speaker 1: Yeah thanks for having me, Sam. I' M Stanley. I'm the founder of DoorDash. It's really amazing to be here because it wasn't naturally that long ago where I sat 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 door dshe 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 this was the night when we just raised our series a. And I took this photo as I was walking back to where I lived, actually lived in roeley at the time on campus. And I took this photo because I realized this, how ridiculous the combinations of things that was holding in my hand at the time. And I was holding my cs 247 homework, and then I had my tax forms since it was April, and I had to fill out taxes. And then also that yellow speeding ticket. And then right below that was a $15 million 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 na share that story with you today. It all began two years ago, actually, in a Macron store. It was my junior year at Stanford. This was fall quarter. And at the time, I was really passionate about how do you build technology for small business owners. And I sat down with Chloe, the owner of Chantal guon, a maccoon store in palalto at the time, just interviewing her, trying to get feedback on this, on this product prototype we've been working on, and also just learning about what her problems were in general. And it was during this meeting when Chloe first brought up this problem of delivery, you know, 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 down because there's no way she could have fulfold them. You know, she had no drivers. And she was the one who ended up having to personally deliver all these orders. And that was a very interesting moment for us. And then we over the over the course of the next few weeks, we talked to around another 150, 200 small business owners. And when we brought this idea of delivery, they kept agreeing with us, saying, Yeah, this is a really big problem for us. We don't have delivery infrastructure. It's such a huge pain for us. There's not any good solutions out there which led us wonder now, delivery is such a common thing, isn't such an obvious thing. Why hasn't anyone solved this before, right? Like we must be missing something here. So we thought, 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 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 now went on the Internet. I found some pdf menus of 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 paaltodelivery. Com. And this is actually what it looked like, you know, super, super, you know, simple, ugly. Like honestly, 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 enough phone calls, then maybe this was this delivery idea was something we're 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 got a phone call, you know, someone called, they wanted to order Thai food. And we were like, Oh, wow, this is a real order. Like, you know, we could have to do something about it, right? So we're in our cars and we're like, okay, we're not doing anything right now. Miles will just, let's just stream by, you know, siam royal, pick up some patat Thai and let's deliver it to this person and let's try to learn how this whole delivery thing works. And we did. We deliver it to this guy up in alpine road. I remember he told us he was I was asking me, Oh, how did he hear about us? Know what he do, he told us was he was a scholar and then he handed me his business card and instead he was the author of a book called weed the people. And that was like our first ever delivery, right? It was like the best first delivery slash worst delivery you could have asked for. We couldn't make this stuff up. And Yeah and then the next day we got you know two more phone calls. The after that we got five and then it became seven and then became ten. And then soon we started gaining traction on campus with paaltodelivery dot com, which was pretty crazy because think about it, right? This was a landing page. You had to look up pdf menus to place your order, and they had to call in. This isn't exactly the most professional looking site yet. People still, we kept getting phone calls. We kept getting orders. And that's kind of when we knew we were onto something, when people were willing we knew we found a need people wanted, when people were 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 know we have any drivers, we didn't have any algorithms, spend you, we didn't 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. It's all about testing your idea, trying to get this thing off the ground, figuring out whether this was something people even wanted. And it's okay to hack things together at the beginning at yc, to the mantra we like to talk about is doing things that don't scale. So at the beginning, we were the delivery drivers. We would go to class and then after class would go deliver food. We were the custom support. I sometimes had to take phone calls during lecture, had to we spent afternoons just going down University Avenue passing out flyers about trying to promote DoorDash. I mean, we didn't have any dispatch systems. So what we had to do was, you know, we used square to charge all of our customers. We used Google Docs to keep track of our orders. We used apples, find my friends to keep track of where all of our drivers were, stuff like that, figuring out like 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 suspicions for money. Launderry we think about it, we were getting small chunks of like $15, 20 orders coming in at a rapid pace. It was Yeah and luckily my cofounder Tony worked at square, so he just emailed some buddies 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 did dispatching, which helped us figure out you how we manually dispatch every driver and that helped us figure out what our driver assignment algorithm should look like. We did customer support ourselves, know getting real time feedback from our customers. I remember you know for the first few months when we got started, we would manually email every single one of our new customers. And at the end of every night and just asking them, Oh, how was your first delivery? How did you hear about us? And we would personalize all these emails, right? Like if I see someone ordered chicken skewers from orange hummus, I would say, Oh, like I love orange hummus. How we're chicken skewers. How did your first delivery went? You just feedback like that was really valuable and our customers really, really appreciated that. And I remember one time this was during yc at we just came out of meeting with one of our restaurant partners and we heard about this ice cream store that just opened up 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 office slash house texted us saying, Oh, we need drivers on the road. We got a huge Spike in demand. So we debated for maybe you 10s, like, should we go get ice cream or should we go go deliver? Obviously, you went and delivered, but that kind of became our motivation on you know scaling, right? Like if we can scale, then you could go get ice cream next time. 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 the three things I would say that I learned from doing doordasshes. First, test your hypothesis. You want to treat your startup ideas like experiments. The second thing is launched fast. We launched in 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 could go get that ice cream. Thanks. Sure. Customers hear about it. Yeah. So the question was, how did our first customer hear about us? Our very first one, I have no idea. We just launched polidelivery com. We didn't do any marketing. So I assume he just must have typed in polidelivery into the web browser. And then after that, we didn't do did barely any marketing. I think I sent out like one email to my dorm and douwas about it. It was all through word of mouth. And that kind of just validates you know just how strong of the need you 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.
