We did the first batch of Startup School.

We had mandatory N to 1 meetings. Those weren't that useful for us (it felt like we were a bit further ahead than other companies) but a few companies got a lot of value out of it.

Our optional 1-1 were insanely useful. Our mentor was a yc alum saas cofounder. He was took notes and saw our homework every week. His perspective was priceless and there weren't many problems we were facing that he hadn't already seen. Like other people mentioned, you come with a problem and they help you understand how to tackle it.

In addition to N-1, 1-1, was there (will there be) an online forum (google group, slack, etc) to ask questions and cloud source answers?

Yes, for this round of Startup School we'll be adding an all-new forum that founders can use to communicate and share learnings!

Yes, there was a slack like chat. There was a lot of channels based on mentor group, category (AI, saas, etc), and many more.

You had to essentially come to the meeting with a specific problem to focus on.

For us it went like:

* A quick status update on what we've accomplished since the last meeting, some back and forth.

* Discuss the main problem we're working on. (For example: "We're stuck on how to improve our inbound traffic")

* Talk about next steps or deliverables for the next meeting. (For example: Try to acquire 10% more users)

It was a great program and I'm excited to try again with my new project.

> with a specific problem to focus on

That's unfortunate... I think that most often picking the right problem is the most important problem itself, but that requires a lot of context.

I'm glad you enjoyed it though!

I don't think you can know what the right problem is to work on, except in hindsight.

Hence why you need an advisor, right? To help with that?

How does one improve inbound traffic? I'm dying for it

Create systems by which people come to know about your site and want to visit it to solve a problem they have.

For example, SEO content marketing targets problems people search Google for and create content that helps solve that problem while advertising the product/service in some way. A good example of this is Digital Ocean's "how to set up software X on operating system Y" articles - good SEO, solves people's problems, and advertises directly to their customers/users.

There are other implementations, like more traditional display advertising and product reviews, but they all follow the same formula: create awareness and gives people solid reasons to come to your product/site/app.

It was useful for us. What we got out of the 1-1s depended on our effort preparing for it -- how we communicated our value prop, how succinctly we described the problems we're having, etc.