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Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta on doing things that don’t scale “Y Combinator encourages startups to do things that don’t scale. I find that this is one of the biggest competitive advantages that a startup has over a larger company… The idea is that once your product has demand, you... can figure out how to scale your product.” Apoorva explains how in the early days of Instacart customers could place orders even if there weren’t shoppers online to fulfill those orders. “Of course, this meant that I would drop everything I was doing and fulfill the order myself.” They also ran into the issue that Trader Joe’s didn’t have an API or website with catalog of the items in the store. So the team literally went to their local Trader Joe’s, bought one of every single item, took it back to their office, photographed every single item, and manually entered it in the Instacart catalog. “Using the same unscalable techniques, we added Whole Foods, Costco and many other stores, and we realized we had the best product in the market.” Having the best product on the market allowed Instacart to quickly expand to 10 cities and maintain 10% week over week growth for 20 weeks. This traction would allow Instacart to raise more money, hire more people, and then make everything scalable. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)show more

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Brian Armstrong shares the Y Combinator advice that helped Coinbase find product/market fit “The first version of a product you put out doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen happen in startups. I’ve never seen a startup where the first version of their product actually worked. Sometimes in hindsight people like to tell that story, but I think in reality it’s very rare.” The first version of Coinbase was a hosted Bitcoin wallet. Brian posted it to Reddit and a few people signed up but nobody stuck around. Rather than get discouraged though, he recalled the advice he got at Y Combinator: “Don’t spend your time going to conferences and trying to raise money. If you don’t have product/market fit yet, talk to your customers and improve the product based on their feedback… There’s really only two things you should be doing in the early stage - talking to your customers and improving the product. It sounds like simple advice, but people spend so much time doing other stuff that’s not actually real work.” Following that advice, Brian emailed 10 of the people who had signed up for Coinbase and asked if they’d be open to a quick phone call. One of the users liked the wallet but didn’t have any Bitcoin. Brian asked him: “If there was an easy way to get Bitcoin into your wallet - like a buy button or something - would you have stuck around and used it?” “Yeah, probably” replied the user. So Brian spent the next few months securing bank partnerships and money transmission licenses so he could build a simple buy button into the app. Then he launched it. “The minute we launched that buy button, it started to grow every day organically with no marketing or anything. And that was the minute I felt like we finally had product/market fit.” Video Source: Steven Bartlett

Brian Armstrong shares the Y Combinator advice that helped Coinbase find product/market fit “The first version of a product you put out doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen happen in startups. I’ve never seen a startup where the first version of their product actually worked. Sometimes in hindsight people like to tell that story, but I think in reality it’s very rare.” The first version of Coinbase was a hosted Bitcoin wallet. Brian posted it to Reddit and a few people signed up but nobody stuck around. Rather than get discouraged though, he recalled the advice he got at Y Combinator: “Don’t spend your time going to conferences and trying to raise money. If you don’t have product/market fit yet, talk to your customers and improve the product based on their feedback… There’s really only two things you should be doing in the early stage - talking to your customers and improving the product. It sounds like simple advice, but people spend so much time doing other stuff that’s not actually real work.” Following that advice, Brian emailed 10 of the people who had signed up for Coinbase and asked if they’d be open to a quick phone call. One of the users liked the wallet but didn’t have any Bitcoin. Brian asked him: “If there was an easy way to get Bitcoin into your wallet - like a buy button or something - would you have stuck around and used it?” “Yeah, probably” replied the user. So Brian spent the next few months securing bank partnerships and money transmission licenses so he could build a simple buy button into the app. Then he launched it. “The minute we launched that buy button, it started to grow every day organically with no marketing or anything. And that was the minute I felt like we finally had product/market fit.” Video Source: Steven Bartlett

