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Jack Dorsey’s #1 rule for pitching your startup: “Show them something that works” Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey, and another engineer built the initial prototype for Square in a month. As Jack recalls: “I could actually swipe a card, generate an electronic receipt via email, and then send it out... to a person. I loved this because I would go around to all these angel investors and VCs and charge them $5-50 to show them my new idea.” This prototype was critical in helping the company raise $10 million in initial funding from Khosla Ventures. And Jack believes it’s a lesson all founders should take to heart: “The thing that really inspires people is a working product. When you’re pitching someone, the best thing you can do is show them something that works.” Jack continues: “We did this with Twitter. We had a great number of users… and we had investors who were coming to us who were already users of the product. Their families were users of the product. So the story became very easy to tell and they could easily see why this was something that was powerful.” Video source: Stanford University (2011)show more

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Jack Dorsey on why building something for yourself can be better than trying to solve a problem When a 29 year old Jack Dorsey joined the podcasting startup Odeo, he soon learned that no one there really cared about podcasting either: “That was one of Odeo’s biggest failures. We were not building tools for us. We were building tools for other people.” As Odeo struggled, the team began to look for new ideas, and Jack presented his idea for Twitter. Somewhat counterintuitively, the product would not solve a specific problem: “Twitter solves no one’s problem at all. It was something we wanted to use. It was something we wanted to see in the world. It was something we wanted to use on a daily basis, and that’s all that drove us. That’s what got us up every single morning, and that’s what made it meaningful.” It turns out there were more people like Jack and the Odeo team who wanted to use it to. “I think that is one of the biggest lessons I learned—Twitter did not start as a company. Twitter started as a product within another company that was failing. And to me, this really emphasized the fact that entrepreneurship is not necessarily starting a new company. It’s actually just taking significant risk to build what you want to see in the world.” Video source: Berkeley Engineering (2013)

Jack Dorsey on why building something for yourself can be better than trying to solve a problem When a 29 year old Jack Dorsey joined the podcasting startup Odeo, he soon learned that no one there really cared about podcasting either: “That was one of Odeo’s biggest failures. We were not building tools for us. We were building tools for other people.” As Odeo struggled, the team began to look for new ideas, and Jack presented his idea for Twitter. Somewhat counterintuitively, the product would not solve a specific problem: “Twitter solves no one’s problem at all. It was something we wanted to use. It was something we wanted to see in the world. It was something we wanted to use on a daily basis, and that’s all that drove us. That’s what got us up every single morning, and that’s what made it meaningful.” It turns out there were more people like Jack and the Odeo team who wanted to use it to. “I think that is one of the biggest lessons I learned—Twitter did not start as a company. Twitter started as a product within another company that was failing. And to me, this really emphasized the fact that entrepreneurship is not necessarily starting a new company. It’s actually just taking significant risk to build what you want to see in the world.” Video source: Berkeley Engineering (2013)

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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)

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)

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Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s biggest mistake in the early days “One of the greatest lessons that I learned in starting and running Twitter — and starting and running Square — is how important it is to instrument all usage.” Jack explains why product metrics are so important: “For the first two years of Twitter’s life, we were flying blind. We had no idea what was going on with the network… with how people were using it. We were making guesses and basing everything on intuition, instead of having a good balance between intuition and data.” Twitter’s product was also going down all the time because of it, commonly referred to as the “Fail Whale” incidents. The image, depicting a whale being lifted by birds, became a symbol of Twitter’s repeated service disruptions. Jack didn’t make the same mistake twice when founding Square: “The first thing I wrote for Square was an admin dashboard, and we have a very strong discipline within the company to log everything, measure everything, and test everything. We treat the dashboard, analytics, and data as a product — we call it the Inference Team. Their job is to instrument all usage and infer all action.” Source: Stanford University (Jun 2011)

Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s biggest mistake in the early days “One of the greatest lessons that I learned in starting and running Twitter — and starting and running Square — is how important it is to instrument all usage.” Jack explains why product metrics are so important: “For the first two years of Twitter’s life, we were flying blind. We had no idea what was going on with the network… with how people were using it. We were making guesses and basing everything on intuition, instead of having a good balance between intuition and data.” Twitter’s product was also going down all the time because of it, commonly referred to as the “Fail Whale” incidents. The image, depicting a whale being lifted by birds, became a symbol of Twitter’s repeated service disruptions. Jack didn’t make the same mistake twice when founding Square: “The first thing I wrote for Square was an admin dashboard, and we have a very strong discipline within the company to log everything, measure everything, and test everything. We treat the dashboard, analytics, and data as a product — we call it the Inference Team. Their job is to instrument all usage and infer all action.” Source: Stanford University (Jun 2011)

