One of the best so far. From speech delivery to content.
Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#22OOph.... I can't listen to him longer than ten minutes. Someone please tell him to stop talking that way. What is it??? the upturn at the end of every other sentence.
It's called a High Rising Terminal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
Very common in Australia. Seems some Brits do it as well.
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#23Amazing talks. Alex is the best in the world at this.
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#24This is a great talk, but I can't help but think this is tailored to bigger companies than YC-application stage start-ups. Alex spends lots of time talking about the distinction between power users and marginal users, which is incredibly valuable advice for the AirBnBs, Dropboxes, Facebooks, etc but a different problem set than the 'normal' start-up.
For emerging product-market fit companies, your power users are your lifeblood. Cultivation super-users early is the make or break for seed companies. These super users are testers, referrals, product-definers, everything. 50M+ user problems are just so limited.
In any case, great talk, but definitely targets growth marketers more than start-up folks. Especially liked the idea of tying 'magic numbers' to logical reasoning, not done enough in the growth world.
Edit: Much better in the tactical section going through marketing tactics.
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#25Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#26This is a great talk, but I can't help but think this is tailored to bigger companies than YC-application stage start-ups. Alex spends lots of time talking about the distinction between power users and marginal users, which is incredibly valuable advice for the AirBnBs, Dropboxes, Facebooks, etc but a different problem set than the 'normal' start-up. For emerging product-market fit companies, your power users are you…
Great talk, but I agree that like a lot of startup advice out there, it is for companies that have a product-market fit.
I've been thinking why the startup community has so few talks about product design. We have a lot of advice about tech stacks, growth hacking, rising funding, building a team, even some about customer research, but surprisingly little about design.
Yet, product design is one of the key activities to achieve product market fit: you can understand the problem, but if your product isn't easy enough to use, PM fit is hard to achieve.
For example, you can find a deep analysis of a different SaaS models, but it is surprisingly rare that someone does a deep analysis of e.g. Facebook's UI and writes a blog post about it.
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#27Awesome talk, just like all the other lectures. Appreciate YC putting this out to the world for free.
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#28Enjoyed the talk. Key takeaway for me was the need for explicit sequencing of product market fit and growth hacking (i.e, don’t bother with growth hacking if you don’t have PM fit). I suppose it is obvious intuitively, but demonstrating PM fit via retention metrics (“make sure your retention flat lines at the appropriate level”) was an interesting take. It can be easy to create work and activity doing growth hacking…
This needs to be better understood/accepted by startups, but it's a bitter pill to swallow for many entrepreneurs. I wrote a book on growth hacking and now often get requests (sometimes casual, sometimes formal) on how a startup can "growth hack" or accelerate their growth. Then when I ask about the basics like target market, retention metrics, customer feedback etc - I get a bunch of blank stares. It's no good drivi…
What is the book?
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This needs to be better understood/accepted by startups, but it's a bitter pill to swallow for many entrepreneurs. I wrote a book on growth hacking and now often get requests (sometimes casual, sometimes formal) on how a startup can "growth hack" or accelerate their growth. Then when I ask about the basics like target market, retention metrics, customer feedback etc - I get a bunch of blank stares. It's no good drivi…
What is the book?
didn't want to seem too self-promotional but since you asked!
Re: Lecture 6: How to Start a Startup
#30This is a great talk, but I can't help but think this is tailored to bigger companies than YC-application stage start-ups. Alex spends lots of time talking about the distinction between power users and marginal users, which is incredibly valuable advice for the AirBnBs, Dropboxes, Facebooks, etc but a different problem set than the 'normal' start-up. For emerging product-market fit companies, your power users are you…
I think it's a very important distinction to make, especially early on, to make sure that founders focus on power users and completely ignore casuals. It's tempting to try to get interest from marginal users, because there is many more of them than potential power users, but it's going to do you no good if power users don't see value in what you build.