- Stories of startup pivots are no less interesting than success stories. At least because a success story is usually a story of pivots 😉
- This startup has already made three pivots on the way to a big idea that can change the education market. And with it, you can create a much larger model of the “new Y Combinator.”
- After all, Y Combinator has a very dangerous motto—”Do what people want.” Under this motto, it’s easy to engage in something you don’t particularly like but can earn from—because others like it.
- In my opinion, a more correct principle is—”Do what you want. Earning enough from it to continue doing it.” 😉
- That’s how one should act themselves. And you can also help others to do the same. And that’s exactly what that startup does.
Project Essence
The first time I wrote about Buildspace was in the fall of 2022 when they raised $10 million from Andreessen Horowitz for an educational service focused on Web3 and AI. The startup’s course feature was not just about learning — the goal was to create something that actually works over the weekend.
Then I mentioned them a couple of times in reviews on another topic when they pivoted to a 6-week accelerator for people who wanted to implement their idea.
Now they’ve undergone another pivot — they aim to become a “place where people create cool things.”
The new product has not yet been released, but the founder described the startup’s history that led to the new idea in a post under the intriguing title “Honesty Is the Best Fucking Policy.” And the post turned out to be interesting and instructive enough for me to dissect it here.
What’s Interesting
What I wrote about Buildspace in 2022 was already another pivot. Before that, the founder created an online school for children aged 4–11, where they could study interesting topics in an engaging manner.
In 2021, the founder decided to stop focusing on children’s education to concentrate on education in general in a new project called Buildspace.
He saw a problem with modern education: it had become a “rat race” for certificates and diplomas. He wanted to prove that people could learn what they wanted and do what they wanted — and still become successful and happy in life.
The solution was small weekend courses where people could create what they wanted, alongside other like-minded individuals and with the help of Buildspace instructors and mentors. By the next year, 2022, the startup was earning $1.5 million annually from this.
What turned out to be amazing was that a small percentage of students managed to turn their “weekend side projects” into real businesses or compelling portfolio projects, helping them find new jobs they loved. This became noticeable in 2023.
However, the idea of “side projects on weekends” started to evolve into a regular platform with educational courses. From such a platform, one could create another small or even medium-sized business that would primarily earn money by selling these courses to companies.
But it wouldn’t solve the main problem of modern education that the founder wanted to address. So, he said “screw it” to the courses and decided to kill the golden goose bringing him $1.5 million a year.
Nevertheless, some people genuinely used their courses as a starting point to turn their ideas into full-fledged projects.
That’s when he realized there was a “gap” in the education market. Universities catered to those who wanted to learn things to land decent jobs. Accelerators like Y Combinator catered to those who wanted to create billion-dollar tech companies.
But what about those in between — for example, those who wanted to record their hip-hop album, start their YouTube channel, make a movie, develop a small program that would be useful to others, and on which they could simply earn?
So, he decided to create an accelerator for such people, called “Nights & Weekends.”
“Nights & Weekends” became a 6-week program structured like a regular startup accelerator. However, in this accelerator, one could work on any project from any field to achieve any goal of any size.
At the end of the accelerator, there was also something like a demo day — but not for investors. It was a three-day offline get-together where accelerator graduates met and mingled with each other.
In 2023, “Nights & Weekends” became, according to the founder’s claim, the “largest accelerator in the world.” 12 million people saw what 30,000 people, who went through this accelerator, were doing. 3,000 of these 30,000 managed to create something real. 1,000 of them attended graduation parties in San Francisco and Dubai.
However, compared to the 1 billion people who daily use services from Mark Zuckerberg, the above results are comparable to rounding errors 😉
There were also problems with monetizing “Nights & Weekends.” There were three options for making money — getting sponsorship money from companies, government support, or creating a venture fund for successful graduates.
Companies could pay for advertising and/or access to accelerator participants. But this could bring in no more than $2–3 million a year.
The government would need to “bend over,” turning the accelerator into a training and retraining program. Although one Asian country was ready to pay $2 million for holding accelerators, $1 million of which would be pure profit.
Switching to a venture model would force focusing only on ideas that could turn into billion-dollar companies. But then they would have to completely ignore hypothetical 14-year-old boys who wanted to record cool videos for their YouTube channel in their room.
Thus, none of these options corresponded to the founder’s ambitions — either in terms of the amount of money or the goals and tasks he wanted to pursue.
Moreover, as the number of “Nights & Weekends” participants grew, another unexpected problem arose. After all, the number of participants was growing very energetically — 5,000 in the first set, 30,000 in the second, 7,500 in the third, and 18,000 in the fourth.
