Pam’s Post

20,000+ projects submitted, 3,200+ teams formed, 135+ countries represented Thats a high level overview of the Headstarter Fellowship. The past three months have been the craziest time of my life. We went from a small unknown startup to all of a sudden being recognized globally in a matter of weeks. It’s been hard finding a moment to rest because there is always so much to do, but that’s what the startup life is all about and I couldn’t be happier. All this started from just an idea Yasin Ehsan 🚀 had 4 months ago, when he told me he wanted to run back the fellowship we did 7x in the past but make it free this time, since it was paid before. I was confident making it free would make it take off, but definitely not like the way it did For a lot of our Fellows, this was their first experience working in teams to build full stack web apps, pushing to production, and getting users. Many went from no AI experience at all to charging subscriptions with Stripe for their AI apps. Many of them learned how to effectively market and distribute their products and iterate based on user feedback I am still in disbelief how we managed to pull this off with an engineering team of 2 - just John Royal and me. On the first day of the Fellowship, John and I onboarded 15,000+ Fellows onto our platform, by manually sending batch emails. It was an absolutely insane experience. (Not once did our database crash lol) With that, I just wanted to share some of my favorite moments from the Fellowship: - Nabeel Alamgir🦄 saying he’s going to invest in two Headstarter teams - CitySwipe & TimeMesh - Getting Fellows hired at our partner companies: Ruby Card (YC W23), Olostep, and Pam - Being able to personally mentor and guide Fellows with their startup ideas - Kaamyaab.pk, Veida AI , ProxiLink, Avano AI, LearnLugha, and more - Rachid Flih sharing the emails that got him into Y Combinator live on Zoom - Doing a session with iqram magdon-ismail, the Co-Founder of Venmo where he showed off his new app Jelly - Hosting weekly sessions with Jack O'Brien where he shared how to get first 1000 users, give feedback on projects from Fellows, and discuss pricing strategies - Hearing Farzaan Aleem's advice on creating content and growing your social media presence - Bringing our investor Tariq Ahmed on to speak to our Fellows about how AI is going to impact Software Engineering - Julian Alvarez 🚀 super motivational talk on his personal journey running a startup during our Pathways2Tech event - And of course, all our events where I got to meet our Fellows in person!