Course Review: Ycombinator Startup School Review

20 Aug 2021

Back in May I went through the startup school curriculum at YC.

The material was short! You could likely do the eniter curriculum in two days. But it seemed packed with insight.

Takeaways:

the best way to source ideas is as a background process over time, work at the edge of a field, note gaps and problems that need addressing then create a company to address them
quick feedback loops are vital – launch in 3 weeks not in a year or months, your thesis about your business idea is pure speculation initially so getting early feedback is vital
keep your business pitch simple, anybody should be able to understand it, if they can’t they how can you expect someone to buy it or an investor to invest in it?
scalable businesses start in an unscalable / hand crafted way. What this means is that the fastest way to get feedback is to do something by hand so you can quickly test the validity of your thesis. In other words, initially you want to optimize for a fast thesis testing and later optimize for large scale delivery – or stated yet another way, optimize the entire timeline of your business development by optimizing for path depenedent bottlenecks as you go
give early customers extra time and attention so you can learn from them, don’t charge for it because then it doesn’t become a ‘bonus’ but an expected activity and you get trapped doing it – you’re goal early on is to learn, then scale your efforts to be efficient