#143 - Startup School Week 2 Recap: Michael Seibel, Adora Cheung, and Ilya Volodarsky

We've cut down the second week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.

First, a lecture from Michael Seibel. Michael is CEO and a partner at YC. His lecture is about How to Plan an MVP.

Then, a lecture from Adora Cheung. Adora is a YC partner and a cofounder of Homejoy. Her lecture is about How to Set KPIs and Goals.

Last, a lecture from Ilya Volodarsky. Ilya is a cofounder of Segment. His lecture is about Analytics for Startups.

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

00:00 - Intro

00:43 - Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP

1:25 - The goal of a pre-launch startup

3:10 - Iterating vs pivoting

3:59 - Lean MVP

5:06 - Heavy MVP

6:19 - Launching

7:35 - Learning is easier with an MVP

8:07 - How to build an MVP quickly

10:17 - Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals

11:51 - What are the right KPIs to set?

15:50 - Revenue or active users

16:28 - Why choose active users?

18:55 - Biotech or hardtech KPIs

20:25 - Secondary metric

21:25 - What if you haven't launched?

22:20 - Setting goals

23:47 - How fast should you grow?

25:13 - Defining your own goals

28:40 - Tracking progress

30:27 - Ilya Volodarsky - Analytics for Startups

30:46 - Why analytics?

31:36 - Funnel

32:51 - Collecting data, analytics, and data flow

34:16 - Metric - Signups per week

35:28 - Metric - Retention cohorts

36:30 - Which metric to pick?

36:57 - Have I reached product market fit?

37:27 - Metric - Revenue

37:51 - Dashboards

38:35 - Advisor updates

39:01 - The startup stack

42:13 - Recommendations for the MVP process