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Elon Musk on raising capital: “You have to show investors that you’re all in” “Tesla almost died in 2008,” Elon explains. “The recession was particularly difficult for car companies, and in the summer of 2008 we had to raise a big funding round. But because of the collapse in the financial system, that funding round didn’t happen and we had to piece together money to keep the company going from myself and existing investors. We were able to complete a financing round that was just barely enough to keep the company going, and we closed it on the last hour of the last day that it was possible to do so. It was Christmas Eve 2008 at 6pm . . . and we would have run out of money a few days after Christmas.” Elon continues: “So while things are going really well these days, I think it’s always important to remember that when you’re creating a company, there are very dark times and it’s about getting through those dark times. That’s the difference between success and failure.” He offers the following advice to aspiring founders: “A company is a group of people gathered together to create a product or service. That’s really all a company is. So you have to really believe in what you’re creating and know in your heart and mind that this is something that matters and that the world ought to have.” Believing whole-heartedly in what your building is especially important for raising capital, Elon argues: “I think it’s important to show investors that you’re all in. For example with Tesla, the fact that I invested all the money I had and was all in — I literally had to borrow money from friends to pay rent in 2008 — made a huge difference to investors and convinced them to invest in Tesla at the same time that GM and Chrysler were going bankrupt. I think you have to show them that you really care, that you’ve got skin in the game, and that you’ve given it everything you’ve got. Then the other people at the company will follow suit, as will investors. I did that at both SpaceX and Tesla and think that’s really fundamental.” Elon also urges founders to only hire people who are passionate about what you’re building: “When you hire people, what you’re really trying to do is convince people to join you in the endeavor. You should hire people who are also passionate about what you’re doing . . . they need to really care about what they’re doing. Then they will stay during the dark times.” Source: Montana Jobs Summit (Nov 2013)

Elon Musk on raising capital: “You have to show investors that you’re all in” “Tesla almost died in 2008,” Elon explains. “The recession was particularly difficult for car companies, and in the summer of 2008 we had to raise a big funding round. But because of the collapse in the financial system, that funding round didn’t happen and we had to piece together money to keep the company going from myself and existing investors. We were able to complete a financing round that was just barely enough to keep the company going, and we closed it on the last hour of the last day that it was possible to do so. It was Christmas Eve 2008 at 6pm . . . and we would have run out of money a few days after Christmas.” Elon continues: “So while things are going really well these days, I think it’s always important to remember that when you’re creating a company, there are very dark times and it’s about getting through those dark times. That’s the difference between success and failure.” He offers the following advice to aspiring founders: “A company is a group of people gathered together to create a product or service. That’s really all a company is. So you have to really believe in what you’re creating and know in your heart and mind that this is something that matters and that the world ought to have.” Believing whole-heartedly in what your building is especially important for raising capital, Elon argues: “I think it’s important to show investors that you’re all in. For example with Tesla, the fact that I invested all the money I had and was all in — I literally had to borrow money from friends to pay rent in 2008 — made a huge difference to investors and convinced them to invest in Tesla at the same time that GM and Chrysler were going bankrupt. I think you have to show them that you really care, that you’ve got skin in the game, and that you’ve given it everything you’ve got. Then the other people at the company will follow suit, as will investors. I did that at both SpaceX and Tesla and think that’s really fundamental.” Elon also urges founders to only hire people who are passionate about what you’re building: “When you hire people, what you’re really trying to do is convince people to join you in the endeavor. You should hire people who are also passionate about what you’re doing . . . they need to really care about what they’re doing. Then they will stay during the dark times.” Source: Montana Jobs Summit (Nov 2013)

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Elon Musk on raising capital: “You have to show investors that you’re all in” “Tesla almost died in 2008,” Elon explains. “The recession was particularly difficult for car companies, and in the summer of 2008 we had to raise a big funding round. But because of the collapse in the financial system, that funding round didn’t happen and we had to piece together money to keep the company going from myself and existing investors. We were able to complete a financing round that was just barely enough to keep the company going, and we closed it on the last hour of the last day that it was possible to do so. It was Christmas Eve 2008 at 6pm . . . and we would have run out of money a few days after Christmas.” Elon continues: “So while things are going really well these days, I think it’s always important to remember that when you’re creating a company, there are very dark times and it’s about getting through those dark times. That’s the difference between success and failure.” He offers the following advice to aspiring founders: “A company is a group of people gathered together to create a product or service. That’s really all a company is. So you have to really believe in what you’re creating and know in your heart and mind that this is something that matters and that the world ought to have.” Believing whole-heartedly in what your building is especially important for raising capital, Elon argues: “I think it’s important to show investors that you’re all in. For example with Tesla, the fact that I invested all the money I had and was all in — I literally had to borrow money from friends to pay rent in 2008 — made a huge difference to investors and convinced them to invest in Tesla at the same time that GM and Chrysler were going bankrupt. I think you have to show them that you really care, that you’ve got skin in the game, and that you’ve given it everything you’ve got. Then the other people at the company will follow suit, as will investors. I did that at both SpaceX and Tesla and think that’s really fundamental.” Elon also urges founders to only hire people who are passionate about what you’re building: “When you hire people, what you’re really trying to do is convince people to join you in the endeavor. You should hire people who are also passionate about what you’re doing . . . they need to really care about what they’re doing. Then they will stay during the dark times.”

