- Startup School in 2019 is a reaction to what was learned from the previous year.
- In 2018, over 15,000 people registered for Startup School, with about 5,000 graduating and 391 getting interviewed for the last batch.
- Startup School is now the largest source of companies accepted into a YC batch.
- The content of Startup School has been shifted to focus on helping participants understand and evaluate ideas like an investor would.
- A directory is being created to help single founders find co-founders, and group sessions will be organized for single founders to meet and build relationships.
- To accommodate international participants, Startup School will be hosting meetups and recording lectures in 18 different cities.
- The online community allows participants to connect with others near them.
- The lectures for Startup School will be shorter this year, focusing on practical and tactical information with case studies.
- Signups for Startup School are open until July 22nd, with the program starting on July 26th.
- Providing a good customer experience in the early days of a startup involves responding to every question or issue, responding quickly, and having the response come from someone knowledgeable about the software.

- The feedback received during the building of the product helped improve it.
- Wufoo focused on creating helpful documentation and intuitive interfaces.
- They aimed to make the software work right out of the gate with smart defaults.
- Wufoo used affordances, similar to how Photoshop prompts users to learn settings.
- They made it easy for users to discover hidden features by using default settings.
- Wufoo differentiated itself from competitors by offering a responsive and user-friendly interface.
- They released an interface demo to showcase the product's capabilities before launch.
- Wufoo built an audience through blogging before launching their product.
- The blog helped establish trust with potential customers and gain a head start in the market.

- Wufoo utilized referral mechanisms such as embedding forms on other websites and including the Wufoo logo on confirmation pages and emails to spread awareness and gain users through word of mouth.
- The design and user experience of Wufoo, with its casual and friendly personality, made it stand out from other apps in the market, leading to positive customer satisfaction and recommendations.
- The idea for Wufoo initially started as a different concept, but during the YC interview, the founders realized the potential in building a form builder and made a pivot.
- Startup School provides support and guidance for founders with or without ideas, and many startups in the program have had successful pivots.
- Unsexy markets can be advantageous for technical product teams as there is less competition, and entering such spaces requires a mindset focused on the mission rather than personal preferences.

- The founder of MailChimp believes that being obsessed with only doing what you love can lead to unhappiness and a bratty attitude.
- He believes that the key skill is learning to love whatever you do, even if it is not glamorous or exciting.
- He shares his experience with building Wufoo and how they achieved product-market fit without relying on venture capital.
- Wufoo focused on steady growth and efficiency, and their approach resulted in high returns for the founders and employees.
- He advises running experiments frugally and recognizing different paths to success.

- Being frugal is important in business.
- Understand why you are giving up equity and increasing burn before making those sacrifices.
- Treat every fundraising round as if it's your last.
- Product market fit is crucial, and if you have to ask if you have it, you probably don't.
- Gauge the size of the market through research and understanding if your business model is plausible.
- Completing weekly updates and participating in group sessions are minimum requirements for success in startup school.
- Being honest about your progress and participating in group sessions can help improve your storytelling and presentation skills.

- Startup School aims to help people build successful companies by teaching them how to attract others and improve their company narrative.
- When looking for a co-founder, treat it like dating and take the time to understand each other and determine if you have complementary skills.
- Start with small favors and see how reliable the potential co-founder is in exchanging small tasks.
- Gradually progress to building something together and then have a conversation about long-term commitment.
- It is important to avoid desperation and be able to sell yourself and your contribution to the partnership.
- It is acceptable to date multiple potential co-founders in the beginning to find the right fit.
- Startup School signups are open until July 22nd at startupschool.org.

