08 - How to Get Started, Doing Things that Don't Scale, Press - How to Start a Startup

Speaker 1 Yeah, thanks for having me a chance. I'm Stanley. I'm the founder of doordash and it's really amazing to be here because it wasn't naturally that long ago, where I sat in your seats. I'll just class of 2014 graduated and see us as well as my co-founder and E. And for those of you who don't know what doordash is. We're building an on-demand delivery Network for a local cities. And I want to start off with this photo that I took just A few months ago, and I think it this was a night when we just raised our series a. And I took this photo as I was walking back to where I lived actual live in robley at the time on campus, and I took this photo because I realized just how ridiculous the combinations of things. I was holding my hand at the time, you know, I was holding my CS 247 homework, and then I had a, my tax forms since it was April, and at the fill out taxes. And then also that yellow speeding ticket. And then right below that was the was a fifteen million dollar piece of paper. I just signed from Sequoia and that kind of summarizes, just how ridiculous our journey has been starting at Stanford doing this while I was at Stanford and then transitioning, this into an actual startup. And I want to share that story with you today. It All Began two years ago actually in a Can restore. It was my junior year at Stanford. This was fall quarter. And at the time I was really passionate about. You know, how do you build technology for small business owners? And I sat down, Chloe, the owner of Xiao Jian Machina store in Palo Alto at the time, just interviewing her, you know, trying to get feedback on this, on this product prototype. We've been working on and also just learning about, you know, what her problems were in general. And it was during this meeting. When Chloe first brought up this problem of delivery. You know, she I remember she took out this really, really thick booklet and she showed me pages and pages of delivery orders and a lot of these orders, she had to turn down because there's no way she could have to fold them. You know, she had no driver's and she was the one who ended up having to personally deliver all these orders. And, and that was a very interesting moment for us. And then we felt the next over the next course. Of over the course of the next few weeks. We talk to, you know, around another 150, 200, small business owners. And when we brought this idea of delivery, they kept, you know, they kept, you know, agreeing with us saying. Yeah, this is this is a really big problem for us, you know, we don't have delivery infrastructure. It's such a huge pain for us. There's not any good Solutions out there and which which led us to wonder, you know, delivery such a common thing is such an obvious thing. Why hasn't anyone solve this before, right? Like we Be missing something here. So we thought, maybe, maybe because people have tried this in the past, right? But they failed because there wasn't consumer demand for this. So we thought, okay, how can we test this hypothesis? You know, we were just a bunch of college kids at the time, you know, we didn't own trucks or delivery infrastructure is or anything like that, right? We can't just we can just spin up a delivery company overnight. So, how can we test this assumption? We had so we decided to Create a simple experiment with restaurant delivery. We spent about an afternoon just putting together a really quick landing page. And now went on the internet. I found some PDF menus of restaurants in Palo Alto. Stuck it up there and then had a phone number at the bottom and which was our personal cell phone number actually, and that was it. We put up the landing page. We called it Paul to deliveryby.com and This is actually what it look like, you know, super super, you know, simple ugly. Like honestly, we weren't really expecting anything. We just launched it and all we wanted to see was, would we get phone calls from this? And if we got enough phone calls then that maybe this was this delivery idea was something worth pursuing. So we put it up there. We weren't really expecting anything and we were driving back home and all of a sudden we got our God. Uncle, you know, someone called they wanted to order Thai food. And we're like, oh wow, this is, this is a real water. Like, you know, we have to do something about it, right? So, so we're in our cars and and we're like, okay, like we're not doing anything right now, mi will just let's just swing by, you know, Siam Royale, take up some Pad Thai. And it's delivered to this person and say let's try to learn how this whole delivery thing works. And we did we delivered to this guy and uh, Up in Alpine Road. I remember he told us he was a vacuum. You know, how did you hear about us? You know, what do you do? He told us, he was a, he was a scholar and then he handed me his business card and it said he was the author of a book called weed the people and that was like, our first ever delivery, right? It was it was like the best delivery. First delivery, / worst delivery, you could have asked for couldn't make this stuff up, and And, yeah, and then the next day we got, you know, two more phone calls. They get the after that, we got five and then it became 7 and then became 10. And then soon, we started gaining traction on campus with Paula to deliver e.com, which was, which is, which is pretty crazy because think about it, right. This was a landing page. You have to look up pdf menus to place your order and they have to call in. This isn't exactly the most professional looking site. Yet people will still we step, we kept getting phone calls. We kept getting orders and that's kind of when we, when we knew we were onto something. When people are willing, like we knew we found this need people wanted when people are willing to put up with all this. So I think another key point to remember is that we launched this in about an hour, right? Like we didn't spend, you know, we don't have any drivers. We don't have any algorithms. We didn't spend, you know, We have a back-end. We didn't spend six months building like a fancy dispatch system. Now, we don't have any of that. We just launched because at the beginning, none of that is necessary right at the beginning. It's all about, testing