okay we're live hi my name is Eric I'm the course facilitator at startup school hi I'm Michael I'm a partner at Y Combinator and help her yeah our volunteer today to help answer your questions so thanks very much for joining in we've got a bunch of questions that people asked about MVPs on the forum we're planning to spend a couple minutes just answering each one and really trying to dive in and give some give some advice tailored
specifically to the syrup so it's just let's do it yeah first question from Luke at Zeff Zephyrus zephyrus is an analytics platform for competitive gamers that provides users with game specific tools and data to help analyze track improve their performance well let's start with the one-liner I I thought it was pretty clear I kind of knew what it was I'm from the space it's not the sexiest one layer in the world
but it definitely accomplished the goal of me having a good picture yeah it does I kind of nodding my head and I understand where this is going that's like a a - for sure yeah it currently is focused on Starcraft - awesome consumers expect more than a scrappy MVP if there are existing products in the space - advice for MVPs entering the space with existing developed competitors so that that was the funny
bit because I felt like the first sentence in that should have been the paragraph do consumers expect more than a scrappy MVP if their other example that's the question and the answer is hopefully no because it's a start-up your ability to build more than a scrappy MVP is very challenging I would say that if I go back to the to the justin.tv days like if you can find a small population of people that have
enough of a problem that the other folks aren't solving that they're willing to use something that's pretty bad that's a very good sign if the only way you can find any group of users even ten even 100 who love you to have a very polished product that's not a good sign that's actually a good sign that the other folks are doing a really good job yeah that the products work yeah so one of the hacks that I
like to use at this stage is to actually layer the MVP on to the existing product so for example if there's already some software that your users know you're like the people in the community are already using to track their competitive Starcraft 2 analysis what you could consider doing is actually like building say like a Chrome extension that sits on top of the other products and just overlays the extra data because you're
really like the goal of any good MVP is to fist it is to test your hypothesis is what you're making like important enough for people to care about like will they actually care that you're building it and so you want to do that with like the least amount of effort and if there's already existing good products like it's possible that you may find the users of those products pretty easily and you can
like build that little little bit that's that's special to you there you go yeah number two cool next up is from plumbing at flat row or flat row we automate billing customer care and maintenance for property managers ok the only thing that's confusing to me is that I thought that property managers do billing customer care maintenance so are you replacing property managers is it software for property managers yeah or
is it like the billing of property managers yeah so maybe a bit of clarification maybe a bit like I would I would probably just start off by we make software for product map for property managers we help them automate billing customer care and maintenance of their properties something yeah yeah if it's a tool part managers are using to be more efficient than not to be more clear in the up front and maybe even speaking to
how much more efficient does that mean the typical property manager can go from managing one property to five or from five to fifteen yeah like what that what's the value prop that you're offering to them yeah I'm not a property manager we didn't get it right off though I mean like I can't visualize the pain though I'm sure there's Rangers so we are currently starting with a few clients
and are basically tailoring our service then cool how do we avoid the trap of making our service too specific and how do we balance between the requirements of a few clients with the need to build a platform that is more Universal so I kind of think that like when I see a start-up like this I really have this basic question which is are you going into this space with knowledge of the space like were you a previous property
manager if so you should have a lot of insights and the types of problems that are general that can be applied across the industry and so you should have a lot of insights on what your initial product should be sub a set B if you're coming into this with little personal experience you think there's an opportunity here but you kind of don't know what it is I don't know any I this is your problem and like I don't know a
clever way of avoiding it just learning the business means you're gonna be building a lot of features that probably are not generally applicable and that's the cost of learning about this business so my mind like if you already know about the business use your gut if someone asks you to build something that like your experience tells you is not general great don't do it if not consider the first five customers as you
just getting an education on the industry and it might be a very expensive one that's fine for the case of someone who's coming into the industry that they're not already a participant of some of the like some of the best founders that I've seen they just immerse themselves in it like for example they may actually become absolutely manager like they may volunteer or they just like go and say
I'm gonna help you run your business for like a week or two I think like that would be great yeah even if I mean if you are a property manager yourself you don't necessarily have to do that because hopefully that's yeah why we're starting this company that seems like an even better offer than giving them software it'd be like hey I'll just do some of your work for you so I can learn one of the things that I learned from kind of
like to this to this question of like how do you prioritize prioritize features I always like try to as I'm doing user interviews or talking to initial users I really try to find pain points that people are already trying to solve so for example like if you're talking to property managers and they're totally comfortable doing all the books by themselves like they just have like their weekly like hour that
