Lecture 8 - How to Get Started, Doing Things that Don't Scale, Press

Key Takeaways

yeah thanks for having me Sam um I'm Stanley I'm the founder of door Dash and it's it's really amazing to be here because it wasn't actually that long ago where I sat in in your seats um I was class of 2014 um graduated in CS as well as my co-founder Andy and um for those of you who don't know what door Dash is we're building an on demand delivery Network for local cities and I want to start off with this photo that I took just a few months ago and I think it this was the the night when we just raised our series a and I took this photo as I was um walking back to where I lived I actually lived in robly at the time on campus and um I took this photo because I realized just how ridiculous the combinations of things I was holding in my hand at the time you know I was holding my cs247 homework um and then I had a my tax forms since it was April and I had to fill out taxes and then also that yellow speeding ticket and then right below that was the was a $15 million piece of paper I just signed um from Sequoia and that kind of summarizes just how ridiculous our our journey has been you know starting at Stanford doing this while I was at Stanford and then transitioning this into an actual startup and I want to share that story with you today um it All Began two years ago actually in a matun store um it was my junior year at Stanford this was fall quarter and at the time I was really passionate about you know how do you build technology for small business owners and I sat down with Khloe the owner of you know Shantel guon um Mac store in palto at the time just interviewing her you know trying to get feedback on this on this product prototype we've been working on and also just learning about you know what her problems were in general and it was during this meeting when Chloe first brought up this problem of of delivery you know she I remember she took out this really really thick booklet and she showed me um pages and pages of delivery orders and a lot of these orders she had to turn down because there's no way she could have fulfilled them you know she had no drivers and she was the one who ended up having to personally deliver all these orders and and that was a a very interesting moment for us and and then we the next over the next course of over the course of the next few weeks we talked to you know around another 150 200 small business owners and when we brought up this idea of delivery they kept you know they kept you know agreeing with us saying yeah this is this is a really big problem for us you know we don't have you know delivery infrastructure um it's such a huge pain for us there's there's not any good Solutions out there and which which led us to wonder you know delivery is such a common thing and such an obvious thing why hasn't anyone solved this before right like we we must be missing something here so we thought maybe maybe because people have tried this in the past right but they failed because there wasn't consumer demand for this so we thought okay how can we test this hypothesis um you know we were just a bunch of college kids at the time you know we didn't own trucks or delivery infrastructures or or anything like that right we you can't just we can't just spin up a delivery company overnight so how can we test this assumption we had so we decided to create a simple experiment um with restaurant delivery we spent about an afternoon just putting together a really quick landing page and you I went on the internet I found some PDF menus of you know restaurants in palto um stuck it up there and then had a phone number at the bottom and and which was our personal cell phone number actually and and that was it we we we put up the landing page we called it paod delivery.com and this is actually what it looked like um you know super super you know simple ugly like honestly we we weren't really expecting anything we just launched it and all we wanted to see was um you know would we get phone calls from this and if we got enough phone calls then then maybe this was this delivery idea was something worth pursuing so we put it up there we weren't really expecting anything and we were we're driving back home and all of a sudden we got a got a phone phone call you know someone called they wanted to order Thai food and we're like oh wow this is this is a real order um like you know we have to do something about it right so so we're in our cars and and um we we're like okay like we're not doing anything right now uh might as well just let's just swing by you know San Royale pick up some Pat thae and and let's let's deliver it to this person and and let's try to learn how this whole delivery thing works and and we did we delivered to this guy and up in Alpine Road I remember um he he told us he was a I was asking him oh how did you hear about us you know what do you do he told us he was a he was a scholar and then he handed me his business card and it said he was the author of a book called weed the people and that was like our first ever delivery right it was like it was like the best first delivery SL worst delivery you could have asked for um we couldn't make this stuff up and and and yeah and then the next day we got you know two more phone calls they day after that we got five and then it became seven and then became 10 and then soon we started gaining traction on campus with paod delivery.com which was which was um which was pretty crazy because think about it right this was a a landing page um you had to look up pdf menus to place your order and then have to call in um this isn't exactly the most professional looking site yet people were still so we Ste we kept getting phone calls we kept getting orders and and that's kind of when when we knew we were on to something um when people are willing like we knew we found there need people wanted when people are willing to put up with all this so I think another key Point um to remember is that we launched this in about an hour right like we didn't spend you know we didn't have any drivers we didn't have any algorithms uh we didn't spend you know we didn't have a backend didn't spend 6 months building like a fancy dispatch system and we didn't have any of that we just launched um because at the beginning none of that is necessary right at the beginning it's all about testing your idea trying to get this thing off the ground and