Advice from Student Founders on Turning Side Projects into Startups | Remote Students

Learn from two student founders about their experiences interviewing for YC, growing to 575K users, and getting funding from grants in college

Paran, a junior at UC Berkeley studying Computer Science and Data Science, is the Co-Founder and CEO of DeWaste. His team is working to reduce food waste in dining institutions by using computer vision to spot trends in existing waste. Through DeWaste, Paran experienced the interview process with Y Combinator, earned a YC Startup School grant, and leveraged school ecosystem resources such as a Cal Hacks Fellowship.

Sameer is a senior at Purdue University studying Computer Information Technology, and he is the founder of The Codex. TheCodex is an online platform for learning how to code that uses high quality programming to help students jumpstart their programming career and learn a new skills. Over 575,000 students have used The Codex since it’s inception, leaving over 25,000 positive reviews. The company has grown to offer 10 different coding courses.

What is your founder story? How did you get where you are today?

Paran: For me, I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship. I was always watching Shark Tank and The Prophet growing up. Coming into freshman year, my friend and I were at the dining hall eating food, when we realized that there was a huge issue with the amount of food waste on days where the food was not so good. At the time, both of us were both really interested in machine learning and computer vision, so, we thought, “let’s try to take a new modern approach to analyzing this food waste.” We developed our first prototype at CalHacks, and we didn’t really think it would go anywhere, until we got into the CalHacks fellowship! During this 3–4 month fellowship, we did a lot of research on food waste at different universities and restaurants, and fine-tuned our app to give the most accurate data. From there, we did lots of iterations on the app, piloted it at different universities, and that’s where we are now :)

Sameer: My first experience with entrepreneurship was during the summer before my freshman year of high school, and stemmed from my long-term passion for robotics. My friend hit me up one day, asking if we should use our summertime to teach elementary students robotics, and from there, we got everything set up and just went for it! We got about 15 students signed up just from going to local elementary schools, presenting a robot we had, and passing out flyers. That became super successful, so after we ran that first summer of teaching students robotics, out of my friend’s garage, we began to think about how much we could scale this, because there seemed to be a huge demand for it. So the next year, we sub-leased a space in San Jose, California, and we we had quadrupled in size. We opened up a web dev course, we were featured in the newspaper, people were talking about us on Yelp, and before we knew it, we had developed some scale.

How did you balance working on a project and a startup while being a student?

Sameer: I consider school to be like a chore- something I just have to do-, and I’ll usually try and get my work done as soon as possible to save time later in the day to work on my startup.

Paran: I take somewhat of a similar approach: I’ll try and finish off the school work as quick as possible and I’ll cut out hours of my day to work on my startup. Before corona, it was helpful that my co-founder was also my roommate, so we could just schedule a few hours, 4–5 times a week, to work together on our company. If you have someone else there to keep you accountable, and if you have a time block where you dedicate that time to startup work, I think that makes it much easier.

How do you know if your side project can become a startup?

Sameer: I think this really depends on person to person, but the best way to go is to start small. Starting small and then waiting until you get validation from your customers/users, or they start demanding for more, will be a good indicator of if there is any room for your product in that space. I would also ask the question of, “can I see yourself working on this for at least five to 10 years?” If the problem or space is something that you’re passionate about then, then definitely go for it.

Paran: Using my own company as an example, it started with the CalHacks fellowship, and that was the first indicator that this could actually turn into something bigger. Still, at that point, we didn’t know that it could grow into being an actual startup. The first thing that we had to do in the fellowship was reach out to managers and just do a bunch of customer interviews and customer research to figure out what the actual problem was instead of trying to focus on what our solution was. That’s when we saw that food waste was a HUGE issue that spanned all dining halls across different universities and restaurants. When we mentioned our idea to different universities, 45/50 of them were ecstatic to hear about it and wanted to use our product. This is where we realized that this was actually a heavily demanded product and there’s a lot of space in this field. The whole thing was a super excited process.

How do I know when to stop working on the MVP of my product and launch it to the first batch of customers?

Paran: There’s this one quote that really resonated with me, by Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn.

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Try to create the most basic version of your product and launch that, so that you get feedback from your customers on that version. Don’t build out too far without getting validation that what you’re doing is right, because you’re going to get a lot of feedback on what things you need to change, which may really influence how you continue to build the product.

Is there anything that the two of you wished you studied before you started a company?

Paran: There are a lot of tools that would have made building our product way easier, but most of these are technical tools, like knowing React or how to use Google Cloud. I think that really learning that stuff from the start, is just going to slow you down. When you have an idea, there’s this passion that comes along it. If you spend your time focusing on trying to learn something else, that passion may die down, so my advice would be to really go for it and learn along the way.

Sameer: My best tip would be: be prepared to learn quickly. If I ever have something I really need to learn for my company, I will just push myself to grind that out in a night, finish a video series on it, buy a book, etc. I agree with that sense of learning on the job.

I would say the most important skill to a successful company is growth and marketing, and having leverage over some marketing channel. The biggest issue I ran across with my second company was being unable to scale it, so if I had a better idea of growth strategies and how to market properly, that probably could’ve been a little more successful.

What was the process like interviewing for YC, and do you see any differences for founders vs. student founders?

Paran: When I was applying for YC, it was one of the most stressful things any of us had to go through. For those of you who didn’t know, YC has a 10 minute interview in which they ask almost 100 questions, so its incredibly rapid-fire, to the point where they will cut you off in the middle of your answer to ask another question. There will be like 3–4 partners there who will just fire questions, and the best thing to do to prepare is just to have answers down for as many of those questions as possible. There’s a bunch of databases online with all the questions that people have been asked, so we just made a huge, like 50 page, Google doc with all these questions and recorded one sentence answers. There will be all these complicated questions, like “how did you come up with this idea”, but you still need to be able to answer that in one sentence. I spent around 2 weeks just recording answers for these, and then another few days memorizing them. After that, we went through a bunch of mock interviews with people who have done YC interviews and gone through YC to learn about how it felt for people to actually interrupt us as we’re talking and act as the YC partners.

As a student founder, I think the one biggest change is that they’re going to ask you straight up, “ Are you ready to drop out?” And they are looking for you to say yes. If you say no, or show any hesitation on this, that’s already a rejection. So, you need to know that you’re ready to drop out and you need to show that dedication that you’re ready to take this full time.

How can student founders show their dedication and their commitment to their project?

Paran: They really want to see that you know this market in and out. You need to know this market better than anyone else. And so you should have spent like weeks just researching other companies in this space, even if they’re just barely related to your field. You should know about them. You should know what they’ve done, what stage they’re at, what customers they have, etc. The partners are just going to pull out a random company’s name, and if you don’t know that, then it’s again showing that maybe you’re not as interested in this, and that you don’t know the market inside and out. So again, another thing that we did was that we had this huge Google Sheet with all the competitors and just descriptions about what they do. Again, that’s a lot for one person to memorize, so we split it up amongst us like we need to know these these these companies.

Join Remote Students for access to more opportunities to meet amazing founders like Sameer and Paran! Watch the full recording here to hear more about Sameer and Paran’s stories as founders and extra tips they have for beginners!