YC Startup School

I just recently received my certificate from YCombinator Startup School. In order to achieve this, I had to watch the curriculum of 16 videos, participate in two group calls, and report 8 consecutive weeks of updates. It seems pretty easy, but it was a huge game-changer, and I never would have launched without it.

Before I discovered YC Startup School, I never would have even started work on Pressto without having found the IndieHackers community, which I had the good fortune to stumble across in April/May 2020. For those who don’t know, IH is a community of developers (coders) who share the strategies behind their side projects and their companies. It was founded by Courtland and Channing Allen and acquired by Stripe. I am not a developer, and I can’t write a line of code, but this community gave me the courage to start what I thought would be a side hustle. I had the idea for months/years, and IH was the spark that got it moving. Pressto launched this month in closed beta. Things are going well, and we can hardly keep up with demand.

I wanted to share the ease and efficacy of YC Startup School. It’s free. It’s very straight-forward, and it appears easy, until you the moment that you realize your side hustle is a real business — a company that may soon employ dozens or hundreds of employees. In my personal experience, it was the weekly updates that changed the game. I thought that I would add only a few friends and family to my weekly updates, but I was encouraged to add every single person that I spoke with about Pressto, and once that list grew to 10 or 20 people, I started taking the weekly updates very seriously.  Once I was taking the updates seriously, I was taking the weekly goal-setting seriously. And once I was taking the goals seriously, we started to hit them. One after another after another. And then - boom - we launched. The waiting list immediately started to skyrocket.

Here’s the thesis of this essay. I initially applied to YCombinator thinking that I would easily get an interview, given my peculiar mix of past success and failure. I successfully sold a company, and watched another fail in blaze of recrimination and disappointment. But I didn’t get into YC, and I joined the free Startup School the same day. With COVID, I’ve been able to work from 930am to 3pm and then again from 8pm to 11pm. I’ve been a super devoted dad, and I’m not burnt out. To the contrary, I’ve never learned so much in my life, and I’ve never been so excited. 
So, for anyone that is looking to start a business, I’d offer these three pieces of unsolicited advice.

1. Do something you love and that you are truly passionate about.
2. Work with people that you admire and that you’d be happy to work with every day, even if it was cleaning dishes (ps. fave job ever).
3. Join the free YC Startup School.  It’s a pretty good sieve / filter to help you realize a couple of things quickly: (1) Do you have something? (2) Do people want it?  Then you can begin the pathway toward building something that people want.

You can visit my biz at: joinpressto.com
And you can read about me at: danielstedman.com