figuring out whether this was something people even wanted and it's okay to to hack things together at the beginning um at YC there's a monra we uh we like to talk about is doing things that don't scale so at the beginning we were the delivery drivers um you know we would you know go to class and then after class we would go you know deliver food uh we were the you know customer support like I sometimes have to take phone calls during lecture um we we had to we we spent afternoons just going down University Avenue passing out flyers about trying to promote door Dash um I mean we didn't have any dispatch system so what we had to do was you know we use Square to charge all of our customers um we we used Google docs to keep track of our orders um we we used Apple's find my friends to keep track of where all of our drivers were you know stuff like that um just figuring out like what's just hacking together Solutions just trying to get this thing off the ground um in fact at one point we were growing so fast that square actually shut our account down because we were under suspicion for moneya laundering um I mean think about it we're getting small chunks of like $15 $20 is coming in at a rapid Pace um it was yeah and luckily my co-founder Tony worked at Square so he just emailed some buddies there and uh everything was solved yeah and um another thing about doing things that don't scale is that it also allows you to become an expert in your business right like driving helped us understand how the whole delivery process worked you know we used that as an opportunity to talk to our customers talk to restaurants um we did dispatching which helped us figure out you know how we manually dispatched every driver and that helped us figure out you know what our driver assignment algorithm should look like um we did customer support ourselves you know getting real-time feedback from from our customers I remember you know for the first few months when we got started we would manually email every single one of our new customers um and at the end of every night and just asking them oh how was your first delivery how did you hear about this and and we would personalize all these emails right like if I see someone order chicken skewers from Orange hummus I would say oh like I love orange hummus um you know how how how were chicken skewers um how did how did your first delivery went you know just feedback like that was was really valuable and our customers really really appreciated that um and and I remember um one time this was during YC we were at a we just came out of a meeting with one of our restaurant partners and you know we we wanted we heard about this ice cream store that just opened up you know on University Avenue called cream and we wanted to go try it out and then all of a sudden our co-founder back at our you know office slous texted us saying oh we need drivers on the road we we got a huge spike in in demand so we debated for maybe you know 10 seconds like should we go get ice cream or should we go go deliver um obviously we went and delivered but that kind of became our motivation on you know scaling right like if if we can scale then you could go get ice cream next time so so yeah I think that kind of um and and now of course we we've scaled across different cities um now you have to worry about building automated Solutions and dispatch systems and figuring out how do you match demand and supply and all all that fancy technology stuff but none of it matters at the beginning because at the beginning it's all about getting this thing off the ground and trying to find um product Market fit so just to summarize so there's three things I would say that I learned from from doing door dashes first test your hypothesis you want to treat your startup ideas like experiments um the second thing is launch fast we launched in you know less than an hour with a with a really simple landing page and finally it's okay to do things that don't scale um doing things that don't scale is one of your biggest competitive advantages when you're starting out and you can figure out how to scale once you have the demand and and maybe once you've scaled then you can go get that ice cream thanks sure how customers here about yeah so the question question was how did our first customer hear about us um our very first one I have no idea um we we just launched pital delivery.com we didn't do any marketing um so I assumed he just must have typed in pital delivery into the the web browser um and then after that we didn't do we did barely any marketing I think I sent out like one email to my dorm and that was about it it was all through word of mouth and and that kind of just validates you know just how strong of a need you found you know when people just start talking about you and they're willing to put up with all this um you know terrible user experience terrible design and stuff like that when you started um it seemed so obvious to you wondering why has no one done this what's your answer now looking back yeah I mean looking back I think um I think the biggest thing is is mobile um the fact that now everyone has one of those in their pocket and we kind of saw that Trend and and thought you know what if you can design you know a delivery system that was entirely based off mobile you know where you don't have you didn't have have to have any infrastructure um or delivery fleets instead you could you know instead of hiring drivers full-time purchasing Vehicles what if you can tap into a more of an OnDemand pool of independent contractors and only send orders to them um when when they have time so so that's kind of the the Insight we had we everything was done through mobile yeah um did you know we were going to be a startup or we were just making some money the same at course yeah I mean at the time we just wanted we're all really passionate about building technology for small business owners um and and honestly this delivery thing came out of an experiment right with the landing page like it was it was literally an experiment we we didn't we weren't expecting anything and it just took off and and we went with it and Logistics was always something we were really passionate about as well you know like Logistics transportation and it's kind of the perfect Fusion of you know how do you help small business owners through delivery back yeah do you launch the mobile app first or the website and how long