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Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

startupclass.samaltman.com

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Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#11

Post by akbar501 »

Adora's talk was very well done. Her use of metrics and graphs to explain various parts of a startup's life was valuable. Frankly, each type of company she discussed (B2B, consumer, etc) could be expanded into their own talks.

One point that rang true was when she said that you may hit a point where the economics of a specific business don't make sense. IME, the economics of a business often look one way before you start, but become increasingly real as you gain early experience with the business. I'm not sure if she was trying to hint that a pivot discussion needs to happen after the real economics of an idea become known, but that's what I got from this point.

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#12

Post by mdda »

prostoalex wrote: post #9

The reasoning behind the ad campaign is that if the ad price multiplied by conversion is below LTV, it's worth it. This seems to be fine in a market with few other competitors, but in heavily contested categories (e.g., SaaS) shouldn't you be multiplying that by customer churn? Seems a bit presumptions to assume that once a customer signs up, they're going to spend 100% of assumed LTV with you and you only.

LTV normally incorporates churn as part of the calculation. If it didn't then unless you have a time-value-of-money discount in there, the LTV of a customer would be infinite. Perhaps you're positing that the LTV refers to the actual physical Lifetime of a customer - but, statistically, that just turns into a churnrate too (sad to say, even 100% of a consumer's lifetime is more than a 0.5% churn rate spread across the whole population).

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#13

Post by prostoalex »

mdda wrote: post #12
prostoalex wrote: post #9

The reasoning behind the ad campaign is that if the ad price multiplied by conversion is below LTV, it's worth it. This seems to be fine in a market with few other competitors, but in heavily contested categories (e.g., SaaS) shouldn't you be multiplying that by customer churn? Seems a bit presumptions to assume that once a customer signs up, they're going to spend 100% of assumed LTV with you and you only.

LTV normally incorporates churn as part of the calculation. If it didn't then unless you have a time-value-of-money discount in there, the LTV of a customer would be infinite. Perhaps you're positing that the LTV refers to the actual physical Lifetime of a customer - but, statistically, that just turns into a churnrate too (sad to say, even 100% of a consumer's lifetime is more than a 0.5% churn rate spread across th…

Thanks for the clarification, makes sense.

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#14

Post by randomsearch »

Loving these lectures so far. Anyone involved in or thinking about a startup should watch them. The recommended reading is also excellent.

MOOCs are notorious for fast drop-off in the size of their engaged audience. It will be interesting to see if the same applies to this lecture series (I realise it's not a MOOC!). Perhaps this explains the reduced number of comments.

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#15

Post by diminish »

soneca wrote: post #6

I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake. Underestimating this initial process…

This lecture is a bit more dense in practical content, so some people like me, need more time to watch fully again and digest before echoing in a chamber :)

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#16

Post by rajensanghvi »

clairity wrote: post #8
soneca wrote: post #6

I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake. Underestimating this initial process…

this lecture definitely has the most practical advice so far (not that the others weren't good as well). adora also spoke at the female founders conference ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eP3-ra8nZY ) and her story about her and her brother's persistence in systematically climbing the learning curve of product/market fit was one of the most memorable. you can tell that she was speaking from real, hard-earned exper…

agree on the basketball reference, the analogy definitely made it easy to understand

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#17

Post by hellodevnull »

diminish wrote: post #15
soneca wrote: post #6

I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake. Underestimating this initial process…

This lecture is a bit more dense in practical content, so some people like me, need more time to watch fully again and digest before echoing in a chamber :)

What I liked about her lecture is that unlike the previous ones that were full of general ideas about starting a startup, she related her practical advice to her own experiences and the mistakes she made. Examples are very useful and for me they ingrain the underlying ideas to a greater extent. Also learning about what not to do is just as, if not more important (see PG's lecture of counterintuitive parts of startups) than learning about what to do.

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#18

Post by jaoued »

I would love to know how many sign-ups and customer appointments did Homejoy get after this lecture, across the 5 countries it covers. Am sure the ROI on this 50 minutes lecture will give more sign-ups than any FB or google ad campaign :-). What a cunning way to grow!

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#19

Post by jkaunisv1 »

soneca wrote: post #6

I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake. Underestimating this initial process…

I think it generated less comments because a lot of the content has been seen before, frequently. It needs to be in that course, but the HN audience has probably read a lot of that advice already.

I'm expecting much of this course to repeat things we already know from reading PG's essays and other blogs, condensed and clarified. That's not a bad thing, as you said it's good to keep it in our heads. And I think there will be new nuggets of wisdom embedded in the stuff we "already know".

Re: Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

#20

Post by xiaoma »

The interesting thing to me is that the "n00b approach" is basically what Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and friends did at Paypal.

1. build product in secret

2. exclusive press launch

3. wait for users

4. buy users

5. give up

They built the product in secret and raised money. They did a huge press launch "beaming" money from PDA to PDA. They waited for users, expecting Palm Pilots to be huge only to see they weren't. They decided to focus on eBay sellers and literally bought users for $20 each. The difference is they didn't give up.

Palantir and Space X also started by building products in secret, press launches and then lengthy sales cycles to get users. Ditto for Apple's "restart" in the late 90s and early 2000s. Maybe a relentless n00b approach is the way to build more transformative products and companies.

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