{"id":2455,"date":"2019-09-27T17:18:36","date_gmt":"2019-09-27T21:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2455"},"modified":"2019-09-27T17:18:36","modified_gmt":"2019-09-27T21:18:36","slug":"y-combinators-startup-school-in-retrospect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2455","title":{"rendered":"Y Combinator&#8217;s Startup School in retrospect"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Y Combinator&#8217;s latest <a href=\"https:\/\/www.startupschool.org\">Startup School<\/a> session ended this week. I still haven&#8217;t gotten nearly as far as I would have liked in TuneSage&#8217;s development, but I did make some progress, and I&#8217;m hoping to launch it near the end of next month. Of course, that prediction is probably still off, since it feels impossible to predict, but I did submit an application to Y Combinator&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ycombinator.com\/\">core program<\/a>, so the sooner I can launch it the better. If they&#8217;re looking at my application and can find no demo videos or samples online demonstrating what TuneSage can do, so much the worse for me.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, here are some of the biggest things I&#8217;ve learned from this year&#8217;s startup school:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Launch your product as soon as you can. The initial version doesn&#8217;t have to be as polished as you might imagine. They talk quite a bit about launching an MVP, a &#8220;minimal viable product&#8221;. This allows you to start getting feedback from early adopters. Handling the initial version of your product like a manuscript submission or a film premiere that needs to attract a crowd upon release isn&#8217;t the right way to think about a tech startup launch; the initial version\u00a0<em>won&#8217;t<\/em> be polished. (For TuneSage, the initial version will likely only generate melodies and chords.)<\/li>\n<li>After launching, it&#8217;s all about growth, and organic growth at that. Pay attention to new users you&#8217;re attracting, user retention, and how users are using your product. (Paying to advertise your product isn&#8217;t a great idea because having to pay to obtain your first customers isn&#8217;t going to scale, and may throw off any traction metrics.) Decide what to work on based on how it will stimulate growth.<\/li>\n<li>Set concrete goals (preferably having to do with growth) so that you know whether or not what you&#8217;re working on is having the desired affect.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ll admit that some of the finance stuff (stock, shareholding, vesting, etc.) is still a bit over my head; some of it is just lingo to learn, but I also think I need to see more examples of it in action.<\/p>\n<p>The Startup School videos are on YouTube, available for anyone to watch (I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll re-watch some of them), but participating in the course also gave me an opportunity to have weekly meetings with other founders. This allowed me to develop my &#8220;pitch&#8221; and get real feedback. I will admit that I need to get better at talking. A bit too much repeating myself, ending sentences on conjunctions (&#8220;and, yeah&#8230;&#8221;), forgetting words and stammering. Sometimes I wasn&#8217;t so bad, but it&#8217;s definitely something to practice. And, yeah&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Overall, it was a great experience, and I&#8217;m excited to get TuneSage up to a launch-able state. Like I said, I wish I had made more progress during Startup School itself, but I should have more time next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Y Combinator&#8217;s latest Startup School session ended this week. I still haven&#8217;t gotten nearly as far as I would have liked in TuneSage&#8217;s development, but I did make some progress, and I&#8217;m hoping to launch it near the end of next month. Of course, that prediction is probably still off, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[797],"tags":[799,786],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-DB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2456,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455\/revisions\/2456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}