your idea. Trying to get this thing off the ground and figuring out whether this was something people even wanted and it's okay to hack things together. The beginning, why see? There's a mantra. We would like to talk about is doing things that don't scale. So Beginning, we were the delivery drivers now, we would you know, go to class and then after class will go, you know, deliver food. We were the customer support. Like I sometimes have to take phone calls during lecture. We had to, we spent afternoons just going down University Avenue passing out, flyers about trying to promote doordash. I mean, we don't have any dispatch system. So what we had to do was, you know, we use Square to charge all of our Summers we used Google docs to keep track of our orders. We use apples, find my friends to keep track of where all our drivers were, you know, stuff like that. Just figure out like, what's just hacking together Solutions. Just trying to get this thing off the ground. In fact, at one point. We were growing so fast that square actually shut our countdown because we were under suspicion of for money laundering. Think about it. We're getting small chunks of Fifteen twenty dollar order is coming in at a rapid Pace. It was. Yeah. And luckily my co-founder Tony worked at Square. So he just emailed somebody's there and everything was solved. Yeah, and another thing about doing things that don't scale is that it also allows you to become an expert in your business, right? Like driving helped us understand how the whole delivery process worked and we use that as an opportunity to talk to. Our customers talk to our restaurants. We did this batching which helped us figure out, you know, how we manually dispatch every drivers land, that helped us figure out, you know, what, our driver assignment algorithm should look like. We did customer support ourselves, you know, getting real-time feedback from from a customer's. I remember, you know, for the first few months, when we got started, we would manually email every single one of our new customers and At the end of every night and just asking them. Oh, how was your first delivery? How did you hear about this? And we would personalize all these emails, right? Like if I see someone ordered chicken skewers from Orange hummus, I would say. Oh, like I love orange hummus. You know, how we're chicken, skewers. How did, how did your first delivery went, you know, just feedback like that was was really valuable when I customers really really appreciated that and And I remember one time this was during YC, we were at a we just came out of a meeting with violent. One of our restaurant partners. And, you know, we wanted we heard about this ice cream store that just opened up, you know, on University Avenue called cream and we wanted to go try it out and then all of a sudden our co-founder back at our, you know, office / house. Texted us saying, oh we need drivers on the road. We got a huge spike in demand, so we debate it for maybe 10. Things like should we go get ice cream? Or should we go go deliver obviously went and delivered but that kind of became my motivation on, you know scaling right? Like if we can scale then you could go get ice cream next time. It's so so yeah, I think that kind of and now of course we scaled across different cities. Now you have to worry about building an automated Solutions and dispatch system and figure out how do you match demand and supply and all that fancy, too? Technology stuff, but none of that matters at the beginning because at the beginning it's all about getting this thing off the ground and trying to find product-market fit. So just to summarize, So, the three things I'll say that I learn from from doing door dashes. First, test your hypothesis. You want to treat your start-up ideas like experiments. The second thing is launched fast. We launched in less than an hour with a really simple landing page. And finally, it's okay to do things that don't scale doing things that don't scale is one of your biggest competitive advantages. When you're starting out and you can figure out how to scale once you have the demand and maybe You've scaled. Thank you. Go. Get that ice cream. Thanks. Sure. Is here about. Yeah, so it's mushy. Question was how did our first customer hear about us? Our very first one. I have no idea. We just launched pop policy of delivery.com., We don't do any marketing. So I assumed you just must have typed in politic delivery into the web browser. And then after that, we didn't do. It did barely any marketing. I think I sent out like, one email to my dorm and that was about it. Was all through word of mouth and that kind of just validates, you know, just how strong of an ed found, you know, when people just start talking about you and they're willing to put up with all this, you know, terrible user experience, terrible design and stuff like that. It seems so obvious. You're wondering why it wasn't done this. What's your answer? Now? Look at that. Yeah, I mean looking back I think. I think the biggest thing is mobile the fact that now everyone has one of those in their pocket and we kind of saw that Trend and and thought you know, what have you can design, you know, a delivery system that was entirely based off mobile, you know where you don't have it? You don't have to have any infrastructure or delivery fleets instead. You could you know, instead of hiring drivers full-time, purchasing Vehicles. What have you can tap into a more of an on demand pull of Contractors and only send orders to them when they have time. So so that's kind of the the Insight we had. We everything was done through mobile. Yeah, Speaker 2 did you know just make me some money? Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, at the time we just wanted we're all really passionate about building technology for small business owners. And and honestly, this delivery thing came out of it, experiment, right? With the landing page, like it was literally an experiment. We didn't, we weren't expecting anything and it just took off, and we went with it and Logistics was always something. We were really passionate about as well. And I like the logistics transportation. And it's kind of the perfect Fusion of, you know, how to help small business owners through delivery. Back, how do you launch the mobile app, first, or the Speaker 2 website? And how long did it take from idea to the first Speaker 1 launch? Yeah. It was, we started with this this, this landing page right here because an hour to Launch Yeah, the question was, how does doordash Stand Out Among a very competitive space. I mean, I mean the beginning I mean for us consumer demand has never been the problem even up until now. So for us it's just about finding a need and just focusing on serving that serving that demand. So the beginning competition doesn't really matter when you getting started. Yeah, question was how long it took for us to incorporate into a company? When we went through y c, so we launched in January 2013 and then we did. Why see that very summer? And we decided to take this idea through YC, we incorporate it. Walmart. Yeah, Speaker 2 what do you plan to do next? Or where do you plan to go with this besides, like food delivery. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the question was, where do we plan to go beyond food, delivery menu for us? The only started doordash. It was always, you know, like I said about, you know, helping small business owners and figuring out, you know, how do you serve this for any local Merchants? Whether you are a macaroon store or a restaurant or a furniture shop? I mean that's still our Focus. That's like the long-term vision for now. We're just focused on restaurant delivery as a way to scale. But ultimately that's where you want to end up in. Thanks. Speaker 2 Alright. Thank you guys, for Me, my name is Walker. I'm the CEO and founder of Teespring. For those of you guys who don't know what Teespring is, where an e-commerce platform, that allows entrepreneurs to launch products and apparel Brands without risk cost or compromise today. The company is about 180 folks and we shipped tens of thousands of products each day. And I want to talk to you about one of the most fundamental advantages you have as a start-up and that's that you're able to do things. Things that don't scale and I Define things that don't scale as things that are sort of fundamentally unsustainable. They will not last. They will not bring in the millionth user and where they break. It's usually time. But it could be a number of other things, but it's really growth strategies that won't take you to a million users. And there's three real places. I want to focus on today. The first one is finding your first users. The second one is turning those users into Champions, and the third one is finding your product and Can fit. So, finding your first users. The first thing you have to understand is that there is no Silver Bullet for user acquisition, you know everybody and this includes me when we got started. You look for that. That dream solution, that pay-per-click campaign, that has tremendous Roi, some accelerating partnership, that's going to springboard, you into the stratosphere and affiliate agreement. Something that solves it for you, but the reality is for the vast majority of companies. And in fact, for every company that I've had the chance to speak to the CEO of, that's just not possible though. Are unicorns and most of the companies that from the outside look like they've had this dream growth curve. The reality is that those first users were impossibly hard to get And let me tell you what the story of a ridiculously unsustainable business. So this is Teespring in 2012. When we first got when we first launched the the business couldn't have looked worse. It took days of meetings. We had to offer free design days of revisions back and forth. We'd have to launch the product ourselves. We'd have to do the social media, all the cell, like 50 shirts for a local nonprofit, and generate a thousand dollars of Revenue, anybody. Looking in would have said you guys need to give up. This is a terrible idea. But as time went on those users start to add up and you know, I think something you have to understand is that when you first launch a company just by virtue of the fact that it's a new product. You're going to be bad at selling it, right? You've got no idea what the pain points of customers really are? You've never sold it before. You don't have any success stories 2.2 or testimonials. Those first users are always going to be Be the hardest and so it's your responsibility as a Founder to do. Whatever it takes to bring in your first users. And, you know, it's going to be different for every company. The Common Thread that I hear is Founders need to spend personal time and effort a lot of their personal time and effort to bring those users in themselves, you know, could mean a number of things, everything from sending, 100 emails a day, getting on the phone and just calling as many people, as you can go. Through a network. If you have a network like Stanford or Y, combinator anything, you can do to get that first user and, you know, I really equate it to pushing a boulder up a hill, and if you think of like a very sort of smooth Hill, the when you get started, the incline is the steepest and those first inches of the hardest and over time as you get farther and farther. The incline studies out, it gets easier. And hopefully eventually reach a point where you're at the top of the hill and the boulder starts to roll on its Zone. And so those first users, you just cannot focus on Roi in the sense of time. Do not expect to spend an hour and returned thousands of dollars. Maybe Stanley is one of those unicorns. That was a pretty incredible story. But for most of us, those first users are going to take a lot of hand holding a lot of personal love and that's okay. That's essential for building a company. And the one sort of caveat of that is that I don't recommend giving away. Your product for free and there's plenty of exceptions to this rule, but in general cutting costs or giving the product away is an unsustainable strategy. I wouldn't recommend. You need to make sure that users value your product and you know, people have a different. They treat products that are free in a much different way than a paid product. And often times, it can give you a false sense of security, of we're getting all these users. Surely, we can convert them over to paid. The second aspect is what happens when you get those users. How do you turn those users into Champions? And a champion is a user who talks