YC Startup School 2018: a free, 10-week, online course

* The content is just really good. Beyond that, I think the interactions with the other startups in our group were really valuable and some of them I still talk to today. The office hours were good, and hopefully some of the practical challenges around scheduling last year will be solved.

* We got accepted into YC after being in Startup School.

* Yes, I believe that the lessons in the course have been important for us.

I took this course last year. The lectures/coursework were very helpful (albeit freely available on youtube as well). But it was the mentorship that really makes it valuable.

You get placed in a cohort representing a wide range of business plans and industries. Some were moonshots requiring a lot of capital-raising and dealmaking, and others (including ours) were smaller SaaS products targeting particular business niches. There were participants at each stage of the startup pipeline, some without a product (or even a concrete idea), some just starting to sell to customers, and some mature companies with employees and interns and such.

We were making a lot of mistakes common to first-time founders, building things without first asking our customers about them, not experimenting with our message, etc. Meeting with our mentor helped us combat those issues and probably was the difference between having a functional company and not.

We'll probably try to do it again this year. Our challenges are different; last year we were trying to get our product built and get acceptance for our first few customers, whereas now we're trying to figure out how to scale our sales pipeline. I'd recommend it to anyone working on a startup, regardless of where they are in the process.

I took the first iteration of Startup School, and while the lectures were outstanding, the weekly calls with the mentor and classmates didn't really help.

I guess it depends on what mentor you get. I've heard of people having excellent mentors, and others that didn't even show up half the time.

But it probably also depends on your experience level as an entrepreneur. If you are just starting out with your first venture, then it can definitely be helpful if your mentor doesn't suck. If you are experienced or your mentor sucks, it's a waste of time.

It looks like the "What is your most impressive accomplishment?" question on the application has a max length of 60 characters. I can understand it needing to be short, but that seems really short. I'm having a tough time trying to slice and dice a sentence to fit.

Hi Adora, I am quitting my fulltime job to found my own startup in the fall, and I am working almost a fulltime per week on my own time to prepare the product for the future startup.

1. Can I still apply if I have a fulltime job in addition to working on my startup?

2. Must the company be established before the program starts, or can it be established a few weeks later?

3. Do you expect the product to be launched during the program, or can it be launched later this year?

Thanks