The essence of the accelerator, among other things, is that its participants can communicate with each other, with mentors, and with an external audience that follows their success. The system at “Nights & Weekends” was built from sticks and stones and held together with sticky tape — it used Discord, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and landing pages created on a simple website builder.
At the very beginning, it still worked, but by the fourth cohort, it completely fell apart. Mentors couldn’t find interesting projects or projects that suddenly became interesting—because there were too many of them. Participants couldn’t attract an audience to their projects because the startup’s channels couldn’t generate enough traffic for all projects, and the participants themselves didn’t have such channels. Participants couldn’t keep track of each other, communicate with each other, or help each other—because on Twitter, Discord, and YouTube, they didn’t see most of them.
From the perspective of the 18,000 participants in the fourth cohort, it looked like a staggering success. But internally, it became clear that this thing had stopped working properly.
However, the founder still wanted to work in education. But he didn’t want to create another educational platform in the traditional sense—another platform for courses, another platform helping with homework, or something like that.
And anyway, “education” somehow is now perceived as synonymous with “learning.” Although learning has ceased to be a problem altogether—you can learn anything now from the abundance of free materials and videos available on the internet.
Learning is just a tool that people use on their way to something bigger, just like climbers drive iron crutches into rocks while climbing to the summit. And also the people you meet along the way—who support and motivate you, like members of your climbing group, belaying you from falling or pulling you up.
And this system of collaboration, mutual support, and pulling up when conquering any summit—that’s exactly what modern education lacks. And it became clear that this is precisely what was missing in “Nights & Weekends.”
So the founder decided to build such a system—that would help people who want to explore the world by doing what they want.
He believes that over the next 10 years, more and more people will choose this path—engaging in what they want. And over time, this should become easier and easier. If people like him help with this, of course 😉
At the same time, “doing what you want” doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should start their own businesses. If someone, for example, likes robotics, they can create some side project on this topic during “Nights & Weekends” and use it to find an interesting job in a company that makes robots. This is also a success—and one that doesn’t need to be considered inferior to starting your own business.
The first version of such a system—his new product—the startup has already begun testing. And he plans to launch it this summer simultaneously with the start of a new cohort at “Nights & Weekends.”
2023 was about “content and experience.” 2024 will be the year of a product that supports this content and experience. I can rephrase this thought—hustle cannot be a business; only a product that supports this hustle can be 😉
The motto of the new product is “find and be found.” And it will look something like this.
Roughly speaking, it will be a) a platform where you can upload videos with descriptions of what you do, b) an AI assistant that will help you find other people who do something that may be useful to you, and c) a place where you can communicate with those you found or who found you.
Where to go
A few conclusions from today’s Buildspace story:
Startup pivots—it’s not jumping to another randomly chosen idea. It’s a sequential “dragging” of a big idea through a series of different implementations. Each of these implementations can not only bring successes but also reveal new problems. This is normal because it’s almost impossible to come up with something really cool right away and in full. However, the task is to not fall asleep on the laurels of achieved success but to continue solving newly emerging problems on the way to the goal. At the same time, don’t be afraid to give up what you’ve already achieved—like revenue of $1.5 million a year or a potential $2 million contract. Otherwise, you’ll stay at the level of a small or medium-sized business and won’t create anything on the scale of what Mark Zuckerberg has achieved. However, the goal for this should be big and general—it’s not like “create a product that does this in this way.” The goal should be something like what “people are already doing this, but within the next 10 years, even more people will, and we should help them with this.” If we return to the big idea of today’s Buildspace, I see it from another angle.
Y Combinator’s motto is “Do what people want.” Although in reality—it’s “can want when they see it,” but that’s not the point 😉
The point is that the idea of doing what others want can lead us astray. Because then we’ll start doing what we ourselves don’t really like—like selling socks at the market or using our face in infomercials. Or we’ll gradually “slide” from our dream to what others are excited about—moving, for example, from creating art house films to shooting funny TikTok videos.
I think a more suitable motto for the “new Y Combinator,” which echoes the vision of Buildspace, is “Do what you want. Earning enough from it to continue doing it.” 😉
And this can well become a big idea, within which you can do very different things. So, this could become a possible direction for a strategic move in a very interesting and promising direction.
And what would you do as the first product on the way in this direction?
About the Company
Buildspace
Website: buildspace.so
Last round: $10M, 15.03.2022
Total investments: $10M+, rounds: 3