- Startup School in 2019 is a program that has been improved based on lessons learned from the previous year.
- In 2018, over 15,000 people registered for Startup School, with about 5,000 graduating and 391 getting interviewed for the last batch.
- Startup School is now the largest source of companies accepted into a YC batch.
- The focus of Startup School has shifted to help participants understand and evaluate ideas like an investor would.
- A directory is being created to help single founders find co-founders, and group sessions will be organized for single founders to meet and build relationships.
- International participants will have the opportunity to attend meetups and access recorded lectures in 18 different cities.
- The online community allows participants to connect with others near them.
- The lectures for Startup School will be shorter this year, focusing on practical and tactical information with case studies.
- Signups for Startup School are open until July 22nd, with the program starting on July 26th.
- Wufoo, a successful startup, focused on providing a good customer experience, improving their product based on feedback, and utilizing effective marketing strategies.
- The founder of MailChimp shares his experience with building a successful startup without relying on venture capital and emphasizes the importance of being frugal and achieving product-market fit.
- Startup School aims to help founders build successful companies by teaching them how to attract others and improve their company narrative.
- When looking for a co-founder, it is important to take the time to understand each other, determine complementary skills, and avoid desperation.

https://StartupSchool.org.

Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC he cofounded Wufoo.

https://twitter.com/ilikevests

Kevin’s on the podcast today to do some Office Hours and talk about this year’s edition of Startup School.

If you’d like to sign up or learn more, check out https://StartupSchool.org.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:25 - Stats from Startup School 2018

1:45 - Updates for Startup School 2019

8:15 - Sign up at StartupSchool.org

8:50 - Sean Maina asks - In the early days of Wufoo, how did you give a great customer experience?

11:30 - Design affordances

13:45 - Sunil Tej asks - How was Wufoo 10x better than the market when they just got started?

17:45 - Building an audience before a product

20:15 - Wufoo's growth

23:30 - Coming up with the idea for Wufoo

27:30 - Companies pivoting during YC

29:00 - Building a product in an unsexy space

32:30 - Sivaraj Ghanesh asks - How do you know if you've achieved product market fit? Or if your product just isn't noticed yet?

43:30 - Sivaraj Ghanesh asks - How do you gauge the size of a market?

46:00 - Tips for Startup School success

50:15 - Advice on vetting cofounders

53:45 - Sign up at StartupSchool.org

You are running Startup School this year.

Me and Adora are hosting and the main instructors for Startup School.

So many people know about Startup School, we've talked about it on the podcast before.

2019 is a reaction to all the stuff that we learned from 2018.

And so I'm going to talk about some stats.

So last year we had over 15,000 people register and participate in Startup School.

From that graduating class, we had about 391 of them end up getting interviewed for the last batch.

The startup school now represents the single largest source of companies that are accepted into a YC batch, which is super exciting.

Because the founders in startup school are so different than what I think a lot of people think a YC company is.

83% of people who started doing Startup School, they were pre-launch, so no traction whatsoever.

52% were working full-time, so the other 48% was only part-time.

63% were single founders, which was very surprising to us.

And so for us, I wanted to make a new version of Startup School that was going to be a better fit for all those different groups of people.

Because I felt like the last 1 probably wasn't a perfect fit.

And so we shifted the content so it's more focused on helping you understand ideas, evaluating them the way an investor would sort of think about them.

So that way if you are spending time on a startup, part-time, or you're by yourself, or you're trying to figure out what to build an MVP for, you have the tools necessary and you have the things that we help our companies do to evaluate, for example, a pivot.

Or evaluate which of the ideas is worth spending time on.

The other thing we did was, for all these single founders, we realized, holy crap, it's over 6,000 people who were all trying to do a startup.

And we constantly tell people finding a co-founder is the best thing you can do for a startup.

And so we're like, why don't we just help them do that?

And this is super important for us because we're finding increasingly teams are being created and other people are asking for equity to help them find co-founders.

Other people meaning other investors, other programs.

Other investors, incubators, programs, et cetera.

And for us, we actually feel like the only people you should be giving equity to for a co-founder is 2 other co-founders.

We're building a directory, we're allowing you to state that you are looking for a co-founder.

And then the group sessions that you'll do during startup school, you'll be matched up with other single founders in a meeting.

And again, we don't expect that you're going to solidify a team during startup school, but you at least will start introductions and start building that relationship, which is needed to figure out if you're going to be a good fit or not.

And we're really, really excited about that because we think that's 1 of the best things we can do to help all these single founders.

And the last 1 is, for all these international people, Last year we did the tapings weekly at our office and we invited people to come and attend the live tapings.

