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Dropbox founder Drew Houston on why distribution is more important than product LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are, in the famous words of the late Steve Jobs, "insanely great." Great products are certainly...

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David Sacks on why founders get distribution wrong “The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people, but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping.” Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. “If you're going to have a breakout startup, you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution, not just product.” What’s tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: “Successful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer effective. Think about SEO. The first people to use that technique got a lot of traffic from Google. Then, a whole bunch of people started doing it and they started gaming the system. Eventually, Google did their notorious Panda release and everyone using SEO basically lost traffic.” Friend virality is another example: “If you look at Facebook, the friend virality was very powerful in the early days. Then people got sick of the spam and stopped paying attention… So the techniques that work initially to get distribution don't stay working because everyone copies them until the channels are spammed to death.” Source: Draper University (feb 2014)
3:48

David Sacks on why founders get distribution wrong “The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people, but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping.” Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. “If you're going to have a breakout startup, you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution, not just product.” What’s tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: “Successful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer effective. Think about SEO. The first people to use that technique got a lot of traffic from Google. Then, a whole bunch of people started doing it and they started gaming the system. Eventually, Google did their notorious Panda release and everyone using SEO basically lost traffic.” Friend virality is another example: “If you look at Facebook, the friend virality was very powerful in the early days. Then people got sick of the spam and stopped paying attention… So the techniques that work initially to get distribution don't stay working because everyone copies them until the channels are spammed to death.” Source: Draper University (feb 2014)

Startup Archive

42,198 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

David Sacks on why founders get distribution wrong “The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people, but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping.” Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. “If you're going to have a breakout startup, you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution, not just product.” What’s tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: “Successful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer effective. Think about SEO. The first people to use that technique got a lot of traffic from Google. Then, a whole bunch of people started doing it and they started gaming the system. Eventually, Google did their notorious Panda release and everyone using SEO basically lost traffic.” Friend virality is another example: “If you look at Facebook, the friend virality was very powerful in the early days. Then people got sick of the spam and stopped paying attention… So the techniques that work initially to get distribution don't stay working because everyone copies them until the channels are spammed to death.” Video source: Draper University (2014)
3:48

David Sacks on why founders get distribution wrong “The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people, but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping.” Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. “If you're going to have a breakout startup, you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution, not just product.” What’s tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: “Successful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer effective. Think about SEO. The first people to use that technique got a lot of traffic from Google. Then, a whole bunch of people started doing it and they started gaming the system. Eventually, Google did their notorious Panda release and everyone using SEO basically lost traffic.” Friend virality is another example: “If you look at Facebook, the friend virality was very powerful in the early days. Then people got sick of the spam and stopped paying attention… So the techniques that work initially to get distribution don't stay working because everyone copies them until the channels are spammed to death.” Video source: Draper University (2014)

Startup Archive

56,468 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice, you have two choices: Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.” Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.” “With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.” He argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use: “In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!
1:41

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice, you have two choices: Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.” Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.” “With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.” He argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use: “In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Startup Archive

565,774 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

We spoke with Dropbox founder and CEO, the “Godfather of Product-Led Growth,” Drew Houston, about his new product Dash and how he’s approaching growth in the age of AI. “We took a lot of the consumer internet playbook in the beginning and built these self-serve, viral, product-led motions that scaled to millions. We’re running a lot of the same playbook with Dash.”
2:29

We spoke with Dropbox founder and CEO, the “Godfather of Product-Led Growth,” Drew Houston, about his new product Dash and how he’s approaching growth in the age of AI. “We took a lot of the consumer internet playbook in the beginning and built these self-serve, viral, product-led motions that scaled to millions. We’re running a lot of the same playbook with Dash.”

TBPN

26,546 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.
1:27

Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.