about an advocates for your product? And I'm a firm believer that every company with a great growth strategy has users, who are champions. And so, really the easiest way to build tape turn a user into a champion, is to Delight them with an experience. They're going to remember. So, something that's unusual or out of the ordinary. Exceptional experience and the easiest way to do this early and again something that is completely unsustainable. It's not going to scale. Forever is to just talk to those users and people will say this all the time and you hear it's one of the sort of core tenets of Y combinator is talk to users but I cannot stress how important it is that you spend a large chunk of your time, talking to users and you should do it constantly every single day. And as long as possible today at Teespring, I'm still the catch-all email address. So anytime somebody misspells support or writes an email address, that doesn't exist. I get that email. And so I still do about 12 to 20, customer service tickets. Every single day. I spend hours each night reading every single tweet. Probably a little bit OCD, but that's okay. I read through all the Teespring communities. You're never going to get a better sense for your product than actually listening to real users. And especially in the early days, you're just the product you've launched with and the feature set you launch with is almost certainly not going to be the feature set that you scale with and the quicker. You talk to users and learn what they actually need, the faster you can get to that point. So there's three ways to talk to your customers. You can run customer service yourself up until Teespring was doing about 130 140 thousand dollars a month. My co-founder Evan and I did everything in customer service. This is one that there's going to be an instinct to quickly pass off and that's because it's painful. Even today, when I open our customer service portal. I have like an emotional reaction where my stomach sinks because it sucks talking to users. Who have had a terrible experience and it's painful? It's something that you love and you've put so much effort into and you've gotten it wrong or they've had a terrible experience or somebody didn't treat them. Right. But it's so important that you go through that and learn what you need to build, what you need to fix. The second step is to proactively reach out to current and churn customers, and turn customers or customers who have left. And this is one that that often Falls by the wayside in the sort of the suit of new customers, but you want to make sure that your customers are having a consistent good experience. You don't want to just leave those current users as sort of the you don't want to take them for granted and then when a user actually leaves your service, you want to reach out and find out why both because that personal Outreach can make the difference between leaving and staying. Sometimes people just need to know that you care and it's going to get better and because even if you can't bring them back, There's a chance that you can learn from the mistake. You made that caused them to leave and fix it. So you don't churn users out the same way in the future. And the final one is again. The one that I'm probably too OCD about but it's social media and communities. You need to know how people are talking about your brand. You need to reach out, and make sure that when somebody does have a bad experience and they're talking about it that you make it, right. Problems are inevitable in startups. There's going to be issues. You're not going to have the perfect product. Things are going to break things are going to go wrong. That's not important. What's important is to always make it right to always go the extra mile and make that customer happy 12 tractor, who's had a terrible experience on? Your platform is enough to reverse the progress of 10 Champions. As all it takes is one person out there to say. Now, you shouldn't use those guys for X y&z reason. To ruin a ton of momentum. So even if it's there's examples in the early days where we would mess up, massive orders. We print the color slightly wrong. It would be the wrong size and it would be like half of our gmv for that month and we would know we got it wrong. The customer would be unhappy and sort of this instinct is well, you know, it's only a little bit off or it's not completely wrong. It'll be fine. But the reality is you just got to bite the bullet and make sure that it's right. And those customers, the customers that are In originally the most frustrated tend to turn into the biggest Champions and the longest term users. And the last one I want to talk about is finding product and Market fit. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I mentioned this earlier. But the product you launch with will almost certainly not be the product that takes you to scale. And so your job in those early moments in those early days of a start-up is to progress and iterate as fast as possible to reach that product that does have Market fit. And as engineer. Your instinct is going to be to build a platform with beautiful clean code that scales, right? You don't want to write, sort of duct tape code that's going to pile on technical debt, but you need to optimize for Speed over scalability and clean code. And sort of an example of this is in the early days. We had a couple Enterprise customers come to us sort of bigger, nonprofits and say hey, we really like your service, but you're missing these fundamental things so we can't we're not going to Use it and we looked at sort of what it would take to build out those features and we weren't sure they were going to work long term, but we wanted to try it and my co-founder Evan who is our CTO and a million times better developer than I am sort of ran the math and figure it out. That if we did it the right way it was going to take about a month to build out these features and in a start-up a month, you know, you live in dog years, a month is a year and that just wasn't going to do. So. He actually went out duplicated the codebase. Did the database and was able to basically build a completely different product that he didn't have to worry about the existing users, for to serve these Enterprise customers. We gave them the tool they on-boarded. They generate