- assigned mentor: we were assigned a former yc startup founder as mentor. the mentor had 30 minute 1-1s with us once a month and gave us useful advice on a wide range of matters.
- weekly homework: choose a single metric you'll measure through the duration of the course and report the metric and growth weekly. The metric could be DAUs, number of customers you've talked to, whatever. It's for you to figure the most important thing to focus on. We were running the startup in a bit of an ad hoc manner until startup school; weekly metric reporting helped focus our efforts in service of a single meaningful metric.
- group calls: we were lucky to be in a good peer group comprising about 30 startups of all kinds -- medical device to SaaS to consumer apps. There were weekly 1-2 hr calls chaired by the mentor. Before the meeting, the mentor sent out a questionnaire to fill out -- what's your product's value prop, what setbacks have you faced, etc. -- and startups would be randomly chosen to talk about their response to the questionnaire. Lot of time for Q&A. Our peer group is still in touch through a facebook group, where we occasionally share progress.
- Demo day: record a 2 minute video talking about our startup. This forced us come up with a concise statement to describe our startup and gave us a platform to showcase it.
If I had to summarize the benefit of startup school, it would be three things:
- quality mentorship
- diverse peer group
- forcing function for startup to hit goals
I'll venture to say it's probably one of the most valuable things an early stage startup could invest time on.