Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups

my name is gustav i i'm gonna give a talk on growth for startups um this is gonna be for um some of you guys not super relevant right now because you might not not launched and thinking too much about growth when you're having launch isn't that relevant but for those of you that have launched this is hopefully going to be good talking so i'm going to cover three different things today first i'm going to talk about product market fit and retention uh the reason that that relates to growth so much is because working on growth before you have product market fit and good retention is not a good idea the second thing i'm going to talk about is growth channels and tactics these things definitely apply after you have launched and often after you have a good product market fit you've found something that people really want and then you want to scale it up to the the larger world and lastly i want to talk about how you make decisions when you have several people on your team you want to start redoing things and you're not really sure exactly if you're making the right decisions or not and this is also things that apply when you're a little bit bigger so my background uh i learned most of these things i'm going to talk about at airbnb i worked on the growth team for uh almost five years from where two people until over 100 people on that team this is the team back in 2015 most of the lessons i'll talk to today are things i learned there most of you are going to be somewhere on this line most startups don't have price market fit founders tell themselves that they do and they try to convince themselves that this is working but the truth is for most companies is not working so that means you're going to be somewhere on this line people also have this idea that if i launch my product it will work somehow it's going to work if i just tell the world that i am my i built my is not now there now unfortunately that's not the case the world is a really busy place and there isn't really lots of people waiting for you to launch your product they're not standing there and they're not going to try it the moment you launch it that is unfortunately not the truth and for many people who have never thought of these questions before of how do i reach the world this actually comes as a surprise people have been used to working in big companies where this is not a problem people be used to going to school or other areas where this is just not a problem in this case when you launch a startup it's all down to you and these are it is going to be a problem in the very very early days there's a great article that i recommend for you guys to read on this this is called doing things that don't scale about paul graham he wrote that six years ago it is about the early days of the airbnb story and the thing that's really important about this is as a founder you need to keep two different skill sets in mind as your company grow in the beginning of your company you're going to do a lot of things that don't feel right at the when they don't feel natural to you because it's not the kind of thing that you learned in your previous jobs or in school it's just like the most kind of um physical or real things that you have to do that you aren't going to be relevant later on but later on as your company grows bigger you're going to be doing a lot of things that are things that relate directly to software and other things to scale your company so these are two things two skill sets so you have to keep in mind at the same time nyc we have this thing where where we tell companies that you just launched uh you got to do things that don't scale and we got lots of these mbas that go went to school and said well this idea does not scale standing outside of this store or sitting in this in this elevator to sell people something that certainly doesn't scale correct that does not scale but that is where everyone needs to start and if you went to school and you learned they should only work on things that really scale you're gonna have to unlearn that skill because when you start your company the most important thing is going to do things that don't scale so if you get comfortable with that idea this is the early days of airbnb so this is sometimes in 2009 they were just a few people the article i mentioned earlier doing things that don't scale tells the story of the first year or two of airbnb when the founders came to yc they had spent almost a year trying to get mb off the ground it didn't really work this was the first version of the airbnb website airbed and breakfast.com in fact the website itself didn't really speak to what the what the what the company does it was started as a website to offer air mattresses to people that visited design conferences and they had to navigate the way to find the place to where mb is today whenever we joined yc the first question they got from paul graham was who are your users and at a time the site looks something like this you click on a listing and you had three different pieces of information you had a photo of the of the host you have one photo in this case of the building from the outside and then you have one map of where that place was now at the time the only comparison to uh what a site like this would look like would be craigslist so craigslist wasn't a lot better than this so at least they met that criteria but it wasn't something that would make airbnb take off they didn't really have in the product will make everybody take off the things that were missing is is this a good listing how does this listing actually look like can i trust the host lots of things that were missing in that early product and how do you learn that the way they learned that is they went and talked to the host on their first week in yc paul graham told the founders of amb you guys go meet your host where are your hosts most of our hosts are in new york we don't have that many but most of them are in new york it's the flu to new york undercover not on the cover they claim to be um hired photographers for airbnb and breakfast so when i met with all the hosts they said want to come by your home and take photos they didn't say that they were the founders because that made the company sound much smaller they came and met with a host and while one of the founders were taking the photos of the listings to make this look a lot better the other founders sat down with the host and asked them questions about how what what are the challenges you're having with the product like what are the things that are not working can you show me how you use the product and by doing that they got for the first time to meet the people that were the customers which they really haven't done before and they got to see how they use the products that's doing things that don't scale and that is nothing that scales you can't go and fly to meet