Elon Musk on raising capital: “You have to show investors that you’re all in” “Tesla almost died in 2008,” Elon explains. “The recession was particularly difficult for car companies, and in the summer of 2008 we had to raise a big funding round. But because of the collapse in the financial system, that funding round didn’t happen and we had to piece together money to keep the company going from myself and existing investors. We were able to complete a financing round that was just barely enough to keep the company going, and we closed it on the last hour of the last day that it was possible to do so. It was Christmas Eve 2008 at 6pm . . . and we would have run out of money a few days after Christmas.” Elon continues: “So while things are going really well these days, I think it’s always important to remember that when you’re creating a company, there are very dark times and it’s about getting through those dark times. That’s the difference between success and failure.” He offers the following advice to aspiring founders: “A company is a group of people gathered together to create a product or service. That’s really all a company is. So you have to really believe in what you’re creating and know in your heart and mind that this is something that matters and that the world ought to have.” Believing whole-heartedly in what your building is especially important for raising capital, Elon argues: “I think it’s important to show investors that you’re all in. For example with Tesla, the fact that I invested all the money I had and was all in — I literally had to borrow money from friends to pay rent in 2008 — made a huge difference to investors and convinced them to invest in Tesla at the same time that GM and Chrysler were going bankrupt. I think you have to show them that you really care, that you’ve got skin in the game, and that you’ve given it everything you’ve got. Then the other people at the company will follow suit, as will investors. I did that at both SpaceX and Tesla and think that’s really fundamental.” Elon also urges founders to only hire people who are passionate about what you’re building: “When you hire people, what you’re really trying to do is convince people to join you in the endeavor. You should hire people who are also passionate about what you’re doing . . . they need to really care about what they’re doing. Then they will stay during the dark times.”

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Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

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34,567 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.” John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later: “When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.” But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.” Yet slow growth has a silver lining: “I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.” The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown. They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them. In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes. “What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2015)

John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.” John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later: “When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.” But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.” Yet slow growth has a silver lining: “I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.” The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown. They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them. In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes. “What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2015)

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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!

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Aman Sanger on scaling Cursor to $100M in revenue in 12 months The four co-founders started working on Cursor in January 2023. “It was about 2-4 months of experimenting, trying different things and finding something that fit,” Aman recalls. “Then we shipped it and it had an okay launch.” The initial version of Cursor got some initial buzz because they shipped it with GPT-4 at a time where very few products were using Open AI’s latest model. But then usage tanked. The team began to doubt their approach after the failed launch. Aman explains: “The entirety of that summer was just incredibly slow growth, and that was somewhat demoralizing. The big question in our minds was, ‘Are we being too ambitious?’ We were trying to build this general purpose thing for all engineers, but with this really small team, maybe we should focus more narrowly on some particular use case like tests or bug detection.” But the fact that they were users of the product gave the team the confidence to keep going down their initial path: “The really magical thing about this product was that we were users of it. So we could iterate incredibly quickly, and we tried all these different things that summer. Then we found this core set of features that worked incredibly well.” The two key features were Command K for instructed edit ability and code-based indexing that let you ask questions about your whole code base. “After we integrated those two features and launched them, growth kind of just took off.” Aman continues: “A lot of the work of Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible. For everything you see in the product, there’s like 10 failed experiments that didn’t work… All of our work for the first 6 months to a year was trying to find new ways to harness these models and make these models better for programming.” Another factor that contributed to Cursor’s success was their willingness to ship half-finished features: “We released these half-finished things, which a lot of our competitors refused to do. The first version of Copilot++ and Cursor Tab sucked. But once you release it to the world and see how people react to it, you can improve on it a ton… We biased toward releasing as soon as something shows signs of usefulness to the team.” Video source: Peak XV Partners (2025)