did it take from idea to the first launch yeah it was we started with this this this landing page right here um took us an hour to launch how does g stand out in space built with uff Postmates and seamless and other companies yeah um yeah the question was how does door Dash Stand Out Among a very competitive space I mean I mean at the beginning I mean for us consumer demand has never been the problem even up until now so for us it's just about you know finding a need and and just focusing on serving that serving that demand so at the beginning competition doesn't really matter when you're getting started Yeah question was how long it took for us to incorporate into a company um when we went through YC so we launched in January 2013 and then we did YC that very summer and we when we decided to take this idea through YC we incorporated it one more um yeah you what do you plan to do next or where do you plan to go with this besides like food delivery yeah I mean the question was where do we plan to go beyond food delivery I mean for us the when we started door Dash it was always you know like I said about you know helping small business owners and figuring out you know how do you serve this for any local Merchant whether whether you are a macaron store a restaurant um or a furniture shop I mean like that's still our Focus um that's like the long-term vision for now we're just focused on restaurant delivery as a way to scale um but ultimately that's where we want to end up in cool thanks okay next is uh Walker Williams from Teespring uh Teespring went through YC year and a half ago that yeah I almost rejected them um sound like a dumb idea but uh now they're getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year of Revenue so very luckily I not and is going to talk also about doing things scale all right thank you guys for having me uh my name is Walker I'm the CEO and founder of Teespring uh for those of you guys who don't know what Teespring is we're an e-commerce platform that allows entrepreneurs to launch products and apparel brands uh without risk cost or compromise today the company is about 180 folks uh and we ship tens of thousands of products each day uh and I want to talk to you about one of the most fundamental advantages you have as a startup and that's that you're able to do things that don't scale and I Define things that don't scale as things that are sort of fundamentally unsustainable they will not last they will not bring in the millionth user uh and where they break it's it's usually time but it could be a number of other things but it's really growth strategies that won't take you to a million users and there's three real places I want to focus on today uh the first one is finding your first users the second one is turning those users into Champions and the third one is finding your product and Market fit so finding your first users the first thing you have to understand is that there is no Silver Bullet for user acquisition uh you know everybody and and this includes me when we got started you look for that that dream solution that pay-per-click campaign that has tremendous Roi uh some accelerating partnership that's going to springboard you into the stratosphere an affiliate agreement something that solves it for you but the reality is for the vast majority of companies and in fact for every company that I've had the chance to speak to the CEO of that's just not possible those are unicorns and most of the companies that from the outside look like they've had this dream growth curve the reality is that those first users were impossibly hard to get and let me tell you the story of a ridiculously unsustainable business so this is Teespring in 2012 uh when we first got when we first launched the the business couldn't have looked worse it took days of meetings we had to offer free design days of revisions back and forth we'd have to launch the product ourselves we'd have to do the social media all to sell like 50 shirts for a local profit uh and generate $1,000 of Revenue anybody looking in would have said you guys need to give up this is a terrible idea uh But as time went on those users start to add up and you know I think something you have to understand is that when when you first launch a company just by virtue of the fact that it's a new product you're going to be bad at selling it right you've got no idea what the pain points of customers really are uh you've never sold it before you don't have any success stories to point2 or testimonials those first users are always going to be the hardest and so it's your responsibility as a Founder to do whatever it takes to bring in your first users and you know it's going to be different for every company the Common Thread that I hear is Founders need to spend personal time and effort a lot of their personal time and effort to bring those users in themselves uh you know it could mean a number of things everything from sending 100 emails a day getting on the phone and just calling as many people as you can going through a network if you have a network like Stanford or YC combinator uh anything you can do to get that first user and you know I really equate it to H pushing a boulder up a hill and if you think of like a very sort of smooth Hill the when you get started the incline is the steepest and those first inches are the hardest and over time as you get farther and farther the incline steadies out it gets easier and hopefully ially you reach a point where you're at the top of the hill and the boulder starts to roll on its own and so those first users you just cannot focus on Roi in the sense of time do not expect to spend an hour and return thousands of dollars maybe Stanley is one of those unicorns that was a pretty incredible story but for for most of us uh those first users are going to take a lot of handholding a lot of personal love and that's okay that's essential for building a company uh and the one sort of caveat of that is that I don't recommend giving away your product for free and there's plenty of exceptions to this rule but in general cutting costs or giving the product away is an unsustainable strategy I wouldn't recommend you need to make sure that users value your product uh and you know people have a different they treat products that are free in a in a much different way than a paid product and oftentimes it can give you a false sense of security of oh we're getting all these