11–20 of 34 posts
Wanted to say that thanks for the talk on Startup Conference. I still have the mental picture of the table with the wine bottles. On what timeframe did you accumulate those bottles? Wiggles of false hope? (Sorry I don't have a better question )
i.e. when growth is flat in the trough of sorrow, wine consumption goes up linearly week/week... that said, even when you start growing, you develop new problems and can gathering bottles even faster ;)
When deciding what "non-scalable thing" you were going to do, did you ever wonder: will this come back and bite me in the butt when I can no longer do this with a large user-base because of either time or monetary restraints?
Wanted to say that thanks for the talk on Startup Conference. I still have the mental picture of the table with the wine bottles. On what timeframe did you accumulate those bottles? Wiggles of false hope? (Sorry I don't have a better question )
F(wine consumption) = ∫ f(growth) i.e. when growth is flat in the trough of sorrow, wine consumption goes up linearly week/week... that said, even when you start growing, you develop new problems and can gathering bottles even faster ;)
Hi Ooshma, Curious as to how you found and got your first batch of users that loved you and were paying for the product.
I put our promo cards at coffee shops and laundromats, emailed meetup groups, went door to door, bought people coffee to demo our product at Starbucks, walked around farmer's markets and gave people coupons and samples, and literally pounded the pavement.
Then, you follow up with them personally. Do they want to order again? Why or why not? What would make them order again? Are they willing to let you visit them in person? What patterns are you noticing in the early feedback?
High level: first you develop a small core user base, then you learn everything about them and communicate with them constantly to find what is secretly working and not working. I would go to people's houses and talk to them and watch them eat dinner multiple times per week. That led me to our 10-minute dinner kits. The AirBNB founders went door-to-door to people's houses and helped them take the right photos to market their homes. This grit is the difference between the want-rapreneurs and the entrepreneurs.
Hi Ooshma! -- you mentioned in your talk that you + team did things that didn't scale to delight existing users and acquire new ones. Kevin Hale brought this up during his Startup School lecture, writing Christmas cards to all of their users, but referenced a user writing to him the following year asking when he would receive this year's xmas card. When deciding what "non-scalable thing" you were going to do, did you…
See my other answer about getting our first users and then here is Part II of that answer:
AirBNB scaled product appeal by later building out an entire internal marketplace and international network of freelance photographers to take great photos of all their hosts' properties.
I care deeply about the personal touch of our business and personalization in both our communications and the dinner kits given to each member every week. We have built software and systems that target my direct communications and our overall lifecycle emails in a very nuanced way across our community. We slice and dice our community in different ways constantly for all daily experiments, communications, and backend analyses. I hate sending someone an email that is not relevant to them.
When you do something that doesn't scale, you gain key insights into what is working for your company. You may not be able to replicate the exact same action from the early days, but you can certainly work to build a scalable solution that replicates those key insights and yields the same success.
Hi Ooshma! -- you mentioned in your talk that you + team did things that didn't scale to delight existing users and acquire new ones. Kevin Hale brought this up during his Startup School lecture, writing Christmas cards to all of their users, but referenced a user writing to him the following year asking when he would receive this year's xmas card. When deciding what "non-scalable thing" you were going to do, did you…
Hey Ooshma! I saw you talk live :) We met several years ago when you were working out the enterprise version of Gobble & I was an undergrad at Stanford, but never kept in touch. Let me know if coffee in Palo Alto sometime works for you, would be great to catch up.
When you're preparing to pitch to potential investors, what do you do to get yourself in "the zone"?
p.s. If your answer involves listening to music, I'd love to hear about your playlist!