly growth (contingent on the former)
- Team Morale (out of 10)
Startup school members also have access to a programme-wide discussion forum, written content to supplement the video courses and deals from YC partners providing services to startup.
YC’s online lectures: Great content from real-life successful entrepreneurs.
The online lectures that all Startup School members can audit are perhaps the most valuable aspect of the programme.
Nowadays, it is no secret that the European and American startup ecosystems are congested by accelerators, incubators and various organizations providing their own take on building companies through a myriad of free content. Paradoxically, aspiring entrepreneurs or curious learners are overwhelmed when looking for content about starting a business and regularly end up learning the wrong stuff, or no stuff at all.
Because it is fairly easy to deliver well marketed and designed content, blog posts by 22-year-old graduates with junior positions at accelerators and nothing more than an internship at a failed startup as their professional record, are now read as seriously as the advice given by more experienced institutions. Needless to say, this is toxic for the entire ecosystem.
Thankfully enough, YC understands that providing relevant and meaningful knowledge is the most important purpose of a lecture about entrepreneurship. We believe YC’s Startup School should be the go to place for anyone looking for free expert content on launching a startup.
What is Y Combinator’s recipe for success?
The formula is pretty simple: no-bullshit lessons from experienced entrepreneurs.
The lectures are presented by either partners of the firm or YC alumni who built successful startups, at scale.
If you are an early stage founder or are just starting to learn about entrepreneurship, the lessons will provide you with all the basic knowledge you need in order to avoid the classic startup mistakes. It helps understand what to prioritize in order to iterate quickly while always keeping an eye on your long term vision.
Experienced entrepreneurs might find some of the lessons redundant or too elementary. To an extent, this is true. However, Startup School lectures are good reminders of practices that all startups should follow. Although we might have already heard some of the advice they give a dozen times, it is always good to be reminded of some simple but important processes that make startups work better.
Ephemeral peaks vs real traction — a lesson from Weebly’s David Rusenko
In the second half of 2018, Feral Horses got more press coverage than it ever did. Our founders appeared on British prime time TV, global newspapers such as the Financial Time or CNN talked about us and we got mentioned several times in important art magazines.
After each good piece of press coverage, we would see an unusual increase in user subscriptions. A couple of days later, registrations would always go back to normal.
A simple takeaway from this could have been: “Good press means a peak in user registrations. So we need more press to get more users”.
Thank god for David Rusenko’s lesson on product-market fit. Weebly’s founder reminded us that peaks in subscription are misleading because they are a mere reflexion of external factors that have little to do with how good your product is or how suitable it is for your target market.
Traction is a constant weekly increase in users, not a series of individual peaks, however numerous they are. Only when growth is stable can a company start asserting that it might have a good product-market fit.
This might seem elementary, but it did help us make important decisions at a crucial time for Feral Horses. The press coverage was of course encouraging, but we still knew something was off. New users were not converting as much as they should have and our retention rates were not ideal.
We were still getting to know our market and were in the process of switching from a model that sold shares of works from emerging artists and put them for rental to a model selling shares of works from established artist and placing them in museums.
This transition has fully taken place now and we are at a better place than we ever were. Of course, YC’s courses were not the deciding factor in this change of direction, but some of the tips we got from lecturers like David helped us focus on important metrics rather than easier — but ultimately less efficient — wins.
YC’s lessons: Still too focused on the American ecosystem.
Although we strongly recommend YC’s lectures, we could not help but notice that some lacked in relevance for non US-based startups like us.
This was particularly true for the lectures on legal mechanics and fundraising fundamentals.
The former seems to be an obvious blocker. YC experts are based in the USA and it would be unrealistic to have lectures on the legal environments of every country of participating companies.
The latter, we thought, could have been a little more diverse. Most companies we interacted within our YC group were not located in the USA and it would have been useful for them to receive more information on raising funds in other ecosystems, such as Europe.
Office hours and groups: poor management and little value.
While we found Startup School’s lecture pretty awesome, we were equally disappointed by the office hours and the interaction with other startups.
It is fair to mention that this year, a glitch in YC’s system caused every applicant to be accepted, which might have affected the overall quality of the programme .
That said, we did think that some things could be easily fixed.
Below is a list of 3 things we did not like about YC’s office hours.
- Most companies did not attend office hours, making them somewhat irrelevant.
It did start well. The first office hour was great! We got to e-meet the 10 startups of our group, learn about their activity and what their plans were for the next ten weeks. However, as weeks went, more and more dropped out….including the group moderator. By the 10th week, there were just two companies remaining. So much for meeting other entrepreneurs!
2. Startups from our group were at different stages, operating in dissimilar industries and based in various countries
It is always great to meet entrepreneurs from across the world who operate in different sectors. We like sharing our experience of creating a business and enjoy listening to other people’s stories. But having at least a few companies which we could actually relate to or potentially work with would have made the office hours so much better!
3. There was a lack of organisation and group management during office hours.
Sometimes, nobody knew what to discuss or what was the agenda for the day. Discussions became shallow, which is frustrating when you work with tight deadlines and scarce time ressources.
Some, (modest) recommendations for improvement.
Here is what we would have loved to see happen during our time with Startup School.
- To be grouped with startups that are at a similar development stage than us. We would have been more able to mutually help each other on problems we would be facing simultaneously
- To be grouped with startups that operate in an industry similar or related to ours. There is a lot of innovation taking place in the art world and YC’s programme would have been even more helpful if we could have interacted with startups trying to innovate in the arts. Even companies that are not operating in our industry per say but that are related to it can become potential partners. A good example is art transportation. Moving and insuring artworks is both a logistical hassle and a heavy cost to bare. We are constantly on the lookout for companies innovating in logistics and transportation and would have loved to meet some through YC.
- Reshuffling groups if levels of commitments differ. Startups in our group progressively got less engaged in office hours, probably because of a lack of time but also because they might not have found office hours as relevant as they expected. It would have been great if YC could have merged or reshuffle some groups halfway through, to make sure those who were still committed to the programme could truly benefit from office hour interactions.
Thank you YC!
Overall our experience with YC was great and we recommend Startup School to anyone who is looking for serious and helpful advice on launching their startup. That said, we do think there is still some room for improvement with regards to the office hours.