they spend doing all this that might not actually be the right place to start with maybe maybe you could start with like are they are they actively experimenting and trying other tools are they have they tried like a competitor product those are usually the problems that I like to start with because like the person's already trying to find a solution so they're primed when you come to talk to them like to be excited and
to try it versus you having to like pitch them hard and like changing their entire business workflow or whatever yeah I think we see the opposite of a lot where somebody says if something's being undone on paper there is a business in putting it into the computer and like by nature of the fact that it's being done on paper you could build a billion dollar company bringing to the computer and that's actually not true
like there are some things that done on paper that are not broken that's like build it and they'll come then yeah yeah so really works all right what's next how do you okay we're asking and answering questions from sky who has started fridge worthy let's see what's fridge where should we use first they did with young maybe will be your initial users ok fridge worthy a social network where people share their
accomplishments well sounds good for Ivy Leaguers you mean like LinkedIn people are using LinkedIn more as a social network yeah things were they there's just an urban I'm trying to see if there's like a website no website yeah okay how do you launch an MVP of user generated a user-generated content platform if I make an MVP with minimal content users will probably leave since there's not too much to consume so the
classic answer to this is one does your platform have a lot of replay value is there any reason why I should come back daily or weekly I think that that's a really important question ask because even if you get a lot of people if there's no reason for them to come back it doesn't really matter I think - is there a smaller community that if that community was using a product they would find it useful even if others
weren't the classic I guess now old example of this was Facebook at Harvard like as long as the Harvard kids were using it or even a class even just one of the grades in Harvard was using the product it was useful and so therefore they didn't need to have millions of users day one literally users of the order of like a couple thousand was very useful so the way that I'd be thinking about this
question is one how frequent do I get value out of it if it's not that frequent is there any value on creating - is there a smaller population of people who can find this useful even if all our friends aren't using it and those people might use it like have the problem or whatever on a more regular basis so they'll be like participating more so start with like a focus smaller group I think there's always you know
tricks of the trade like generate them yourself a lot of the best user generated content networks like 9gag which is now this like massive meme meme website was started by like scraping memes from other sites that's not that shouldn't be something too too crazy to think about reddit same story in the early days Sachs Amster um so like in this case if you're talking like if you're building a network for people
sharing their accomplishments you could look to where people are already sharing this and like prime prime it by grabbing the accomplishments like for example if someone's tweet like if you're trying to like get an someone who's already on Twitter on to your platform you could potentially like go through each person's Twitter account and scrape their the things that they're proud of crunch page is actually interesting
example of this before people cared about their approach phrase profile TechCrunch just built the profiles on CrunchBase yeah if I'm media reports and it was media reports and so and so forth and after a while people cared about their profile and so they tried to keep it updated and when I'm thinking more about this problem like it's true like we have a lot like one github we're on like dribble there's all these different
platforms that people may participate in so that's us I mean that's a service right there like not how generate your own page yeah cool next up Dennis at swish swish swish swish technologies we're building the self-driving cars for ride-sharing and retirement communities and for schools in the US okay so I'm imagining like club cars or whatever got down please share some of your advice for founders
like us with a product that can take a very long time to launch how do we get users even before we launch how can we generate sales even before we launch so I deal with a lot of companies you seen a lot of this we hope they like 25 companies that are all you know working their way through the FDA process and we've also funded a lot of like supersonic aircraft companies that will probably take a little while for launch
so this is like this hands-on I mean Guardian self-driving car companies in fact probably we follow this exact idea yeah so there's a couple different there's a couple different ways that you can go with this I'd say that in in areas where there's like the possibility for harm or there's like safety concerns you have to be extremely careful about what you consider an MVP in any way that
can actively like harm somebody so that having been said we have had companies test smaller versions of what they're like smaller versions of their larger vision with kind of off-the-shelf technology some of the best hardware companies that I've worked with even though they now make their own hardware and they they build a bunch of custom stuff they started using they started by using off-the-shelf systems like
raspberry pies cameras just existing technology and put them together in interesting kind of normal ways so in this case like there is now you know more and more kind of off-the-shelf tech that you could use to craft together a like a rudimentary self-driving car I think we're getting back to like I guess like why we work on MVPs one reason we do is to actually validate that people want this the second reason we work on MVPs is to
demonstrate that we as founders have the skills and capabilities to like to that kind of like take the problem from just an idea to an actual implementation even if that implementation is not the like long vision of this so in this case it's very easy to have the idea to say I want to build like a self-driving car or something like that but it's but there's like a huge gap there's a huge discrete