Aman Sanger on scaling Cursor to $100M in revenue in 12 months The four co-founders started working on Cursor in January 2023. “It was about 2-4 months of experimenting, trying different things and finding something that fit,” Aman recalls. “Then we shipped it and it had an okay launch.” The initial version of Cursor got some initial buzz because they shipped it with GPT-4 at a time where very few products were using Open AI’s latest model. But then usage tanked. The team began to doubt their approach after the failed launch. Aman explains: “The entirety of that summer was just incredibly slow growth, and that was somewhat demoralizing. The big question in our minds was, ‘Are we being too ambitious?’ We were trying to build this general purpose thing for all engineers, but with this really small team, maybe we should focus more narrowly on some particular use case like tests or bug detection.” But the fact that they were users of the product gave the team the confidence to keep going down their initial path: “The really magical thing about this product was that we were users of it. So we could iterate incredibly quickly, and we tried all these different things that summer. Then we found this core set of features that worked incredibly well.” The two key features were Command K for instructed edit ability and code-based indexing that let you ask questions about your whole code base. “After we integrated those two features and launched them, growth kind of just took off.” Aman continues: “A lot of the work of Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible. For everything you see in the product, there’s like 10 failed experiments that didn’t work… All of our work for the first 6 months to a year was trying to find new ways to harness these models and make these models better for programming.” Another factor that contributed to Cursor’s success was their willingness to ship half-finished features: “We released these half-finished things, which a lot of our competitors refused to do. The first version of Copilot++ and Cursor Tab sucked. But once you release it to the world and see how people react to it, you can improve on it a ton… We biased toward releasing as soon as something shows signs of usefulness to the team.” Video source: Peak XV Partners (2025)

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Keith Rabois explains that the key to LinkedIn’s success was investing 80% of resources in virality Keith was employee number 20 at LinkedIn, and when he left almost three years later, they were at employee 59: “People forget that it took two years to get to a million users, which in a social product feels like an eternity. Revenue - we had like none for the first 2-3 years.” He continues: “The key was Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, was very savvy, and he knew what the ingredients for success were. He was very consciously aware that LinkedIn had to be a viral product. We could not afford to pay for customer acquisition. So almost everything was predicated on: How do you create a truly viral product? And there’s ways of measuring it. That was like 80% of resources. And once we nailed the viral product, and the [viral] coefficient was above 1, then we could take time to build other products.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2024)

Keith Rabois explains that the key to LinkedIn’s success was investing 80% of resources in virality Keith was employee number 20 at LinkedIn, and when he left almost three years later, they were at employee 59: “People forget that it took two years to get to a million users, which in a social product feels like an eternity. Revenue - we had like none for the first 2-3 years.” He continues: “The key was Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, was very savvy, and he knew what the ingredients for success were. He was very consciously aware that LinkedIn had to be a viral product. We could not afford to pay for customer acquisition. So almost everything was predicated on: How do you create a truly viral product? And there’s ways of measuring it. That was like 80% of resources. And once we nailed the viral product, and the [viral] coefficient was above 1, then we could take time to build other products.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2024)

Startup Archive

167,344 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Today Lattice is synonymous with performance reviews and people management. But not many know that in the very early days, Jack Altman and @ekosz1 had a different product entirely — an OKR tool trying to solve the painful quarterly planning process. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from Lattice’s pivot — grateful Jack took the time to share his lessons for other builders. 🙏 Here are a few takeaways that have stuck with me: Market pull can be confusing in the early days. Much of PMF advice contains some variation of a “you’ll know it when you see it” type of definition. But for Jack, there’s a key nuance here. “If you haven’t seen early market pull yourself before, you can get easily confused about what it looks like. People are telling you this looks cool, they're saying that they're excited about what's coming, so you think, ‘Okay, maybe we are onto something,’ and that can bleed on that path for quite a long time.” In retrospect, Jack points to 2 signs the OKR tool idea wasn’t working: 1) It was hard to get people to actually pull out their credit cards. “A lot of CEOs and people leaders said, ‘We'd really like this. Can we try it? Can we test it for a quarter? Can we do a monthly thing? Can you give me a login so I can poke around?’ But when we tried to get them to pay, it was very challenging.” 2) Even when people got into the product and did a full OKR planning cycle in Lattice, the next quarter didn't come easily. “They were like, ‘Ugh, we’ve got to do this.’ And then by the third quarter they were like, ‘This is not happening naturally.’ For the employees, the retention was just not there. So both sides were not strong enough.” After Lattice’s pivot (where they kept their HR buyer but changed the product), the difference in traction immediately felt clear. “We had people paying us annual upfront contracts without ever seeing a product, just on our design mocks — which couldn't be more different than the experience we’d been having with OKRs. There were leads coming organically from all over the place. I think we booked twice as much revenue in the first month on that product than we had booked in the previous year on the last one.” If you’re stuck, it takes big swings, not small changes. “A lot of people hang out in nascent PMF and make small changes for years, and that's just a literal waste of everybody's time and resources. Moving up levels of product-market fit or getting unstuck requires more than just incremental steps or giving it more time. More often than not, if you're working on something that is not getting great traction, you’re probably not a 10% adjustment away — you’re probably a 200% adjustment away.” The only people who have the answers are the buyers. “You should really be spending all of your time talking to customers. And that sounds so obvious. But people will find so many reasons to not do that. You’ll hear ‘I really should be recruiting,’ or ‘Some VC wanted to have coffee with me, maybe I'll learn from them about this market.’ And it's all a waste of time. The buyers are where the truth is. When you get to the point where you’ve talked to so many customers that you're sick of hearing the same thing over and over again, that's when you know, you've talked to enough. One of the things that always really helped me is I would remind people that it really doesn't help me if you're nice to me in this meeting. I'm trying to build a company that doesn't fail. And I can only do that if I get genuine responses from you.”