speaker 2: When you started, it seems so obvious you're wondering, why has no one done this? What's your answer? Now.
speaker 1: looking back, 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 thought, you know what if you can design you a delivery system that was entirely based off mobile where you don't you didn't 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 only send orders to them when they have time? So that's kind of the insight we had. Everything was done through mobile.
speaker 2: Yeah. Did you know we were going to be a starup or we just making some money? Yeah. I mean, at the time.
speaker 1: we just wanted we're all really passionate about building technology for small business owners. And I know honestly, this delivery thing came out of an 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 we went with it. And logistics was always something we were really passionate about as well, you know, like logistics, transportation. And it's kind of the perfect fusion of how to help small business owners through delivery back Yeah do .
speaker 3: you launch the mobile .
speaker 1: app first or the website? And how long did it take from ito? The first launch? Yeah, we started with this landing page right here. Took us an hour to launch. Out goda set up a space built .
speaker 2: with postmates and seamless and .
speaker 1: other companies. Yeah, Yeah. The question was how does dodash stand out among a very competitive space? I mean, in the beginning, I mean, for us, consumer demand has never been the problem even up until now. So for us, it's just about finding a need and just focusing on serving that serving that demand. So in the beginning, competition doesn't really matter when you're getting started.
speaker 2: Did into company first. Yeah .
speaker 1: question was how long it took for to incorporate into a company when we went through yc. So we launched in January 2013, and then we did yc that very summer. And when we decided to take this idea through yc, we incorporated one more Yeah you what .
speaker 3: do you plan to do next or where do you plan to go with this .
speaker 1: besides like food delivery? Yeah. I mean, the question was, where do we plan to go beyond food delivery? I mean, for us, the when we started DoorDash, 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 merchant, whether you were a macarum store or restaurant or a furniture shop? I mean, 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. Thanks. Okay, next is Walker Williams from tespring tespring with yc to I that I almost rejected them, sounds like a dumb idea, but now they're doing hundreds of Milto dollars of revenue. So very luckily, I is not. And walis going to talk also about doing things in unscale.
speaker 3: All right, thank you guys for having me. My name is Walker. I'm the CEO and founder of tespring. For those of you guys who don't know what tespring 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 na 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.
speaker 2: the first thing you have .
speaker 3: to understand is that there is no silver bullet for user acquisition. You, everybody, and this includes me, when we got started, you look for that dream solution, that paperclick campaign that has tremendous roi, some accelerating partnership that's going to 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 look 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 the story of a ridiculously unsustainable business. So this is tespring. In 2012, when we first launched, the business couldn't have looked worse. It took days of meetings. We had to offer free design, days of revisions back and forth, wehave to launch the product ourselves, wehave to do the social media, all the sell like 50 shirts for a local nonprofit and generate dollar thousand 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 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 going to 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 going to 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 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, anything 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 when you get started, the incline is the steepest and those first inches are the hardest. And over time, as you get farther and farther, the incline steaout, 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 thousands 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 oftentimes, 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 turn a user into a champion is to delight them with an experience they're going na 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 tenets of why combinator is talk to users. But 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 tespring, I'm still the catch all email address. So anytime somebody misspells, support or writes an email address that doesn't exist, I get that email. And so I still do about twelve to 20 customer service tickets every single day. I spend hours each night reading every single tweet. Probably a little bit ocd, but that's okay. I read through all the tespring communities. You're never going to get a better sense for your product than actually listening to real users. And especially in the early days, you're just the product 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 tespring was doing about 130, $140000a 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 PaaS 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 syks 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 churcustomers and and churcustomers or customers who have left. And this is one 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 service, 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 going to be issues. You're not going to have the perfect product. Things are going to break. Things are going to 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, now you shouldn't use those guys for X, Y and z. Reason to ruin a ton of momentum. So even if there's examples in the early days where we would mess up massive orders, weprint 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 only a little bit off or it's not completely wrong. Itbe, 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, 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 startup, 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 sort of duct tape code that's going to 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 come to us, sort of bigger non profits and say, Hey, we really like your service. But you're missing these fundamental things. So 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 going to 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 going na take about a month to build out these features. And in a startup, a month, you live in dog years, a month is a year. And that just wasn't going na do. So he actually went out, duplicated the code base, duplicated 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 onboarded. They generate 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 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 going to serve a million users? You should be worried about how are we going to get to 100. When you're at 100, you should think about a thousand. 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 failwhale is a great example. And tespring, there were month stretches where every single night the site would crash every night and 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, you 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 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 that. Those sort of bumps are just speed bumps. And speed is so, so important early. So the lesson that I've been learning lately is 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 in 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 tespring, 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 watsee. I couldn't miss this opportunity to sell. So if you guys want na grab one of the officialtejust, go to tespring dot com slash startup and it's supporting a great cause. Thank you. Sure. Go ahead. The t shirt printing business, it seems like it has a lot of comso. What convinced you to think this is a viable market .