bump between people who have the idea for self-driving car and people who have like built something that resembles it so in this case like building something that demonstrates your capability could separate you dramatically from the pack so we've had companies that are now off building like embark which builds self-driving trucks like literally they're running on the streets in the highways in Nevada they started with a
cop car yeah I think like at demo day they had a golf cart that they rigged up with like six cameras I don't even know if it was autonomous it might have just been remotely driven or something like that there's a great there's a great like comic on how to build an MVP and it literally is someone building a car but the first step is building like a skateboard and then you build a bicycle
and then you build a car so you can apply the same logic here that like if you're trying to figure out how to build something that's autonomous that works in these communities maybe you start with like an autonomous wheelchair right like you just create like or one of those personal mover things right you start with that and it still kind of accomplishes the first the overall goal of making something that's for
retirement communities for example but much safer much cheaper and that actually sounds like kind of a cool idea maybe Segen or not at all the couple of parts of this question how do we generate sales before we launch I actually think that that is sales are hard generating letters of intent or agreements to pilot you shouldn't be very hard if there's a lot of demand for this sort of thing so being able just to
get your customer to sign anything even if doesn't have a price on it is evidence that you can sell to an investor and is often seen as more valuable than not having it so some other things that people have done in this way is if your plan is to sell cars maybe the first thing you do is you sell the service so you don't have you don't have autonomous you know self-driving cars yet but you do have yourself so
what if you ran a car sharing service in this retirement community to start that would demonstrate to people that you know there are people who want to use smartphones to like request cars not kind of thing and you could you could literally get started like tomorrow doing that potentially all right what's next we've got Ethan at volley word volley we facilitate the servicing of users vehicles they do not need to leave the
home or office servicing that seems like an awkward way of saying we're a car mechanic that yeah anywhere you are I think this is a perfect example of like the description requiring examples because servicing does not put a picture in my head as opposed to refuelling changing the tires doing an annual checkup all those things create pictures in my head and also there's probably something that you're starting with I
imagine that you're not like servicing every end-to-end thing in the car to start so some of the best pitches like like Michael said they cause you to like visualize what the service does but here's actually a problem that a lot of founders run into is they think that their one-liner or their short description has to encompass like everything that they'll ever do under the ends of the earth because they won't
they think that like investors only will get excited by these like big dreams but in reality like we're actually just trying to understand what your company is so that we could talk about something else and so your description doesn't need to be this all-encompassing future vision it's just like we won't I know what you do quickly like get to the next step what's while getting all of the legal taken care of to protect
from liability so Ethan the first question I would ask you before you even think about this is have you studied every startup that has failed trying to do this idea and do you understand why if not you are doomed to repeat their failure so you can start by looking in the YC database we have funded this so I really think that the real number one questions do you understand something that everyone else doesn't know about
this space the other thing that I think is tricky is that like the population that has the most problem with their cars tends to also be in a population that is extremely price sensitive about fixing their cars and so make sure that you have some insight on how you can be offering the cheapest option because if you're if you're the kind of issue here is a lot of people like to go with
luxury and high price first but the problem is like you're solving like car braking which is way less common if I bought it a year ago and so make sure that you're actually letting this up so you actually have a product that can have demand oh yes we've seen in other countries as well yes say in terms of the liability question like you got to be you got to be extremely careful especially when you're dealing with like
large expensive items that people care about the way that I like to think about this is you know trust your gut you're usually not going to make you're usually not going to try to put yourself in a position where you're taking too much risk naturally so like listen listen to listen to yourself and listen to other people when they when they when they kind of bring up problems that you that they think you might encounter alright
okay this one's okay can you pronounce that one no are we doing high-five or this Oh being being stopped gonna stop Louis Louis okay Louis we're a been a stop we build a home wellness service and products marketplace for people's wellness objectives okay no idea I don't really know what they do home wellness I think I'm like thinking of home gym I'm telling you I don't even want to stretch my mind to try to figure
out what emotions because it's so much jargon it is a unique name let's see let's see if the website has anything more didn't step Oh best app surfing this oh no is it be honest Dennis being a step ok services for your well-being at home what kind of services what kind of service Quest Oh exercises meditation sports when you say like yeah like your description on your front page is much
better than scription does so that okay back to the question great should we launch our MVP for free or is it better to charge people let's be clear you have a service where you're actually like there is real cost meaning like your service is helping someone exercise there is cost to sending someone to that place there's costs recruiting them there's a cost to their time in any situation where you actually have real cost you