Today Lattice is synonymous with performance reviews and people management. But not many know that in the very early days, Jack Altman and @ekosz1 had a different product entirely — an OKR tool trying to solve the painful quarterly planning process. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from Lattice’s pivot — grateful Jack took the time to share his lessons for other builders. 🙏 Here are a few takeaways that have stuck with me: Market pull can be confusing in the early days. Much of PMF advice contains some variation of a “you’ll know it when you see it” type of definition. But for Jack, there’s a key nuance here. “If you haven’t seen early market pull yourself before, you can get easily confused about what it looks like. People are telling you this looks cool, they're saying that they're excited about what's coming, so you think, ‘Okay, maybe we are onto something,’ and that can bleed on that path for quite a long time.” In retrospect, Jack points to 2 signs the OKR tool idea wasn’t working: 1) It was hard to get people to actually pull out their credit cards. “A lot of CEOs and people leaders said, ‘We'd really like this. Can we try it? Can we test it for a quarter? Can we do a monthly thing? Can you give me a login so I can poke around?’ But when we tried to get them to pay, it was very challenging.” 2) Even when people got into the product and did a full OKR planning cycle in Lattice, the next quarter didn't come easily. “They were like, ‘Ugh, we’ve got to do this.’ And then by the third quarter they were like, ‘This is not happening naturally.’ For the employees, the retention was just not there. So both sides were not strong enough.” After Lattice’s pivot (where they kept their HR buyer but changed the product), the difference in traction immediately felt clear. “We had people paying us annual upfront contracts without ever seeing a product, just on our design mocks — which couldn't be more different than the experience we’d been having with OKRs. There were leads coming organically from all over the place. I think we booked twice as much revenue in the first month on that product than we had booked in the previous year on the last one.” If you’re stuck, it takes big swings, not small changes. “A lot of people hang out in nascent PMF and make small changes for years, and that's just a literal waste of everybody's time and resources. Moving up levels of product-market fit or getting unstuck requires more than just incremental steps or giving it more time. More often than not, if you're working on something that is not getting great traction, you’re probably not a 10% adjustment away — you’re probably a 200% adjustment away.” The only people who have the answers are the buyers. “You should really be spending all of your time talking to customers. And that sounds so obvious. But people will find so many reasons to not do that. You’ll hear ‘I really should be recruiting,’ or ‘Some VC wanted to have coffee with me, maybe I'll learn from them about this market.’ And it's all a waste of time. The buyers are where the truth is. When you get to the point where you’ve talked to so many customers that you're sick of hearing the same thing over and over again, that's when you know, you've talked to enough. One of the things that always really helped me is I would remind people that it really doesn't help me if you're nice to me in this meeting. I'm trying to build a company that doesn't fail. And I can only do that if I get genuine responses from you.”

Brett Berson

48,044 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

" IN AMERICA'S GREATEST CITY NEW YORK YOU WILL NOW HAVE SOMEONE WHO JUST BECAME A CITIZEN IN 2018 IN MAMDANI WHO BELIEVES IN MARXISM AND YOU WILL SEE OPEN SEASON AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE IN NYC." - Jack Posobiec Jack Posobiec then discusses the hope that is across the river in New Jersey and that you need to get out to the polls out there early for JACK CIATTARELLI and contact any friends of yours out in New Jersey to ask them when they voted and THIS IS AN ELECTIONS WE CAN WIN IF WE GET OUT TO VOTE.

" IN AMERICA'S GREATEST CITY NEW YORK YOU WILL NOW HAVE SOMEONE WHO JUST BECAME A CITIZEN IN 2018 IN MAMDANI WHO BELIEVES IN MARXISM AND YOU WILL SEE OPEN SEASON AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE IN NYC." - Jack Posobiec Jack Posobiec then discusses the hope that is across the river in New Jersey and that you need to get out to the polls out there early for JACK CIATTARELLI and contact any friends of yours out in New Jersey to ask them when they voted and THIS IS AN ELECTIONS WE CAN WIN IF WE GET OUT TO VOTE.