speaker 2: even when sht going well in.
speaker 3: 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 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 tespring 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 you can sort of feel the wind on your back where people are adopting the product quickly. The pain point is clearly there. It's not a met need. So I would say that oftentimes 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.
speaker 1: Our nonprofits, your biggest customer base? No.
speaker 3: You know today, our biggest customer base, our 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 teesspring 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 .
speaker 1: of our business, just not the majority. Thank you. Was the founder of Kiko and then Justin tv, which pretty switand. It's now for now I combinator and it's going to talk about.
speaker 2: Cool. 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 to 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 talk about at why 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 as something that happens magically. They think about it as like something that journalists are out there trying to find the best stories and really know, discover. 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 na 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 did as an important company. And it turns out if you don't have any goals, you're not going na achieve them, right? I mean, that's 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 is 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 your 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 social cam, which was a spinoff of justiess and 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 Instagram app and like be thought of in that context when it was you know time to pitch our like Silicon Valley investors and influencers. And so we really wanted to get in like Tech Press and kind of be positioned as this new hot social lab with exec. One of my goals was a second like to get customers. So exc was like a local cleaning service. And our goal was to get people in San Francisco to use it. It wasn't like useful to get the national Press because know 99% of those people couldn't use it. So we really targeted initially a lot of know like sa 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 is a espspn 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 because 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 it was a place to advertise. And it wasn't like known as like a we were a very nascent small gaming community. And our goal was to get people in the gaming industry, whether they were developers or advertisers, to think about us as like an important place where influencers were. So we really targeted industry trades and game Dev blogs and places where like gamers or games bestuff like that the industry was reading. So you know what's an actual story? I think there's a bunch of different types of stories, but these are usually the ones that you see in startups. Those are like product launches. Like you 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 if you raise a million dollar seed round, pretty much you can get that covered. Milestones or metrics like you've achieved a million dollars a week in revenue. That's the company that bought exec just announced that they achieved a million dollars a week in revenue and was covered pretty widely, like business stories, which generally happen when you're like already a successful company, someone you like to New York Times or New Yorker business magazine will 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 don't know if you guys remember, but a couple years ago this yc company called wipay 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 in the news for freezing, you know, like various developers accounts. And so that was like widely covered because it was just so know, kind of an interesting thing. And really it got them in the story right? They wouldn't have been talked about in the context of PayPal at all, really hiring announcements, if you're a big enough company and you hire someone, really important people who 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 side like that. So those are like you know basically any of those things 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 startup, you think that everything you're doing is interesting, but that's not for like other people, right? Like what you really need to think about is like objectively, if I wasn't the founder of this company, would I want na read a story about what I'm pitching? So your incremental feature release, your 2.01 feature release, might not be interesting just because you added like find your contacts in Facebook or something. You have to you really want to take a step back before you invest the time and actually trying to pitch a story and think, does anyone, will anyone actually want to read this? Because what people are 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 pressed in news doesn't have to be original, you know, like you don't it just has to be like what I like to call original enough, right? So you don't want to be the second cooler company to raise $5 million on Kickstarter, right? That's like the first guy gets like all the news, but like if you're the I think the first video game console to raise $10 million on Kickstarter, like Yeah, was that was like they raised like a million in $4 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 the actual mechanics of getting a story, this is like pretty tactical. So if you want to get your news in, know the Press, basically there's some easy, simple steps. So it's basically getting pressed is like you can think of it like a sales funnel. So you're gonna na talk to a lot of people and not all of them are gonna to convert, right? And so you shouldn't be upset when someone like one individual person or a reporter or whatever doesn't write your story. The first thing is like you have to think of a story, right? It's going to be one of those, probably one of those things that I listed up before. The second step is like you want na get introduced to a reporter or multiple reporters who are gonna to 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 cool 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 a startup and they were covered on tech crunch, get them to introduce you to that reporter who wrote about them. The reason that's good is because from the entrepreneur's 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 is 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 intro from someone who they know they thought was interesting enough to write about. And so like by the transitive property, you're basically they're going to think you're 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 to 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, Oh, just n I'm watching this product tomorrow. Like can you get me in this know tech crunch or something? And that's like probably not gonna to 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 you've set a date for your news to go out, you're going to launch your product like in two weeks you have this intro, you set up some sort of meeting and you really want na get the reporter to invest time and effort in you because they don't like there's like kind of a suncost fallacy at play. Basically, if you, the more time and they spend with you, the more likely they are to 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 na like actually try to get in contact with them, set up 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 we'll write out the story, my ideal story, and I'll memorize it, like the entire 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 theybe, like taking notes, right? And then theygo and transcribe those notes into a story. And so it's a like what I wrote will eventually be translated into a actual story. And by preparing, you can actually much more easily control the conversation and not forget critical things like your cofounmentioning, your cofounder's name, or like what all 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 walk through a conversation that includes all of those things. So you know, you do that, you have a pitch, they take notes, they're going to 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 thanks for meeting. Here's like collateral. Like if you have like a video or photos or something, you want them to include screenshots, like how to spell your cofounders names and your name, just like include all the information that I really care about. And I bold it right? And then that's it. Then hopefully the day comes, you Press submit on their release to the App Store. And at the same time, they release their article on tech crunch 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 startup, you want to do it yourself before you hire someone else to do it. And it's actually pretty easy, especially with Tech Press, you 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 firms can only help you with 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 your you know 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 and 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 5000 and $20000a month, which is like for various firms. That's a lot for a startup, right? You should it's generally not a good use of money, I would say, especially in the very early days. You know, getting pressed is a lot of work, so you should really make sure it's worth it. You know, like I said, it really getting pressed 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 actually give you mean that getting you're making money, you're getting users, you're making those users happy. It's you know sometimes it's a really good strategy for getting your first hundred or 200 or 1000 customers, but it's really not a scalable user acquisition strategy. So it's something that's really just like a you know a bootstrap. You can't just get like infinity articles written about you. Like eventually people are going to get tired of hearing about your company and usually that happens pretty quickly, right? The pull point about news is it's new. And so it's pretty, pretty pretty hard unless you're Google to get covered in the Press like every week, you know something to you know if you decide it's worth it though, like you 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 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 when we're gonna to launch things and like make sure to space them out but have them you know appear regular at regular intervals so that people like didn't wouldn't forget about us and we could kind of maximize our coverage. And you won't really want to keep your know contacts fresh. It's like really a relationships business. So once someone writes about you, you should keep going back to them for more for you know to write about you in the future. It's kind of like you know when when basically people know you're more likely to do something for someone you've already like done something for you you really like. It's if you just, you know I would try to establish 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, having relationships will help you know kind of get your side of the story out. And the last thing is like you know it's kind of 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 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 other things that I think would be interesting stories for them. And usually that comes back. The reporters like it because it's like helping them find interesting stories and you're more likely to get leads back from those entrepreneurs that you help out. So if you're interested in learning more about Press, there's two resources that I really liked. Jason Kincaid, who's former tech crunch reporter, just wrote a really, really great overview that covers a lot of the things I just talked about in more depth. And from the 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 one of a former marketer at American Apparel. And he talks about a lot of ways that he pretty like evilly actually manipulated the Press. But I think it's a pretty good look into the psychology of how people, things spread on the Internet. You know, how stories spread on the Internet and it might be valuable to take a look at cool. That's basically it. One question, just one. Okay. Two questions or zero questions.
speaker 1: So when is the right time start werying what Press altogether better.
speaker 2: When is the right time to start worrying about Press altogether? I think it's a really good way. Like if you just the first time I launched you my first products in our first startup, for a lot of them, we got like zero attention and we didn't really know how to even get 100 users. I think it's a really fine way to get 100 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 crstory to 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 very beginning. All right. Anything else there .
speaker 1: seems .
speaker 2: like .
speaker 1: the biggest story of with the Pokemon thing. So like how much how much of a role did you guys actually play getting that out? Yeah. Or was that just .
speaker 2: like so twitch you know had this thing called twitch plapokemon where developers set up like a Pokemon like Game Boy game that was controlled by chat. So know millions of people would be typing in a or b and like the character would wanaround 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 on reddit is talking about? They would have some context. The other thing is like we didn't come up with the idea for that was like fortuitous, but we helped give it legs by making the company available to talk to the reporters and suggesting follow up stories about like know, there were stories not just about twitch plays Pokemon because 100000 people were watching this Pokemon game, but because you know it finally, 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 was. And like so we kind of gave that story like a little bit more legs, but we didn't know originated it was the community really who originated it. All right. I think that's it. Thank you very much.