This Week in Startups
00:14:29 · Amanda Bradford
It wasn't exponential growth. It was hard growth, but we kind of rose consistently through the daily active users and sign ups. Then eventually we launched in 155 cities. The big takeaways launching other cities. A lot of founders come to me and are like, Oh, we want to go to New York, we want to do this, we want to do this, we want to go international. And I'm like, No, no, no, you still have so much TAM in New York or San Francisco, wherever their first city is, I was like, need to get better penetration in your first city before expanding. And I think you can, in retrospect, we launched 155 cities. If I had to go back in time, I would have capped it at 20 because the revenue from the twenty first through the 150 city was negligible and added more complexity to operations. Hiring, I couldn't find a perfect co founder. If you can, that's amazing. If you can't, just go forward. Don't wait for Mr. Right. Fundraising, same concept with fundraising, show that you have skin in the game before asking for money. If you don't get a yes, say cool, this ship sailing whether you're in or not. And so I think my investors particularly liked that I was launching already, I was going to launch, I need it if they gave me money, that's great. But I wasn't like stuck if I didn't get fundraising. And in press, and I would put influencers on this now too, are your best friend if because they'll do it for free. It's earned media. None of our press costs us money. If you can get influencers to tweet about your things or post about your things for free, that's amazing. So try to do these targeted pitches to these people that have this distribution. And then monetizing, we didn't monetize the first year and a half, but what I did do is a smoke and mirrors thing where I said, Do you want to upgrade to heavy hitter? If so, click the button. And then I just said, We charged your card. Now you're a heavy hitter. And we gave him the features, but we didn't actually... My engineer didn't even know how to do billing or anything at that point. So it was a total fake out. But we could then see, okay, about 15% of people pushed the button, said they were willing to pay $15 So then when I went to go fundraise, could say we did a, you know, we did a test and we know that 15% of people, so maybe 13% in reality, would would be up for like a membership fee.
00:16:24 · Amanda Bradford
That that helps people or helps the investors feel okay with the fact that we could monetize even though we hadn't. Then rebuilding your MVP start earlier than you think. We had a lot of kind of scaling issues when we went to New York. And that was part of why we waited so long for LA. But it was definitely an MVP. So as soon as you know that you're getting traction, just realize that that's a project you'll probably need to take on.
00:16:45 · Jason Calacanis
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00:18:33 · Amanda Bradford
[00:18:33] S1: Well, Mark wrote the book on Dreamforce. I used to work at Salesforce, so that was a big part of his strategy, getting everyone together and they could talk to other people that also were admins of Salesforce. So he had the first developer meets sales conference together. For Replit, I think developers like to meet other developers, and it's similar to how NBA Singles wanted to meet other NBA Singles. You find a niche of the developers that maybe it's hard to find people that are specialized in this one thing, and you could create a meetup for them, or a startup hackathon or something that they get $100,000 Or if you're a startup, maybe it's $10,000 but you get some sort of award and a trophy. But I think, yes, finding that group of people, what their need is around who they're wanting to connect with that they can. Maybe it's investors and developers that want to meet those people. So then you bring in, you ask Jason to see if he can bring in some investors. They want to come to the event. So use your network, but find out what it is that they're not getting. And for our demographic, was they weren't getting curated mixers. You were going to a bar and everybody was either in a relationship or too old or too young. Was like the Goldilocks thing. If I could get everybody who's same age, same...
00:19:43 · Jason Calacanis, Amanda Bradford, Alex Wilhelm
[00:19:43] S2: So this is key, the hit rate in it. So if you're here, is anybody in the room not a founder? Anybody here not a founder? Oh, We'd People to kick you on my team are investors. So it is, if you're here and you're talking to somebody, they're 100% a founder. That's actually kind of a great thing. So now, I guess the way I could make this better is I could tell people I'm going to have 75 early driven founders here, and I could offer to have 10 investors Early [00:20:15] S1: stage because it's hard to get early... Find early [00:20:16] S2: stage. [00:20:16] S3: And then [00:20:17] S2: that could make the post networking, even even better. But... So... Okay. I'm unpacking it. Step one, everybody in the room has to be a match, so to speak. That's one thing. [00:20:28] S1: Yeah. I I guess, in target demographic of what you're going after, if you're going after, I don't know, rock climbers or something for some outdoorsy app, then yes, you would want to try it. [00:20:38] S2: Now, how do you get it to convert to a press hit, and how do you get it to convert to a customer? Let's unpack those, and we have a good example, I think we're working here, which is, say, Replit or some DevTool. You got the hackathon. [00:20:52] S1: You bought me the hardest one, DevTools. [00:20:54] S2: That's what I was trying to do. If I asked you to do it for a probiotic soda, that's also pretty hard. So do probiotic soda.
00:20:54 · Jason Calacanis, Amanda Bradford
[00:20:54] S2: That's what I was trying to do. If I asked you to do it for a probiotic soda, that's also pretty hard. So do probiotic soda. [00:21:02] S1: Our example for us was we would do some PR stunts. We had a helicopter, We had a party in Montauk in Upstate New York, and we flew people out on Blade, which is this elite helicopter that people take to the Hamptons. We put three blind dates on that. Then you invite Press. So that's the trick, is you got to invite Press to your party. Obviously give them a free ticket. Tell them there's going be all these interesting people that they're going to cover. Maybe if you have some sort of out there thing that might be controversial, it's good to kind of mix that in. Maybe you have, I don't know, Replit is doing something that, I don't know, they're gonna copy OpenAI or they're gonna go head to head against [00:21:41] S2: That would be actually a good one if you add a little controversy. This... What is... Not distilling or deconstruction, but a reverse engineering. [00:21:51] S1: Yeah. It reverse engineering? [00:21:52] S2: What's your better term for it? [00:21:54] S1: Distilling. Yeah. That's good name. Could have, like... You could [00:21:57] S2: be like, oh, we're gonna have a distillation of Photoshop, best distillation of Grand Theft Auto or something as a competition, You can actually watch people distill a piece of software. [00:22:07] S1: The best hit will be Silicon Valley engineers. [00:22:10] S2: Distilling photoshop kills trillion dollar company....