should be charging from day one in a pure software play where you don't have any costs maybe consider something that's freemium but like you don't want to anchor like the number one thing with these like marketplaces that are actually moving humans around is that if you can do a situation where you're providing a dollar with a value and you're only getting 75 years that sets back you're gonna get a lot of demand
but you're gonna lose a lot of money and when you actually equalize the the demand in the price you'll lose a lot of customers especially for something like this where it's an existing service that people are already buying from other vendors yeah so you kind of don't need to validate that like people want to have yoga classes or people want to have dance classes what you want to validate is do they want to have them at their
home like that's the that's the thing that's kind of new and I think unique about this so like definitely definitely charge for it yeah I think just charge a lot charge more than you might feel comfortable so you can identify the people are most desperate for it here's your crazy idea charge more than the existing solutions because like when I think about it if I'm like I want to have a private yoga
class that's expensive I would have to schlep out to go to the studio and I'm having it at home yeah I mean and that would actually charging more it sounds a little bit weird but it would like force it would really force the question of like are you building something that people really want you would get an answer really quickly if you were charging more than like the neighborhood yoga studio and people are still coming
to you then you're really on to something if like you're constantly having to cut the price and like you know run discounts and stuff like that like maybe they're only coming to you because it's slightly cheaper than the alternative so there you go yeah okay now we're on to high five high five is a local news website that helps you get invited to activities based on topics you enjoy discussing we help people in
their 20s and 30s meet new friends with similar hobbies humor and lifestyle that sounds like two one-liners in one or three or three yeah so once again Vlad something that a lot of people have tried before is both local news and interest based social networks and dating and dating and meeting new people yeah so like make sure that you're studying those products and you have a strong opinion about why they suck it's
gonna help you two reasons one it'll help you figure out what to make is a good product and two a very common investor question if you ever want to raise money is like well what about this everyone's always heard of like the other app that they funded they may have funded like five of them yeah and if your answer is like oh I don't know then instantly you lose credibility so make sure you're an expert on all of these
various things my hunch here is that Vlad this might actually be a problem that you're solving for yourself which is great like maybe you just moved to a new city and like you're experiencing this exact problem so like or yeah or your friend has so like the way that I would start building an MVP is kind of like what we mentioned at the beginning it's taking what you already do on a
regular basis like maybe you go to meetups maybe you like read it for the subreddit event of that city and like think clearly about like what are you doing today and what's the smallest thing that you could do that has an outsized impact like you want to you want to add the least amount of new kind of like process to your weekly workflow that just has this like out sized large impact yeah
all right okay what do you do after you launch an MVP exciting okay next up we got a keys from small scope what are some steps to launch an MVP that found that what are some steps after launch of an MVP that fence founders should follow in the video there are some examples of successful companies MVPs however there's no discussion at all on how they iterated what they learned why they narrowed it down to those features so
Peter from segment Donahoe actually had a talk at yce this week on this subject which i think is really interesting so we started with like this depressing fact most startups are in the process of dying and that's offense in fact one and depressing fact two is that most startups have convinced themselves that they're right on the verge of product market fit one of the fact they're actually in the process of
dying so if you set that as the like environment that you live in one of the things he said that I thought was really helpful is take your MVP and be a skeptic have someone in your company be dyspeptic and basically ask the question is this providing any value to my users and not like oh well you know if I built these 17 features than it would is my first MVP what the service that I could write people today is it providing any
value to my users then if the answer is no go figure out who's in so much pain around this problem that they would use your MVP and get them to use it and then ask that question again am i providing any value to those users it turns out that like it's too easy to go down a track where step one you're not providing any value and just to make it so that iteration one you're providing no value iteration two you're writing no
value iteration three of writing value if your product if your problem you're solving is severe enough there should be some over people who are willing to use a really bad product to help solve it and so go find them that's where I think the best folks that do MVPs and go and what they do is they literally take what they have to and they talked to different groups of users and they begin to kind of instead
of iterating on the product like building more features they actually iterate on the market yeah so they'll find like I mean it's it's always a great example but the superhuman the super hold the founder of superhuman board a great blog post on how you iterate towards product market fit and one of the things that he talks about is looking at like the demographics within the first hundred users and he realized
that like founders sales people were really like really taking advantage of the basic features that super human had and then like product managers and some of the people who didn't like deal with email on the same volume just like did not get value and stopped like using it another test to kind of your point of like do people benefit from this very first version one like kind of crazy out there test that I sometimes seen people