every single one of your customers but when you start doing that you will learn things that you can't learn sitting in front of a computer so they learned that this payouts things didn't work or this there was a big ui bug on this page or didn't work on an internet explorer well all these things that you can't learn sitting in your in front of a computer they went back to san francisco um back to y combinator and um they sent an email today the morning after and said here are all the photos we took of your house they're now up on urban breakfast.com and by the way we fixed half of the bugs that you emailed us about or we fixed the bug that you told us about yesterday um that made the host love them and those hosts became the reason their b eventually took off like doing doing things that don't scale fixing the product making the product work for the early host we which became the backbones of the early days of a b so the lesson here is that founders are the ones who make starters take off the founders you guys are the ones that make the stars take off you're going to have to do unconventional things you're going to have to do things that don't feel right certainly going to do things that you didn't learn in in business school and just going to do the things that are needed and this is basically what the yc batch is about when someone joins yc we're going to be like you're going to launch because that's the most important thing you do right now but once you've launched is like how do i get users like you got to figure out how to do it and it's different for every company for many other companies that means sales for other companies that means doing things that don't scale typically people start with their friends and then friends of friends and then hopefully you get one step further the people that are now not your friends and friends and they're going to give you true opinion about your company those are the people you're going to have to reach early on it doesn't really start with like i launched my website and i put up google ads or i launched my website and somehow it's being discovered that's not how companies get started that's how they end up much later but that's not how they get started there's only one way to grow when you're really small and that is doing things that don't scale all right next topic i'm going to talk about product market fit this is a terminology that probably most of you have heard of this is a thing that's been hard to measure or hard for people to say do i have project market fit or not a lot of people like to tell themselves that they do have product market fit um it's this thing that we throw around as a way to say my product is great so now i have price market fit i would argue that there are some ways you can measure product market fit and there are many ways that you can't so let's talk about the one thing that i think is the best way to do that i think that the best way to figure out a product market fit is to use data unbiased data to understand if you basically have made something people want the two ways that i do that when i start that the first way is i try to figure out what is the metric the data point that represents the value of your company that's the first thing i do the second thing i do is try to figure out how often should i really be doing that a great example might be startup school the metric here is like are people showing up to the video talks at startup school how often is that it's every week all right that's pretty easy but most companies can be defined this way let's give some example so airbnb what is the the metric that represents the value well it's the bookings and the stays it's not the searches search is not that it's going to be the bookings in the state when i travel and b i've experienced the value so now i know what it is about how often do people do this well travel is actually mostly an annual thing you don't really travel every month most people don't do that so when we were measuring retention um at air b we're looking at annual let's look at instagram what's the expected use case of instagram it's basically just coming back to instagram most people are not expected to post photos every day it's just gonna be coming back to instagram and viewing photos that's what most people do and that's fine that's actually what they want they want some people to post for sometimes but most of the time just coming back is good enough how often probably every day let's think of a b2b company gusto so for gus though the most valuable thing that they do for their customers is their own payroll and they pay out money to employees they're they're the employees of customers gusto's customers so um how often do you run payroll well it depends probably every bi-weekly or monthly and by measuring these two things how many people am i running payroll and are they continually running payroll with me that's probably the best way to figure out if people enjoy using gusto if they're going to switch to some other payroll provider and finally lyft you might want to think it's rides here the rides is the best metric here it's actually writers like the people that are taking the rides are the ones that matter because um it's the individuals that we want to measure here and we not necessarily want to measure the the action that they take and that's it probably weekly or monthly so now we have these two metrics we have a bunch of examples of those companies let's put in my graph one piece on the graph is going to be the metric and the other one is going to be the time window so every single uh time window we can put some percentage of those people on the graph so let's give an example on week zero in the case of lyft you had 100 drivers so what i'm what do i mean by that i basically mean that um if i had a hund like let's say 10 riders this week the road would lift they would be calculated on the week zero now how many of their riders that i had last week are now traveling with lyft this week that is your week not one number and the week two number and the week three number now why is this important because we're trying to measure repeat usage repeat usage is the best most unbiased way to figure out if someone is liking your product it's more true than what they tell you they might tell you things but what they do is going to be the most important thing so most companies can be defined this way even if you have a b2b contract company that do annual contracts measuring say what do people do with my product could be a really good way on like this this regular basis so even if i pay for gusto on an annual basis which they don't do measuring the activity are you using gusto on a regular basis let's say bi-weekly and monthly is is the way to figure out if people actually using the product so most of the ideas even your bdb or consumers could be plotted on this line now why is this important well if