HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who got on to Startup School?

20 points by greysteil ↗ HN
Just got an email saying my company, [Dependabot](https://dependabot.com), was rejected. A little disappointed as we're growing at 25% month-on-month, have 2,000 active users and have $6k MRR after just 12 months.

Who got on, and what are you building?

15 comments

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kacy
This looks like a great product! Congrats on your success so far
greysteil
Thanks Kacy! Had been looking forward to having others to learn from, but I'm pretty confident that Dependabot is going to be OK.

Would love to hear from all the companies that got accepted!

forgotmypwz
We also got rejected, from my experience it’s pretty pointless to ask for feedback as well as we applied several times in the past (to YC) and never got anything beyond “sorry just try again”. I mean that’s fine and they don’t owe us an explanation, I will just not apply again as it seems to be a waste of time and without useful feedback there’s not much I/we can learn from this. This time we were even explicitly asked to apply as we were a “promising candidate” with our YC application, which probably was just another mass e-mailing though.

Looking at the current batches it’s pretty difficult to say what exactly they’re looking for, as there are some ideas that I consider quite reasonable and others that seem completely ridiculous to me.

In general I get the (personal) impression that most of their grandiose talk changing the world is just marketing, in the end it’s just about what has a good chance to make decent money.

Sorry this is probably the disappointment speaking but my impression is that we’re mostly building unnecessary garbage and diversions while the real problems don’t get tackled. Just my 2 Cents anyway, good luck getting in next time :)

nayname
Check your inbox once again, looks like we were accepted finally
dynamic99
Got an acceptance followed by a notification that it was a mistake 90 minutes later. Really sucks, I got excited. Maybe next year.
fullofsid
Funnily, I received an acceptance first and then a rejection email after 2 hours.
nayname
vice versa, I first got You fail letter, and now - Your Company was ACCEPTED: Startup School Advisor Track
nayname
Hi Fedor,

We are deeply sorry, but an error occurred in the software that triggers acceptance emails and you were actually supposed to receive the email below accepting you into the Startup School Advisor Track. Thank you for applying to Startup School Online. Your application looked promising and we would like to invite you to the Advisor track!

As part of the Advisor track, you will be a member of a group of about 25 companies with an expert advisor with whom you will meet regularly during the course. You will have access to the software to:

gj0
Hi Guys, trying to form a crowdsourced list of Startup School Founders - 2018 tagged by country here https://lystof.com/list/HyemlctL7. Feel free to add a founder for this batch or create your own list.
markfer
Rejected at first and then accepted into Advisor Track with www.recapped.io. I quit my full-time job about 6 months ago to focus fully on this venture.