YCombinator Startup School

Just received my certificate from YCombinator Startup School. In order to achieve this, I had to watch their curriculum of 16 videos, participate in two group calls, and report 8 consecutive weeks of updates. Seems easy, but it was a game-changer for my new venture Pressto, and I never could have launched our beta without YC.

Prior to joining YC Startup School, I never would have even begun work on Pressto without the IndieHackers community, which I had the good fortune to find in April/May 2020. For those who don’t know, IH is a community of developers who share the strategies behind their side projects and their companies. It was founded by Courtland and Channing Allen and acquired by Stripe. I'm 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 ahead. Pressto launched launched month in closed beta. Things are going well, and we can hardly keep up with demand.

The mission of Pressto is to help students everywhere lead mentally healthy lives through behavior change. How? Student journalism. We are building educational tools in a simple end-to-end content management system. Our cognitive behavioral therapy teaches critical thinking and media, communication, and life skills. Pressto teaches kids the ability to discern and report facts, the difference between fact and opinion, and leaves young people less susceptible to the manipulations of social media.

I wanted to share the ease and efficacy of YC Startup School for anything thinking about starting a new business. It’s free. It’s very straight-forward, and it appears easy, until that moment you realize your side hustle is a real business — a company that may one day employ dozens or hundreds of employees. In my 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. 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. 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. I was wrong. I didn’t get into YC, but 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 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 great 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 read more about me or Pressto and join the waitlist here.