you're ever going to raise money this is a graph that investors are going to ask for like how much retention do you have like are people actually repetitively using your product those are things they're really curious about because they know there are other metrics that you might have that don't matter this is a sign of a bad product basically every single week after i started using this product fewer and fewer and fewer people continue to come back and use the product so this graph can be plotted and basically show that this wasn't a good product this however is a good product every week it eventually flattens out and the people that stop from the product stop stop using the product and eventually here at week 8 9 10 we have a flat line of people that continues to use product every single week that means that they are retained i they you have product market fit for those users for this product so i'm not gonna ask you these questions but here are two examples of two companies that i would argue have product market fit the first one here has thirty percent after two months and twenty one percent after twenty months this is pretty good so you kept a fifty users 21 months later or twenty months later store dash door dash have a monthly retention of 20 two years later a year and a half later uh here's another company more like a b2b company um so 80 retention after one month and then 30 after 60 months it's really good this is a really good product very sticky people like this product and they don't stop using it it's a github so retention is the best way to measure product market fit let's talk about specific things you might wanna uh that some people think uh is a better way i'll argue that they're not so here's some worse ways to make sure product market fits net progress score why is it not good well you can just google the best products and best companies in the world they all have bad net promoter score like the iphone apple all of them have bad enough for more scores like it doesn't necessarily correlate with good products correlates with perceptions of companies surveys problem with surveys is they are going to be biased so if you ask your users you're going to have some level of bias there are good ways to use service to improve your products but it's not going to be the best way to figure out this metric there is one cool question you can ask user which is how would you feel if you can no longer use this product sometimes this works it can give you an idea but i wouldn't do it instead of of attention i was to always try to find a way to measure retention all right so what are some bad metrics for prime market fit these are not the kind of things you want to throw around it's like evidence for your practice working registered users really bad does not say anything about repeat usage or if they liked you or not visitors also bad does not say anything about whether your product is going to be valuable conversion rate we have this conversion rate of visitors to something else well that doesn't really say much because you don't know what people you're converting you don't know who they are so this does not say much about market fit either and finally something that should be a paid product you're giving away for free is not a good sign of product market fit like you want to figure out if people are willing to pay for it because price if someone says i love this if it's free but if it costs money i'm not going to use it that's pretty bad like then they're not going to work out for you so you want to make sure that the people that are doing something like this on this graph if it's expected that you pay for a product they should be paying for the all right next section let's talk about growth channels and tactics this section really applies if you have product market fit if you if most of the people that come to your product go down the drain right away and they never come back this section doesn't matter like why would you work on trying to get more people to a product that if no one is using your product anyway if most people are just churning and like they try it once and then they're going to come back like don't work out the stuff wait with this stuff until you have some people that care about your product you can try to use some of these channels to reach those people specifically there's really two ways that you can grow at scale so when i looked at that team they saw the photo of the airbnb team they worked on two things they either worked on what i call product growth or conversion rate optimization what this means is you have typically engineers designers data scientists product managers working on improving specific parts of your product to get more people through that funnel it's a good example i'm going to give you some example in a second but that's basically what i defined as the first section most of those people in that photo were in this category they were engineers designers product managers and their scientists the second group is what i call growth channels growth channels is basically platforms in the world that people tend to discover products on let me give you some specific examples google huge platform for new products to be discovered anything that you want to use that is a rare behavior in your life google that's what you do insurance so i forgot insurance google when i find a doctor google everything you do rarely is going to be google which means lots of products are being discovered on google and growth channels like google is an extremely important one for many companies another one might be facebook instagram advertising on facebook and instagram is critical to companies growth these days what i mean by growth channels that means basically other platforms about your website or your app so let's talk about conversion rate optimization what does it mean every single step of your product experience is a funnel that like the retention curve can be measured you can have a metric and i think i think ilya talked about this since earlier shop school school talk when you build funnels if you put a metric on every single page in your product you will know what percent of people that make it from the first page let's say the homepage to the booking page in the case of airbnb we call the home page p1 the search results page p2 and then the booking page and the listing page p3 and then the booking page was p4 four pages that was the entire website now what's the funnel what percent of people make it from p1 to p4 what percent not that many one percent two percent most people don't make it that far your job is to figure out how many people make it that far why are they dropping off what can i do to increase that number that's basically multiple teams or multiple people at startups that work on those things every single step in that funnel is going to have some kind of drop up for some reason they might be that