This definitely calls for a celebration! So put your party hat on because this is no small feat in the startup world: We completed Y Combinator’s Startup School. Y Combinator – one of the most well-known startup acceleration programs in the world – might be familiar to you from their startup program in Silicon Valley, but they also have an online course for startup founders called Y Combinator Startup School, which we attended.
But that completion is not the main thing to celebrate. We are even happier to tell you about the feedback we received from members of our small feedback groups:
- 100% said that they understood the idea behind Prönö.
- when group members had to choose another startup to join, Prönö was always their choice.
So thank you, startuppers.
This kind of feedback is important for a startup like us, because before anything is ready we are just working from the belief that we have identified a problem and that we can solve it. When you get positive feedback on your idea, it feels like some steady wind in your sails.
Our Startup School experience
The Startup School lasted 8 weeks. During those weeks, we attended online lectures every week and group sessions with other founders every other week. Inspiring lectures spanned topics like How to Plan an MVP, Growth for Startups and Modern Startup Funding (links to YouTube of the lessons). As a new startup, this program helped us to make decisions and improve our tactics to develop and sell our product and service. During these months, we became a smarter, stronger startup.
The best part of startup school was definitely group sessions with people from 4-6 other companies. Discussing and pitching our own idea to other startup entrepreneurs was a brilliant way to get honest and useful feedback.
It is always exciting to reach new milestones. As you know, deadlines are good motivators to make things really happen. At startup school, weekly updates were required, which was definitely a gentle push from the outside that kept our wheels turning and even accelerating. And of course, it was rewarding to see we were moving forward every week!
Studying, discussing and learning gave us lots of new ideas and tactics to do things right from the beginning, which gave us self-confidence about the future. And after 8 weeks we got a short email.
“Congratulations on completing SUS Winter 2020!”
Y Combinator Startup School is for founders who have an idea and want to turn it into a startup.
This is what they do:
- Encourage and inspire people to consider starting a company as a way to positively impact the world.
- Teach people how to start a startup and equip them with the resources and tools to help prepare them for now and the future.
- Build a community of entrepreneurs who can encourage, teach and support one another.
If you have an idea and want to make it happen, this is definitely for you. And the best thing is all this is free.
Startup School graduates represent the largest single source of founders accepted into Y Combinator’s core program, so it might be the start of something much, much bigger. It’s all up to you and how much you are ready to work for your success.
Read more here: https://www.startupschool.org/