a lot of Revenue. Eventually we learned what features work or and integrated them into the core product. But what would have taken a month? We were able to do in, you know, three to four days. A great rule of thumb is to only worry about the next order of magnitude. So when you have your 10th user you shouldn't be wondering. Well, how are we going to serve a million users? You should be worried about? How are we going to get to 100? When you're at 100? You should think about 1,000. It's one of those things where necessity is the mother of invention of all inventions. So when you hit that Breaking Point, like the Twitter fail, whale is a great example and Teespring there were months months stretches. Every single night, the site would crash every night and during the day and every single person on the team would go to sleep with their phone on loud under their pillow. So that inevitably when the buzzer went off we could quickly get up restart the servers and go back to sleep and this would happen daily, but the reality is that it was worth it and you know, you'll end up with these huge pain points and all this for technical debt and regret but it's worth it just to get to that end goal and that product fit. Faster, you will make it work. You will survive that. Those sort of bumps are just speed bumps and speed is so so important early. So the, the lesson that I've been learning lately is, you know, you want to do these things that don't scale as long as possible. There's not some magical moment. It's not the series a, it's not when you hit a certain Revenue Milestone that you stop doing things that don't scale. This is one of your biggest advantages. As a company and the moment you give it up, you're giving your competitors that are smaller. They can still do these things that advantage over you. So as long as humanly possible, as long as it is a net positive, you need to be spending time, talking to your users. You need to move fast in development as fast as possible, but don't give it up willingly. It should be ripped from you. And so, we're trying to practice what? I preach. I want to give you guys my email address. If you guys have any questions if you want to learn about Teespring, if you want to print some T-shirts, fingers crossed just shoot me an email. I'd love to help and I'd love to speak to you. And the last thing is we've created official how to start a start-up tea with Sam and all proceeds are going to w e. I couldn't miss this opportunity to sell. So if you guys want to grab one of the official T's just go to Teespring.com., Startup, and it's supporting a great cause. Thank you. Sure. Go ahead. Yeah, the t-shirt printing business. Speaker 1 It seems like it has a lot of combat. Speaker 2 So what made you? What convinced you to think? This is a viable Market, even when sure, you know, so the question was, the t-shirt. Printing business has a lot of competition. What would convince us to get into the market? I think there's two factors to it. So first, I completely agree from the outside. People have been telling us that this is a silly idea since day one and sort of every order of magnitude. We reach, people will come and say, hey, that's a terrible terrible idea. Why are you doing that? But the reason that we launched Teespring is because we ran into a personal pain point where we had a need and we looked at the current Solutions. I was a student at Brown and I was trying to create a remember the bar shirt for a dive bar that got shut down and I realized that nothing needed. Nothing matched. Mine. Needs and so because I knew that I had that pain point, and I knew there was Market fit, and I had seen people adopt the product. I knew there was something there and it was also one of those things where you can sort of feel the you can, you can sort of feel the wind on your back where people are adopting the product quickly. Your, the pain point is clearly there. It's not a met need. So I would say that oftentimes, great ideas, start look by looking like silly ideas, and then you can sort of feel out whether or Not, there's a scalable business here by how people are adopting. It. Is it possible to bring customers aboard? Sure. No, you know, today our biggest customer base our entrepreneurs who are trying to build Brands and businesses, you know, we have a little over 1000 people that make their full time living on Teespring today via Brands. They've launched. And the other side is influencers. So YouTube Stars. Reddit, communities bloggers who want to add product merchandise as a way to sort of create a brand and monetize that affinity. So those are our two biggest markets. We still do work with a lot of nonprofits and love working with them. It's still a part of our business. Just not the majority. Amber of Kiko and then Justin Stevie Speaker 1 Whispering. I'll be there. I started a bunch of startups, but I think you've heard a lot of awesome, you know, kind of how did I get started stories? So I'm going to talk about something very specific that people always have questions with which is press and like, how do you get it? How does it work? It's something. This is kind of like an Abridged version of what we talk about at Y combinator and hopefully you guys will find it helpful. So You know, a lot of people, I think, when they first get started with entrepreneurship think about getting press and being in the press as something that happens magically as they think about it as like something that journalists are like out there like trying to find the best stories and really, you know, like discover the blight. It's like a meritocracy which is like absolutely not the case. So before you think about press, one of the things you really want to think about is who you want to reach and like what's your actual goal. Right. A lot of people I know what I got started. I wanted to just be in the news because I thought that's what like he did as an important company and it turns out it. If you don't have any goals, you're not going to achieve them, right? I mean that's true of like pretty much everything. And with press if you just like aimlessly, want to be covered. It's not really going to do anything for your startup. So getting like, in the news is nice because you can send it to your mom or and say, hey, I have a real job, you know, look, we're in the