the content on the page is not suited for them latin airbnb all the content speaks to millennials i have a family it's not not good content i land on some other website and the content doesn't speak to me because i'm not the the right customer that's one example of a drop-off you can fix with content content changing the content another one might be i'll land on the website it doesn't work because internet explorer is not optimized for that it's not optimized for that you're going to drop off so you've got to fix that too there's lots of different reasons people want to drop off here are some specific things that people tend to work on when they work on conversion rate optimization internationalization if your website or your product is international translating it the product is really a good idea uh we saw that airbnb i've seen that at facebook i've seen that many other companies where translation is is is really really important authentication most products have some flow where you're signing up now that flow probably your products too have some kind of authentication flow that flow is very um critical and the users are kind of vulnerable in that case because they don't really have time for too much friction so if it's not working perfect they might just go to the next website uh so make sure the authentication flow works really well look at the best websites in the world look at pinterest look at airbnb look at some of those sites they have teams optimizing these these these flows the authentication flow copy what they do they probably figure it out they spend a lot of time optimizing onboarding this is a huge effort specifically for products that need a lot of involvement from the users to be able to um become active users so a lot of questions you might want to ask early on on a new product the more you can onboard users by asking them questions that make the experience better the more active and the more retained they will be so onboarding the lots of things you can do and finally purchase conversion when you're about to purchase a lot of things around urgency and scarcity and just user flow and ui all of these things matters and that's another great example of version of optimization so let's talk about growth channels so again don't get here until you have some good sense of that this is something people want first one um like i said earlier if this is a rare behavior most new ideas are rare behaviors either because they don't exist yet or because they're not something you do every day we tend to go to google to learn about rare things that we don't do very often so that's why if that is the kind of product that you have being on google is going to be really important it can be either on google through paid marketing through sem or through seo i'll talk about in a second second does your product already the people already share your product through word of mouth so some products are viral in this nature because they sound really exciting to talk about left and uber and airbnb are examples of those um if that's the case you want to make sure you focus on virality and referrals what does that mean is you're building into your product a flow that friends can tell other friends about the product referrals is a way that you can do that by giving some kind of financial incentive does the proc get better if you have more users well this is true for marketplaces but it's specifically true for anything that's social so if you think of a linkedin or an airbnb so linkedin or facebook then having more people on the product is going to make it better so it's going to be really important for you to get more people and those people on your site is going to be the ones doing it so you want to figure out a good viral loop so when you sign up to linkedin the first thing they ask you is to invite more people that's because your experience get better and there are more people on linkedin now many products do work this way and this can be perfected and the ones who really succeed in the world of of um of the social products are the ones that really nailed this down to figure out how it is really well the many people that make social apps underestimate how important it's going to be to get to get your friends on that product if you can make a list of all your customers even if that list is a hundred thousand or five hundred thousand if as long as it's not mainstream enough they'll be in the tens of millions you're probably gonna do sales you'll make that list and you start counting on those people why make it any more complicated why go out and reach the world for people if there are only a few people that you really want to reach so most companies in yc these days i ask them this question can you make a list of your customers yeah right make that list start listing them out who are the people decision makers in those companies you're trying to sell to these people make the list email addresses phone numbers try to figure out how to reach them but start by making the list don't make it complicated by going out in a in a world where most people aren't going to be relevant for for your product and finally this is a channel that nowadays is bigger than it ever has been and more important than it ever has been which is if you look at how the entire world of startups has changed in the last 10 years more and more of them are turning more money um and and therefore getting what's called a higher high ltv high lifetime value by getting a higher lifetime value you're enabling the ability to buy paid advertising if you don't have people paying for your product where you're making money from your product you should not be spending time on on online marketing now the truth is that most companies these days are charting for the products they are making money from the product and therefore they spend money on online marketing if that's true for you this can be an extremely powerful channel the biggest mistakes founders make is to start working online marketing when they don't have people paying for the product here's an insight you probably didn't think of most really big companies didn't use all of those channels they use one or two channels think of a tripadvisor how is supervisor big seo you guys type in something on google you land on tripadvisor and that's how you found this website most companies have um have a setup where there's gonna be one or two channels that really matters if you think of pinterest seo is the ra the real way how printers is going you type something on google they already access the pinterest board for that you'll land on that pinterest board that's how they acquire new users all right i'm going to give some specific uh tactical advice on some of these channels the first one i talk about is referrals and virality so referrals is word of mouth if word of mouth is a strong drive of a product then referrals is going to be one way that