David Senra

27,043 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

David Sacks on what made the PayPal Mafia so successful The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s, such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. David Sacks—founding COO and product leader at PayPal—reflects on some of the factors that he believed contributed to their success: “I think one of the key things was that PayPal innovated not just on product, but on distribution as well.” He gives three examples of distribution strategies the PayPal Mafia brought with them to their next companies: 1. Virality. PayPal paid users $20 to refer their friends, which led to explosive growth. Virality was a huge factor in LinkedIn’s success. 2. Building on an existing network/platform. PayPal leveraged eBay’s power seller network, while LinkedIn leveraged their users’ network of email contacts. You want to “go where the users already are,” Sacks argues. 3. Embeds. PayPal let customers embed the logo on their websites and eBay auctions. YouTube employed this same strategy by making their videos easy to embed on Myspace and other websites. Sacks continues: “All of these techniques today are commonplace, but in the early 2000s, we were one of the first companies to do them… We were innovating not just on product but on distribution as well, and that is something that all of the PayPal Mafia companies have done.” He contrasts the ~220 employees pre-IPO PayPal employees producing 7+ unicorns versus only a handful from Google even though Google had 100x the number of employees. “It’s a really interesting question: Why?… I think this sort of scrappiness around distribution is a big part of the explanation… If you’re an entrepreneur working in a small team, you’ve got to figure out from zero: How do I get my first user? How do I get the second user? How does that go to one hundred, one thousand, one million?… [Google] never has to think about that. They’ve got guaranteed distribution of half a billion users. And so, I think that scrappiness around distribution is one of the key reasons that there’s been so many PayPal mafia companies. I think it’s an interesting thing to think about as you create your own startups.” Video source: Draper University (2014)
3:10

David Sacks on what made the PayPal Mafia so successful The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s, such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. David Sacks—founding COO and product leader at PayPal—reflects on some of the factors that he believed contributed to their success: “I think one of the key things was that PayPal innovated not just on product, but on distribution as well.” He gives three examples of distribution strategies the PayPal Mafia brought with them to their next companies: 1. Virality. PayPal paid users $20 to refer their friends, which led to explosive growth. Virality was a huge factor in LinkedIn’s success. 2. Building on an existing network/platform. PayPal leveraged eBay’s power seller network, while LinkedIn leveraged their users’ network of email contacts. You want to “go where the users already are,” Sacks argues. 3. Embeds. PayPal let customers embed the logo on their websites and eBay auctions. YouTube employed this same strategy by making their videos easy to embed on Myspace and other websites. Sacks continues: “All of these techniques today are commonplace, but in the early 2000s, we were one of the first companies to do them… We were innovating not just on product but on distribution as well, and that is something that all of the PayPal Mafia companies have done.” He contrasts the ~220 employees pre-IPO PayPal employees producing 7+ unicorns versus only a handful from Google even though Google had 100x the number of employees. “It’s a really interesting question: Why?… I think this sort of scrappiness around distribution is a big part of the explanation… If you’re an entrepreneur working in a small team, you’ve got to figure out from zero: How do I get my first user? How do I get the second user? How does that go to one hundred, one thousand, one million?… [Google] never has to think about that. They’ve got guaranteed distribution of half a billion users. And so, I think that scrappiness around distribution is one of the key reasons that there’s been so many PayPal mafia companies. I think it’s an interesting thing to think about as you create your own startups.” Video source: Draper University (2014)

Startup Archive

61,009 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Q: How do you decide which customers to listen to? As Superhuman founder & CEO Rahul Vohra puts it: “In a world where you’re drowning in feedback—and most startups are drowning in feedback—you have to filter it down to only the stuff that’s going to increase the number of people who fall in love with your product.” Most startups will listen to all feedback from on-the-fence customers, but this isn’t targeted enough and will often lead to a muddled, incoherent product. As Rahul argues in the clip below, you need to identify the main benefit of your product—for Superhuman this was speed. And then focus on the feedback of on-the-fence users who also view this as the main benefit—there’s often something small holding them back. Users for whom your main benefit does not resonate (e.g. Superhuman users who value offline capabilities rather than speed), are unlikely to ever fall in love with your product. When Superhuman ran this analysis in 2015, they found that the main thing holding back users who viewed speed as the main benefit was their lack of a mobile app. Probing further, they found some less obvious and more interesting requests, such as integrations, attachment handling, calendering, unified inbox and read receipts. With a clear understanding of their main benefit and missing features, they were able to move this cohort of users from on-the-fence into the territory of enthusiastic advocates. As Rahul puts it in his Product Market Fit Engine article: “To increase your product/market fit score, spend half your time doubling down on what users already love and the other half on addressing what’s holding others back.” But make sure you’re focusing on users who love the main benefit of your product. Users who don’t are unlikely to ever fall in love with your product.
2:03

Q: How do you decide which customers to listen to? As Superhuman founder & CEO Rahul Vohra puts it: “In a world where you’re drowning in feedback—and most startups are drowning in feedback—you have to filter it down to only the stuff that’s going to increase the number of people who fall in love with your product.” Most startups will listen to all feedback from on-the-fence customers, but this isn’t targeted enough and will often lead to a muddled, incoherent product. As Rahul argues in the clip below, you need to identify the main benefit of your product—for Superhuman this was speed. And then focus on the feedback of on-the-fence users who also view this as the main benefit—there’s often something small holding them back. Users for whom your main benefit does not resonate (e.g. Superhuman users who value offline capabilities rather than speed), are unlikely to ever fall in love with your product. When Superhuman ran this analysis in 2015, they found that the main thing holding back users who viewed speed as the main benefit was their lack of a mobile app. Probing further, they found some less obvious and more interesting requests, such as integrations, attachment handling, calendering, unified inbox and read receipts. With a clear understanding of their main benefit and missing features, they were able to move this cohort of users from on-the-fence into the territory of enthusiastic advocates. As Rahul puts it in his Product Market Fit Engine article: “To increase your product/market fit score, spend half your time doubling down on what users already love and the other half on addressing what’s holding others back.” But make sure you’re focusing on users who love the main benefit of your product. Users who don’t are unlikely to ever fall in love with your product.

Michael McGuiness

89,869 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

From writing the first lines of code for Dropbox on a bus to New York to navigating the era of AI, CEO Drew Houston reflects on building and scaling Dropbox, and why gen AI has “reset the scoreboard” for what’s possible. Hear his conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit Podcast:
1:01

From writing the first lines of code for Dropbox on a bus to New York to navigating the era of AI, CEO Drew Houston reflects on building and scaling Dropbox, and why gen AI has “reset the scoreboard” for what’s possible. Hear his conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit Podcast:

Dropbox

20,787 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Jensen Huang: “VCs don’t invest in business plans” When asked for advice on business plans and raising venture capital, Jensen tells the student audience at Stanford: “VCs don’t invest in business plans… They invest in great people. And so the question is: do they trust you? Your reputation matters. Your history matters.” He explains that a one of the key reasons Sequoia wrote the initial check into NVIDIA was because he had done great work with Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun. Jensen also argues that you need to have a vision that’s “sufficiently large to invest in.” Because of the nature of the businesses VCs invest in, the odds of success are rather low. “If they need to put in $10 million and the market is only $20 million, they’ll never get that $10 million back with a reasonable return.” But market size is secondary to people: “You might have to reinvent yourself over time, and if you want to reinvent yourself, you need to have great people. That’s why great people are so important.” Video source: Stanford Online (2011)
1:28

Jensen Huang: “VCs don’t invest in business plans” When asked for advice on business plans and raising venture capital, Jensen tells the student audience at Stanford: “VCs don’t invest in business plans… They invest in great people. And so the question is: do they trust you? Your reputation matters. Your history matters.” He explains that a one of the key reasons Sequoia wrote the initial check into NVIDIA was because he had done great work with Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun. Jensen also argues that you need to have a vision that’s “sufficiently large to invest in.” Because of the nature of the businesses VCs invest in, the odds of success are rather low. “If they need to put in $10 million and the market is only $20 million, they’ll never get that $10 million back with a reasonable return.” But market size is secondary to people: “You might have to reinvent yourself over time, and if you want to reinvent yourself, you need to have great people. That’s why great people are so important.” Video source: Stanford Online (2011)

Startup Archive

117,110 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”
4:39

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Michael McGuiness

67,106 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast? Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small, intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets started. PG continues: "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on them and making them super super happy." Another example he draws upon is a startup in a Y Combinator batch making a new mobile email client. Their beta group had one user: Sam Altman. This startup's goal was to just make Sam happy. Sam uses email a lot on the go, knows all of the other email client options, and is super demanding. So they know that if they build a product that makes Sam happy, odds are it will make lots of other people happy too. "One of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where they can make just one user happy is to act like a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy--it can say 'Sam Altman' at the top of the screen. That's ok! Just so long as Sam would feel bummed if you stopped working on it. That's the test." Ultimately the secret to building a great product that grows really fast is to build something a small group of people love so much that they'd be really disappointed if you stopped working on it. There's lots of important steps to get right after this, but this is the foundation for growth. It's somewhat counterintuitive, but most of the world's largest companies (e.g. Apple, Facebook, etc.) started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy.
2:29

Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast? Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small, intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets started. PG continues: "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on them and making them super super happy." Another example he draws upon is a startup in a Y Combinator batch making a new mobile email client. Their beta group had one user: Sam Altman. This startup's goal was to just make Sam happy. Sam uses email a lot on the go, knows all of the other email client options, and is super demanding. So they know that if they build a product that makes Sam happy, odds are it will make lots of other people happy too. "One of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where they can make just one user happy is to act like a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy--it can say 'Sam Altman' at the top of the screen. That's ok! Just so long as Sam would feel bummed if you stopped working on it. That's the test." Ultimately the secret to building a great product that grows really fast is to build something a small group of people love so much that they'd be really disappointed if you stopped working on it. There's lots of important steps to get right after this, but this is the foundation for growth. It's somewhat counterintuitive, but most of the world's largest companies (e.g. Apple, Facebook, etc.) started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy.

Michael McGuiness

890,425 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Don’t start with the product. Start with distribution. I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the time because distribution is the hardest part of building a company. “Build it and they will come” almost never works. And even if you expect distribution to be hard—it’ll be 10× harder. HotelTonight started with a distribution insight. In 2009, we saw that the App Store about to become a massive channel. Billion-dollar companies would be built there, and early movers could earn free distribution before the competition showed up. From that insight, we worked backwards to the product: - A use case uniquely suited to mobile: last-minute hotel booking - Designed to win App Store ranking and retention: beautiful UI, lightning-fast 8-second bookings - Clear, curated choices and amazing deals that fit the mobile moment That combo—a unique distribution edge + a product tailored to it—powered our growth. As you think about your next company, begin with your edge in distribution. Maybe you are an expert at selling into a specific vertical. Maybe you're great at creating authentic content. Maybe you’ve spotted an emerging channel before anyone else. Only then decide what to build—the product that best amplifies your distribution advantage. At speedrun, we’re seeing teams win with GEO, founder-led content, and high-intent launch videos. So I’ll leave you with a prompt: What’s your unique approach to distribution—and what product could you build that maximizes it? If you’re working on this, I’d love to hear from you. Apply to a16z speedrun 🧊 at sr [dot] a16z [dot] com.
1:54

Don’t start with the product. Start with distribution. I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the time because distribution is the hardest part of building a company. “Build it and they will come” almost never works. And even if you expect distribution to be hard—it’ll be 10× harder. HotelTonight started with a distribution insight. In 2009, we saw that the App Store about to become a massive channel. Billion-dollar companies would be built there, and early movers could earn free distribution before the competition showed up. From that insight, we worked backwards to the product: - A use case uniquely suited to mobile: last-minute hotel booking - Designed to win App Store ranking and retention: beautiful UI, lightning-fast 8-second bookings - Clear, curated choices and amazing deals that fit the mobile moment That combo—a unique distribution edge + a product tailored to it—powered our growth. As you think about your next company, begin with your edge in distribution. Maybe you are an expert at selling into a specific vertical. Maybe you're great at creating authentic content. Maybe you’ve spotted an emerging channel before anyone else. Only then decide what to build—the product that best amplifies your distribution advantage. At speedrun, we’re seeing teams win with GEO, founder-led content, and high-intent launch videos. So I’ll leave you with a prompt: What’s your unique approach to distribution—and what product could you build that maximizes it? If you’re working on this, I’d love to hear from you. Apply to a16z speedrun 🧊 at sr [dot] a16z [dot] com.

Sam Shank

328,277 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

In the latest Social Radars we talk to Drew Houston of Dropbox, which is a classic example of a common phenomenon: the startup that succeeds, and then has to redefine itself and succeed again. Drew faced this challenge and executed perfectly.
6:11

In the latest Social Radars we talk to Drew Houston of Dropbox, which is a classic example of a common phenomenon: the startup that succeeds, and then has to redefine itself and succeed again. Drew faced this challenge and executed perfectly.

Jessica Livingston

113,304 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Steve Jobs on leadership In the clip below, Steve argues: “The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting consensus on a common vision.” Borrowing from his tagline for the original Mac, Steve continues: “we wanted people who were insanely great at what they did… and the neatest thing that happens when you get a core group of ten great people is that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself to be recruiting.” This observation on the importance of getting the first ten people right is a refrain you constantly hear from the very best founders. As Patrick Collison put it: “A large part of the reason why the first ten people you hire are so important is because you’re not just hiring those first ten people. You’re actually hiring 100 people, because you should think of each of those people as bring along another ten people with them.” The best leaders recruit “insanely great” people and align them around a common vision.
0:56

Steve Jobs on leadership In the clip below, Steve argues: “The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting consensus on a common vision.” Borrowing from his tagline for the original Mac, Steve continues: “we wanted people who were insanely great at what they did… and the neatest thing that happens when you get a core group of ten great people is that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself to be recruiting.” This observation on the importance of getting the first ten people right is a refrain you constantly hear from the very best founders. As Patrick Collison put it: “A large part of the reason why the first ten people you hire are so important is because you’re not just hiring those first ten people. You’re actually hiring 100 people, because you should think of each of those people as bring along another ten people with them.” The best leaders recruit “insanely great” people and align them around a common vision.

