How to Get Started, Doing Things that Don't Scale, and Press (How to Start a Startup 2014: 8)

thanks for having me Sam I'm Stanley I'm the founder of door - and it's it's really amazing to be here because it wasn't naturally that long ago where I sat in in your seats I was class of 2014 graduated in CS as well as my co-founder Andy and for those of you who don't know what doordash is we're building an on-demand delivery network for local cities and I want to start off with this photo that I took just a few months ago and I think if 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 actually living Robley at the time on campus and I took this photo because I realized this how ridiculous the combinations of things I was holding in my hand at the time you know I was holding my CS 247 homework and then I had a my tax forms since so it was April and had to 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 you know 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 macaron store 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 you know Shawntel G on that canoe 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 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 because there's no way she could have fulfilled them you know she had no drivers 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 and then we thought the next over the next course of over the course of the next few weeks we talked 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 you know delivery infrastructure is such a huge pain for us there's there's not any good solutions out there and which which let us wonder you know delivery such a common thing it's such an obvious thing why hasn't anyone solved this before right like we must 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 infrastructures 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 you know I went on the internet I found some PDF menus of you know 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 delivery comm and this is actually what it looked like you know super super you know simple ugly like honestly we we weren't really expecting anything we just launched it and all we wanted to see was you know would we get phone calls from this and if we got in the 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 gotta got a phone call you know someone called they wanted to order Thai food and we're like oh wow this is this is a real order like you know we could 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 Nazli just lets just stream by you know Siam Royale pick up some Pad Thai and it's delivered to this person and let's try to learn how this whole delivery thing works and we did we delivered to this guy and up in Alpine Road I remember he he told us he was a asking me oh how did you hear about us you know what'd he do he told us he was a he was a scholar and then he handed me his business card and I 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 of the first delivery slash worst delivery you could have asked for we couldn't make this stuff up and and and yeah and then the next day we got you know two more phone calls that day after that we got five and then it became 7 and then became 10 and then soon we started gaining traction on campus with Powell to delivery comm which was which is um 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 were still we stepped we kept getting phone calls we kept any orders and and that's kind of when we knew we were on to 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 and we don't have any of that we just launched because at the beginning none of that is necessary right at the beginning is all about test 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 to hack things together at the beginning at YC there's a mantra we we like to talk about is doing things that don't scale so at the beginning we were the delivery drivers you know we would you know go to class and then after class we'll go you know deliver food we were the you know customer support like I sometimes have to take phone calls during lectures we we had to we spent afternoons just going down University Avenue passing out flyers about kind of promoted or - I mean we didn't have any dispatch system so what we had to do was you know we use square to charge all of our customers 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 I'm just thinking out like what's just hacking together solutions you're 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 for money laundering I mean think about it we're getting small chunks of like 15 $20 orders 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 you know we use that as an opportunity to talk to our customers talk to our restaurants we the dispatching which helped us figure out you know how we manually dispatched every driver and 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 customers I remember you know for the first few months when we got started we would manually email everything one of our new customers and at the end of every night and just asking them oh how was your first delivery how did he hear about this and we would personalize all these emails right like if I see someone order chicken skewers from orange hummus I would say oh like I love orange Thomas you know how our chicken skewers how did how did your first delivery went you know just feedback like that was was really valuable and I customers really really appreciated that and and I remember um one time this was during YC we were at a we just came out of meeting with 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 flash house texted us saying oh we need drivers on the road we got a huge spike in demand so we debated for maybe you know 10 seconds like should we go get ice cream or should we go go deliver obviously we went and delivered but that kind of became our motivation on you know scaling right like if we can scale then we could go get ice cream next time so so yeah I think that kind of and now of course we've scaled across different cities now you have to worry about building out automated solutions and dispatch systems and figuring out how do you match demand and supply and all that fancy 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 there's three things I would say that I learned from from doing door Dash's first test your hypothesis you want to treat your startup ideas like experiments the second thing is launch fast we launched in you know 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 once you've scaled then you go get that ice cream thanks yeah question was how did our first customer hear about us our very first one I had no idea we just launched pop Paulette of delivery calm we don't do any marketing so I assumed he 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 does about it it was all through word-of-mouth and and that kind of just validates you know just how strong the needy 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 obviously you're wondering why no one's done this what's your answer now 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 if you can design you know a delivery system that was entirely based off mobile you know where you don't have it you didn't have to have to have any infrastructure or delivery fleets instead you could you know instead of hiring drivers full-time purchasing vehicles what if you can tap into a more of an on-demand pool of independent contractors and I only send orders to them when when they have time so so that's kind of the the insight we had we everything was done through mobile yeah 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 a 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 and we went with it and logistics was always something we were really passionate about as well you know like the logistics transportation and it's kind of the perfect fusion of you know how do you help small business owners through delivery back yeah do you launch at first or the website and how long did it take from idea to the first launch yeah it was we started with this landing page right here took us an hour to launch yeah the question was how does the or - Daniel am on a very competitive space I mean I mean in the beginning I mean for us consumer demand has never been the problem you went up until now so for us it's just about you know finding a need and just focusing on serving that serving that demand so I mean the beginning competition doesn't really