you can amplify that word of mouth how do i define referrals financial incentive to tell your friends about the product that's my definition this is the airbnb referral product you give someone forty dollars to sign up to airbnb and when they do i get twenty dollars pretty simple concept uh we have that on the on the website and on the mobile app now that's actually more complicated than you might think this entire product funnel where there's multiple steps in that funnel i'm not going to go into detail here but if you think of a referral product it's not just as simple as throwing that offer out that's probably what you want in the very beginning but once you have a referral part you want to start measuring each of these steps like what is that referral offer and people go to that page how many people send invites how many of those invites are being clicked on how many of those people sign up from those invites how many of those people that sign up end up booking each one of those steps is a step in this funnel let's talk about one specific step the referrals email invite so we would spend a lot of time optimizing this this step because there were lots of people getting the referrals email invited at airbnb so what are the things you can optimize on the referral invite email first who's the sender of the email if it's just airbnb i probably never never heard of air b with the first time i get this email if it's gustav they send the email and i send it to my friends they have heard of me that's the reason to open the email so people open the email clear value what is this email about many emails you start with text don't start with text just have the clear value prop at the top why should i care about this email in this case it's extremely simple gustav sent you 40 for your first trip that sounds good what is that about i'm gonna read about it um when do i have to care about this by this date in the next month so i can't just leave this email and never open it again i have to do it right now what do i have to do here well i could sign up which is a undefined thing that you can do sometime in the future or i can do what we did here was accept my invitation this sounds more exclusive it sounds like something that is just for me it doesn't sound like something i can do anytime in the future and finally here's some social proof from uh this email this is me i live in san francisco we can reveal that i actually been a member of mmb since 2009 and we can reveal that as well let's talk about paid growth each of these sections referrals pay growth seo could be a presentation on its own so it's impossible for me to go into deep details on this but if you're determined that you have product market fit you want to grow one of these channels and this is the channel you wanna you wanna go deep on you're gonna have to go really deep on it because being really good at one of these channels require a lot of work so there's lots and lots of stuff online about how to get really good at one of these channels it doesn't really make sense to get good at all of them because most of you won't really need all of them the number one lesson in paid growth ie online marketing is to not do it if you unless you have revenue this is the most common mistake that founders make is that someone start buying ads for products and they'll never be able to pay them back don't do that the next thing you want to figure out is what's called cac customer acquisition cost how much does it cost to acquire a new paying or a new valuable customer someone's giving you value value back um many of the advertising tools like google and facebook have a very clear system for how they calculate this and once you start running ads they'll start telling you what the cost is going to be next is going to be that your revenue or protected revenue from this user is going to have to be higher than the cac higher than the cost very simple otherwise you can't do this so how do you know this is the common question you get early on in paid marketing well it seems like in eight months it will be higher but not in the first month well you can't take all your money and spend on something that you have no clear certainty of is going to happen in the future so you're gonna have to either wait eight months or you're gonna look for early indicators that your hypothesis about the value is going to be stronger the best thing startup can do is don't wait eight months just have a much lower like a much lower target on what your cac is going to be maybe one month two months three months first first transaction something like that that's a much better way to do it the main channels for online marketing these days is going to be google facebook instagram that's pretty much it let's talk about search engine optimization this has changed a lot in the last couple of years it's very competitive and what changed is there used to be millions of websites each would rank for tens of millions of keywords now what i've changed is that the really big companies starting getting really good at ranking for all those keywords so a pinterest or a tripadvisor might rank for every single travel keyword you can imagine that's hard for small companies what that means that if you are going to rely on search engine optimization to grow um you're going to have to be as good as a pinterest or or supervisor eventually not right away but eventually uh it's so competitive to win in this grant like large world of seo when you get started you can think of this way seo is is a zero-sum game basically you're competing against others so what you do in seo is going to be matter and what do you compare to others the second thing is that the the keywords that people search for are changing right constantly so if you're building something new let's say asmr i think was in a thing that came up recently lots of companies able to rank for that because it's a new keyword there weren't websites built 10 years ago they rank for that because the thing didn't really exist all right let's talk about seo how it works on the technology side this is their b search results page this is what you and me see when we go to the mb this is what google see google just sees text so to be good at seo you need to understand what text am i showing to google so google can understand what the website is about people can't understand what your site is about it's not going to rank it what are the two main levers for seo the first one is going to be things i do on my page so for example what's the title of the page can google read the the page does the page throw errors what specific page in my keyword am i trying to rank my page for well start with the keywords do some research and see what are people searching for how many people are searching for asmr in in in the united states per month maybe i want to try rank for that keyword we'll build a website just trying to