New York Times, but if you don't have a actual goal for your like a business goal. With it. It's really just like not a good use of time. So, you know, there's many different goals. One example is you know, you might want to with Socialcam which was a spinoff of Justin TV. It was like an app that was kind of like video Instagram and our goal was really to be known as like a video like Instagram app and like be thought of in that context when it was, you know, time to pitch are like Silicon Valley, investors and and influencers. And so, we really wanted to get in like, Tech press and kind of be Positioned as this like new hot social lab with exact. One of my goals was the second like to get customers. So exact was like a cleaning, local cleaning service and our goal was to get people in San Francisco to use. It wasn't like, useful to get national press because, you know, 99% of those people can use it. So we really targeted initially a lot of, you know, like SF Chronicle and a like local San Francisco, press that would directly talk to people who could potentially Or app for twitch which is probably the thing that you guys mostly know. It was, you know, Twitches aqui es PN for gaming or kind of like a live streaming community of Gamers. And our goal was to with press was like to reach the gaming industry because like, when we when we start it now, it's like 55 million uniques and like people in the gaming industry, know about it, but when we started, nobody really knew that like it was a place to advertise and like it wasn't like known as like a, you know, we were very nascent, small gaming. Unity. And our goal was to like, get people in the gaming industry, whether they were developers or advertisers to think about us as like an important place where like influencers were. So we really targeted industry trades and Game Dev blogs and places where like Gamers were no games be stuff like that. The industry was reading. So, you know, what's an actual story. I think there's, you know, there's a bunch of different types of stories. But these are usually the ones that you see in startups. Those are like product, launches like you let just launched a new version of your app. There's fundraising for whatever reason, you know, press loves to write about fundraising even though it's not very interesting. So, you know, like if you raise a million dollar seed round, pretty much you can get that covered Milestones are metrics like you've achieved a million dollars. A week in Revenue that one of our one of our the the company that bought exact just announced that they achieved a million dollars a week in revenue and was covered pretty widely like business stories which generally happen when you're like already a successful company, someone like a New York Times, our New Yorker business magazine will like want to cover, like kind of the story of your startup. Usually don't have to worry about that in the beginning, what I like to call stunts, which are like I know if you guys remember but a couple of years ago this YC company called we pay dropped a block of ice with money Frozen in it outside of the PayPal like a PayPal developers conference because they were like PayPal was like no in the news for freezing, you know, like various developers accounts. And so that was like a widely covered because it was just so, you know, kind of an interesting thing and it really it got them in the story. Right there would have been talked about in the context of PayPal at all. Really. Hiring announcements fear of big enough company and you hire someone really important people want to cover that and then contributed articles like, you writing, some sort of Industry overview or some opinion piece in like maybe a tech blog or site like that. So those are like, you know, basically any of those things can can be stories. One of the things that people usually don't think about is that, you know, you really have to think about like everything when you start a start-up. You think that everything you're doing is interesting. But that's not true for like other people. Write like you what you need really need to think about is like objectively. If I wasn't the founder of this company, what I want to like read a story about what I'm pitching, right? So, you know, your incremental feature release your 2.01, you know, feature release might not be interesting. If you like just because you added like, you know, find your contacts in Facebook or something like you have to, you really want to take a step back before you invest the time and like, actually trying to pitch a story and think, does anyone? Will anyone actually want to read this? Because what people are, you know, journalists and bloggers are looking for is things that people actually want to read, right? The other thing is, like, you don't actually have to be very original. You're pressed in news. Doesn't have to be original, you know, like you don't you just have to be like what I like to call original enough, right? So you don't want to be the second cooler company to raise five million dollars on Kickstarter, right. That's like that the first guy gets like all the news but like if you're the I think the first a video game console to raise ten million dollars on Kickstarter like Ouya was that was like, there is like a million dollars in 24 hours. That was like, huge news because they were kind of like the first in that category, right? Even though other people, had raised a lot of money on Kickstarter before. So just like think about your stories in the context of like where they are in the like what else has been written about and if they're like kind of Novel enough and they haven't been something that was like just written about in the news. So Them like actual mechanics of getting a story. This is like pretty tactical. So if you want to get your news in, you know, the Press. Basically, there's some easy simple steps. So it's basically getting press is like you can think of it like a sales funnel. So you're gonna talk to a lot of people and not all of them are going to convert, right? And so you shouldn't be upset when someone like one individual person or report or whatever. It doesn't write your story. The first thing is like you have to think of a story, right? It's gonna be one of those. Probably one of those things that I've listed up