Y Combinator Startup Podcast

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

Sep 11, 2019

Michael Seibel, CEO and partner at Y Combinator, discusses the essence of planning a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and the importance of launching quickly to test market viability. Adora Cheung, YC partner and co-founder of Homejoy, dives into setting meaningful KPIs for startups, emphasizing the right metrics to track, such as active users versus revenue. Lastly, Ilya Volodarsky shares insights on establishing effective analytics systems to enhance growth and measure user retention, ensuring startups evolve based on data-driven decisions.

43:08

Creator website

Episode guests

Adora Cheung

Michael Seibel

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Start with a Lean MVP

01:21

Startup Growth Goals

00:52

Regular Metrics Tracking for Business Growth

00:55

Intro

2min

Gaining Traction: The Early Steps of Startups

8min

Setting the Right Metrics for Startup Success

20min

Establishing Analytics Foundations for Startups

5min

Measuring User Retention and Product-Market Fit

2min

Building a Data-Driven Startup Culture

6min

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

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