users surely we can convert them over to paid the second aspect is what happens when you get those users how do you turn those users into Champions and a champion is a user who talks about and advocates for your product and I'm a firm believer that every company with a great growth strategy has users who are champions uh and so really the easiest way to build take turn a user into a champion is to Delight them with an experience they're going to remember so something that's unusual or outof the ordinary uh an exceptional experience and the easiest way to do this early and again something that is completely unsustainable it's not going to scale forever is to just talk to those users and PE people will say this all the time and you hear it's one of the sort of core tenants of why combinator is talk to users but I I cannot stress how important it is that you spend a large chunk of your time talking to users uh and you should do it constantly every single day and as long as possible uh today at Teespring I'm still the catchall email address so anytime somebody misspells support or writes an email address that doesn't exist I get that email and so I still do about 12 to 20 customer service tickets every single day uh I spend hours each night reading every single tweet probably a little bit OCD but that's okay uh I read through all the Teespring communities you're never going to get a better sense for your product than actually listening to real users uh and especially in the early days you're just the product you launch with and the feature set you launch with is almost certainly not going to be the feature set that you scale with and the quicker you talk to users and learn what they actually need the faster you can get to that point so there's three ways to talk to your customers uh you can run customer service yourself uh up until Teespring was doing about 100 30 $140,000 a month uh my co-founder Evan and I did everything in customer service uh this is one that there's going to be an instinct to quickly pass off uh and that's because it's painful uh even today when I open our customer service portal uh I I have like an emotional reaction where my stomach sinks because it sucks talking to users who have had a terrible experience and it's painful it's something that you love and you've put so much effort into and you've gotten it wrong or they've had a terrible experience or somebody didn't treat them right uh but it's so important that you go through that and learn what you need to build what you need to fix uh the second step is to proactively reach out to current andur customers and insur customers or customers who have left and this is one that that often Falls by the wayside in sort of the pursuit of new customers but you want to make sure that your customers are having a consistent good experience you don't want to just leave those current users as sort of you don't want to take them for granted and then when a user actually leaves your service you want to reach out and find out why both because that personal Outreach can make the difference between leaving and staying sometimes people just need to know that you care and it's going to get better uh and because even if you can't bring them back there's a chance that you can learn from the mistake you made that caused them to leave and fix it so you don't churn users out the same way in the future and the final one is again the one that I'm probably too OCD about but it's social media and communities you need to know how people are talking about your brand you need to reach out and make sure that uh when somebody does have a bad experience and they're talking about it that you make it right problems are inevitable in startups there's going to be issues you're not going to have the perfect product things are going to break things are going to go wrong that's not important what's important is to always make it right to always go the extra mile and make that customer happy one detractor who's had a terrible experience on your platform is enough to reverse the progress of 10 Champions it's all it takes is one person out there to say ah no you shouldn't use those guys for X Y and Z reason to ruin a ton of momentum uh so even if it's uh you know there's examples in the early days where we would mess up massive orders we'd print the color slightly wrong it would be the wrong size and it would be like half of our gmv for that month and we would know we got it wrong the customer would be unhappy and sort of this instinct is well you know it's it's only a little bit off or it's not completely wrong it'll be fine but the reality is you just got to bite the bullet and make sure that it's right and those customers the customers that are often originally the most frustrated tend to turn into the biggest Champions and the longest term users and the last one I want to talk about is finding product and Market fit and what I mean by that is that you know I mentioned this earlier but the product you launch with will almost certainly not be the product that takes you to scale uh and so your job in those early moments in those early days of a startup is to progress and iterate as fast as possible to reach that product that does have Market fit and as Engineers your instinct is going to be to build a platform with beautiful clean code that scales right you you don't want to write uh sort of duct tape code that's going to pile on technical debt but you need to optimize for Speed overs scalability and clean code and and sort of an example of this is in the early days we had a couple Enterprise customers come to us sort of bigger nonprofits and say hey we really like your service but you're missing these fundamental things so we can't we're not going to use it uh and we looked at sort of what it would take to build out those features and we worked sure they were going to work long term but we wanted to try it uh and my co-founder Evan who is uh our CTO and a million times uh better developer than I am sort of ran the math and figured out that if we did it the right way it was going to take about a month to build out these features and in a startup a month you know you live in dog ears a month is a year and that just wasn't going to do so he actually went out duplicated the codebase duplicated the the database and was able to basically build a completely different product that he didn't have to worry about the existing users for to serve these Enterprise customers we gave them the tool they onboarded they generated a lot of Revenue eventually we learned what features were core and we integrated them into the core product but what would have taken a month we were able to do in you know 3 to four days a great rule of thumb is to only worry about the next uh order of Mag magnitude so when you have your 10th user you shouldn't be wondering well how are we going to a million users you should be worried about how are we going to get to 100 uh when you're at 100 you should think about a thousand it's it's one of those things where necessity is the mother of invention of all invention so when you hit that Breaking Point like the Twitter fail whale is a great example and tpr there were months month stretches where every single night the site would crash every night and and during the day and every single person on the team would go to sleep with their phone on loud under their pillow so that inevitably when the buzzer went off we could quickly get up restart the servers and go back to sleep and this would happen daily but the reality is that it was worth it and you know you'll end up with these huge pain points and all this technical debt and regret uh but it it's worth it just to get to that end goal and that product fit faster you will make it work you will survive uh the those sort of bumps are just speed bumps and speed is so so important early so the the lesson that I've been learning lately is uh you know you want to do these things that don't scale as long as possible there's not some magical moment it's not the series a it's not when you hit a certain Revenue Milestone that you stop doing things that don't scale this is one of your biggest advantages as a company and the moment you give it up you're giving your competitors that are smaller that can still do these things that advantage over you so as long as humanly possible as long as it is a net positive you need to be spending time talking to your users you need to move fast in development as fast as possible uh but don't give it up willingly it should be ripped from you and so sort of trying to practice what I preach uh I want to give you guys my email address if you guys have any questions if you want to learn about Teespring if you want to print some T-shirts fingers crossed just shoot me an email uh I I'd love to help and I'd love to speak to you and the last thing is we've uh created an IAL how to start a startup tea with Sam uh and all proceeds are going to watsi I couldn't miss this opportunity to sell uh so if if you guys want to grab one of the official te's just go to teespring.com Startup and it's supporting a great cause thank you sure go ahead y um the t-shirt printing business uh it seems like it has um a lot of comp so what made you uh what convinced you um to think this is a viable Market uh even when you know so the question was uh the t-shirt printing business has a lot of competition what would convince us to get into the market uh I think there's two factors to it so first I I completely agree from the outside uh people have been telling us that this is a silly idea since day one uh and sort of at every order of magnitude we reach people will come and say hey that's a terrible terrible idea why are you doing that uh but the reason that we launched Teespring is because we ran into a personal pain point where we had a need and we looked at the current Solutions I was a student at Brown and I was trying to create a remember the bar shirt for a dive bar that got shut down and I realized that nothing needed nothing matched my needs uh and so because I knew that I had that pain point and I knew there was Market fit and I had seen people adopt the product I knew there was something there uh and it was also one of those things where you you can sort of feel the you can you can sort of feel the wind on your back where people are adopting the product quickly uh your the pain point is clearly there it's not a met need so I would say that often times great ideas start look by looking like silly ideas and then you can sort of feel out whether or not there's a scalable business here by how people are adopting it is it possible to bring customers aboard sure are nonprofits your biggest customer base like no you know today our biggest customer base are uh entrepreneurs who are trying to build Brands and businesses you know we have uh a little over a thousand people that make their full-time living on Teespring today uh via Brands they've launched and the other side is influencers so uh YouTube Stars Reddit communities bloggers who want to add product merchandise as a way to sort of create a brand and and money I that Affinity so those are our two biggest markets we still do work with a lot of nonprofits uh and love working with them uh it's still a part of our business just not the majority thank you [Applause] yeah was the founder of Kiko and then Justin TV which switch and is nowator and it's going talk about cool well while I wait for the slide to happen um I started a bunch of startups but I think you've heard a lot of awesome you know kind of how did I get started stories so I'm going to talk about something very specific uh that people always have questions with which is press and like how do you get it how does it work uh it's something this is kind of like an a bridged version of uh what we talk about at why combinator and um hopefully you guys will find it helpful so uh you know a lot of people I think when they first get started with entrepreneurship think about getting press and being in the press as something that happens magically they think about it as like something that you know journalists are like out there like trying to find the best stories and really you know like discover the like it's like a meritocracy um which is like absolutely not the case um so before you think about press one of the things you really want to think about is who you want to reach and like what's your actual goal right A lot of people like I know when I got started I wanted to just be in the news because I thought that's what like you did as an important company and it turns out it if you don't have any goals you're not going to achieve them right I mean that's true of like pretty much everything and with press if you just like aimlessly want to be covered um it's not really going to do anything for your startup so getting like in the news is nice because you can send it to your mom or and say hey I have a real job you know look we're in the New York Times but if you don't have a actual um goal for your like a business goal with it it's really just like not a good use of time um so you know there's many different goals uh one example is you know you might want to with with social cam which was a spin-off of Justin TV uh it was like an app that was kind of like video Instagram and our goal was really to be known as like a video like Instagram app and like be thought of in that context when it was you know time to uh pitch our like Silicon Valley investors and and influencers and so we really wanted to get in like Tech press and um kind of be positioned as this like new hot social lab um with uh exec one of my goals um was the second like to get customers so uh exec was like a cleaning local cleaning service and our goal was to get people in San Francisco to use it it wasn't like useful to get national press because uh you know 99% of those people couldn't use it so we really targeted initially a lot of you know like SF Chronicle and like local San Francisco press that would directly talk to people who could potentially use our app um for twitch which is probably the thing that you guys mostly know uh it was you know twitch was a ESPN for gaming or kind of like a live streaming community of of Gamers and uh our goal was to with press was like to reach the gaming industry CU like when we when we started now it's like 55 million uniques and like people in the gaming industry know about it but when we started nobody really knew that like it was a place to advertise and like it wasn't like known as like a you know we were a very nent small gaming community and our goal was to like get people in the gaming industry whether they were developers or advertisers to think about us as like an important place where like influencers were so we really targeted you know industry trades and Game Dev blogs and places where like Gamers where you know games beat stuff like that the industry was reading so um you know what's an actual story I think there's you know there's a bunch of different types of stories um but these are usually the ones that you see in um you know startups uh those are like product launches like you let launched a new version of your app uh there's fundraising for whatever reason uh you know press loves to write about fundraising even though it's not very interesting uh so you know like if you raise a million dollar seed round pretty much you can get that covered um Milestones or metrics like you've achieved a million dollars a um a week in Revenue that one of our um one of our the the company that bought exec just uh announced that they they achieved a million dollars a week in revenue and it was covered pretty widely um like business stories which generally happen when you're like already a successful company someone you like a New York Times or New Yorker business magazine will like want to cover like kind of the story of your startup um usually don't have to worry about that in the beginning uh what I like to call stunts which are like um I don't know if you guys remember but a couple years ago this YC company called wee uh dropped a block of ice with money Frozen in it outside of the PayPal like a PayPal developers conference because they were like PayPal was like no in the news for freezing um you know like various uh developers accounts and so that was like widely covered because it was just so you know kind of an interesting thing and and it really um it it got them in the story right they wouldn't have been talked about in the context of PayPal at all really um hiring announcements if you're a big enough company and you hire someone really important people will want to cover that and then contributed articles like you writing some sort of Industry overview or some opinion piece in like maybe a tech blog or um said like that so those are like you know basically any of those things can can be stories one of the things that um people usually don't think about is that you know you really have to think about like everything when you start a startup you think that everything you're doing is interesting but um that's not true for like other people right like you what you need really need to think about is like objectively if I wasn't the founder of this company would I want to like read a story about what I'm pitching right so you know you're incremental feature release your 2.01 you know feature release might not be interesting if like just because you added like a you know find your contacts in Facebook or something like you have to you really want to take a step back before you invest the time in like actually trying to pitch a story and think does anyone will anyone actually want to read this because what people are you know journalists and bloggers are looking for is things that people actually want to read right um the other thing is like you don't actually have to be very original your press in news doesn't have to be original um you know like you don't it just has to be like what I like to call original enough right so you don't want to be the second cooler company to raise $5 million on Kickstarter right that's like the the first guy gets like all the news but like if you're the um I think the first uh video game console to raise $10 million on Kickstarter like Ouya was that was like or they raised like a million dollars in in 24 hours that was like huge news because they were kind of like the first in that category right even though other people had raised a lot of money on Kickstarter before um so just like think about your stories in the context of like where they are and the like what else has been written about and if they're like kind of Novel enough and they haven't been something that was like just written about in the news um so one of the like actual mechanics of getting a story um this is like pretty tactical so what if you want to get your news in you know the the Press basically there's some easy simple steps so it's basically getting press is like you can think of it like a sales funnel so you're going to talk to a lot of people and um not all of them are going to convert right and so you shouldn't be upset when someone like one individual person or reporter or whatever doesn't write your story um the first thing is like you have to think of a story right it's going to be one of those probably one of those things that I listed up before um the second step is like you want to get introduced to a reporter or multiple reporters who are going to write about your thing um if it's like much much easier just like any sort of Business Development to actually get in touch with them through someone um it's like you know rather than cold emailing them uh the best thing to do I found is like you want to go to entrepreneurs who were just written about like your friends who Maybe started a startup and they were covered on Tech crunch get them to introduce you to your that reporter who wrote about them um the reason that's good is because like from the entrepreneurs perspective like the easiest thing to do in the world is ruce you to a reporter who already wrote about them right they don't like need anything else from that reporter um they're actually doing that person a favor if your story is interesting it's not like you're asking for inos to investors or potential uh you know people that they would want to hire employees um and then from the reporter's perspective they're getting intro to someone who you know they already vetted as interesting like they're they getting intro from someone who they know they thought was interesting enough to write about and so like by the transitive property you're basically going to they're going to think you're you know probably interesting um so you get like an email that's like oh you know from this guy that introduces you to um the reporter and you want to get in contact with them with enough time that you can actually get them to like write a story uh probably a week in advance or more um because they're not going to like drop everything they're doing to just write about your news so a lot of people especially first-time entrepreneurs will come and say like oh Justin I'm launching this product tomorrow like can you get me in this you know Tech crunch or something and that's like probably not going to happen unless you already have a relationship the best way to do it to the best thing to do is like give yourself some lead time get that intro in advance and then um so then you should uh like once once you've set a date for your news to go out you're going to launch a product like in two weeks you have this intro you set set up some sort of meeting um and you really want to get the the reporter to like invest time and effort in you right because they don't like there's like kind of a sunk cost f at play um basically if you the more time and the they spend with you the more likely they are to like actually write something so you the best thing to do is get like a face- to-face meeting right lots of people report bloggers actively don't want to meet you face to face but like um if not that then get like a phone call right and get on the phone with them the worst thing to do is like just have an email exchange right because it's very easy for them to like forget about it ignore it um so you want to like actually try to get in contact with them set up a meeting okay so then the next step is actually pitch them um what I usually do is actually write out all my new like the story that I would want to see published like in bullet points and I like will write out the story my my ideal story and I'll memorize it like the entire like set of bullet points and uh when I have a conversation with them if it's in person I'll like walk them through this like I'll have a conversation that's like structured like my outline and they'll be like taking notes right and then they'll go go and transcribe those notes into a story and so it's like a t like what I wrote will eventually be translated into a actual story and um you know by preparing you can actually you know much more easily control the conversation and not forget critical things like you know your co-found mentioning your co-founder's name or like what the all the features in your awesome app are um if it's I'm doing this like on the phone I will like have these bullet points in front of me and I will make sure to like walk through a conversation that includes all of those things um so you know you do that they you have a pitch they take they take notes they're going to write the story at this time and then the next thing is like follow up like a couple days or a day before your actual news goes out you want to send them an email that says like you know this is the time we're launching the app like je thanks for meeting um here's like collateral like me if if you have like a video or photos or something you want them to include screenshots um like how to SP your co-founders names and your name just like include all the information that I really care about and I bold it right um and then that's it then hopefully the the day comes you press submit on the release to the App Store and at the same time they release their article on Tech Crunch and you are famous okay so a lot of people ask us about PR firms um so you know I think in the beginning it's kind of like um everything else you do at a startup you want to do it yourself before you hire someone else to do it and uh it's actually pretty easy especially with tech press who you know and bloggers who like constantly need new things to write about and you know you should I strongly encourage people to like try it themselves and kind of get started by learning the process themselves before they hire anyone one thing I'll say is that like firms can can only help you with like kind of the contacts and the logistics but they can't help you know what's interesting about your company or very you know I've never had anyone who's been able to tell me what the stories that I'm producing are they've only been able to tell me you know like your um you know like here's are the here's a list of reporters that you might want to contact um so you know you really have to be responsible for thinking about like what's interesting about your company and what are you doing you know what's the road map of interesting things that you're working on um they're also really expensive you know I think we were spending between $5,000 and $20,000 a month which is like um at very you know for various firms um that's a lot for a start up right you should it's generally not a good use of money I would say especially in the very early days um you know getting press is is a lot of work uh so you should really make sure it's worth it um you know like I said it really getting press doesn't mean it feels like it's like a vanity metric right it feels like you're being successful because lots of successful companies you know like Google and Facebook are covered in the press all the time but it doesn't actually mean you're successful it doesn't you know actually give you you know mean that you're getting you're making money you're getting users you're making those users happy um it's you know sometimes it's a really good strategy for getting your first 100 or 200 or a thousand customers um but it's really not a scalable user acquisition strategy so it's something that's really just like a you know a bootstrap um you can't like just get like Infinity articles written about you like eventually people are going to like get tired of hearing about your company and usually that happens pretty pretty quickly right the PLL point about news is it's new and so um it's pretty pretty pretty hard unless you're Google to like get covered in the Press like every week you know with something um to you know if you decide it's worth it though like you do want to have like a regular heartbeat of news um so that's like something where you know you're planning out those types of what you're think about what you're doing that matches those you know maybe seven story types in the future and like you know when I was um you know working primarily on marketing and and PR it would be I would like make a schedule on like a calendar and what when we're going to launch things like make sure to space them out but like have them you know appear regular at regular intervals so that people like didn't wouldn't forget about us um and we could kind of maximize our coverage and um you really want to keep your you know contacts fresh it's like really a relationships business so once you someone writes about you should keep going back to them for for more um for writing about you know to write about you in the future it's kind of like um you know when when basically people you know you're more likely to do something for someone you've already like done something for you know you really like it's if you just you know I would try to establish good good relationships with a couple reporters over time that you can go to to you know break news and it will come in handy later if you ever have are in the position if you're fortunate enough to be in the position where people are writing negative things about you um you know having relationships will help you you know kind of get your side of the story out um and the last thing is like you know it's kind of uh Golden Rule really or maybe more like a Pay It Forward really applies here like you should help your fellow entrepreneur get get coverage because they will help you get coverage the best way to get covered is um really through these like warm introductions and so uh you know when I'm ever I'm you know meeting with reporters I always help like throwing out the names of like other things that I think would be interesting stories for them and usually that comes back they the the reporters like it because they it's like helping them find interesting stories and um you're more likely to get you know leads back from those entrepreneurs that you help out so if you're interested in learning more about press here's two resources that I really liked um Jason concade who a former Tech frunch reporter just wrote a really really great overview that covers a lot of the things I just talked about in more depth and from the you know blogger side um that was a really great book and then uh kind of an evil resource is uh this book trust me I'm lying which was written by the one of the um a former marketer at American Apparel and he talks about like a lot of ways that he pretty like evily act actually manipulated the Press but I think it's a pretty good look into like the psychology of like how people you know things spread on the internet um you know how stories spread on the internet and I it's it's um might be valuable to take a look at cool that's that's basically it one question just one two two two qu okay two questions or zero questions so when is the right time to start worrying about press all together uh when is the right time to start worrying about press altogether I think it's a really good way like if you just uh the first time I launched you know my first products in our in our first startup um for a lot of them we got like zero attention and we didn't really know how to even get 100 users I think it's a really fine way to get 100 users and a lot of companies in YC when they first launch their product we'll encourage them to get out and just do one Tech runch story to like get a few people to to see it um it's good to get into practice I wouldn't like obsess over getting like coverage in multiple Outlets or anything like that in the very beginning all right anything else there seems like the biggest story about twitch with the Pokemon thing so like how much of a much of a role did you guys actually play in getting that out in press or was that just like oh like this blew off a uh so twitch um you know had this thing called Twitch Plays Pokemon where a developer set up like a Pokemon on like Game Boy game that was controlled by chat so you know millions of people would be typing in A or B and like the character would run wander around aimlessly and um that was like a huge news story and um I think that what we did was you know there's a couple parts one we set the stage by having other news stories that so when someone from the BBC would Google like twitch and be like what is this crazy thing that everyone on Reddit is talking about um they would like have some context um the other thing is like we didn't come up with the idea for TW that was like fortuitous but we helped like give it legs by you know making the company available to talk to the reporters and um suggesting follow-up stories about like you know there were stories not just about Twitch Plays Pokemon because 100,000 people were watching this Pokemon game but because um you know it finally like there were stories when they beat the game and there were stories when they launched Twitch Plays Pokemon you know Crystal or whatever the next Pokémon version was and like so we kind of gave that story like a little bit more legs um but we didn't you know originate it it was the community really who who originated it all right I think that's it thank you very much