for the second step is like you want to get introduced to a reporter or multiple reporters, who are going to write about your thing. It's like much much easier just like any sort of Business Development to actually get in touch with them through someone. It's like, you know, rather than cold emailing them. The best thing to do. I found is like you want to go to entrepreneurs who are just written about like your Maybe start a start-up and they were covered on TechCrunch get them to introduce you to your that reporter who wrote about them. The reason that's good is because like from the entrepreneurs perspective like the easiest thing to do in the world is introduce you to a reporter who already wrote about them, right? They don't like need anything else from that reporter. They're actually doing that person. A favor of your stories. Interesting. It's not like you're asking for interest to investors or potential people that they would want to hire employees. And then from the reporter's perspective. They're An intro to someone who, you know, they already vetted as interesting. Like, they're getting any answer from someone who they know. They thought was interesting enough to write about. And so, like by the transitive property, you're basically going to, they're going to think you're probably interesting. So you have like an email that's like, oh, you know, from this guy that introduces you to the reporter and you want to get in contact with them with enough time that you can actually get them to like write a story probably. We can advance or more because they're not going to like drop everything you're doing to just write about your news. So a lot of people especially first-time entrepreneurs will come and say like, oh Justin I'm watching this product tomorrow. Like can you get me in this, you know, TechCrunch or something? And that's like probably not going to happen unless you already have a relationship, the best way to do it. So the best thing to do is like, give yourself some lead time, get that intro in advance and then so then you should like once. Once you've set a date for your news, to go out. You're going to want your product like Like in two weeks you have this intro you set up some sort of meeting and you really want to get the reporter to like invest time and effort in the UI because they don't like there's like a kind of a sunk cost fallacy at play. Basically, if you the more time and then they spend with you, the more likely they are to, like, actually write something. So, you the best thing to do is get like a face-to-face meeting, right? Lots of people report. Bloggers actively. Don't want to meet you face-to-face, but like if not that then Like a phone call right and get on the phone with them. The worst thing to do is like just have an email exchange, right? Because it's very easy for them to like forget about it, ignore it. So you want to like actually try to get in contact with them set up a meeting. Okay. So then the next step is actually pitched them. What I usually do is actually write out all my new like this story that I would want to see published like in bullet points and I like, will write out the store at my Deal story and I'll memorize it like the entire like set of bullet points. And when I have a conversation with them, if it's in person, I like walk them through this. Like I have a conversation that's like structured like my outline and they'll be like taking notes right and then they'll go and transcribe those notes into a story and so it's like a tell like what I wrote will eventually be translated into a actual story and, you know, by preparing you can actually can much more easily control the conversation and not forget critical things like You know, your Co Fountain mentioning your co-founders name or like what the fault of features in your awesome app. Are if it's I'm doing this like on the phone I will like have this bullet points in front of me and I will make sure to like walk through a conversation that at includes all those things. So, you know, you do that. They you have a pitch to take. They take notes. They're going to write the story at this time. And then the next thing is like follow-up. Like a a couple days or a day before your actual news goes out. You want to Send them an email that says like, you know, this is the time. We're launching the app. Like just thanks for meeting. Here's like collateral like media. If you have like a video or photos or something, you want them include screenshots like how to spell your co-founders names and your name just like include all the information that I really care about and I bowled it right? And then that's it. Then hopefully the the day comes, you, press submit on the release to the App Store and at the same time, they release their Article on TechCrunch and you are famous. Okay. So a lot of people ask us about PR firms. So, you know, I think in the beginning, it's kind of like everything else you do at a start-up. You want to do it yourself before you hire someone else to do it. And it's actually pretty easy, especially with tech press who, you know, and bloggers who, like, constantly need new things to write about and, you know, you should, I strongly encourage people to like, try it themselves and kind of get started by learning the process themselves before they hire. Anyone one thing I'll say is that, like, firms can only help you with like, Of the contacts and the logistics but they can't help. You know, what's interesting about your company or very, you know, I've never had anyone who's been able to tell me what the stories that I'm producing are. They've only been able to tell me, you know, like you're you know, like here's our the here's a list of reporters that you might want to contact. So, you know, you really have to be responsible for thinking about like what's interesting about your company of what are you doing? You know, what's the roadmap of interesting things that you're working on? They're also really expensive. You know, I think we were spending between in five thousand and twenty thousand dollars a month, which is like at very, you know for various firms. That's a lot for a start-up right? You should it's generally not a good use of money. I would say especially in the very early days. You're getting presses is a lot of work. So you should really