rank for that keyword start in that that start with google don't start with your own content you don't know exactly what people are searching for you're going to start doing some research the second thing is the thing you can't do that much about which is called off-page optimization or domain authority or or something like that which basically means how valuable does google perceive your website to be in the grand scheme of all websites and the more inbound links you get from press the more links you get from all kinds of people that are also authorized like have high authority the more valuable your website will be in the in the eyes of google which means it will rank you higher on some of the keywords you're trying to rank for because it will compare you to other websites and see if they seem more or less authoritative i'm going to details here but that's basically how google work if you're curious about this you can google pay track and go to the wikipedia article on page link basically will explain sort of like high level how google works final section i'm going to go through this one a little faster most of you guys don't have to focus on a b testing at all it won't matter for a long time it is a great decision making tool later on here's the the situation the startups tend to get into i want to launch a new um home page i want to launch a new design i did and the numbers went down what happened it's a really hard problem to launch something new and sort of like just look at that the metric over time don't do that there's a better way first before you get into that stage you want to figure out is a b testing something i want to do the best way to do that is to go to google and type in a b testing calculator think of the metrics that you're trying to change here so like visitors to some conversion metric put them into that first link you see on google and that'll tell you whether it's going to be worth doing most of you it won't be worth doing for quite a while so here's the example i'm trying to give you on the website so i want to ship a new experiment our new design on the homepage so let's ship it the metric went up or the magic went down either way like i don't know if the website actually cost it or not the only way for me to know if this new design actually changed the metric is if i had an alternative alternative side of history because two side to two different um parallel universes at the same time one with the new design and one with the older sign if i had that i can tell exactly what happened that's the definition of a testing you basically have two different parallel universes of the thing you shipped the same time you measured the metrics that matter to you the reason this is so powerful helps you make decisions at scale what ends up happening if founders when they get five or ten people in the company and they launch a new design and they're arguing about what caused the thing to go up or go down the only way to really know is to run an a test to figure out uh what does the metric say about what it went up or down this is hard to internalize because most people think of themselves as as good product good product thinkers so we're talking about one thing called experiment review this is airbnb how many here think that you guys have good product instincts they usually hand now you guys are founders you have you should have good products these things all right let's see let's say go there um all right so i'm gonna give you two examples so at airbnb we launched uh a new sharing sheet for the mobile app and um this was the old version which was the the native share sheet that you've seen on ios uh you click on share and then you see a bunch of sharing options and then we just tried this new sheet that showed more options uh we call this the experiment but it didn't really look native so the question was which one was better well we didn't really know so we launched an a b test we launched both of them at same time for different users the goal here was to measure the number of shares so all right how many here think that the control was better how many people think that this experiment was better and people thought there was no difference this is quite common this is about forty percent better for us so thank god a bit of an experiment because if this was the decision making group then we wouldn't have made the right decision next one should we have a sign up wall or not in the app now these are not necessarily learnings you can apply to your companies right away but it was an important decision for us to determine so should we have people just open air b app and go straight into the app or should we have an experiment where you can click out and x out the sign up wall or should we have a sign up wall that is a wall that you can't climb over you have to sign up otherwise you can use the mb app which one is better how many here think that the control no sign up wall is better raise your hand how many people thought that the experiment where you can x out and then sign up was better and people thought that just like this wall you can't climb over it was better that's a few amount of people all right so this is a lot better um we got 2.6 more bookings from ios by making people sign up through a signup wall in the app why is that well we knew something about them so we can send we can show them more personalized stuff and when they were about to book we already had them signed up so they don't have to at the time of booking go through the motions of signing up you want to learn why why cost this the whole point is basically when you get big enough when you're starting to grow and you have these decisions about should i launch this thing or not um this is a really good way to do it practice decisions are really hard so using data to to to make them is a good way most of you won't have to worry about this for a while so don't worry about it here's the summary of my talk today most of you need to do things that don't scale you are not at the place where you can think about um real growth things that growth teams do so you have to unlearn the things you've learned at your big companies or in mba programs and just do things they don't scale secondly you want to measure your attention to understand if you have product market fit there are other ways too but that's the best way in my opinion and third you want to build a cult culture experimentation you want to use data and not have the loudest voice in your room decide what the best decision is but you want to use data and experimentation to decide what is the best decision probably doesn't matter right now but it will matter some point thank you you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 138,362

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, startup school

Id: 6lY9CYIY4pQ

Length: 38min 50sec (2330 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019