run is they kind of they turn off their product and they see how complaints like you don't really have to do this but you could kind of figure out ways to simulate this so for example if you had an outage if your servers went down like last week look back at your email logs to see like did anyone care did anyone care so you might already have run this experiment by accident at some point it's a perfect example of doing
something doesn't scale like a big company could never do that and awesome all start-up like I mean reddit did that from yeah like I mean it Twitter did to but like a small start-up but something you totally can do and if you think about the environment is like the greatest percentage chance of what I'm doing is death then you should be willing to experiment with extreme things fairly with death yeah that's
weird alright that's next I do remember a lot of failed wills funds whatever else and I always complained like whenever reddit would go down I would complain to my friends when we were trying to like oh yeah router where I would text Eve it would be funny I'd be like Steve your website's down I'm sure I'm the first person who's telling you like that's a massive sign that you're onto something if like people can't live
without your website like five minutes yep got something yeah next up from posh wha-at local be my company's our website for shopping from home base and small businesses around us after evaluating what I do I've realized that I have a small I have I have users interaction that we do not have product market fit now the question is should I continue working on this especially since margins are thin or should I quit
this and beginning in and search for market product market fit you know I think this is always the hardest question to answer because I see problems on both sides there's a set of founders who if they don't succeed immediately their mental model is that their company's a failure but then there's also a set of founders who even after learning two years worth of horrible facts they still like will not
acknowledge that it's not working I think the best strategy for this the one that's easiest to execute is to time-bound it so what I would say is like hey we're gonna try everything as hard as possible to make this work for this period of time probably no less than six months and if we haven't figured it out then then we're gonna be open ourselves up to pivoting I find it's easier to time bandit because like
you can it's easier to be intellectually honest with yourself about like have I worked on this really hard for six months versus three versus have I tried all of my ideas like that's a look at they're running out of ideas then yeah yeah like you like ideas they're kind of thing it's it's it's easy to trick yourself that you've tried all of your ideas it's not easy to trick yourself have I been working on this for six
months so some strategies that you can use during that six months are like put all the ideas that you still have up on a whiteboard and like pick the top one and spend a week working really hard on that because it's possible that like you've been going through this for you know a couple months or a year and you've gotten into this into this setup where you think you've you know tried everything or you're not sure like about
a specific question that you might have like am I going after a demographic am i and I use it do I have the right stores or small businesses on my platform and you could test it you say like actually we don't have product market fit the founder of TaskRabbit was just speaking last night and she was talking about how like different that first every single everything like TaskRabbit you could just do anything
yeah but then they started realizing that like some people who really just wanted idea furniture set up and so one of the things that she said that she was looking back and she was like I wish we tried this at the beginning was saying what if we just made like a landing page that was just like get your IKEA furniture set up and so I could imagine something like this really like forcing that issue and the cool thing about that
is you can do that in a week yeah like you already have built all the framework for it you could spin up a landing page that's like I wanted my hypothesis is that people really want to buy you know baby stuff on like a really short term basis because they can't run out and get it so I'm gonna use my existing website and the existing like whole thing that I've built and just test that one
demographic with one use case and then when to like when to quit insert start the search over again what did Peter say about that because he did like they certainly I think Peter said that like if you can convince the critic in the company but basically he was like identify a critic in the company identify a sign that would either that would even convince the critic that there's something here if you can't hit
that sign within a period of time you should move so like don't trust the faith of the optimist like try to assume the pessimist role and like try to come up with an objective measure of like yeah next person would be like holy yeah yeah even the skeptic would be like yeah okay I guess we have to work on this like that's what you're looking for and like for him he tells a story segment which is really cool which was
that the idea of segments he didn't believe in and his co-founder did and his test was like well okay put it on Hacker News let's see what like engineers think and he thought it was like it was just gonna not get any up votes and move on to the next topic and the next day it's from an age of hacker news and he was like oh crap like even as a skeptic I must acknowledge that like is way more demand for this than ever
thought like that is a good yeah a good mental framework you have to get yourself out of tricking yourself that that it's working when it's not next up crystal at site full along our journey we've done surveys interviews and had many conversations with users once the MVP is live and we invite users to use and test our tool what are the top methods you recommend for capturing and measuring feedback I often think that
startups try to scale this effort way too fast the things that I've seen work really well are you call the users yourself personally you invite the users to your office you host a dinner for your users you put your initial users in a whatsapp group that you can all talk with together but like things that absolutely don't scale another famous one was Airbnb where customer service was one of the co-founders Joe's