People were flying from all over the world.

It was incredibly popular, but we felt really guilty because That's a waste of money and time, we think, for people to come for a one-hour session with partners.

We are humbled that people think that that's worth it and valuable.

Part of what we're going to do is, we looked at the data for what are the top 18 cities that people attended or participated in Startup School, and we're going to go out there.

We're going to record some lectures and we're going to host startup school meetups.

It's going to be, I think, super exciting that these people will 1, kind of get to interact with us and we get to interact with them, which I think is always energizing for us.

But the second thing is, startup school creates structure and community.

And I think when you're meeting other people who are going through the same thing, from the very first startup school when it was just like a mini conference, everyone was always excited about the energy of being in a room with other people who are having a shared experience or a shared ambition.

And so I want to give that opportunity as many people as possible, not just the ones who can make it to San Francisco.

Well, in addition to that, the online community allows you to meet people near you as well.

So like when you're finding a co-founder, for instance.

Actually, we have a fairly sophisticated matching program for the group session.

So you match with people based on your time zone, your level of progress, your preferences that you put into the software, et cetera.

So Kyle Corbett, he's the person from the software team working on Startup School software, did an awesome job basically looking through the data, doing regression tests, and just proving that we're going to have a really good group session.

That other thing that we're doing is, we initially had it for last year, it was like you got into a group with 20 other startups

Unfortunately, a lot of people just drop off over time, and so those aren't people you can count on.

What we've changed instead is that you're always going to be matched up with people who are actively participating in Serp School.

your group's going to change a little bit.

Your group is going to change every week, actually.

You'll meet more people, get more people to build into your network, get more advice, but also you're always gonna be matched up with people who are serious about this.

Which I think is also gonna improve the quality of the program for

And just to clarify for people listening and watching, we always put all this content on YouTube.

It's not paywall, it's not behind anything.

So we believe, and the thing is, I actually think the lectures are the least important part of startup school.

It's 1 thing that brings a lot of tension, it helps build up the brand.

But those lectures are a way for people to understand and get help if they can't commit to a 10-week program.

But if you have the ambition and passion and the desire, the 10-week structure in terms of how we set up group discussions, the assignments, the way we hold you accountable by putting in weekly updates into our software, all that is actually the most powerful thing that can help your startup.

And so again, we're happy to give away all the lectures for free.

It's something that we've always done for YC.

And so this other part is the part that we're trying to figure out how to scale.

And the lectures are going to be a little bit shorter this year.

We're kind of taking a cue from what's popular from this YouTube generation.

And so I think you can watch, people just drop off on the hour-long lectures.

Some people who are serious, they really love it.

What we want to make sure is that you're going to spend 20 minutes and it's going to be the highest quality 20 minutes that you're going to get.

I've given instructions to all the people doing lectures that were focused more on practical, tactical information and then try to back up stuff with as much case studies as possible.

So therefore it would always just feel like, I'm watching a lecture, and then you're not gonna feel like, I don't know how to apply this to my company.

And so I think that'll be a really nice difference.

Because some lectures I felt like, for companies who are really early, they're just like, I'm so far away from even thinking about this stuff.

And so to me it's like, okay great, we have room to make a lot of great content to help people with first principles.

Right, it's inspiring but not always relevant.

Yes, those are the ones you go back to once you have things going well on the ground.

And I think we have enough of that inspirational content and there's probably enough of it being created by lots of other people.

All right, and so just to be clear, signups are open right now.

So pretty much right up until it starts, on that day is when I release a video on orientation, and then the first lecture is recorded on the 25th, and then we release that live to the public the next day on Thursday, so on the 26th.

So let's get to some relevant and important advice.

We have a bunch of Office Hours questions for you.

Many of them, I think, for whatever reason, maybe it's the mood, the startup school announcement, are about the early days.

Both of your startup and just startups in general, starting a product.

So let's start with this very simple question.

In the early days of Wufoo, how did you give a great customer experience, like the basic beginning days?

So it's actually relatively easy to provide a good customer experience.

I think the default is people expect to not get a response, that it's going to be a really slow response, and the response that I'm going to get is not relevant.