Johnny St.Pete

38,270 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Jack Dorsey: I think of the CEO role as “Chief Editor” of the company “I think of my role as CEO of Square as an editorial function,” Jack Dorsey explains. “By editorial, I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing, but there’s only one or two that are important.” He continues: “All of these ideas and stories from users, engineers, support people, designers, are going to constantly flood what we should be doing. We need to choose the one or two that are really going to drive and sustain the product. As an editor, I’m constantly taking all these inputs and deciding on that one — or the intersection of a few — that makes sense for what we’re doing.” There are three “access points” that Jack pays attention to in particular: 1. The team. “We have to bring the best people in and edit away any negative elements… At the end of the day, we’re just a group of people working on one single goal, and if we can’t step in a cohesive, coordinated fashion, we’re going to trip all over the place. Recruiting is no. 1.” 2. Internal & External Communication. “Internal communication is just the coordination of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it… If you have the vision, the next 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, and year maybe, it makes it very easy to set priorities and for all the edges of the company to do the right thing. The external communication is the product, and the product is the story we’re telling the world… We don’t want it to be about a person. We want it to be about how people are using it, fitting it into their lives, and what they’re doing with it. That’s the strongest story we have.” 3. Editing the “money in the bank” story. “This comes in two ways: 1) through investment… or 2) through revenue.” Jack concludes: “My three priorities and focus areas are in that order. That’s what I’m constantly editing as CEO, and I think it makes managing a growing company in a fast-paced environment very easy because there’s basically one thing you have to do: You have to make every single detail perfect and you have to limit the number of details. That’s it. If you can do that well… you’re going to succeed because you’re paying attention to the smallest things. And if you pay attention to the smallest things while knowing what’s important, then everything else takes care of itself.” Video source: Stanford University (2011)

Jack Dorsey: I think of the CEO role as “Chief Editor” of the company “I think of my role as CEO of Square as an editorial function,” Jack Dorsey explains. “By editorial, I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing, but there’s only one or two that are important.” He continues: “All of these ideas and stories from users, engineers, support people, designers, are going to constantly flood what we should be doing. We need to choose the one or two that are really going to drive and sustain the product. As an editor, I’m constantly taking all these inputs and deciding on that one — or the intersection of a few — that makes sense for what we’re doing.” There are three “access points” that Jack pays attention to in particular: 1. The team. “We have to bring the best people in and edit away any negative elements… At the end of the day, we’re just a group of people working on one single goal, and if we can’t step in a cohesive, coordinated fashion, we’re going to trip all over the place. Recruiting is no. 1.” 2. Internal & External Communication. “Internal communication is just the coordination of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it… If you have the vision, the next 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, and year maybe, it makes it very easy to set priorities and for all the edges of the company to do the right thing. The external communication is the product, and the product is the story we’re telling the world… We don’t want it to be about a person. We want it to be about how people are using it, fitting it into their lives, and what they’re doing with it. That’s the strongest story we have.” 3. Editing the “money in the bank” story. “This comes in two ways: 1) through investment… or 2) through revenue.” Jack concludes: “My three priorities and focus areas are in that order. That’s what I’m constantly editing as CEO, and I think it makes managing a growing company in a fast-paced environment very easy because there’s basically one thing you have to do: You have to make every single detail perfect and you have to limit the number of details. That’s it. If you can do that well… you’re going to succeed because you’re paying attention to the smallest things. And if you pay attention to the smallest things while knowing what’s important, then everything else takes care of itself.” Video source: Stanford University (2011)

Startup Archive

46,836 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten

Dylan Field on his biggest learnings from Figma’s 0 to 1 phase Figma’s 0 to 1 phase was notoriously long. The company was founded in 2012, but it took four years before they publicly launched their product in 2016. Figma co-founder Dylan Field reflects on what he learned from this period: “From August 2012 to June of 2013, that was a period where we were pivoting constantly trying lots of things. But then we had a thesis, felt like there was an opportunity, and started to build it out more. Then it was like, ‘Okay, this is going to take a while.’ In retrospect, we were lucky to have raised money and have resources, but I should have hired faster once we started to get signal from the market that we had product/market fit.” Dylan recalls going to a user study with a friend who was a designer at Coursera. The following day, his friend sent over a 12-page document listing all of the stuff he wanted Dylan to build into Figma. “I should’ve taken something like that and gone, ‘Okay, this is clear product/market pull.’ The market was pulling the product out of us. I should’ve then gone and hired faster. But instead I was still very cautious. And so that’s something where I wish — if I could go back in time — we would’ve gone a little faster there.” Sam Altman gives similar advice: “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” Video source: Y Combinator (2025)

Dylan Field on his biggest learnings from Figma’s 0 to 1 phase Figma’s 0 to 1 phase was notoriously long. The company was founded in 2012, but it took four years before they publicly launched their product in 2016. Figma co-founder Dylan Field reflects on what he learned from this period: “From August 2012 to June of 2013, that was a period where we were pivoting constantly trying lots of things. But then we had a thesis, felt like there was an opportunity, and started to build it out more. Then it was like, ‘Okay, this is going to take a while.’ In retrospect, we were lucky to have raised money and have resources, but I should have hired faster once we started to get signal from the market that we had product/market fit.” Dylan recalls going to a user study with a friend who was a designer at Coursera. The following day, his friend sent over a 12-page document listing all of the stuff he wanted Dylan to build into Figma. “I should’ve taken something like that and gone, ‘Okay, this is clear product/market pull.’ The market was pulling the product out of us. I should’ve then gone and hired faster. But instead I was still very cautious. And so that’s something where I wish — if I could go back in time — we would’ve gone a little faster there.” Sam Altman gives similar advice: “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” Video source: Y Combinator (2025)