cellphone number like this is the perfect area we're like you want there to be so much information flow from the customers to you that like you have to do things that don't scale you shouldn't be thinking about oh how do I get my like ideal intercom setup and my Zen desk set up in the other days you do not need that stuff but let me unpack something there because it's easy to overlook I think why we talk about do
things that don't scale the the reason in this case is actually you don't know the questions to ask yet and so you want a really high bandwidth a really wide broad way of collecting feedback because you don't know the questions that you want to ask it and so by having this like open-ended like the example there may be very cool because they're literally just like talking like actually talking to users that have
problems so you could ask questions like when they when they phone up and say like hey like take him to my Airbnb you solve that and then while they're on the phone you say like oh by the way how did you find us how's your experience so far like your friends you like you basically can you basically can like pack the system and instead of having to create like the perfect survey the perfect you
just like talk my recommendation is to write that all down and maybe on like a weekly basis get together with you and your co-founders kind of debrief about these conversations that you have because like some of the times like during office hours I really like talking to founders that have had these conversations and we just kind of just talked through I'm like tell me about like this users background
like where do they work how do they and and sometimes you can pull interesting insights out of this that can help you like tune and tweak your MVP to basically like kind of to the point that we were talking about before about these like experiments that you can run you could say like well actually like a lot of you know singles are using this tool and I've talked to like three of them maybe we could like try something that
just goes after this demo yeah next up MVP as part of your startup pitch well let's see what Spencer has to say from Spencer at carnuba work her nuba the first online back office and field service management platform for independent car care professionals Wow that is a mouthful and you say mechanics Detailers etc field service management platform is jargon that's something that probably they understand in a normal
investor will not independent I'm imagining like awesome one-off mechanic yeah I don't know what's good like a nutburger professional is either okay here's what I think you do you write software for mechanics shops and it helps them manage dinner there it like what places the paper with them yeah I'm still not totally alright so that's the question our end goal is to build an online marketplace to connect car owners
with local independent car care professionals and get it to go chain says but our VP is the back-office a pure service management platform to build up our supply side of the marketplace should we be pitching to our investors our end goals or what we're working on now classic question so here's how I would probably structure the pitch step one what you're working on now step two the traction step three
the business model and then step four division it's a lot easier to sell me if I know what the hell's going on and those first three now I kind of know okay this is what you're doing today I have a base of knowledge so I can basically when you tell me the vision I have context enough to how where you are today connects with the vision if you just send me the vision I'm gonna be very confused that
you you know if you're saying this marketplace I'm imagining why don't you just build the marketplace today and then like Oh actually we're doing this like b2b product now I'm just confused so Star Tours you're doing today then talk about the vision here's here's another reason why I really like confounders do that is I can evaluate like I'm mostly at this early stage I'm mostly just trying to like understand
you and like are you are you cool are you like you're smart have you have you figured out a pain point and by sharing like what you're doing and some but if you just talk about this vision I have no like metrics to evaluate you you you you know if you pitch you're short if you pitch your short-term goal I can say like what you're like is every part of the way there's no way there if you pitch this like take over the world
vision you're like no winner yeah I just can't really differentiate like are you a poser or you just like talking a big idea thing where are you actually getting deliver on this oh no it's questions during 3 what we're gonna go into some YouTube questions see how this goes autumn at jump dot IO asks says my name is autumn and my business is a barter service that connects startup entrepreneurs with one another ok
bartering ok I thinking back the barter system once again no pictures yeah maybe like an Olympic training are they trading desks or the trading computers the trading service providers software's no idea in consideration of getting an MVP up as soon as possible what are the pros and cons of using white label services so this is a good this really brings up kind of a classic thing so I would say I
would say a couple things to this point one if you're just trying to test any demand at all and a white label service between like let you do that great but I'd argue that like if you want to test any demand at all for this type of product probably like a Google sheet spreadsheet could do it too and so if you're just looking to test is there any demand like go as simple as possible if you have seen demand and you're
thinking to yourself ok I want to make this a company if you want to make it a software company that can scale that can raise money it's a lot easier if you're building your own software what's an exit vivec at fleet code I am asks says fleet Co provides a business assistant for transport and logistics companies which helps business owners to know how much their vehicles are making and profit a profit and loss oh I don't
know what a business assistant is is that like it my consultant is it an analyst it sounds like an Indian specific thing potentially so oftentimes like we you know are investing a lot in India right now and I think one of the things that I'm learning is that there are certain different like just different facts in the Indian market but as someone who lives in San Francisco I can't like visualize that as much so some of the
