Reflecting on 10 Weeks of Startup School

If you’ve been connected with me for awhile, you’ve probably come across a post or something about Gifts Done. Last year, my sister and I started a company that we think will change the world…at scale. Not change the world like curing cancer or getting everyone safe drinking water but change the world for a minor first world problem: gifting. Gifing is hard - people forget, they get busy, they spend a bunch of time looking for a great gift and never actually pick one but don’t have any more energy to give that decision. We solved it. What if someone took what you know about the person who you want to give a gift to and your budget into consideration and found an excellent independent maker to create something just for that person? It would be amazing, right? That’s what we made.

So, we want to scale up. Our concept works best when we can support more suppliers, with more locations and skills, so we can better target preferences. The more people who rely on us to curate gifts, the more small, indpendent makers that we can engage. It just is not worth it for someone to try to stay available for us when we can’t provide them enough work. That being said, we want to grow rapidly, and rapid growth is the difference between a startup and any other type of business.

A Chance Finding

Back in June, I saw a post about a new thing that Y Combinator was going to do to engage more startups. Instead of just the few folks that come down to California for full-time Y Combinator classes, they were going to do a virtual class - Start Up School. I signed up, not knowing what we should expect. We figured that our best case was to learn how to approach things with a startup mindset.

In the Thick of It

We started in late July. We honestly were not sure if week 0 was week 1 or what was going on at first. Quickly, we got in over our heads.

The StartUp School feels like a whirlwind when it is in process. Or, at least it did to us.

The concept seems to be that each week, we would watch all of the lectures, fill out our report, engage on the forums, and participate in group sessions. All in all, it was about a 5-10 hour per week time commitment.

With full time jobs and other commitments outside of SUS, we constantly felt like we were lagging behind. We would miss lectures and go back and binge them. We would rush to get our weekly report in and try to find time to crush in the essential group call. Throughout, we barely touched the forum, and we thought we were missing important interactions.

What we got out

I was originally going to call this “what we learned”, but I am not sure that our take aways and our learnings are the same. We learned so, so much. Here’s a little taste:

• Figuring out the right metrics to track the health and growth of your business is non-trivial. It matters. It is probably something to do with money. Even if it is zero, you should write it down and graph it over time. Focus on this. Track your earnings, be honest.
• You are in business to make money. I’m not sure I can say that loudly enough in this format. You are in business to make money.
• If you don’t measure it, you cannot improve it.
• Talk to customers. Talk to potential customers. Talk to competitors. Talk to other people.
• Other founders, no matter the business, share at least some of your problems
• Opinions are like butts. Everyone has one. If you are talking to people, you are probably hearing a lot of opinions. Listen to all of them, but only act on the ones that you want to act on. You decide what to do with all of the opinions. Seriously, we revised our website 3 times during SUS and every time, we got exactly opposite feedback from the next reviewer.

Bottom Line

We learned a bunch. We grew as a company. We are better for our time in SUS.

We’d recommend SUS to founders. The lectures that we watched were so valuable for thinking about how to evaluate and track our business. And that is knowing that you might not be able to spend all of the time to do all of the things. We cannot speak for what folks might gain if they are working a business full time.