make sure it's worth it. You know, like I said, it really getting pressed doesn't mean it feels like it's like a vanity metric, right? It feels like you're being successful because lots of successful companies, you know, I Google and Facebook are covered in the press all the time, but it doesn't actually mean you're successful. It doesn't, you know, actually give you you know mean that you're getting, you're making money, you're getting users. You're making those users happy. It's, you know, sometimes it's a really good strategy. You forgetting your first hundred or two hundred or thousand customers, but it's really not a scalable user acquisition strategy. So it's something that's really just like a bootstrap. You can't like, just get like Infinity articles written about you. Like, eventually people are going to like get tired of hearing about your company. And usually, that happens pretty pretty quickly. Right. The pull point about news is it's new. And so it's pretty pretty, pretty hard less your Google to like get covered in the Press like every week, you know, something to you. So if you decide it's worth it though, like you do want to have like a regular heartbeat of news. So that's like something where you know, you're planning out. Those types of what you're think about what you're doing that matches those, maybe seven story types in the future and like, you know, when I was working primarily on marketing and PR it would be, I would like make a schedule on like a calendar and of what when we're going to launch things and like, make sure to space them out, but like have them, you know, appear regularly at regular intervals. So that people like didn't Forget about us and we could kind of maximize our coverage and you don't really want to keep your contacts fresh. It's like really a relationships business. So once you someone writes about you should keep going back to them for four more for writing about, you know to write about you in the future. It's kind of like, you know, when when basically people, you know, you're more likely to do something for someone. You've already like it done something for you really like it's if you just, you know, I would try to establish good relationships with a couple reporters. It's over time that you can go to to break news and it will come in handy later. If you ever have on the position, if you're fortunate enough to be in the position where people are writing negative things about you, you know, having relationships will help you, you know, kind of get your side of the story out. And the last thing is like, you know, it's kind of Golden Rule really, or maybe more like a Pay, It Forward really applies here. Like you should help your fellow entrepreneurs, get get coverage because they will help you get coverage. The best way to get covered is really through these like warm introductions. And so, you know, when I'm never I'm meeting with reporters, I'll always help like throwing out the names of like other things that I think would be interesting stories for them. And usually that comes back. They the reporters like it because they it's like helping them find interesting. Is and you're more likely to get leads back from those entrepreneurs that you help out. So if you're interested in learning more about procedures to resources that I really liked Jason, Kincaid was former TechCrunch reporter, just wrote a really really great overview that covers a lot of things. I just talked about in more depth and from the, you know, blogger side. That was a really great book and then kind of an evil resource. Is this book? Trust me, I'm lying. Which was written by at the one of the former marketer at American Apparel. And he talks about like a lot of ways that he Pretty like evilly actually manipulated the Press but I think it's a pretty good look into like the psychology of like how people you know, things spread on the internet, you know, how stories spread on the internet and I it's might be valuable to take a look at cool. That's that's basically it. One question. Just 12 quiet. Okay, two questions. Or 0 questions. When do I stop start wearing? When is the right time to start worrying about press all together? I think it's a really good way. Like, if you just the first time I launch my first products in our first start up, for a lot of them. We got like, zero attention and we didn't really know how to even get 100 users. I think it's a really fine way to get 100 users and a lot of companies and why see, when they first launched, their product will encourage them to get out and just do one TechCrunch story to like get a few. People to see it and it's good to get in the practice. I wouldn't like obsess over getting light coverage and multiple Outlets or anything like that. In the very beginning. All right, anything else their biggest story about your basement? The Pokemon things? So like, how much of a prick of a role? Did you guys actually play and getting out? Yeah, or was that just like so twitch? You know, had this thing called twitchplayspokemon where developers set up a like a Pokemon like Game Boy game. That was controlled by the chat. So, you know, millions of people would be typing in A, or B and like, the character would run one around aimlessly and that was like, a huge news story. And I think that what we did was, you know, there's a couple of Parts one. We set the stage by having other news stories that. So when someone from the BBC would Google like twitch and be like, what is this crazy thing that everyone on Reddit is talking about? They would like have some Context. The other thing is, like, we didn't come up with the idea for a toy that was like fortuitous, but we helped, like, give it legs by, you know, making the company available to talk to the reporters and suggesting follow-up stories about like there were stories, not just about Twitch Plays Pokemon because 100,000 people watching this Pokemon game, but because, you know, it finally, like there were stories when they beat the game and there were stories when they launched Twitch Plays Pokemon, you know, Crystal or whatever. The next Pokemon version. One was and like so we kind of gave that story like a little bit more legs, but we didn't, you know originated it. It was the community really who originated it. Alright, I think that's it. Thank you very much.