So those are the 3 ways that you can really fix this.

1 is make sure you respond to every single person that has a question or problem issue.

Second, we responded on average 7 to 12 minutes.

And then the third 1 is the person that's responding to your question is most likely probably was going to be someone that worked on the software, was an engineer.

And so in the early days of Wufoo, it was like the founders.

We were answering all customer support for the first 2 years.

And We just got really disciplined and diligent.

We said this was going to be a number 1 priority for us.

That if people are taking a chance on us, that they deserve the respect of getting a good response.

1 is that the people building the product got all this awesome feedback on how to improve it.

You also have the right feedback loop where it's just like, I'm tired of getting this question.

And the result also is that We started doing a lot of stuff to help people help themselves.

I would say Wufoo in the early days had some of the best documentation, screencast, tutorials, help tips.

And then we also got very diligent and passionate about building really simple intuitive interfaces.

And that meant actually it was really hard to add features to Wufoo.

It was really hard to add a button or a piece of copy, et cetera, because we just knew that, oh, that results in extra customer support or complexity.

And so how can we do this with smart defaults or ways that we do this so that we do it with as few different controls or manipulations as possible?

And the result is a software that mostly just works right out of the gate for you.

Kind of is doing what you want by default, if possible, and then anything that we felt like was not worth that trade-off, we would say, hey, you have to go somewhere else for that kind of complexity.

Because eventually people would graduate and we would know where we are in terms of the life cycle of people's form needs.

Like at some point you need to get a developer and build your own app, like if you need something really complicated.

Yeah, and I like that part about your talk recently when you were describing how Photoshop was putting the stroke in red, and that was prompting users to learn the settings.

Yeah, so in that case, I do this talk to the batch about affordances.

And so I talk about basically, there's an affordance of something really ugly, especially in a design app or a photography app like Adobe Photoshop.

And so when you put a border on something, the default was like this 3 pixel dark red line.

And the affordance of that is like designers want to change it.

They'll do whatever it takes to change that default.

And what it does is it naturally gets them to learn how to use the settings and find the properties, et cetera.

And they don't even know they're doing it.

They're being kind of annoyed about this 1 thing, but they're actually learning all the skills and all the things that will help them change all the other settings in Photoshop, which I think is a really brilliant intuitive thing.

And so for us in Wufoo, we tried to do that in a lot of other places.

And a lot of that had to do with helping discover certain functions or features that would be hidden behind tabs that were unnatural to find or to think about.

And what we would do is we would call things, we would call the default form, untitled form.

No 1 would want to have their form called that, so they default naturally wanted to click on that, and as a result it revealed all these extra settings that were kind of like candies.

And they don't even realize that they were learning something.

So to me, I always like that interface that teaches people without them realizing they're being taught.

I don't think there's many people who sign up for a new piece of software and they get tossed into a walkthrough tutorial and they're like, oh, I'm so excited.

the people who are the best at this are video games.

They do a phenomenal job, and the people who are worse at this is B2B enterprise software.

I think they don't realize how important it is to get that storytelling and that natural feeling right.

They just think like, oh, I just see someone else has this forced walkthrough, we should just do this as well.

Not realizing it's like the mindset of your user is like panicked, trying to evaluate, is this something that's going to solve my immediate problem and so is not going to put up with any weird forced bullshit to walk through your maze.

Yeah, or that's part of your business model, offering expensive trainings.

So in the very early days of Wufoo, there's a question from Sunil Tej.

They ask, how is Wufoo 10X better than the market when you just got started?

1 of those, response time on customer support.

So I wouldn't call that a 10X improvement.

Like that's probably, it's like, oh that's a good improvement.

But I don't know if anyone was like, oh I want to switch for great customer.

That's, Great customer support is actually a good 1 for improving retention.

And it's something I also tell people about in terms of that's a great user experience.

And most user experience features, a lot of people like to be forward on them, especially designers.

It's really beautiful, it's really easy to use, intuitive.

And the problem is those words are the words that no other competitor or no other company will ever say the opposite of.

And therefore, when you use it, it means nothing.

