How to Make So Much Money Your Accountant Asks Questions | My First Million

Key Takeaways

All right, give give us give us more of the sauce. Brick by brick way that you can build, you know that get that get those first 100 users, then those first thousand users, then that first 10,000 of revenue, and get to the first million of revenue, and then now you're at 30 million of revenue. And I'm kind of wondering if we can kind of remix what you did. We entered I guess I'll set the stage. We there are 25 plus competitors that we entered this space into. And when we first launched, we had nothing, right? Like you could we we set up how to send an email 2 weeks before launch. No automations. You couldn't customize anything. Basically table stakes of what you could do on every one of our competitors you could not do on our platform. And so basically what we decided we would do is we would ship one marketable feature every single week. So like we had a core team of engineers. Our core competitive advantage was going to be product velocity. And it was the only option. I would I'd be reaching out to all these people on the wait list. I'd be convincing them to sign up to the platform. I'd do all this hard work and they'd be like, "Bro, I I can't do anything on this platform." Like, nothing works. And so, like, from the earliest days, I did such a great job selling, but the product wasn't caught up to like the expectations of what you were supposed to deliver in this industry. And so, the what we decided to do in addition to shipping one marketable feature every single week was we turn each product release into like a moment. And so what I mean by that is we would figure out what would be the most useful thing that would prevent churn and that would be flashy enough that when I launched this on Twitter and and uh LinkedIn that people would be like oh one that's super interesting the platform I have doesn't even offer that. And when you do it repetitively week after week, it becomes more of a narrative of yes, maybe they don't offer what I have what I want today. But if they're shipping something new every single week, it's only a matter of time until they offer exactly what I want. >> And it sounds like you when you said you didn't just say make the product better, build features, you're you're saying build one marketable feature every week. And I like the word marketable there. It's reminds me of the Amazon work backwards from the press release. At Amazon, you don't get to build a feature until you have written the press release. How would we announce this to the press? Now, press release is like this very outdated thing. The reality for you is probably like, what's the tweet? What's the tweet? Like, why are we building this if there's no tweet? If if nobody's going to care when we tweet this, why are we building this? And that simple forcing function of starting with the tweet and working backwards to do product is going to eliminate like 30% of wasted effort just doing you know pet projects or things that sound good on paper to you internally but nobody cares about the users don't care about >> and that comes from a place of again like talking to the users from the beginning and and being really indebted into these communities on Twitter and like the framework that I would use for prioritizing what to build um is like three-part framework. One is preventing churn. In the earliest days, we had we had 10 users, right? If one user turns, that's 10% of our revenue. So, if someone says, "Hey, you don't have X and if you don't build X, I'm leaving." Like, I can't take that 10% hit of revenue. So, that's like top of the line. We have to ship that first. Next is unblocking growth. So, as I'm trying to convince all of these people to leave their perfectly good platform to come to our platform, someone might be like, you don't offer this feature, thus I can't move over until you have that. Once I hear that two, three, four times, it becomes a pattern that becomes something that needs to be prioritized to be able to unblock and bring new people into the ecosystem. And then the third one is just maximal hype, right? So some combination of what do I know? Whether it's the the morning brew referral program or XYZ feature when we first launched the AI writer into the editor, right? It was like at the peak moment, it was like a year after chat GBT, like I knew that AI would hit as it does for everything now. Um, but some combination of like we don't want the people that we've already worked so hard to get into this platform to leave. So, anything to prevent that, what opens the door and casts a wider net for more people to come into our ecosystem. And then like what's that sizzle at the end that we can add that we know that when we tweet it, working backwards from the tweet and like the press release that we know will spread because it it solves the problems of the people that we know we want on this platform. Um, so that's how we would think about the product release. Um, and we do a few different things with the product release. And this is like probably what we are most well known for today is when we would turn each product release into a moment. We have the email that goes to every user. And this is coming from a place of insecurity of I wake up every morning in these days and I have you were one of them way back when of like, hey, if you don't this like I'm out of here. And so the email goes out to all of our users >> threats. [laughter] We were one of your early users. I don't know what how like do you know roughly we were like in the first what? we'll we'll call you the first few thousand users. >> Yeah. And we uh I remember we needed automations. It was like, hey, when somebody signs up, I need to be able to uh like automatically send them this email first after a day, this one after two days, and then, you know, so on these sequences or whatever. And you guys did not have that. And we were like, yeah, we need this. Um and the funny thing is you had uh pitched us for an investment. And I said, no. I was like, I don't know. Newsletter seems I don't know. Isn't that a solved problem? It's kind of a small market. How many creators are there going to be really that create newsletters? Dumb in retrospect, but at the time I didn't understand the market. And so we passed, but we wanted to be a user. I like the product. I was like, I'm a user, but I just don't know how many people there are like me out there. And then as we're using it and you had this crazy story where your co-founder passed away, your technical co-founder passed away and we were sitting here badgering you about features. I felt like such a jerk when you were like, "Hey, here's here's why we're just a little slow for this, you know, the last couple weeks here getting back to you." And then you guys picked up the velocity like crazy after that. And I just thought, man, this guy's a force of nature. Like, if he's going to do this, he's going to solve our problems this fast and this well, I got to make this bet. I actually didn't change my mind about the market at I was like, I still think all those bad things about the market, but now I think new things about him that's going to trump this because I've seen that founders who have that sort of force of will that that they create the sort of avalanche of momentum, whether it's with product or with marketing, I don't know, they get like many shots on goal. They leaves a lot of room for error and you can recover from whatever your shortcomings are, you can overcome them that way. And so, um, that's been one thing and I think you've parlayed that with your investor updates. the company does well, you talk about how the well the company's doing. It makes the company do better and then that flywheel and I've always been hesitant to do that because it feels like you're you're exposed, you're naked, you're vulnerable, you're putting out your numbers out there for the world to see. Uh but you've done this. So I guess like show your investor update here and like why does this like does this work and why does this work? >> Yeah, I I mean I'd even take a step back in the sense of like you know building in public. I mean, everyone talks about it now on Twitter and like that's something I've been very intentional. There's like an altruistic view of it of like entrepreneurship's great. There's a lot of people who are successful who don't share their secrets of like why they're successful and like that is to the disadvantage of everyone else who wants to build something, right? And then there's like the more selfish reason of I could tweet and post about newsletters all day long and there's probably a few thousand people who would love that content. But if I were to post all day about here's how we hire. Here's how we built this feature. Here's the strategy and tactic to get us from 1 million to two million, then all of a sudden like the addressable market of that content is 10 times bigger. It's anyone who wants to build a startup. It's anyone who's at a small medium-sized business. It's anyone who's like an early startup employee who's thinking about maybe going off on their own. And so I made a very intentional decision from the very beginning of I want to share everything that we do. the the ups which is you know from zero to a million to one to five in the second year the downs obviously you hit on the worst moment of the entire journey which is us losing our co-founder and like just all of the different things along the way cuz again I think people follow people and they want the story and they want the narrative and also if I can turn that into useful tactics that other people could take and use for their business now I become someone that they look to and that they trust. >> Yeah. Do you have like data on like how these get forwarded around or how many people sign up from this email from the investor updates? Do you know anything about that or is that do you not track that specifically? >> So the investor updates it says very clearly at the top you're not supposed to forward these. People do um and it's like it's like privateish, right? And so yes, so they hit on the investor update. It's like whether it started on Twitter when I would say here's our first hundred users. Here's how we got a million dollars. Eventually I turned that into sending an investor update to all of our initial investors. I also have everyone who passed as an investor. Um you were on this list as Yeah, I think I got a few of those and that made me uh have some FOMO, >> right? Exactly. So, like to me, like to your point of like being exposed and naked, like Yes. But that's kind of like where I think I thrive. Like I want the accountability and I want the pressure on that no matter what happens at the end of the month, I'm going to send an investor update to 500 people who trusted me with their money or passed and I don't want them to get the gratification that they were right in passing. And I know that we are going to be exposed and share our revenue numbers and I want those numbers to be up and to the right and green. And so there's like a inspirational like motivational tactic behind it. There's also like a very um tactful like a lot time is your biggest resource especially as a founder when you're being pulled in a million different directions. And like we went down the venturebacked route and so as you're building in public and sharing your milestones, there's always investors who are reaching out on Twitter. Hey, you want to grab coffee for 30 minutes? Hey, you want to do this? and like my time's too valuable to have these coffee meets, but I do need to nurture those relationships in some capacity if I do want to raise a later round. And so the investor update to me became the greatest life hack of saying like, "No, I'm not going to spend 30 minutes meeting for coffee, but I'll add you to our investor update." And you will learn far more about me and the business and how I think about this and how we're growing month over month by reading 3 to four months of our investor updates than you would ever get in like a 30-minute coffee meet. And so by using these investor updates, we actually raised our series A in one week. We raised 12 and a half million dollars in a week. I don't know with AI companies, maybe that's not as impressive, but it was amazing for us.