Startup Archive

151,125 views • 1 year ago

Brian Armstrong shares the Y Combinator advice that helped Coinbase find product/market fit “The first version of a product you put out doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen happen in startups. I’ve never seen a startup where the first version of their product actually worked. Sometimes in hindsight people like to tell that story, but I think in reality it’s very rare.” The first version of Coinbase was a hosted Bitcoin wallet. Brian posted it to Reddit and a few people signed up but nobody stuck around. Rather than get discouraged though, he recalled the advice he got at Y Combinator: “Don’t spend your time going to conferences and trying to raise money. If you don’t have product/market fit yet, talk to your customers and improve the product based on their feedback… There’s really only two things you should be doing in the early stage - talking to your customers and improving the product. It sounds like simple advice, but people spend so much time doing other stuff that’s not actually real work.” Following that advice, Brian emailed 10 of the people who had signed up for Coinbase and asked if they’d be open to a quick phone call. One of the users liked the wallet but didn’t have any Bitcoin. Brian asked him: “If there was an easy way to get Bitcoin into your wallet - like a buy button or something - would you have stuck around and used it?” “Yeah, probably” replied the user. So Brian spent the next few months securing bank partnerships and money transmission licenses so he could build a simple buy button into the app. Then he launched it. “The minute we launched that buy button, it started to grow every day organically with no marketing or anything. And that was the minute I felt like we finally had product/market fit.” Video source: Steven Bartlett (2022)

Brian Armstrong shares the Y Combinator advice that helped Coinbase find product/market fit “The first version of a product you put out doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen happen in startups. I’ve never seen a startup where the first version of their product actually worked. Sometimes in hindsight people like to tell that story, but I think in reality it’s very rare.” The first version of Coinbase was a hosted Bitcoin wallet. Brian posted it to Reddit and a few people signed up but nobody stuck around. Rather than get discouraged though, he recalled the advice he got at Y Combinator: “Don’t spend your time going to conferences and trying to raise money. If you don’t have product/market fit yet, talk to your customers and improve the product based on their feedback… There’s really only two things you should be doing in the early stage - talking to your customers and improving the product. It sounds like simple advice, but people spend so much time doing other stuff that’s not actually real work.” Following that advice, Brian emailed 10 of the people who had signed up for Coinbase and asked if they’d be open to a quick phone call. One of the users liked the wallet but didn’t have any Bitcoin. Brian asked him: “If there was an easy way to get Bitcoin into your wallet - like a buy button or something - would you have stuck around and used it?” “Yeah, probably” replied the user. So Brian spent the next few months securing bank partnerships and money transmission licenses so he could build a simple buy button into the app. Then he launched it. “The minute we launched that buy button, it started to grow every day organically with no marketing or anything. And that was the minute I felt like we finally had product/market fit.” Video source: Steven Bartlett (2022)

Startup Archive

56,857 views • 1 year ago

Brian Armstrong shares the Y Combinator advice that helped Coinbase find product/market fit “The first version of a product you put out doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen happen in startups. I’ve never seen a startup where the first version of their product actually worked. Sometimes in hindsight people like to tell that story, but I think in reality it’s very rare.” The first version of Coinbase was a hosted Bitcoin wallet. Brian posted it to Reddit and a few people signed up but nobody stuck around. Rather than get discouraged though, he recalled the advice he got at Y Combinator: “Don’t spend your time going to conferences and trying to raise money. If you don’t have product/market fit yet, talk to your customers and improve the product based on their feedback… There’s really only two things you should be doing in the early stage - talking to your customers and improving the product. It sounds like simple advice, but people spend so much time doing other stuff that’s not actually real work.” Following that advice, Brian emailed 10 of the people who had signed up for Coinbase and asked if they’d be open to a quick phone call. One of the users liked the wallet but didn’t have any Bitcoin. Brian asked him: “If there was an easy way to get Bitcoin into your wallet - like a buy button or something - would you have stuck around and used it?” “Yeah, probably” replied the user. So Brian spent the next few months securing bank partnerships and money transmission licenses so he could build a simple buy button into the app. Then he launched it. “The minute we launched that buy button, it started to grow every day organically with no marketing or anything. And that was the minute I felt like we finally had product/market fit.” Video source: Steven Bartlett (2022)

Brian Armstrong shares the Y Combinator advice that helped Coinbase find product/market fit “The first version of a product you put out doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen happen in startups. I’ve never seen a startup where the first version of their product actually worked. Sometimes in hindsight people like to tell that story, but I think in reality it’s very rare.” The first version of Coinbase was a hosted Bitcoin wallet. Brian posted it to Reddit and a few people signed up but nobody stuck around. Rather than get discouraged though, he recalled the advice he got at Y Combinator: “Don’t spend your time going to conferences and trying to raise money. If you don’t have product/market fit yet, talk to your customers and improve the product based on their feedback… There’s really only two things you should be doing in the early stage - talking to your customers and improving the product. It sounds like simple advice, but people spend so much time doing other stuff that’s not actually real work.” Following that advice, Brian emailed 10 of the people who had signed up for Coinbase and asked if they’d be open to a quick phone call. One of the users liked the wallet but didn’t have any Bitcoin. Brian asked him: “If there was an easy way to get Bitcoin into your wallet - like a buy button or something - would you have stuck around and used it?” “Yeah, probably” replied the user. So Brian spent the next few months securing bank partnerships and money transmission licenses so he could build a simple buy button into the app. Then he launched it. “The minute we launched that buy button, it started to grow every day organically with no marketing or anything. And that was the minute I felt like we finally had product/market fit.” Video source: Steven Bartlett (2022)