So as far as conversion is concerned, when we built Wufoo, it was in 2006.

And that is the era where Gmail just kind of came out.

And so it is a world where AJAX was brand new, And then the idea of building a modern web app that felt kind of like a desktop came into being.

And so all the other form builders at the time was literally, it was like a page refresh for every change you want to make.

And so it made that process of creating a form really, really difficult.

So 1 thing is we changed the level of responsiveness so that you could build a form really quickly.

The other thing we did on top of that was build an interface that was simple, drag and drop.

So other people, it's like, a form board builder is a really interesting user interface challenge, because it's an interface that builds interfaces.

So there's all this weird kind of complexity.

So you have to kind of show, what is the difference between my interface, the tool that's helping you build, and the interface I'm trying to actually create.

so a lot of the aesthetic weirdness of Wufoo had to do with all this crazy colorful stuff, this is Wufoo land, and the stuff that you're building, that's probably this drab gray and white form.

It was really easy to distinguish between the 2.

And so being able to drag and drop and be like, hey, what you know you want as a non-technical person is like, I need to collect the name, email address, a bunch of questions, et cetera.

You've seen other people do it, and you want to copy what you've seen.

A lot of other apps at the time had these different kinds of approaches.

1 of them was like, hey, we're a database application builder.

And so they would start with being like, well, it's just a structured data that you need, tell me how to all this stuff.

And so what ended up happening is you had to know too much about development to build the forms instead of being like, hey, I just need to copy what I want, and can you just magically make it work?

And so that magic was the big thing that was changed.

And when we started Wufoo, we were able to prove that it was going to field that fast by releasing actually an interface demo.

So the very first thing that we launched, so I think we got into YC for winter 2006.

We wrote the first lines of code in January of that year.

We launched an interface demo in early February.

So all you could do was drag and drop the fields that you want, and then pretend like you're going to hit save.

It looked like you were changing all the settings for it, and then you hit save, and what it came up, it prompted, was just like, hey, you just completed the interface demo for Wufoo.

If you're interested in using this builder for other forms in the future, sign up.

We got over 100,000 people who went through that demo and gave us emails in that interface prototype.

Basically, it showed people kind of like Dropbox's video demo.

It was like, oh, this is what it should feel like.

And so by making it so it was like no signups to feel what the change was going to be, for us that helped people be like, oh, I can imagine myself using this or I can imagine myself giving this to someone else and that they could use it.

And not have me build this really tedious thing, which is a form.

Where were you distributing that at the time?

So when we first got started in entrepreneurship, we realized we do nothing.

And we had attended a talk at South by Southwest by Jason Freed.

It's called Doing Big Things with Small Teams.

And they mentioned at 37 Signals that they were blogging for years before they finally released Basecamp, their first product.

And so they had an audience of huge, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who followed them before they launched.

And so when they got started, they were not starting from 0.

And their piece of advice they had was like, build an audience first.

And we're like, well, we don't have an audience and we don't have a product, so let's start doing that.

So that night we registered a domain called particletree.com and then we just started writing about stuff that we didn't know anything about.

Like literally we would research stuff about entrepreneurship, about design, and about business.

Like the 3 things we were like, this is what we're gonna need to know to start a startup, like a technical startup.

And so we would research this stuff and we'd write these beautiful essays.

It was something like part of my expertise.

I knew, like I studied modern American literature, I was editor-in-chief of my newspaper, and I was like, I know publishing, I know how we can write this stuff so that it's clear for people.

And we build that readership to 100,000 subscribers.

This was like the heyday of like Delicious and Slashdot.

And so like good content got spread around pretty easily.

And it's actually, Paul Graham had recognized us from our blog, and that's why I think we got in.

That was like our proof that we got stuff done.

Right, you can at least make something someone wants.

we've been writing on that blog for multiple years,

about 2 years, And so when we launched this prototype, we launched it on the blog.

We said, hey, we've taken all these skills and we're starting to build a company, we're building this product, come check it out.

So we had all these readers who were developers and other entrepreneurs who were actually our ideal customers coming in to try a thing.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Updates for Startup School 2019 and Office Hours with Kevin Hale