Startup School YC registration ends tomorrow

I don't know if it's for me either but I registered. At least it's free and if I see it's not right for me I will just drop it.
And I see some good point even before it started - somebody created a post for those who is looking for a co-founder and I already have a couple of people interested to join :)

I did it last year and found it to be a very positive experience in terms of making me more productive, focused and disciplined.

Weekly office hours were the biggest factor here, it's surprising how useful it can be to have someone spend 10 minutes a week questioning your progress and helping you set goals. This was on the advisor track and I think it made a big difference to have a successful startup founder and investor helping you. They seem to have gotten rid the advisors this year, I guess because it doesn't scale, so it remains to be seen whether the experience will be as good.

The lectures were good too but I think they'll end up on YouTube either way.

The forum within our group could be very helpful but it wasn't that active. The wider forum for all of startup school was of much lower quality on average, although they had AMAs which were quite good.

I got a few great deals as well from the Startup School offers, it's worth registering just for those if you're actively looking for tools to help your project.

To answer your specific questions:

• The only strict commitment was office hours and filling out progress reports which took a couple of hours a week (or less if you didn't bother listening to other people during office hours but I did and I found that helpful). Overall I spent about five hours per week doing Startup School specific things. It also made me much more productive for the hours actually spent on product/sales though.
• I don't think there are any issues with changing what you're working on. That seems to be even more the case this year.
• You don't have be far at all with the idea. Ideally you have enough direction that you can at least come up with a metric for measuring progress, but that could even just be number of ideas brainstormed that week.
• You don't need to have a team, I was solo as were many other people and I think they are putting more effort into helping people find co-founders this year too.

Overall I would say there's nothing to lose by registering and it can be a great boost to your productivity and focus. I'll be registering again even though I can't commit the same amount of time this year just because I want that boost. Strong recommendation from me.

Okay, just found the FAQs section (🙈) that helps me a bit -> https://www.startupschool.org/faq

Still, super interested to hear from experiences of others. Please share!