best Indian fakirs they actually like spend maybe like a sentence or two bringing me up to speed on what's happening in their market so that I could begin to like understand what that is it's question about pricing yeah and so the same answers we get before price expensively make it so that you have a high bar for delivering great value and that you have a good verification that the person has a lot of pain it's more
often that people price under price than over price so lean towards over pricing again it forces it forces the issue see what else we got let's do this one okay okay Deb food is an e-learning platform to help people learn software development okay we've already launched our MVP it's basically a publication text plus YouTube we get about a thousand users on our channel monthly shall we focus on building new features
and innovations or should we go after currently implement a little revenue sources like subscription court oh ok so should we start charging for things that we're already offering or should we build new free features this is a tricky one because it really goes to like what your current situation is aka do you need money right look how big of a startup you're looking to build if you're looking at with a lifestyle
business then like I would definitely charge right now and kind of what your vision of what the product should be and so like this one's hard to answer just straight away if you're thinking oh I don't need this to be a venture scale business I want it to be something I can do with all my time so it needs to make money so I can quit my job then charge great if you're thinking like oh I'm looking to build a
free product for teaching people to learn the software development because I want to monetize it in this other way then I'm not so sure and then in terms of building new features like that's a question for your users like what what do your users want what are they how are they frustrated with your product today I mean you're also looking at engagement like our people coming back and using your service on a regular
basis we often get questions like this that basically asked us for product insights when we're not the customer and like be very careful about asking any startup person who's not your customer for for customer insight because they won't have them it's a great point yeah and but they'll offer them they will yes yeah a bunch of recommendations that are based on ok now we're actually we're gonna get ready to the YouTube comments
oh here's a good one how do you deal with co-founders conflict with regards to company direction so that's never yeah I think that step one is to have the conversation in a respectful way I think oftentimes what happens is that people avoid this conversation until it becomes so problematic that it causes a founder breakup and in the early days just people being heard and conflict being heard actually helps to spell it
so that would be my first step I think step two is we talked about kind of time bounding and dealing with the sceptics let's say that your co-founder becomes a skeptic ask him ok what's the test that would prove that the direction we're going in right now is a good one and what is the time period that we can all agree with to go after that and then BAM we're running an experiment now if we
don't make it we'll switch if we do well you'll change your mind much is your way to what once you're having a conversation and kind of structure that way as opposed to like you have to listen to me because I'm the product guy or I'm the CEO that that really works well you give this piece of advice at the beginning of YC that I really like which is to get all the co-founders together in a room and plan the week or
two to plan your two-week sprint and then to ask everyone to put their ideas let's on the white board all ideas go up there like you don't you don't start like deleting ideas at this point and then you like once the ideas are up then you prioritize I think too often especially like developers we're already internalizing like how difficult things are gonna be to build yeah when we might
not have understood like the potential benefit from building this and it's always a trade-off so like go broad think think of what think of like entertain the idea of what you can build and then filter it then and kind of like prioritize the list rather than just like preemptively shooting down ideas yeah brainstorms turn into shooting down ideas so fast yeah oh god that's more pricing questions hard tech
cuz at the bottom of the list no I'm just looking through to see which one okay they're not I was like okay here we go Elias asks how should I talk to my first b2b customers to let them know that I want them to sell but also that they are part of like a beta test so this is a fun one I always think and a lot of times founders ask these questions where it's basically like the answer is just to be honest right like or the answer is you
can just ask right and this comes up with investment car investor conversations and customer conversations right you're looking for early customer who is excited by the opportunity to work really closely with the founder be able to give feedback quickly to be able to get changes fit quickly and it's not intimidated by something that's actually a feature yeah but a lot of customers that's like they would pay more for that
yeah and so you're looking for that customer so be upfront about it and it's same thing with an investor really like a lot of times we get asks a question like what did the investor mean by this or what stage of the process in my--in and the answer is like just ask the investor I think like it actually shows a level of sophistication to ask the question when you don't know as opposed
to just kind of like not as if you do know and not and then leave without any insights and the failure mode here is if you don't bring this up now and you just like present yourself as this big enterprise software company like they're gonna be disappointed you're gonna be disappointed like everyone's gonna have a not fun time so spin it in a positive yeah like it's it's again you might even close the deal because you bring this up
maybe don't call it a beta test just say like I'm gonna work extremely closely with you to make this a success like I'm gonna I'll be awake 24/7 making this work because you will be awake 24/7 all right what else here we go Oscar says we're blue a platform where housewives resell products from suppliers using whatsapp it's like me show for let him get that should we give incentives to our housewives to trust us