Startup Archive

39,718 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Jack Dorsey on becoming a better storyteller: "I found myself very early on thinking about something like thinking about this early idea for Twitter and saying to myself, I could build this awesome. You have those shower-like moments, or you're walking at midnight in some town in New York City, and you've got these amazing brand ideas. And then you start thinking, well, I could really start doing this if only X and if I had this person or if this technology existed or if this happened or this happened. And what I realized was that I was constantly making excuses for not working on it. And then the window had passed, and then I couldn't do anything. So I think it's really, really important to write it out or to draw it out or to code it. But you need to get it out of your head. And the reason you have to get it out of your head is that you need to be able to see it on a surface that is not in your mind. And once you can see it, and once you can step back from it, then you can also decide this passes my filter, my constraints, so maybe I can show it and share it with some other people. And then they will be like that's the stupidest idea ever and or that's somewhat interesting, but maybe this and this and this. So the sooner you can do that, then you have a lot of momentum around it, and you can really decide if you want to commit to it and work on it more or put it on the shelf for a later date. And the realization that I think everyone needs to have about that latter option, putting it on the shelf, is that you can come back to it and it will surface back up in another piece of work or another idea at some point in your life. So having that ability to close off a chapter and move on is really, really important. You can't have all these open threads, and that's what I realized I was doing. And that also encouraged me to really write more and to really think about what's the story? How are people coming to this? And like when I show my friends this, how are they going to react and I would write it down. I would actually treat it like a play. And when I realized that I was writing plays, I read a lot more plays for style and for substance and for technique and I think it's really good. I think there is another company that I have always looked towards for inspiration and I know a number of people in this room probably have a similar company in mind, which is Apple. Apple, I think, is run like a theater company. It has a great sense of pacing, has a great sense of story and has a great sense of execution and it's all about event-driven, it's all stage-driven, the stage being a billboard or the stage being a keynote or the stage being a product launch. All of it has a very, very cohesive end-to-end story. I mean you think about what happened when Steve Jobs came back to the company. The first thing he did was kill every product line the company was working on. And for two years,rs they had no product on the market whatsoever. All they had were a bunch of posters all around the world with Steve Jobs' heroes, and it said, think different. And it was just focused on bringing up the brand and making people aware of the brand again and how the brand is aligning to this particular feeling and story. And then they came out with the iMac and then built iTunes and then the iPod, and they realized that, wait a minute, people are carrying music on their phones now, so we better build a phone, an iPhone. And so this unfolding of the plot and the epic story has been very, very interesting to watch, especially if you look back to that time when he came back to the company. So I've learned a lot from that company and other companies that operate in a similar fashion."

Founder Mode

107,213 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

🔥 PREACHHH. " THE TIME FOR HAVING A SERIOUS CONVERSATION ABOUT THIS ENDED AT ABOUT 3PM ON SEPT 10th..AT UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY..THE TIME FOR THE DIALOGUE ENDED..AND WE KNOW WHOSE SIDE ENDED IT" - Jack Posobiec " THESE PEOPLE WANT TO KILL US..THESE PEOPLE ALREADY DID ONE OF US..THE MAN I USED TO SIT NEXT TO IN THIS STUDIO & CHARLIE IS NOT WITH US ANYMORE BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE" - Jack Poso 🇺🇸 Jack compliments Nick shirley for being out there and asks him to be careful because as he says all it takes is one of these NUT JOBS WITH A GUN. Jack knows PORTLAND ANTIFA is a HOT BED and Rose City Antifa going back to 2007 and then 2017 and joined the TORCH NETWORK & their affiliates. Jack notes this ALSO IS WHERE A TRUMP SUPPORTER, AARON DANIELSON..WAS KILLED FOR WEARING A MAGA HAT AFTER PRAYER SERVICE. "Why are they just allowed to ACCOST PEOPLE IN THE STREET like Nick when he is not a provocateur..he does it the right way. He is about going in and getting the story and WE NEED THE CRACKDOWN." - Jack Jack says the press club wont condemn the violence, we know that Portland is the ONLY PLACE in the country where they cannot pretend ANTIFA does not exist and Jack makes a great point about the Mayor..of course THE SHOCK TROOPS aren't bothering you ..they think you are one of them and he makes another good point...when you unleash these WILD ANIMALS sometimes it is tough to call them back or impossible and they can turn on them as well. "WHEN WE HAVE THESE CANCEROUS ELEMENTS IN IT AND THE DISEASE MUST BE FOUGHT AND CUT OUT & ERADICATED" - Jack Posobiec