matter when you're getting started yeah question was how long it took for us in corporate into a company when we went through YC so we launched in January 2013 and then we did YC that very summer and we when we decided to take this idea through YC we incorporated one more yeah you what do you plan to do next or where do you plan to go with this yeah I mean the question was where do we plan to go beyond food delivery when for us the when we started or - 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're a macaroon store a restaurant or a furniture shop I mean I 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 alright thank you guys for having 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 we're 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 ship 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 startup and that's that you're able to do 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 market 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 gonna springboard you into the stratosphere an 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 those are unicorns and most of the companies that from the outside it looked 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 about 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 to sell 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 gonna 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 to point to or testimonials those first users are always going to 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 gonna 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 it you know can 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 going through a network if you have a network like Stanford or Y Combinator any thing 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 you reach a point where you're at the top of the hill and the boulder starts to roll on its own and so those first users you just cannot focus on ROI in the sense of time do not expect to spend an hour and return 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 oh 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 and 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 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 an 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 tenants of Y Combinator is talk to users but I 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 misspelled 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 spent 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 gonna get a better sense for your product than actually listening to real users and especially in the early days you're just the products you launch 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 a hundred and thirty one hundred forty 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 current customers and insurance or customers who have left and this is one that that often falls by the wayside in sort of the pursuit 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 you don't want to take them for granted and then when a user actually leaves your servus 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 gonna be issues you're not gonna have the perfect product things are gonna break things are gonna 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 one detractor who's had a terrible experience on your platform is enough to reverse the progress of ten champions it's all it takes is one person out there to say no you shouldn't use those guys for x y&z reason to ruin a ton of momentum so even if it's you know there's examples in the early days where we would mess up massive orders we'd 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 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 often 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 engineers your instinct is going to be to build a platform with beautiful clean code that scales right you don't want to write a sort of duct-tape code that's gonna 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 coming 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 gonna 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 figured out that if we did it the right way it was gonna take about a month to build out these features and in a startup a month you know you live in dog years a month is a year and that just wasn't gonna do so he actually went out duplicated the codebase duplicated the 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 generated a lot of revenue eventually we learned what features were core and we 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 tenth user you shouldn't be wondering well how are we gonna serve a million users you should be worried about how are we gonna get to a hundred when you're at a hundred you should think about a thousand it's 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 where every single night the site would crash every night and then 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 Minh 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 that 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 and development as fast as possible but don't give it up willingly it should be ripped from you and so sort of 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 an official how to start a startup tea with Sam and all proceeds are going to watse I couldn't miss this opportunity to sell so if you guys want to grab one of the official teas just go to teespring comm slash startup and it's supporting a great cause thank you sure go ahead the t-shirt printing business do you think it has a lot of combat 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 I completely agree from the outside people have been telling us that this is a silly idea since day one and sort of at 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 my 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 you're the pain point is clearly there it's not a met need so I would say that often times great ideas start 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 are entrepreneurs who are trying to build brands and businesses you know we have a little over a thousand 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 well while I wait for the slide to happen 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 gonna 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 talked 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 is something that happens magically they think about it as like something that you know journalists are like out there like trying to find the best stories and really you know discover them like 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 like I know when 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 gonna 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 it's 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 you're 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 with social cam 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 in the Graham app and like be thought of in that context when it was you know time to pitch our 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 app with exec one of my goals was ii like to get customers so exec was like a cleaning local cleaning service and our goal was to get people in San Francisco to use it it wasn't like useful to get national press because you know 99% of those people couldn't 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 use our app for twitch which is probably the thing that you guys mostly know it was you know twitch was a ESPN 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 cuz like when we when we started 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 community 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 you know industry trades and game dev blogs and places where like gamers when they up games beat 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 you know 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 dollars you drown pretty much you can get that covered milestones or 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 they achieved a million dollars a week in revenue and it was covered pretty widely like business stories which generally happen when you're like already a successful company someone you might go New York Times or 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 years ago this YC company called WePay 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 they're widely covered because it was just so you know kind of an interesting thing and it really it got them in this story right they wouldn't been talked about in the context of PayPal at all really hiring announcement if you're a 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 right like dude you what you need really need to think about it's like objectively if I wasn't the founder of this company would I want to like read a story about what I'm pitching right so you know you're incremental feature release or 2.01 you know feature release might not be interesting it like just because you add it like you know find your contacts in the 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 your press 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 video game console to raise ten million dollars on Kickstarter like ooh yah was that was like really raised like a million dollars in 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 one of them like actual mechanics of getting a story this is like pretty tactical so what if you want to get your news in you know the 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 gonna convert right and so you shouldn't be upset when someone like one individual person or a reporter 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 listed up before the second step is like you want to get introduced to a reporter or multiple reporters who are gonna 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 were just written about like your friends who maybe started to startup 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 if your story's interesting it's not like you're asking for interest to investors or potential you know people that they would want to hire employees and then from the reporter's perspective they're getting intro to someone who you know they already vetted as interesting like they're getting an answer from someone who they know they thought was interesting enough to write about and so like by the transitive property you're basically gonna they're gonna think you know probably interesting so you get 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 a week in advance or more because they're not gonna like drop everything they're doing to just write about your news so a lot of people especially first-time entrepreneurs will come and say like just that I'm launching this product tomorrow like can you get me in this you know TechCrunch or something and that's like probably not gonna 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 gonna launch your product like in two weeks you have this intro you set up some sort of meeting and you really want to get the the reporter to like invest time and effort in you because they don't like there's like 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 get 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 instead of a meeting okay so then the next step is actually pitch 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 Mike my ideal 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'll like walk them through this like I'll 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 canoe much more easily control the conversation and not forget critical things like you know your co-founding your co-founders name or like what the fall the 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 includes all of those things so you know you do that they you have a pitch to take they take notes they're gonna write the story at this time and then the next thing is like follow up like 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 to 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 their 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 yeah 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't can only help you with like kind 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 other 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 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 their very early days you know getting press is a lot of work so you should really make sure it's worth it you know like I said it really getting press 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 like 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 their disease you're happy it's you know sometimes it's a really good strategy for getting your first hundred or two hundred or a thousand customers but it's really not a scalable user acquisition strategy so it's something that's really just like a you know 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 look the pull point about news is it's new and so it's pretty pretty pretty hard unless you're Google to like get covered in the press like every week you know something to you know if you decide it's worth it though like they 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 that what you're thinking about what you're doing that matches those you know maybe seven story types in the future and like you know when I was you know working primarily on marketing and PR it would be I would like make a schedule on like a calendar if what when we're gonna 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 wouldn't forget about us and we could kind of maximize our coverage and you don't really want to keep your you know contacts fresh it's like really a relationships business so once you someone writes about you should keep going back to them for form or 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 that do something for someone you've already liked it done something for you know you really like it's if you just you know I would try to establish good good relationships with a couple reporters over time that you can go to to you know break news and it will come in handy later if you ever have are in 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 a 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 ever I'm you know meeting with reporters I 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 know the reporters like it because they it's like helping them find interesting stories and you're more likely to get you know leads back from those entrepreneurs than you help out so if you're interested in learning more about press there's two resources that I really liked Jason Kincaid it 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 and 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 it's um might be valuable to take a look at cool that's that's basically it one question just one to quit okay two questions or zero questions 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 launched you know my first products in our in our first startup for a lot of them we got like zero attention and we didn't really know how to even get a hundred users I think it's a really fine way to get a hundred users and a lot of companies in YC when they first launched their product will encourage them to get out and just do one tech Mart 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 like coverage in multiple outlets or anything like that in the be very beginning I had anything else so twitch you know had this thing called twitchplayspokemon where a developers set up like a Pokemon like Gameboy game that was controlled by chat so you know millions of people would be typing in a or b and like the character would run 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 when 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 I rented is talking about they would like have some contact the other thing is like we didn't come up with the idea for Twitter right that was like fortuitous but we helped you like give it legs by you know making the company available to talk to the reporters and suggesting follow up stories about like you know there were stories not just about twitchplayspokemon because a hundred thousand people were watching this Pokemon game but because you know if 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 wasn't like so he kind of gave that story like a little bit more legs but we didn't you know originated it it was the community really whoo-hoo they did it alright I think that's it thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 35,302

Rating: 4.9043603 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, Startup, Lecture, Stanford, Class, Sam Altman, How to start a startup, startup school, stanley tang, walker williams, justin kan

Id: sr0UabJd8qE

Length: 52min 25sec (3145 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2017