Startup Archive

78,532 views • 8 months ago

For this episode of Uncapped I got to sit down with my close friend Max Mullen, cofounder of Instacart 🥕 We talked about the key moments of Instacart...how it got started, critical wins, tough losses, competitive dynamics, earned insights, going public, and Instacart's future. Max is also an awesome startup investor, and we talked about what he looks for in founders, consumer investing, and what he's building with Workshop. He's one of the best people I know, hope you enjoy. (0:00) Intro (0:36) The inception of Instacart (4:55) Finding product market fit (7:20) Landing Trader Joe’s (11:04) Big levers for growth (13:36) Operationally complex businesses (14:55) Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods (17:50) COVID and Instacart’s IPO (20:02) Prioritizing profitability (23:21) Avoiding temptations (24:59) The future of Instacart (25:53) Investing in consumer (28:21) Irrationally optimistic founders (29:49) B2B vs consumer founders (30:35) How to work with investors (33:38) Building Workshop

For this episode of Uncapped I got to sit down with my close friend Max Mullen, cofounder of Instacart 🥕 We talked about the key moments of Instacart...how it got started, critical wins, tough losses, competitive dynamics, earned insights, going public, and Instacart's future. Max is also an awesome startup investor, and we talked about what he looks for in founders, consumer investing, and what he's building with Workshop. He's one of the best people I know, hope you enjoy. (0:00) Intro (0:36) The inception of Instacart (4:55) Finding product market fit (7:20) Landing Trader Joe’s (11:04) Big levers for growth (13:36) Operationally complex businesses (14:55) Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods (17:50) COVID and Instacart’s IPO (20:02) Prioritizing profitability (23:21) Avoiding temptations (24:59) The future of Instacart (25:53) Investing in consumer (28:21) Irrationally optimistic founders (29:49) B2B vs consumer founders (30:35) How to work with investors (33:38) Building Workshop

Jack Altman

221,822 views • 2 months ago

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”

Startup Archive

17,320 views • 4 months ago

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum explains why he charged $1 for the product to intentionally slow growth Sam Altman recalls: “I remember in 2011, people would say WhatsApp is never going to work because they charge a dollar and it’s a viral app and that’s just going to kill it right there.” But Jan explains that charging $1 was a very intentional lever WhatsApp used to slow growth: “I know it sounds very counterintuitive - why would you want to slow your growth? We wanted to slow our growth so we could better support our existing users. So we could build servers that don’t crash. So that we could build a product that doesn’t drop messages. So that we could answer their customer support emails.” A lot of people told Jan and the WhatsApp team this was a bad strategy, but Jan compares it to what Facebook did in the early days: “They were doing colleges only, and they weren’t open to the entire world.” WhatsApp wanted to do the same thing: “We wanted to make sure that we have our existing users happy, and that when people sign up, they have a great experience, and that the app works, and it’s fast, and the servers are up and running all the time. And I think that worked for us because we were really able to focus on the product.” Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum explains why he charged $1 for the product to intentionally slow growth Sam Altman recalls: “I remember in 2011, people would say WhatsApp is never going to work because they charge a dollar and it’s a viral app and that’s just going to kill it right there.” But Jan explains that charging $1 was a very intentional lever WhatsApp used to slow growth: “I know it sounds very counterintuitive - why would you want to slow your growth? We wanted to slow our growth so we could better support our existing users. So we could build servers that don’t crash. So that we could build a product that doesn’t drop messages. So that we could answer their customer support emails.” A lot of people told Jan and the WhatsApp team this was a bad strategy, but Jan compares it to what Facebook did in the early days: “They were doing colleges only, and they weren’t open to the entire world.” WhatsApp wanted to do the same thing: “We wanted to make sure that we have our existing users happy, and that when people sign up, they have a great experience, and that the app works, and it’s fast, and the servers are up and running all the time. And I think that worked for us because we were really able to focus on the product.” Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

Startup Archive

124,322 views • 1 year ago

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.”

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 views • 2 years ago

Steph Curry says the Warriors have to get back to the basics of what makes a good, competitive basketball team next season: “I’ve only been in one locker room for the last 17 years, and before you win the title, there were only those first two years where you’re building the foundation for what a championship team looks like, even though you had no idea what that really meant. Then you accomplish it, then everything else is based off of that, and it’s been that way since 2015. So I think we can reshape the narrative, like knowing in the back of our mind that is the ultimate goal, but we have to get back to the basics of what makes a good, competitive basketball team every single night. Understand how, realize how hard it is to win in this league, but can we rethink how we do things with the foundation that we’ve established? We don’t have to keep saying championship, championship, championship every day, even though we’ve experienced that. It’s can we just build the foundation again with what this team needs to do, with the way that the game is played now, how fast it is, how young and athletic it is. All of those things, we have to kind of put everything on the drawing board to get back to just being competitive every single night.”

Steph Curry says the Warriors have to get back to the basics of what makes a good, competitive basketball team next season: “I’ve only been in one locker room for the last 17 years, and before you win the title, there were only those first two years where you’re building the foundation for what a championship team looks like, even though you had no idea what that really meant. Then you accomplish it, then everything else is based off of that, and it’s been that way since 2015. So I think we can reshape the narrative, like knowing in the back of our mind that is the ultimate goal, but we have to get back to the basics of what makes a good, competitive basketball team every single night. Understand how, realize how hard it is to win in this league, but can we rethink how we do things with the foundation that we’ve established? We don’t have to keep saying championship, championship, championship every day, even though we’ve experienced that. It’s can we just build the foundation again with what this team needs to do, with the way that the game is played now, how fast it is, how young and athletic it is. All of those things, we have to kind of put everything on the drawing board to get back to just being competitive every single night.”

aly ✶

121,941 views • 2 months ago

Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users “The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.” Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”: 1. How do you get people in the front door? 2. How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? 3. How do you deliver core product value as often as possible? Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff. The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore: “In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.” As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization: “The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.” He continues: “You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.” Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.

Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users “The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.” Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”: 1. How do you get people in the front door? 2. How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? 3. How do you deliver core product value as often as possible? Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff. The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore: “In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.” As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization: “The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.” He continues: “You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.” Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.

Startup Archive

156,392 views • 6 months ago

James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months “Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2016)

James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months “Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2016)

Startup Archive

18,380 views • 7 months ago

"Aerodrome and Base are literally delivering a product that is up to 300x better than the biggest institutions, or the hottest fintech startups. This to me is a revolution. And it is one that we are still in the early days of."

"Aerodrome and Base are literally delivering a product that is up to 300x better than the biggest institutions, or the hottest fintech startups. This to me is a revolution. And it is one that we are still in the early days of."

Aerodrome

43,075 views • 6 months ago

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!

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

565,758 views • 2 years ago

HUGE ‼️ After public pushback Instacart ends dynamic pricing! We are all making a difference! “Instacart is pulling the plug on AI setting different prices for different customers — Effective immediately, Instacart is ending all item price tests on our platform” “The fact that they caved so quickly says to me that they know that they were doing something wrong.” “Think Tank Groundwork Collaborative found that Instacart's algorithmic pricing charged various prices for the same item from the same store. The prices varied by 7% on average, depending on the shopper, which could cost a family of four $4, $1,200 more per year. One example, according to the report, a dozen eggs added to virtual carts at the same time from one Washington, D.C. grocery store rang up at five different prices, ranging from $3.99 to $4.79.” “Instacart insists that this price testing was not dynamic pricing (which is a lie, it was proven to be dynamic pricing) — the FTC is now probing Instacart over these controversial practices.”

HUGE ‼️ After public pushback Instacart ends dynamic pricing! We are all making a difference! “Instacart is pulling the plug on AI setting different prices for different customers — Effective immediately, Instacart is ending all item price tests on our platform” “The fact that they caved so quickly says to me that they know that they were doing something wrong.” “Think Tank Groundwork Collaborative found that Instacart's algorithmic pricing charged various prices for the same item from the same store. The prices varied by 7% on average, depending on the shopper, which could cost a family of four $4, $1,200 more per year. One example, according to the report, a dozen eggs added to virtual carts at the same time from one Washington, D.C. grocery store rang up at five different prices, ranging from $3.99 to $4.79.” “Instacart insists that this price testing was not dynamic pricing (which is a lie, it was proven to be dynamic pricing) — the FTC is now probing Instacart over these controversial practices.”

Wall Street Apes

71,374 views • 6 months ago

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Founder Mode

39,005 views • 5 months ago

Brian Armstrong tells the founding story of Coinbase: “Nothing was working” After quitting his job in 2012 and joining Y Combinator to build Coinbase, Brian faced setback after setback: “I was struggling to find anybody who would join my team and work with me... I almost cofounded it with one person and that all exploded in dramatic fashion… I finally found the right cofounder, Fred Erhsam, we got off to the races, and someone sued us three months later.” But as Brian explains, this is the norm for startups: “Startups are moving from one setback to the next with enthusiasm… nothing is working, and that’s kind of the default state… If it feels like that, just don’t give up. That’s the main thing. A lot of times I’ve seen people: they have an idea, they have a team that comes together, it doesn’t work, and four months they have a big cofounder fight, blow up, and they all go home… And it’s like, well, you didn’t really try it because there’s no idea that works on the first try.” He continues: “You have to put something out there, and then grind it out for two or three years. Talk to your customers, improve the product, talk to your customers, improve the product… If you look at almost every successful startup, it feels like it was an overnight success, but really that’s just how history gets written in hindsight. If you talk to most of those founders in the early days, there was a period where any reasonable person would have quit. Nothing was working… And all of them somehow persevered and pushed through and finally found something that started to work.” This was especially true for Coinbase. There was no way to buy and sell crypto in the first version. A couple hundred people signed up after Brian posted it on Reddit, and they all left. After emailing five of the people who signed up and churned, he realized some people liked the app but couldn’t use it because they didn’t have Bitcoin: “I remember this light bubble that went off in my head, and I was like, well if there was a simple way to buy [Bitcoin] in the app, would you have done it? He’s like, yeah, probably. And so I hung up and the next few months I had to start thinking about how do we build a simple buy button? And there were a million things that had to go into that: bank partners, legal, licensing, and all this kind of stuff. But that’s when we finally got product/market fit. And that was just one example of hundreds of times where I did that. And I was trying to find something that works… So talk to your customers, improve the product. That’s all we did. And that was one of the things I would recommend.” Video source: a16z crypto (2023)

Brian Armstrong tells the founding story of Coinbase: “Nothing was working” After quitting his job in 2012 and joining Y Combinator to build Coinbase, Brian faced setback after setback: “I was struggling to find anybody who would join my team and work with me... I almost cofounded it with one person and that all exploded in dramatic fashion… I finally found the right cofounder, Fred Erhsam, we got off to the races, and someone sued us three months later.” But as Brian explains, this is the norm for startups: “Startups are moving from one setback to the next with enthusiasm… nothing is working, and that’s kind of the default state… If it feels like that, just don’t give up. That’s the main thing. A lot of times I’ve seen people: they have an idea, they have a team that comes together, it doesn’t work, and four months they have a big cofounder fight, blow up, and they all go home… And it’s like, well, you didn’t really try it because there’s no idea that works on the first try.” He continues: “You have to put something out there, and then grind it out for two or three years. Talk to your customers, improve the product, talk to your customers, improve the product… If you look at almost every successful startup, it feels like it was an overnight success, but really that’s just how history gets written in hindsight. If you talk to most of those founders in the early days, there was a period where any reasonable person would have quit. Nothing was working… And all of them somehow persevered and pushed through and finally found something that started to work.” This was especially true for Coinbase. There was no way to buy and sell crypto in the first version. A couple hundred people signed up after Brian posted it on Reddit, and they all left. After emailing five of the people who signed up and churned, he realized some people liked the app but couldn’t use it because they didn’t have Bitcoin: “I remember this light bubble that went off in my head, and I was like, well if there was a simple way to buy [Bitcoin] in the app, would you have done it? He’s like, yeah, probably. And so I hung up and the next few months I had to start thinking about how do we build a simple buy button? And there were a million things that had to go into that: bank partners, legal, licensing, and all this kind of stuff. But that’s when we finally got product/market fit. And that was just one example of hundreds of times where I did that. And I was trying to find something that works… So talk to your customers, improve the product. That’s all we did. And that was one of the things I would recommend.” Video source: a16z crypto (2023)

Startup Archive

141,120 views • 7 months ago

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a hello@ironclad.ai email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a [email protected] email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”

Todd Jackson

50,683 views • 2 years ago