🔥 PREACHHH. " THE TIME FOR HAVING A SERIOUS CONVERSATION ABOUT THIS ENDED AT ABOUT 3PM ON SEPT 10th..AT UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY..THE TIME FOR THE DIALOGUE ENDED..AND WE KNOW WHOSE SIDE ENDED IT" - Jack Posobiec " THESE PEOPLE WANT TO KILL US..THESE PEOPLE ALREADY DID ONE OF US..THE MAN I USED TO SIT NEXT TO IN THIS STUDIO & CHARLIE IS NOT WITH US ANYMORE BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE" - Jack Poso 🇺🇸 Jack compliments Nick shirley for being out there and asks him to be careful because as he says all it takes is one of these NUT JOBS WITH A GUN. Jack knows PORTLAND ANTIFA is a HOT BED and Rose City Antifa going back to 2007 and then 2017 and joined the TORCH NETWORK & their affiliates. Jack notes this ALSO IS WHERE A TRUMP SUPPORTER, AARON DANIELSON..WAS KILLED FOR WEARING A MAGA HAT AFTER PRAYER SERVICE. "Why are they just allowed to ACCOST PEOPLE IN THE STREET like Nick when he is not a provocateur..he does it the right way. He is about going in and getting the story and WE NEED THE CRACKDOWN." - Jack Jack says the press club wont condemn the violence, we know that Portland is the ONLY PLACE in the country where they cannot pretend ANTIFA does not exist and Jack makes a great point about the Mayor..of course THE SHOCK TROOPS aren't bothering you ..they think you are one of them and he makes another good point...when you unleash these WILD ANIMALS sometimes it is tough to call them back or impossible and they can turn on them as well. "WHEN WE HAVE THESE CANCEROUS ELEMENTS IN IT AND THE DISEASE MUST BE FOUGHT AND CUT OUT & ERADICATED" - Jack Posobiec

Johnny St.Pete

61,933 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten

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

141,137 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users “We started working on [Discord] in January 2015, and within I’d say two months, some of our friends were very excited about it but we didn’t really have any users. It was pretty clear they wanted to use it, it just wasn’t exactly correct. We rebuilt the voice chat engine three times, for example. But I’d say within 3-4 months, we had 20 DAU that weren’t us.” However, as Jason explains, growth stalled after those first 20 users: “We were like, ‘How do we get the word out?’ Because everyone was actually very skeptical about a group chat app for gaming. People would say, ‘This is the dumbest idea ever, no one is going to use this.’ And even people who played games, many of them thought, ‘Why would I want this? I already have whatever app I’m using.’ And so we were having a hard time getting other people to try it.” Jason recalls a period of 3-4 weeks sitting around thinking, “We like this, but maybe no one else does.” Then they figured out their growth unlock: “The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app, as opposed to saying, ‘Try this thing out we’re selling to you.’ What we actually did was we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit, and we got one of our friends to make a post on the subreddit basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this new voice over IP app. What do y’all think about it?’” Jason continues: “People found it on Reddit, clicked on that link, went into the server, and then they were talking to us and trying it out. And they went back to the subreddit and were like, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool. I met the devs. They seem pretty cool.’ We got 50 users that day from that post and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day and it sort of started to snowball. And then we did this playbook for six months and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.” Video source: The Twenty Minute VC Harry Stebbings (2024)

Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users “We started working on [Discord] in January 2015, and within I’d say two months, some of our friends were very excited about it but we didn’t really have any users. It was pretty clear they wanted to use it, it just wasn’t exactly correct. We rebuilt the voice chat engine three times, for example. But I’d say within 3-4 months, we had 20 DAU that weren’t us.” However, as Jason explains, growth stalled after those first 20 users: “We were like, ‘How do we get the word out?’ Because everyone was actually very skeptical about a group chat app for gaming. People would say, ‘This is the dumbest idea ever, no one is going to use this.’ And even people who played games, many of them thought, ‘Why would I want this? I already have whatever app I’m using.’ And so we were having a hard time getting other people to try it.” Jason recalls a period of 3-4 weeks sitting around thinking, “We like this, but maybe no one else does.” Then they figured out their growth unlock: “The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app, as opposed to saying, ‘Try this thing out we’re selling to you.’ What we actually did was we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit, and we got one of our friends to make a post on the subreddit basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this new voice over IP app. What do y’all think about it?’” Jason continues: “People found it on Reddit, clicked on that link, went into the server, and then they were talking to us and trying it out. And they went back to the subreddit and were like, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool. I met the devs. They seem pretty cool.’ We got 50 users that day from that post and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day and it sort of started to snowball. And then we did this playbook for six months and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.” Video source: The Twenty Minute VC Harry Stebbings (2024)

Startup Archive

20,407 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten