Startup School 2018 – Curriculum
Two weeks ago we announced Startup School 2018 [https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-startup-school-2018/]. Our free, online course will kick off in just three weeks, on August 28th. We also let founders know that 100 of the companies that complete the course will receive $10,000 in equity-free funding from YC…
Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
How to Sell – a guide for SaaS startups
In our years of coaching dozens of Silicon Valley SaaS startups, we've seen a lot of things trip otherwise great teams up. One of the biggest fundamentals? How to sell. With that in mind, we've to developed our first-ever guide, How to Sell, designed to give you and your team the tools you need to understand how to…
Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month
Wondering how to make a Slackbot that drives revenue? Check out this step-by-step tutorial. It's a case study of how we built a profitable business on Slack with thousands of USD in revenue.
You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL
On Software, life and everything in-between
Financial Modeling for Startups: An Introduction
Founders and executives of new companies, particularly those seeking to raise capital, will inevitably be confronted with the prospect of building a financial model. The goal of this guide is to give you an idea of what a financial model is, why you might want one, and how to go about building one.
How to price a product, sell it to customers, and build a sales team
Steli Efti explains how to price a product, sell it to customers, and build a sales team.
How I've built a profitable Slack bot as a side project in Rails
I've built a Slack anonymous messaging bot in Ruby on Rails and it is profitable. In this blog post I will describe what I did and tools I used to create, promote and monetize a simple SAAS product.
Going Global with Your Startup
Kwindla Hultman Kramer [https://twitter.com/kwindla] is the founder of Daily.co [http://Daily.co] (W16). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When we started Daily.co [http://Daily.co], we thought we were only targeting the US market. Our plan was to get traction at home and…
Starting a Business in Silicon Valley
A Personal Story (This is the text of an essay I read in a presentation at African Leadership University in Mauritius. Please see the video of that presentation here. For the other lectures from that trip, please see this playlist.) When it comes to starting a business, Silicon Valley is...
A Bank for Student Hackers
It was February 2nd, 2018 at 2 PM when I got a call from Jake Reilly, the founder of Kapaa High School's Hack Club, our first chapter in…
Updated Request for Startups
The application deadline for YC Summer 2018 is on March 24, and in honor of the deadline, we published an update to our Request for Startups [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/] (RFS). While many of the best ideas we’ve funded were ones that surprised us, there are always a collection of ideas we wish more founders would…
Ten Years' Worth of Learning About Pricing
Discover proven SaaS pricing frameworks from 10 years of startup investing. Learn 3 key strategies and 4 components to optimize your revenue model.
Startup Investor School: The Basics of Seed Investing
Last year, for the first time, we taught a MOOC (massively open online course) for startup founders called Startup School. This year, we’re adding a new course called Startup Investor School [https://investor.startupschool.org] which will teach the basics of seed (early) stage startup investing to anyone interested…
How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine
Atlassian didn't jump through the standard hoops. Instead, they chose an unconventional path that would ultimately help them build a $10 billion business.
YouTube marketing horror story
Results from asking 180 YouTubers to make an unboxing video for a subscription box. Includes detailed breakdown of response rate, number of videos made, views and the sales results from them.
How to Hire Your First Engineer
Harj Taggar [https://twitter.com/Harjeet] is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte [https://triplebyte.com/] (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC…