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what will i okay good morning everyone and good evening and it could be anywhere actually I'd like somewhere my name is Eric I'm the facilitator of course facilitator here at startup school pleasure to be joined by Kat hi
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everyone I'm captain yaw like a partner at YC Kat and I are here today to answer questions about the subjects of this week's lectures how to talk to users and how to launch again and again and again we've pulled a bunch of questions
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together from the thread on the start of school forums that will start answering but we will also take some questions from the YouTube comments from Twitter smoke signals basically anywhere that you can find us we will attempt to answer some questions so let's jump into it first question is from Gustavo from flexo flexo enables you to build a financial model for your growing company in minutes not days so I only have one
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question good stuff about this one-liner and it was who is this for is this for start founders is it for small businesses so I would just add like even the one line the one letter is pretty good but just add who it's for your
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question was there are so many channels we can launch on but many of these I can either do something quick and hit launch I can spend days and weeks trying to be trying to maximize the chance that each successful each channel is successful
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what's your recommendation for balancing between maximizing number of launches versus maximizing chances of success at each launch so one of my main goals for the talk was a to sort of stop founders from putting too much emphasis on that one perfect launch so I would say wrap spending you shouldn't be spending weeks trying to perfect any of these channels so what I would recommend is you know you might spend a few hours trying to
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get the messaging for each of these channels down you might spend a couple hours to a couple days getting feedback on that messaging but don't sort of spend weeks stressing over each of these channels granted you know launching a
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kind of pre-order Kickstarter campaign or pitching press does take a little longer and I'm sure Eric has some so I'm Kickstarter and pre-orders but but don't spend too much time stressing over any of these channels yeah a launch
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one of the things that I've learned is that think about it this way everyone in the world doesn't know who you are right now every time you launch 0.01 percent of the world finds out about it so every single launch will be brand new to so many people that that's kind of the motivation to keep keep launching and it's like kind of like an MVP like if if it's perfect by the time you launch then you've waited too long yeah you want to
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maximize your surface area and it's so hard to get people to care about you at this stage in your company's life that you want more but more and more of those chances a feedback yeah next up Matthew from Katara writes Katara we help you find bias in your AI training data sets and then help eliminate it my question is for Kat how long is too long for a landing page call to actions like sign up to be notified of our alpha launch or
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get on our mailing list to be the first users on our platform is there a general rule of thumb on how long people should wait or stay interested so the longer you have people on a wait list the harder it is to reengage them so I would
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say get you know an MVP of the product out as soon as you can and I would question was also like how how long yeah like how long the call to action how how long should the actual call that can be as short as possible
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like no one users don't care like alpha beta doesn't mean anything to me does a user so just say like sign up to be you know sign up to be notified of our launch sign up for our newsletter whatever it is short I think often times
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like when I'm writing content or copy for a site I sometimes get a little bit too caught up in my own head one thing to consider is like you're the one who's been thinking about this for ages like for hours and weeks and days so it's
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possible that you may just need to get whatever you've written in front of anybody and just ask them what they think and get their opinion on it because oftentimes like we we will obsess over the perfect copy when in reality like they still don't know what we're talking yeah you try to get it as much feedback as you can as possible yeah schools like a great place so yeah host you can post your content on the starter cool school
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forum and just like if you need some eyeballs that aren't your own just like post a thread say hey can I get some feedback on this I'm sure that some people would jump in and say like I don't I don't get it try to be if if you
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see something on the startup school forum that you don't understand jump in there and because you need to hear those honest voices of instructive constructive yeah okay Daniel at story low story Lowe's launched we help brands
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hire photographers for their digital marketing needs okay yeah I get that we have a round of user interviews scheduled next week we are also heavily engaged in paid customer acquisition through an incentive program well we are
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talking to a user should we pitch them on a new coupon incentive it just asks for feedback is it it's better not to mix up these two user touch points yes I have some some great advice for this I like to separate my user interviews into
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two different groups one is with people who are using the product and one is with people who are not users who I just want to learn about how they like what problem they have on the day to day and what existing solutions they're already using once they start using the product generally I find that people just want to talk about how to improve it and give me feedback and it's really difficult to get them to context switch back to a
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world before they started using your solution so in your case I would say separate like if you have user interviews with people who haven't begun using your products try to treat those as kind of wide open interviews where you're asking questions to find out you know what other products do they use have they paid money for similar products in the past how those products failed before you introduced your your product and start getting feedback on
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that and then in terms of like coupons incentives I always try to just ask for people's I try to ask for a feedback without any incentive because honestly if this is a real problem that people have on a regular basis then you're helping them buy you buy you like asking them about their problem and trying to build something as a solution like that already should be the incentive that they have if this is truly a big problem for it if you're
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finding that you're constantly having to pay money to people to answer surveys and stuff like that it's possible that they don't really have a burning a burning problem and one thing I would think about too is is what you're building really better than what's currently already out on the market because that might be a challenge to is converting people who you know already use you know similar services so yeah as Eric was saying if it's not a real
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problem that you're solving or if your product isn't 10x better than what they were using it might be difficult to convince people - yeah like that's a good data point as you as you as you consider which ideas to work on next up
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we are latter a platform that simplifies the process of finding effective mental wellness practices and solutions okay it's a few months a few problems with this one like I can't tell if it's an app it's a website if it's a service
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platform doesn't really tell me I think I get like something to do with mental mental practices I think it would be also it's missing like who is this for exactly like is it for is it just you know for consumers is it for you know are you directly connecting consumers with therapists or let's assume okay I'm gonna assume that it's so who is it for and what is the exact problem you're solving okay their question is what are
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effective strategies for getting influencers bloggers and leaders to help us launch preferably as cheap as possible if not free a good question how do you get how do you get people to talk about your product it is really tough I
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think one of the things that I had to think through are is do your research are you when you reach out to bloggers or influencers are you actually solving a problem that they care about or that their readers care about I would say
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that you know and and frankly it's a numbers game so for a lot of the YC companies that I've worked with that have tried to get influencers and bloggers to cover them they will reach out you know if you're doing cold read
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and not getting warm instructions you can reach out to 50 bloggers and only get one person to respond that quantity its quantity so do a little bit of research know who you're targeting but also just keep reaching out so if you're
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you know if it if you need more than one person to respond you're gonna have to send hundreds of these emails and often people say oh we tried to reach ten or twenty or thirty it's not enough so you need it's this is a numbers game and I also one of the things to aim aim lower so there's a lot of people who want to help like basically the people that have this problem that you're trying to solve they exist everywhere on the Internet
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some are these like top level influencers there's are people who run like a Facebook group we've seen a lot of companies get their first users and people talking about their product by finding like a Facebook group there's a
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company two batches ago that made a device that held help kids with cerebral palsy learned how to walk if they simply just went on Facebook found a group of parents and families whose children have cerebral palsy and got dozens if not
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hundreds of signups just through that group so there's subreddits there's like half Twitter hashtags there's Facebook groups what are some of those you know there's product hunt there's happy news and and if you're reaching out to bloggers and you're emailing don't think that they're going to respond on the first after the first email it's just like sales you have to it you've to follow up with a follow up email there
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was a company that I mentioned in the talk called joy they were trying to get featured by their a wedding website builder and they were trying to get featured by wedding websites and blogs so they you know they said out of you know fifty only one responded and they they had a whole sort of like drip campaign to follow up with with those sources we've definitely follow up how are we doing on the tech thing still streaming yeah oh okay cool
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oh yeah forgot that the internet here is not perfect okay we're good now okay you can hear us okay next question I'm the founder of porch ship we provide an affordable pickup for any return shopping returns directly from your
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porch that's very clear it's clearly not talking twister with a lot of mentions of porch okay I'm lunching in Pittsburgh this week what can you advise for launching in a specific metro area in my case Pittsburgh I've been to Pittsburgh
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once I don't know if my Pittsburgh area of knowledge is perfect okay so launching in an area with like a geo targeted service I guess you have like you must have runners that go and pick up these porches or something like that I mean one story that I love is lug when lug is uber for movers or they basically will you know come deliver snow come up and pick up anything though don't pick up any like delivery item then so what they did on their first
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week just to figure out you know just to start getting getting people using it is they stood outside of Ikea they actually had you know one of the founders was driving a truck and one of the founders would run up to people in the line and I can say stuff yeah hey hey do you need help moving this getting this home and they would have you know they're you know user like click a button and then the other founder would drive the the
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truck up and so I think in the very beginnings you're gonna have to do some manual stuff on the ground stuff like that that's some ideas for this one so like presumably you met have would you might have gone to school you might have
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worked it I had companies in the area why don't you get all of your past co-workers your friends your your colleagues you know other classmates using this like it's kind of a universal problem like people who buy stuff on
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Amazon need to return it I'm sure that you can just talk to your friends and see if they have the problem other alternatives are we've seen companies have some success with door hangers where they just go to King was print off other still Kinkos no I think sounds like that are okay so they go and they print off little door hanger things and they go around to houses isn't just hang them on doors it was kind of top of mind I could imagine like
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what if they printed off stickers and you've let like as you saw Amazon bucket oh then people would think that you're trying to steal the enzyme put stickers on other people's Amazon boxes on their porch one thing that worked with for me is I recently started using a startup because they put something up in my a buildings elevator so they said hey if you want you know to have this these the types of things delivered yeah and then
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so I took down the numbers just like wherever there's a higher concentration of people yeah that's right that's a cool idea but like a little did you rip off a little tag or was it like I didn't I just took a photo I guess okay next
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one from she--she founder of yd s Medicine which provides self-driving molecular design services serving as a GPS for the journey of drug discovery okay I work with a lot of bio companies by our founders have amazingly
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interesting products and yeah ideas they generally have to dumb it down for the rest of us so this might be this one needs a little a little workshop baby yeah okay the question is how are we're to launch biotech or Pharma tech
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companies me in terms of press and media wise we found that fierce biotech and stat are great and they are often interested in early-stage bio and life sciences and what I do is I you know look at what reporters have covered
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companies like mine or like the company I'm going to pitch before is what I'm building in the wheelhouse of things that they're interested in and then I make sort of like a list of who I might reach out to and I prioritize the first
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and I you know say I'm going to fierce biotech I'd find the right reporter there I'd reach out offer them an exclusive on the fact that we're you know we've launched and then you know go down the list from there if they don't
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respond or pass then go to the next you know report our publication I think that I always love launching when I have some reason to launch like some sort of event so oftentimes scientists are gonna conferences they're publishing papers they're publishing posters which are a thing so if you're if you're doing that try to I consider reaching out to reporters or bloggers or people who are in this space and pitching them your idea timed around
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that it's a good reason to say like hey pay attention to me there's something happening like this week yeah I think that's great I think especially if you're you know from the life sciences you might be publishing a paper and oftentimes like you know the university you might be publishing that with will help reach out to you sometimes have groups that yes specialize in trying to get like the work of students and
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researchers out so that could be another there's no help mm-hmm cool next up we are Robin and Rover an online platform for people to trade their purchasing data directly with companies okay I think I know what you do but I'm
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guessing there's something a little bit missing like purchasing data like my amazon shopping history okay so this is like one of those companies that is trying to get from add like monetizing basement adds like a clear transparent
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giving consumers control of their data cool yeah okay regarding the mom test you say to talk about specifics not hypotheticals I need to test which functionalities to develop to evolve our current MVP to do so I've
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gathered some insights from users on what they would like to do I want to I want to test them with others but should I ask hypothetical future features how would you recommend to test them okay so I always like to when I'm testing an MEP
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with users I always like to build something whatever is the the actual MVP like the smallest set of work that I have to do in order to solve their problem and then put it in their hands and get feedback talking about a hypothetical product is hard talking about a hypotheticals sorry talking about a hypothetical product is hard it's much easier to talk about a problem that they're having and then build a solution give them the solution
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to the problem they told you they actually have and then validate your hypothesis do they do they actually have this problem sometimes people will like talk about a problem that they think they have or that they wish they have
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like you know anyways so so yeah so as you're gathering these insights try to gather the insights about the problem that people have and then in the backyard mind think about how you could solve them and then give people the
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solution so I can try it okay next one okay okay aq okay Keep Calm teach kids ai using video games cool does it make sense to save the hard launch the full version 1.0 public release for a big event such as demo day well if you were
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going through YC we would say no don't save that big launch for demo day launch as quickly as you can so that by demo day you have some amount of traction or you've been able to get real user feedback and you know iterate the
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product based on what your actual users are saying yeah I think like just hearing some of the words that you're using about this saying like hard launch full version 1.0 public release I think you may already be kind of getting you
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know too complicated with this in reality what you're making is sounds interesting like a game that that helps kids learn AI like just get that out there I'm sure that either you have kids yourself or you know some people who
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have kids don't treat your launch as like oh it has to be perfect sacred thing yeah just like push the button make it go live make the website live and tell your friends that's that's one point up that's that's a public launch and that's something like Kat was saying like that's what the the first point on which you can iterate afterwards like I said before at the beginning every time you launch there will be a magnitude
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mega mega to never said a word just like a multitude attitude of people who never heard what you put your app is so they'll like be happy to find out about it then so yeah don't don't overthink things okay Blake from live simulator
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live simulator is a VR training is VR training for first responders cool got it I let users run the call by placing them in VR and having them command virtual crews to resolve an emergency communicate using an in-game radio and
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try not to get anyone virtually killed it's created by a firefighter for firefighters oh this is all don't matter okay it's a long one liner I think your one-liner the VR training for first responders already does mm-hmm great
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I've built three modules over the years but the two failed launches convinced me that the bar is much higher for my MVP does YC have good examples of solo founders who've built very big projects while working full time I mean we
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probably do that some great examples yeah I mean we certainly have founders who built their MVP while working full-time but I think after the MVP you know that was enough to convince most of them that they needed to go full time to
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really build it into a big company I agree I think like working a full-time job and splitting it is is a good way to get started and really like the first test that you want to run if you're working at a big company and you're
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working on an idea is do you even care about this idea like you're the first person that you have to convince if you're not convinced that this is gonna be exciting and interesting there's no way you're gonna you know convince other people so get yourself convinced and it's possible that while you're working part time on this you'll be convinced that at least there's a problem so while you may have discovered that your MVP
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doesn't solve that problem yet I hope that over the two years or over the time that you've been working on it you've kind of talked to enough firefighters just and I guess leaders like like the captains of that kind of thing to figure out if people actually have this problem in terms of like like maybe to add I guess we'd have to have a bit more information understand why you think that launches have failed but I guess no
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one is constantly using your MVP that's yeah that's tough I would say that like if you find that P if your MVP is designed to be used regularly and people aren't using it regularly then that's a good that's a good sign that like you
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don't have the features yet or you're not solving the specific problem that they have a question from Kyle at phase we're phase a white label payments SDK that enables our enterprise partners to issue digital rewards in exchange for
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the end users value that's stored on their platforms okay I kind of got yeah yeah a white label payments SDK it's like stripe okay Digital rewards which I'm not sure what those are in exchange for end-user value which also is vague I'm bid lost well let me get back to Kyle of this the question that Kyle asks is once our white label payments SDK is integrated we only get paid when the enterprise partners end users of our service from end users of
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our service we pay X dollars per transaction and our enterprise partners upsell our services to their end users in this flow of funds it doesn't enable us to av-test different pricing for end users how do we start thinking about experiments around pricing so there's a lot of content that YC is published around pricing I always love pricing for enterprise partners because you kind of don't have to publish it on your website
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you can have one price for one one customer one price for a different customer and they probably will never find out about it so especially in the early days you actually can run a lot of AP testing just by not having kind of
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like a public version of your of your pricing have you seen you else what else doing trade any interesting Enterprise no I think I think that's right one thing that I know surprises a lot of you know founders who are building enterprise
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companies for the first time is that you were probably charging too little that's the most common thing hmm I've seen is that you're not asking for enough I mean one way to think about it is for any for any enterprise software if you're building something that solves a problem that the enterprise has the alternative is probably them using their own engineering team to solve to like build a solution to the problem that's upfront
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engineering time and labor and then the maintenance cost of having like to maintain that software overtime for it any engineer to pick up a pen or whatever engineers you used to do things these days like it's gonna be hundreds
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if not thousands of dollars so yeah it's a cat's point like don't be afraid to ask for more they'll push back if you know yeah like again you think really truly have this burning problem like they're they may say no to the price but
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they still want it and there will be a price at which they'll pay the trade off okay zyre at boom loaf we're in love we help users to separate we help users to separate most of their inorganic trash by scanning the barcode of empty packages okay good help with whether it's for like companies or businesses or people's homes when your user is different than the paying customer how do you optimize between the priorities of your users and the ones of
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your customers great question this happens a lot less often on the consumer side and more often on the b2b enterprise side where the buyer might be the founder or the manager and the user might be someone else so this is this is a really good example of having of needing to do a variety of user interviews I generally will start attacking a problem that has the same person be the the user and the and the pair but if that's the case that they're
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they're split you generally have to figure out how the flow of how the flow of money works like who's the person who decides whether to pay to solve this problem who manages the budget I talked about this a little bit in my video one of the important questions that you need to resolve during user interviews is are they already paying for a solution to this problem or are all do they already have the budget to pay for a solution to
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this problem if they don't if they don't pay or they don't have a budget it's possible that they might not be the best first users for your product we're selling our services to municipal governments I'm sure there's just where
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the head is there any hack that accelerates their decision-making to pilot test your product it's useful governments are slow process extremely tough yeah I guess some things that you can consider doing are find out when the
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budgeting process starts understand if you actually if they actually have budget in there if they have line items in the budget to solve this I mean it's kind of a non-starter if they don't that would be like six to twelve months of getting back on their their their radar I'm gonna read the whole questions okay yeah [Laughter] okay Mandor at contact pointers contact pointers is a service for automatically updating other people's address books
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when you change your contact information and letting you control manage what info they get we are hoping okay gonna pause there that idea I have heard before yeah we have funded before yeah we definitely have like yeah it's and it's something that everyone wants it is a problem so here's here's one of those tricks like it is a problem that everyone has has it's not necessarily a problem that people are willing to pay money for right there are
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a lot of dead bodies in the past I would recommend going to look at them yeah what happened to them try to do a deep dive there okay we're hoping to do a friends/family launch in the next few days and we're wondering about what our feature targets should be for an online launch because of the nature of our service it has a strong network effect but we have features plan to make it useful and sharing contact information
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with people who don't have the service my question is how vital do you think the quality of these features is to an online launch I'm worried about potential early adopters assignment is not useful because there's a large
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network and then it being harder to get them back and for lunch later this is a legitimate worry no I don't think so because there are a lot of people in the world and so if you find that you know the first few users try it and they
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don't they don't you know they don't like it they leave and it'll come back not the end of the world because your product from what we can tell is designed like for a lot of people if there were only like a hundred people in
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the world who might use this and I talked to a product yesterday who is making something for sailing coaches like there are probably only a thousand people in the world so you can Assaf 100 of them that's not a good thing but in
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your case like yeah you should not be worried about this especially your friends and family like they will use it as many times as you tell them to use it so yeah you can launch again once you have an improved product if you can watch the same people yeah I've launched the same people over and over and they if anything like as it gets better they'll be like wow this is way better than last time the problem that I could see a little
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bit with yours is it sounds like it has a network effect where it needs to have a network effect I would try to build it so it doesn't need a network effects so just when you use it by yourself it's more useful hi hi that's Sonny from starett stream today industries we tell our bank that we make tell our bank that we make silicon case antennas for responsive sensor frameworks but we could we actually make his AI sex toys that doubles even length
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that double sex toys that double the length of a woman's orgasm I have a question for Kat about relaunch narratives long story short I success also that's hilarious long story short I successfully launched this X story five
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years ago as CMO after initially going viral a dispute that led me to believe and the company to pivot into medical devices and then being asked to return to refocus the business to our original idea recently here's my question if you
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were a potential investor looking at a rebirth company like this what indicators what kind of indicators would you be looking for to prove that a team can continue to make new moments in a spotlight little complicated question okay but yeah it's really elicit eight the question yeah so she he or she left and came back now they're relaunching this company and trying to look for investors yeah they started out as a sex
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toy pivoted and medical devices think that pivoting back and I think I'd want to understand like like what you and the rest of the team you know what convinced you that this was what do you learn what have you learned like what have you
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learned from all of that that has just happened anyone who works on something for five years has learned a tremendous about amount about the industry and the problems that yeah so you should hopefully know a lot about what have
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some major insight there exactly yeah and then you know also have you you know I don't know I don't know whether you'd raised a ton of money and burn through all of it and now or whether this is the first time you're raising that because that can make things complicated but yeah I think the main thing is is that clearly your team has expertise in this space and that's exciting but yes what is it but you've learned and what do you know that others
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don't yeah good luck he'll be a fun ride yeah I'm Rafi founder of Aventis media publisher of the bridge magazine it's a digital magazine aim to make news finance and career related information relevant engaging and useful to young adults aged 13 to 18 a little bit a little bit long in terms of what ladder but I get it this is a subscription-based service my users are the kids and customers the kids and the customers are the parents who pay for
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the subscription I'm currently in the process of customer discovery my research reveals that the kids are not looking to actively solve the problem but the parents are I've been asking questions similar to that in the video
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but I'm feel like I'm missing an angle I appreciate your take okay so in general I think your users and customers are kind of both the parent like hmm if you're if you're like these topics sound pretty like long-term focused on kind of
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the little like what happens after the kid grows up I mean not a 13 18 year old but unless you're unless you have super ambitious yeah 13 to 18 year old maybe so actually maybe maybe that's kind of the point if you if you specifically are trying to like talk to those users maybe maybe focus your product down even more to make it like just for like IVs do international baccalaureate students yeah or just for like Model UN students
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or something like it was a very specific niche like a very tiny niche because then you won't have to have different users and different customers they'll all be the same person which is generally easier because and maybe price it accordingly if someone's spending their allowance on it in my different than if they were like thinking about how much better this is going to be for their kids education and get them into Harvard and all that kind
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of stuff so think about your audience and maybe play with the positioning of your product huh interesting next up Alexander at insta cents insta cents is one click micro donations to support digital content cool my initial hunch was to validate the idea by talking to content creators and we thought would love to unlock new sources of revenue however most of them aren't engaging find a prototype it would be easier to show exactly how it worked
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okay I'm just going to stop there there are many solutions to this problem so the first thing that I went to is kind of the same as the answer to the other question I would look at who is trying to do this in the past and figure out what are the problems and as you're talking to content creators I would only talk to content creators who have experimented with the other solutions because if they haven't experimented with any solution in the
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space they probably don't care yeah and I would really focus on like how what you're building is you know better than stuff like patreon or things that every Rock yeah a lot of things in this space yeah there's a multitude of these but yeah if you're technical and you know it's going to be fast to build a quick MVP I think that's always I talked about this a little bit in the last video last week but one thing that you can actually do
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is you can take an existing solution that's that arts that's already on the market and like kind of hack it or white-label it and make it yours so that you can experiment very quickly by like taking something that's already built so
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you don't have to build an MVP Bruno from Glee board we board matches ambitious CEOs with curated executives and founders into ad hoc advisory boards to help them collectively make better decisions sounds useful for certain
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school companies you've posted that on the forums my question is when you are exploring different user niches do you prioritize the users that you talk to do we go to several of them at the same time and then zoom in where you feel
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it's more relevant or do you go you're one group after another I personally like to do things more in a sequential path I do it kind of like this I sit down and I whiteboard out all the potential users groups that I could
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talk to and then make it guess as to which ones I think are gonna be most valuable kind of based on those three overlapping Venn diagrams I talked about in the video which ones are have the most acute problem who have the most frequent problems and who are more likely to spend money to solve those problems I take a guess of like which groups which groups of users will be the best and then I go and start talking to
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them if they don't prove to be good I'll move on to the next one yeah cool next Yoda from SSS spot spot we allow we connect drivers in Latin America who are looking for a public parking lot with public and private parking lot owners
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cool app that helps you find parking spots in Latin America I have a question related to user interviews we've launched our prototype six months ago and we have 15 percent month-over-month growth that's good Congrats that's very
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impressive now we're looking for proper market fit is it okay if I make the interview with users who are discovering the product or we have to make it with our active users we're testing the feature parking bookings in sports games and concerts kind of touched on this for another question but generally I try to segment these user interviews into two different groups one with people who have never talked to who aren't using a
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product and one with people who are using the product and the questions are slightly different for each of those two groups all kind of like it sounds like you're on the right path towards product market fit like that growth is
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indicating that there is a problem hopefully that's revenue yeah I think that's revenue growth if you're testing a feature I would recommend testing it with your cart users but it sounds like this might be like a new group of users
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like parking for sports games and concerts do you think you find for that reaching a new audience that yeah yeah so I'm definitely try like I would definitely also try to talk to new users because I could imagine yeah people who are using your app to like Park for work aren't the same people who are going to get week or something like that okay moving into moving into Twitter okay John Dougherty asks what's the fastest way to identify the
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beachhead when you have paying customers for a mix of industries or sectors kind of kind of again to that last question like you probably like if you're building a product either hopefully you are a user in the past like you're building this to solve your own problem then you have a protein you should have a pretty good idea of who the potential users are because they should look a lot like you if you're building a product
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for an industry that you're not already a user of then kind of do what I just said where you like generate a list of kind of hypotheses I'm looking through who are your most active users or who you know yeah or who's the easiest sale
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like who then you know you're actually solving a big problem for these people they're willing to pay and maybe it's worth you know exploring that particular sector well they have they have paying customers yeah yeah sorry I
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misunderstood yeah so if you already have those users yeah talk to them like within those users there's probably larger demo demographics and you can like double click and say there's two users in this one group maybe we can find a hundred other users that are in a similar similar space okay we are assist force the most reliable freelance platform for tech companies that replaces outsourcing agencies how do we approach Silicon
38:54
Valley tech companies if we are no-name European company producthunt hacker news as first sort of communities that I highly recommend I think those hit a lot of the you know people at the companies that you want to sell to and those are if you haven't done those yet I highly recommend it yeah proud of Hunt especially with yours I think it's possible that there are a variety of different platforms already that people use so like to double click
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on what cat said you really got to differentiate like why are you better than upward top tail and all these other ok Sandro Franco asks what is the downside of referencing a product or business that already exists for instance our company is I do an interactive tik-tok Instagram for language language learning so yeah so I a lot of people ask me should we use the X for Y construction which is a uber for X or Airbnb for X and I think sometimes
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the answer is you should use that construction if it's the fastest way to paint a picture in someone's head of what you're building so you know for example if you know tik-tok Instagram like the the X has to be a well-known
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household name it can't be something that people only a few people have heard of and then it has to be fairly clear why why would be interested in X so an interactive tik-tok or Instagram for language learning that paints a pretty
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fast yeah it's a it's a good picture yeah so it's a good like the best the best one-liners always generate questions like it makes me interested to want to learn more and I have questions about what you do so that's a good good
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start I would definitely use that when wouldn't you want to reference the product so when it's oh I've seen a lot of people describe themselves as like we work for X yeah when it's like if there's a company that's in crisis you
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don't want to like we work is something you might not want to see I've seen I saw a lot of we works for X in actually applying to this batch of YC and so I thought about that hard I was like wow I personally wouldn't use that I wouldn't use it if the X is something nice um you know an alum ones called themselves buffer for snapchat which like I don't think enough people know it buffer is to make that make sense at that point just described the
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problems they're solving or or what you're building in general yeah Kelly Romina asks would a simple site like our example magic it was just like a single page landing page be sufficient and it be sufficient MVP to begin raising money or does the MVP need to show extensive working features magic I think raised a lot of money on the back of that MVP yes so the answer is it depends if the MVP actually solves a problem that people have then by all
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means like literally a web page that says hi my name is Eric here's my phone number I will solve your problem if you have this is a great MVP like we have we have founders in this batch of YC where that literally is their whole product like their product is they have the like their their their brain can solve this problem for you and other people have this problem like talk to that person in solve the problems so absolutely like if
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you can solve someone's problem and put it up on a webpage put it out there friendly that's all they needed to get they have tens of thousands of people sign up for their wait list so that's all magic needed but of course not all
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companies are gonna have have it that easy essentially ok should I answer this part which question yes we are in spirit we're SmartWatch company our main feature is real-time hydration monitoring since you're on a watch our
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sensors up and running the development of other parts is not organic growth by revenue by selling one piece of time to take forever okay this is a common mistake that people make organic revenue by selling is the only way that your company can be successful and it starts with one you make one product you sell it to one person and they're happy then you sell to and you so forth then you select any grows so oftentimes like people get way
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too like ahead of themselves where they think of success is only if I sell 1,000 of something when in reality like you absolutely have to make one of them and get someone to use it and they have to love it and if you can't do that then
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it's probably not worth working on people in hardware always think like that's not the way to do it but that actually is the way to do it so ideally if you can use to your problem is that you've made the sensor but not the
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SmartWatch why not try attaching your sensor to someone else's SmartWatch some other smartwatches have Bluetooth interfaces just add it on to the strap like there's a lot of ways that you can have this together without it building it good luck here's one that got Naga Sri from Tori asks we connect global shoppers to international travelers my launch is delayed for four months and there's a huge drop in the users how do I get them
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back I think there are a lot of ways to re-engage customers and users whether that's reaching out I mean I think if there are just a few you can reach out and call or try to try to contact every single one of them and get on the phone
44:30
with them you can send emails I think there are there are a lot of ways that to you know catch and depends on what you know we'd love to hear episode of what you've tried already yeah one thing I like to do is to reach
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out personally as the CEO yes like why she's all about doing things that don't scale and this is one thing that you can do as the founder like think about it this way no big company in the world the CEO is not individually emailing people to ask them to use the product like I'm talking a real email from your Gmail account not some drip email campaign that that oftentimes is enough like not for everybody from the public to
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reengage we engage some people other way to asks we use methods like surveys to determine product market fit in place of spending a lot of money to build a product and then we realize we need to pivot or changed features now the
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question that's fine okay that sounds like a good idea it's it's it's really good again like as we were saying before for that other question like not building an MVP is sometimes a good like it's sometimes an okay method for
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determining if people have the problem or not if they have the problem then by all means go and create the MVP and get it out there here's one we're Metro push we're building a push notifications app for public service providers electricity water who have a bad reputation for keeping their users informed how do we avoid burning being perceived as a failure before we before even getting the chance to serve our users I think
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that this is one of those things that you can do even before you become a even before you sell to one of these properties public service providers like this is something that you can run just by yourselves like you can be the alert
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function for regular users of these public services that's how you could earn a good reputation like imagine if you started a Twitter account that would talk about the public state of the utilities in your city people would
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begin to rely on that and you'd become like a trusted name into place then you would go to the public services and say we've already built this trusted service like you need to give us the good data so that we can like continue providing this Evan even the higher level yeah like that okay here's one jemelle from nukes vision asks oh the extrusion is the Google Analytics for retail stores my question is we're having difficulties to find our
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first users since we're targeting big live and retailers like Walmart are we too small for them to consider us how do we approach big companies with this with this type of an innovative product it's tough oftentimes it YC we have companies that want to immediately go after big companies like Walmart we call this whale hunting because one big contract could result in hundreds of millions of dollars so honestly the best strategy
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here is to not go whale hunting at the beginning hopefully your product is useful for other customers indifferent as well as kind of big retail stores so I would try to go after customers who who have the problem but are also like
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small enough where you could get it immediately to someone who could make a buying decision after you show them a demo or after you integrated into your product you just like you really want to get a paying customer who's giving you
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feedback fast and going to big companies is just a recipe for ya multi the reality is unless you have some connection to Walmart already it's unlikely that they're gonna be your first customer [Music] Michael from biz asks we're busy or busy too we're busy we show people's businesses around them and help those businesses receive payments question is is it okay to stop rebuild and relaunch if I'm not exactly pivoting hmmm so honestly when I
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hear questions like this from founders I usually like wonder have they have they discovered something about their business that says that it's not gonna work that's kind of that's kind of okay like oftentimes as we're talking to
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early customers we have this hypothesis about what we think the product of the market is going to be and after a month or two of talking to customers we realized that like no one actually has this problem no one is you know the problem is it as
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painful as we thought it would be and at that point like yeah it's fine you have to you have to consider other options because like I don't know who's with the quote but if you keep the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and thinking that it's going to work so yeah like people can pivot people can change but you cannot like you also have permission to say like what I'm working on it's just not
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the right thing and I don't know if that's the case for yours I might be extrapolating too much but it's possible that you may have actually learned about a better problem in the in the course of your doing user interviews over the last
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like couple months you may have discovered that like there's better things there's a better problem that that your users have to solve that's here's one I've run gifted app gifted as a platform for users to manage their
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wish lists from multiple sites to shop on and shop for gifts for friends I'm seeing a lot of traction from high schoolers who use it to share things they love but the audience won't spend a lot of money isn't adding a lot of
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revenue should I keep doubling down on that demographic anyways I think you answer your own question mm-hmm if your users aren't like are using it but aren't actually spending a lot of money probably don't sound like the people
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that you should be going after I've have changed the product so that it's something that high schoolers can use but then there's also a way to generate revenue from or maybe that's not the right demographic to to work on okay Cristina from list Alya asks is that a why yeah it is Oh am i yeah one question that I feel we're still trying to figure out in in user interviews is focusing on what features they want when the scope of the
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interview is understanding the behavior rather than what we can build again like that is that's an incredibly important kind of thing to consider as you're as you're doing user interviews I love to consider user interviews as like 15
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minutes of time where I don't like talk and the users just tell me what their life is like because oftentimes like well everyone has different lives and we're in our own heads pretty often thinking about like what we do on a
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regular basis and you know how we would use the product if we were using it but you really need to do with these user interviews is just let kind of the users whole life flow over you where do they live what do they do for a living how do they how often do they have this problem like would you just got to get all that context I treat those as kind of like wide open user interviews so if they keep trying to pitch you solutions you
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should try to like refocus yeah like ask them why they're asking for that solution try to try to understand under under the ask like what's driving them to have that problem and then you can definitely guide the conversation towards kind of problems that they have and solutions they think would be good for that problem and then you build it when you give it back to them there's a question Elliot from unify asks how would you recommend
53:10
successfully launching a big update for a mobile app we're planning a large update that hopefully will convert more pay for users to paying users I think you go through the entire launch process again you launch in all those channels
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and so you know you'll do producthunt you can do you know unified 2.0 you'll do hacker news you'll do you always recommend companies do a blog post on their own as well and they write about the update and what it means for their
53:36
users and why they why they built it this way but I would say go through to treat it like you know it's your first launch and hit all the same channels that you would have hit the first time around you have anything to add to that I would test your update with existing users and like treat treat some early launches as a beta launch where if they're not if you test it with like a hundred or a thousand free users and if
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they're not upgrading to paid then you need to figure out what are the words that you can use to cause them to upgrade and use that like use that as almost like an experiment of a marketing experiment that you can then use when
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you launch publicly when you launch the big update like I always love to to treat marketing like I train engineering that it's a iterative improvement process with experiments and hypotheses that I would then use to kind of like
54:32
tune and tweak the marketing sometimes like the best marketing messages for launches actually come from your users like I write down actual sentences that users say and then I just repeat them to other users and see if it clicks because
54:45
oftentimes like again there are the people who have the problem or who use the app or whatever and when they like when they start using it they get excited and they may actually share words that you could then use to get
54:57
other people excited as well here we go well in asks we empower yoga teachers do events at your local home I remember that from last week we've quickly grown forcing us to waitlist new instructors should we hire more to
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expand our current city expand to a new city with a new MVP or talk to investors to enable us to build an MVP into a platform so it's great congratulations on getting a backlog of new instructors we've seen this a number of times with
55:38
kind of these local startups so let's let's identify the three camps the first is grow in your existing city the second is expand to a new city the third is get investor dollars to build to improve your platform I think the
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answer is a it sounds like you already have a backlog presumably in that first city that you're launching in I would continue to work in that city because you you know it's much easier to build an MVP with one location than to build
56:07
an MVP that's live at all these different locations for a couple things one is like usually you perfected at one location and then copy and paste it into another location it's very hard to like improve the product if you have two different locations or more alive at the same time adora has a lot of things yes it is started a folk joy another third one talking to investors like if you can help it try to get money from your
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actual customers to fund your business rather than trying to rely on investor dollars I know that sounds weird as yeah investor it'll make fundraising so much easier in the future that one I mean the trick to fundraising is to not need money for investors then I just love to invest at that point okay I think we can take two more questions we're serious platform for a preoperative tella consultations to prepare patients for surgery from
56:58
home my question is how to launch fast in the healthcare vertical when you have some legal or ethical discussions for telemedicine in your region okay so launching fast breaking things is is usually a good sign probably not in medicine yes not in healthcare we definitely don't recommend not if they're legal or ethical implications especially yeah what I would consider doing here is thinking about your product as as an evolution or an
57:29
extension of the other products that are already on the market so in your market if there are telemedicine or tell a consultation products already there then maybe maybe one thing to do is to approach those apps and say hey I would like to add on a module that is specifically around pre-op tell consultations could we use your app to do that in the US there are a few HIPAA compliant apps that are kind of like platforms that you can use I think I
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think like you could probably try going to them and seeing if you could like use their entire text back and just copy and paste it into your application if you're worried about HIPAA and that kind of stuff which they should be again kind of
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tight to the last point focus on one region here so that you're not like balancing the the ethical and legal ramifications in a bunch of different regions but I think that sounds like what you're mm-hmm already okay
58:41
this'n is an audio to text platform that transcribes speaker sessions at conferences in real-time to make them more accessible cool question I mentioned I Eric mentioned that pursuing large customers might be the best I don't know if I mean so the question is like pursuing large customers is that good for startups actually it's probably not always the best the best for startups here's another product question however if a person pursues larger
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customers they have lower property that probability of converting and longer sales cycle isn't there an opportunity cost to not try and spend time to convert smaller customers yes the answer is that's exactly the problem I'm not
59:28
sure where I said that pursuing large customers is great but I might have misspoke honestly as we mentioned before for the answer to another question trying to get smaller customers who can make a decision quicker to buy or use
59:42
your product is generally better especially as you're iterating the product market fit in the early days yeah waiting for those big customers might kill you cool on that note we are gonna end this week's live queue day
1:00:00
thank you very much as for all those questions keep him coming on Twitter and on the forums we'll have another session next week actually next week's session is going to be live design reviews with Aaron ability so if you want to have an
1:00:14
amazing designer review your landing page or website look out for the forum thread on Monday just post your post your website in the forum and we will do a live review where we will like look at your webpage and talk about what we see as we as we do this next week it's gonna be after long session two hours so we will have I think more than enough time to cover a lot of lot of sites I'll see you next week Thanks Thanks