like uber did at the beginning so um interestingly enough this is a common thing that happens where a start-up thinks they know what happened at the beginning of a company and sometimes they don't so in the extreme beginning of uber what we're so interesting was that it launched in San Francisco and it launched as uber black which is really expensive product actually it wasn't well subsidized and the real value is that it was impossible
get a taxi in San Francisco absolutely impossible so they didn't have to incentivize people to use the first version very much because like the alternative was like you couldn't move around the city at all now as they expand to new markets and they figured out how marketing worked and they figured out that like they could accelerate penetrating into a new city if they gave away rewards that was all
stuff they did later much like yes we don't copy what you think someone did in the beginning when actually that wasn't what they did in the beginning in the beginning they solved like a really hilarious pain point and if uber had launched in New York City it wouldn't have worked because like yeah did not exist in New York City the pain was so great great in San Francisco that everyone was willing to use uber black
like they turned a lot of it such a money so they did the exact thing that in charge way too much and they found like a very specific pain point that like certain very wealthy people had I remember the first time I got an overt that was yeah it was good I felt like for like a king they had a limo in their first initial fleet and every once in a while you recall uber and like a stretch limo would come and pick you up
yeah like two people it was crazy they charged you for charge extra for the excellent idea but it was expensive okay okay this is this is a really important escort the next question Ashly asks if we're gonna be if we're if we're starting a technology service that has never been done before is it important to get it patented before we release the MVP and I have I have some ideas on this but I want to hear only you your I
usually abstain far away from my PMS it's a buyout company but you have more experience than idea so this is such like like I I started my company and you know a small town in Ontario just outside of Toronto like I was not in the thick of startup world and I'm trying to think back to like how many people told me to patent that yeah this is like one of those things that people who are not in the startup world think
is a critical piece of starting a business because they may have heard of like someone else who got screwed out of their idea or something like that but if you're starting a startup which is kind of defined as a technology company that's designed to grow rapidly then the the number one thing that you need to do is find something that people want and sell it to them and then iterate and
grow patents are not a critical step necessarily in this path in fact a lot of times like I had a conversation with a founder NYC and they were talking about how they needed to get their stuff patented before they launched as a YC company and we just I didn't dismiss it outright because there's always edge cases where it could be could be critical but we talk through like what are the benefits that you're like then
you expect to come from this patent and most of them are for like circumstances that are after you've already hit product market fit they're like projecting problems that they will have in the future there are a multitude of problems that you may have you need to keep focused on the problems like you actually have which is you have no users you have no product and you have no revenue you solve those ones you will
have the pleasure of like running into patent stuff later in the future should we do one more yeah we get a little more last one where you talk about design there's one of our platform risk where is that one this girl daddy was the YouTube platform risk alarm there it is okay Rahmi asks we have a project that solves a very critical and wide pain point but it totally depends on youtube so if YouTube decides to block it well
but we we will be out of business is it a good risk it doesn't this risk we render the business worthless Wow I think this is something that's changed that feels like it's changed over the last 15 years I feel like when I came into the startup world there were these basically there were these systems that were open and so Google felt like a very open system for finding websites that
Google didn't have a whole bunch of other products that were competing with you messaging felt like a very open system it was SMS email for like a very open system most emails that were sent were received even promotional ones the tricky thing now is that almost all of these systems are now closed and almost all of these companies understand that they exploited an open system to get big and that if their system is open
if YouTube system isn't open if Facebook system is open they will be exploited by the next person and so the problem is is that you're not only competing with other players in your market you're competing against the platform you're on if this is a significant revenue opportunity for the platform you're on they have every incentive to either by you or kill it and they're not gonna buy you for a lot of money because they have
a lot of leverage over you so the question would ask you is like is your dependence on youtube today or is it dependence on YouTube forever if it's that forever question I'd be very very cautious about building this into a business I might consider making it a lifestyle business where you can monetize it quickly so that if it does go away at least you've made money and it brings in this like subscription
revenue that like youtubers must like hardcore youtubers must have this and therefore they're willing to pay fifty or hundred bucks a month or something yeah the only other way you can get away with this is kind of like the eBay PayPal case we're like your product becomes so mainstream on you tube so quickly that if you to tried to shut it down like there be a mass revolt yeah which is hard but interesting enough like do you remember
vine like Twitter shut down the vine replace or not fine periscope yep and that was popular like that was popular with all the cool kids in San Francisco and they still got like me captain so yeah alright cool everyone thank you very much for asking all these excellent questions we'll be back next Wednesday at 11 a.m. Pacific time to answer questions about next week's lectures so thanks see you later