Startup Archive

187,721 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe • For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird • All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead. Video source: Y Combinator (2018)
2:13

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe • For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird • All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead. Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

45,833 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

Steve Jobs: “There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product” Steve recounts: “One of the things that really hurt Apple was, after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease—I’ve seen other people get it too—is the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work.” But that’s never the case. As Steve explains, a product idea never turns out as originally conceived because you learn a lot from the details of building it, and there are always tradeoffs you have to make. “There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product… and it’s that process that is the magic.” He compares a team working hard on something they’re passionate about to a rock tumbler: “It's through the team--through a group of incredibly talented people--bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together... they polish each other and polish the ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.”
3:10

Steve Jobs: “There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product” Steve recounts: “One of the things that really hurt Apple was, after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease—I’ve seen other people get it too—is the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work.” But that’s never the case. As Steve explains, a product idea never turns out as originally conceived because you learn a lot from the details of building it, and there are always tradeoffs you have to make. “There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product… and it’s that process that is the magic.” He compares a team working hard on something they’re passionate about to a rock tumbler: “It's through the team--through a group of incredibly talented people--bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together... they polish each other and polish the ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.”

Startup Archive

125,580 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Q: How do you build effective teams? Keith Rabois, Founders Fund Partner and former COO of Square, has a great framework for building effective teams that he calls: “Barrels and Ammunition.” When most companies begin scaling, they just hire a lot of people. Naively, they expect that—as they add people—their velocity of shipping will increase. But startups don’t work that way, and in fact you sometimes get less done when you add more people. Keith argues that the reason for this is that most people in your company—even great people—are what he calls “ammunition.” But what you need in your company are “barrels”. He defines barrels as extremely talented people who can take ideas from inception all the way through to fully shipped product. To increase company velocity, you need to add “barrels” and then stock them with “ammunition.” Most companies start with one barrel (the founder) and then double their throughput when they add another one. In the clip below, he explains this framework and some specific tactics for identifying and managing barrels:
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Q: How do you build effective teams? Keith Rabois, Founders Fund Partner and former COO of Square, has a great framework for building effective teams that he calls: “Barrels and Ammunition.” When most companies begin scaling, they just hire a lot of people. Naively, they expect that—as they add people—their velocity of shipping will increase. But startups don’t work that way, and in fact you sometimes get less done when you add more people. Keith argues that the reason for this is that most people in your company—even great people—are what he calls “ammunition.” But what you need in your company are “barrels”. He defines barrels as extremely talented people who can take ideas from inception all the way through to fully shipped product. To increase company velocity, you need to add “barrels” and then stock them with “ammunition.” Most companies start with one barrel (the founder) and then double their throughput when they add another one. In the clip below, he explains this framework and some specific tactics for identifying and managing barrels:

Michael McGuiness

567,832 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Steve Jobs explains why it's dangerous for sales and marketing people to run tech companies: Jobs starts with PepsiCo and John Sculley: "At PepsiCo, they at most would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was like a new-size bottle." In that world, sales and marketing people drove success and ran the company. For PepsiCo, that worked. But Jobs warns about what happens in tech: "The same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies like IBM and Xerox. When you have a monopoly market share, sales and marketing people end up running the companies." The danger? "The product people get driven out of the decision-making forums and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product, no conception of the craftsmanship required to turn a good idea into a good product, and no feeling in their hearts about wanting to really help the customers." Jobs uses Xerox as his cautionary tale, where marketing executives had "no clue" about the revolutionary technology they owned: "They grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have been the IBM of the '90s. Could have been the Microsoft of the '90s." The bottom line: Jobs argues that sales and marketing people can run companies where products don't change. But in technology, they'll hurt what made the company great.
2:19

Steve Jobs explains why it's dangerous for sales and marketing people to run tech companies: Jobs starts with PepsiCo and John Sculley: "At PepsiCo, they at most would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was like a new-size bottle." In that world, sales and marketing people drove success and ran the company. For PepsiCo, that worked. But Jobs warns about what happens in tech: "The same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies like IBM and Xerox. When you have a monopoly market share, sales and marketing people end up running the companies." The danger? "The product people get driven out of the decision-making forums and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product, no conception of the craftsmanship required to turn a good idea into a good product, and no feeling in their hearts about wanting to really help the customers." Jobs uses Xerox as his cautionary tale, where marketing executives had "no clue" about the revolutionary technology they owned: "They grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have been the IBM of the '90s. Could have been the Microsoft of the '90s." The bottom line: Jobs argues that sales and marketing people can run companies where products don't change. But in technology, they'll hurt what made the company great.

Big Brain Marketing

234,929 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten