This is such a great question, but it's also super hard to answer without much more context. Some businesses can survive without charging their customers because their path to scale is rapid enough, and their funding large enough, to get them to the point of making money. Others need to make money sooner because of their costs.
6-8% a week is pretty good, but I'd generally edge towards at least experimenting with revenue so you start to have an idea of what you're going to do. Of course, if you're going to run out of money before you get to profitability...you might have to charge sooner!
2
Initially our biggest challenge was that we didn't know what we wanted to be when we "grew up". We started as a consumer product that also worked for businesses, and eventually (about 1.5 years into the business) we determined that balancing these two very different worlds and use-cases wasn't going to lead to world domination. So we went back and forth a ton in the early days, but ultimately decided to "listen" to the market and go after a space where we felt we could best innovate (and compete). That was the enterprise market.
3
The market is crazy right now, but the key is to not focus on the stock market (or your stock price) in the near-term. You have to have conviction around what you're building and make sure you're executing for the long run. All the best companies in the world have dealt with either being somewhat misunderstood (see Netflix, Facebook, etc.) or dealt with crazy stock market volatility, and they've had to get through it. The cool thing is having been working at Box for 11 years now, we've dealt with MUCH greater challenges. Like raising our Series B :-)
4
Great question. The tradeoff of engagement and reach versus revenue is massive in certain circumstances. I think I philosophically lean towards the idea that more distribution will lead to more revenue over time, but that could be naive. Luckily at Mattermark our editorial work isn't accretive in terms of revenue, so I would certainly take wider distribution as there is essentially no cost.
5
When you're first starting out, you should use all the channels that the big guys can't use because they are focused on scale. So mailing lists, forums, online communities, offline gatherings, etc. Those are all great. Then you prove out the product and over time, scale your product into bigger channels.
6
For products that have found product/market fit, I mostly focus on finding feedback loops. How does one group of people end up "generating" the next set of users. Sometimes that's an SEO loop (discover content, some % make content, that gets indexed, more people find it). Or viral (get invited, then invite others). You can optimize these loops over time.
7
I don't believe that paid customer acquisition works for digitally native brands - it can work at first, but not if you want to ultimately have a profitable business. One of the great secrets is that paid digital acquisition, for the vast majority of companies, doesn't scale, and most of the great companies that do scale don't need it to succeed. The equation in the early days is WAY more about the product resonating than finding a way to pay for it to matter. And our product, which is a bundle of great clothing and great service, scaled early due to a mixture of great PR, great word of mouth, and great in-person sales (trunk show and in-person sales out of our various apartments). We then applied a lot of digital spend to that in 2009-2011, and it definitely helped us grow, but it was nowhere near as good of customer cohorts as the ones that we are now seeing now that we have put more of our energy to extending our assortment (shirts and suits) and expanding our distribution (guideshops - the reinvention of retail! - catalog, and Nordstrom). I advise most digitally native brands now to think about partnerships and in-person retail earlier than I did, because outside of freak (amazing) stories like Tuft & Needle, there are not many ways to really take off online only..
8
1. Again the key to great early days marketing is a great product, not great marketing. Founders miss this again and again. 2. Don't! :-) Just kidding, but technology-enabled apparel is a nearly impossible market to crack. I don't recommend it...
9
You have to be willing to try lots of different things and watch the signs and see where you get peaks of traction. One of the reasons l like early stage startups getting angel/seed money only (and not VC dollars too soon) is because at the beginning or the journey you should be able to try lots of different approaches and tactics to your problem. Sometimes when you raise VC money you get locked into delivering on certain metrics and goals. you have to take time to really define the profile of you customer (sometimes its not who you think it will be) then listen to the pulse of them by trying out different strategies/ products. I have noticed that some companies I have worked on have gotten early traction in places or with a product offering they never anticipated.
10
Bringing together people from different worlds and facilitating interesting conversations has always been part of my Greek DNA. So from our earliest days as a startup, the whole point of The Huffington Post was to take the sort of conversations found at water coolers and around dinner tables -- about politics and art and books and food -- and open them up and bring them online.
Our growth and momentum at HuffPost have come from our commitment to keep evolving, and our secret ingredient has always been our embrace of change – our willingness to innovate. And that has brought huge benefits to HuffPost, because that way we’ve avoided what Clayton Christensen calls the innovator’s dilemma, the idea that even very successful companies, with very capable personnel, often fail because they tend to stick too closely to the strategies that made them successful in the first place, leaving them vulnerable to changing conditions and new realities. They miss major opportunities because they are unwilling to disrupt their own game.
11
I've been a huge fan of how Disqus puts their users into their conversion funnel. They let their people write their comments without signing up. It's only when they try to post it, Disqus asks them to login or signup. This increases the chances of the user signing up because the user has already made an effort to write a comment. Some might think it's borderline unethical but I think it's a very smart way of converting guests into registered users.
Coming to your question, it depends on what stage is the user in. If a user has already made some progress in your funnel, you might want to use a modal and get out of their way quickly. But if it's a general registration (or the user has clicked a button/link to signup), it's always better to use a separate page to avoid distractions. Even better, use social authentication if that's a possibility. You can always ask for their additional details later. Your users would love your product if you keep the nasty forms away to them. :)
12
I generally default to weekly metrics unless user behavior is more appropriate for a monthly batch. I also try to build in systems that lend themselves to predictable metrics. In other words flat growth is still better than no growth.
13
a) Lean Canvas + Traction Model + Customer Factory blueprint These are models that help to describe the business and where you currently stand. b) Starting price is best determined by studying and anchoring against your customer's existing alternatives. The best way to test this is in a f2f conversation. Beyond that, price optimization is more science. A/B tests and lots more conversations is what we rely on.
14
I think the celeb and branding aspect is really only a small portion of what we do. In fact if I feel a company is only interested in that I generally choose to not invest. Celeb endorsement isn't gonna make anyones product better. We focus heavily on helping companies grow. Sometimes that comes in the form of shaping the brand and the messaging but more often than not its about really understanding the customer conversion channels. I think where the celeb thing comes in handy is in being vocal when companies come up against regulation or simply getting a return phone call from a strategic BD situation.
15
Most new products and features come from vehement discourse and debate. I think the best ideas are the ones that survive intense debate. I am a firm believer that friction yields progress. Most ideas for new products/features are not new. They have been floating around the ether within a company or team for a while. As a PM, I think my role is to be an editor and help winnow out the weak ideas from the strong ideas through questions and synthesizing disparate pieces of information. A couple of things I like to ask myself when evaluating new ideas: 1. How much impact will the idea yield? 2. How do I quantify that impact e.g. engagement metrics, growth, monetization? If I can't quantify it then what are some intangible markers for success i.e. user research, satisfaction survey, better design experience. 3. Will this idea survive the test of time? 4. Will this idea scale? 5. What would the failure state look like if we were to execute this idea poorly? 6. What would success look like? There is no silver bullet metric for testing out new ideas unfortunately. Most ideas come down to poor execution so I emphasize being tactical and practical when it comes down the building v1 of a product or feature. Get it out there early, test it with a small group, and get feedback. The best ideas are ones that last through vigorous testing and discourse. If you're idea is too precious to share with the rest of the world then it will probably not last.
16
One of my biggest suggestions would be to try to launch with a bang.
On Instagram if you post a photo when you don't have any followers, that's fine. Once you get followers, people can scroll back and see that content you worked hard to create.
On Snapchat, if you work hard to create great content and you don't have any (or very many) followers, that content is gone forever.
A few ways to launch big:
-Partner with influencers to bring people to your account
-Do something worthy of press attention (Honestly, just having a Snapchat account is currently enough of a big deal right now to get some press. We're that early in the game.)
-Give a huge push to your existing social/email
//
On top of that, focus on consistency. You want people to get in the habit of seeking out your stories, so try to create some regularity.
Once per day
Every week
During every new episode of your show
During every sports game
During every industry event
Etc
I hope this is helpful!
17
Hi Harry! As a professional photographer, Instagram was an incredible platform to organically share the work I do seamlessly and easily. My Instagram audience grew most quickly and from there I was able to promote my other platforms (Snapchat, Twitter, and my new email newsletter). I've also found that press (which is usually pretty random and sporadic) ends up driving a lot of attention to my social platforms. Lastly, other users mentioning me, posting photos of me, etc within each platform have been huge for growth.
I love Instagram, but my current favorite platform is Snapchat. It feels like the wild wild west and I love the opportunity to truly innovate when I create on there.
18
...while building Cluster, we had also been releasing a lot of learnings and tools to the developer community. For example, the post we did on iOS permissions got over 250,000 views. The Sketch template we posted here was the top product of the week. So we decided to explore taking all the learnings and internal tools we'd built for ourselves and turning them into a product. We started the experiment in February this year, and within 2 months it was clear we wanted to double down on LaunchKit.
19
Community unlike a network is built around a shared passion and purpose and a group understanding that together WE > ME and therefore to truly scale a community you not only have to focus on adding value to the community but identify that every person, product and experience is a learning opportunity for you as well. When you do that you don't look at the time you spend investing in your community as a one way street rather it becomes as valuable to you as it does them. I will also say that I LOVE what I am doing and have passion for it and I don't know if I would be able to scale and grow what I've grown if I didn't.
20
Brian Lam: We treat it like a small business and the business objectives serve the content and product, not the other way around. That makes all the difference because the point is to make money to make useful things, not the other way around. I went to a conference recently about publishing business and no one who spoke ever spoke about great content or reader service and finding a model that supports the type of content you do. That is kind of insane, in my book. I also believe that a company is a great place to practice karma, so taking care of readers and people who work here comes ahead of anything else, and so far, that has also made a huge difference.
21
Ganda Suthivarakom: As Joseph Campbell could have told you, people love a good story. When we tested bike locks, our writer tracked down the dude who STOLE HIS BIKE to get his professional opinion on which locks were foilable. That's real life, and that's the kind of thing you can't get in a lab with machines and metrics. Those are the guides people really share and talk about.
22
What up, Willem! Thanks for hanging out here. Our team is 60ish-70ish depending on if you count interns and contractors etc. The biggest challenge is for sure communication. As we scale the team and start having sub-teams, some things can get taken out of context or might not make it all the way through the org at all. I've been loving Slack to keep our team centralized and to ensure communication is rapid and easy to participate in
23
The main thing was that we just wrote a bunch of content ourselves to prime the pump. I remember a funny joke my friend Jeff Hammerbacher made one time where he posted something like "Hey I just found a cool service called Quora that lets you ask Charlie Cheever questions in real time" because we were the only people really answering lots of questions at the very beginning. Then we got a few friends pulled into doing it with us and a community started to form. I'm not really sure what happened from there -- I wish I understood it fully but I'm not entirely sure I could recreate whatever went on to make Quora's community work, but Marc Bodnick was really important. He was on the site literally > 12 hours a day for a long time and was just a backbone of the community, encouraging people writing good stuff, and asking good questions, and just being around. I guess there's a kind of magic in just having people who care who are just present.
24
Most organizations hire a social team, get on Facebook and Twitter, and that's it. It's used for marketing and maybe sometimes customer service, and that's it. They think they can check the box and go back to business as usual. But these use cases only scratch the surface of the much larger transformative change happening with customer expectations, and what these organizations' management teams and boards actually need to be doing is thinking about how these changes affect their products and business models.
25
Hello Pedro ! thanks for the question. Before focusing on big growth, the key is to find the perfect market fit. K-factor, retention, engagement. When these KPIs are Green, you can go big in Growth. few months ago, we've noticed that people joining Tribe without any friends on the app couldn't experience the magic of Tribe. We'd rather Users that are able to use the app the second day login for the first time.
26
Great question -- when we launched, we received a strong amount of PR which helped launch our product and spur initial growth. Also, we built in the ability to share across multiple channels (iMessage, Twitter, Instagram etc.) to increase awareness and gain traction with early adopters. One of the first things we tested before we launched was “What does someone say back to you when you send them an imoji?” Most answers were something like: “What is that” or “How did you do that” …which helps users naturally discover the product. IMO, the best way to grow is through happy customers and word of mouth.
27
Thanks for the kind words. My advice: Start small. Don't try to snag 1 million followers. Try to get one. Then another. Then a third. And if everyone doesn't agree with you, that's a good sign. It could mean you're on to something. For more on this topic generally, look for Kevin Kelly's awesome essay, 1000 True Fans.
28
That's very hard. As the CEO, you have a big vision so you want to expand as fast as possible and you get a lot of validiation for expanding fast, especially from investors. I think the fundamental thing is you have to expend money and time to do that. So there's only so much you can do. You can either spread yourself very thin and kind of do a mediocre job on a lot of things or you could pick a couple things and be really good at them.
29
i think it's better for founders to start in markets they know, then go/grow to other markets after they have some initial traction. particularly if your market is 50-100M+ people, it's not a bad idea to get product/market fit in your home market first, then after validating try to open up new markets.
30
yeah that happens sometimes. altho usually if you aren't moving forward building / marketing / selling stuff, you will get pretty immediate feedback (at least from 500) that you should get your shit together and stop playing startup theater. most of our companies are very focused on getting new customers and raising a seed round of capital. unless they are already profitable, if they don't do those things they will probably run out of money and die within 3-6 months.
31
My major transition point came when I stopped trying to be exhaustive in what I covered, and instead stuck to what I was interested in. More personality, less curation. That's when sign-ups started flowing.
32
Hi Emilly if you are in the B2B space, and need to get results quickly, there are two tactics that yield results pretty quickly. The first is to try paid search ads. The second is to create an event where you bring together the experts in your particular product area, and get them to debate where the market is going. Use this event as a hook to talk to prospects and invite them to the event to start to build a relationship with them.
I also often tell B2B startups to do outbound cold calling, the way that a Sales Development Rep would do it. You're probably surprised with this answer given that I am all about Inbound Marketing, and this is very much outbound. The reason why I don't put Inbound content marketing first, is because it typically takes time to ramp up, and as an early stage startup, you need results fast. Using the event I described above gives you a great reason to call them where you are offering them value, as opposed to selling (which they hate). You might have seen somewhere that I like to treat customers like a bank account: you have to deposit money before you can expect to be able to draw it out.
33
There are a couple schools of thought here:
The first school of thought is that the ROI of community is inherent. It's like design. You know it's important to have a well designed product/website, but you can necessarily track the revenue results of the look and feel of your product. You just know it's important and you know whether it's good or bad.
That's great, but it doesn't solve the problem. The reality is community is being used as a business tactic and so it has to achieve business goals. So you HAVE to be able to tie it to your business goals. That doesn't always mean the bottom line (though if you can do that that's great). But if your company goals is to improve the support experience, focus on those metrics. If you're trying to increase product retention, then track your community efforts based on those metrics. If it's marketing/acquisition goals, you should be building community programs that can bring more people into the product and track the results there.
34
There are two kinds of metrics a community pro should be tracking:
1. Community health metrics - how healthy is your community?
2. Business metrics - how is community impacting your business?
I touched on a few metrics and ways of thinking about #2. Basically, you have to look at what the goal is for the business and focus on community programs that will achieve those goals. Tie it to the existing narrative in your company and develop a report that will show how it's impacting the company goals.
For community health metrics, some of the most common ones are:
- community growth and churn
- post and comment activity: per user, per day, per thread, over time
- happiness: NPS, surveys, interviews (can be more qualitative)
You can also get more detailed:
- time to first post after joining
- % of members who introduce themselves
- network density
35
It wasn't just making a product they liked... it was making a community that people wanted to be a part of (figuring out badges, competing for mayors being a super user, being an early adopter, leaving tips everywhere!). That was a big eye opener for us... it's not just the product / the screens... its the community behind it that really makes it work
36
I don't roll my eyes, but we invest so early that projected growth stats/forecasts are pretty irrelevant. They're worth looking at only to see what assumptions the founders believe will drive/affect business/growth, but that's about it (absolute figures are meaningless); it's the model that matters/reflects something.
"Evidence" of traction should always be quantitative, so dashboards or Google Analytics/GoSquared/other analytics reports are great
37
To grow your userbase there is either something wrong with your product (i.e. it is not "10X" better) or there is something wrong with your customer acquisition (we aren't selling it to the right buyer, or through the right channel). Most startups fail because of a lack of product/market fit. E.g. you can stitch the world's best growth team onto a terrible product, and it just won't sell. Too many people try growth tactics on a product that a market does not want, and all those efforts are wasted.
38
if you mean userbase growth, the first thing to nail is do people actually want to use the product and is there a market need? If the answer is "Yes" due to e.g. organic adoption, the next question is how to scale it. Common tools include: 1. Funnel analysis. Where are you losing users? Do you have a lot of people showing up and you are bad at converting them? Or are you simply not attracting enough people to begin with? These two types of problems have different solutions. 2. What is your sales strategy? In general, as an enterprise or SaaS company you will need to focus on sales and marketing including building out an ISO or direct sales team. An analysis of sales approach can really matter. 3. Where do similar products get distribution? You can often copy or innovate on these approaches. 4. Is there a channel briefly open you can exploit? e.g. Every 2 years there is a new way to bootstrap distribution on Facebook. I think too many companies unfortunately lack basic product/market fit and then try to scale it without a product that works. The second most common mistake is companies with product/market fit not investing in distribution early enough as they are growing fast organically. Google and FB were both hyper aggressive on distribution tactics even early on.
39
We were fortunate enough at Twitch to have a running start, because there was already an organic gaming community from Justin.tv that we could tap into. You can't make communities. The right metaphor is planting a forest. At most you try to make sure the conditions are right and plant the right set of initial trees, but after that your control is limited to altering the parameters of the environment to the degree that's even possible.
The root of community is the same as communication, and that's not an accident. Communities will form anywhere that people regularly communicate with each other. So to grow a community, find some way to help people connect and talk with each other. After that, there's not much more you can do except deal with the occasional weevil infestation.
40
There are only 5 ways to grow an audience: viral growth, advertising, platform exploits, sales, and content.
Viral growth works iff using your product intrinsically involves other people. Think about how Uber spreads, by people taking cars with their friends. If your product is viral, you already know its viral.
Advertising works if you have lots and lots of potential customers, and you make enough money per customer that you can afford to pay to acquire them. Do the math, compare your cost of acquisition to the lifetime value of the user.
Platform exploits pop up periodically before becoming saturated. Think of how early Facebook games blew up, before Facebook clamped down on the channel. If you can find a new one of these, you win. They don't come around that often though.
Sales is pretty straightforward. If you have relatively few customers and make a LOT of money per customer, you can use sales by directly talking to each individual customer. This is a very good way to sell very expensive things.
Content is what we used at Twitch. If you create a platform that provides value to content creators, they will become your audience acquisition channel because they will be strongly incentivized to bring their existing fans in. Then your job is making sure you do a good job keeping those fans and helping them discover even more content! This works for media-driven platforms.
41
Hey. ✋ It's hard. There are many things we do. One is that we ship features and products to customers very, very early. So we frequently find that the simpler solutions are all we need and don't have to go much further at that time so solve the majority of a problem for the majority of our customers.
42
Hey. ✋ We are just over 4 years old. For most of the life of this company we had no sales and marketing but awesome customer and revenue growth. We obsessed about a. building something unique and very awesome and literally remarkable, such that people would tell their friends about it, and b. spreading our ideas far and wide on our blog and then our books to grow our brand in a meaningful way. Product-focused and bootstrapped businesses can do this too and hire great product-focused marketers later when you're ready to grow to the next level.
43
Remove as much friction as possible, get rid of unnecessary steps in your funnel. Make it as easy as possible for people to order. The more time it takes, the more you five them time to doubt their purchase. Once they land, have strong call to actions to the things you want them to do on your site and remove anything else that could distract them from that desired outcome.
44
1. Thank you
2. Be aggressive, don't wait for people to follow you on social media. Go out and find them, follow them and engage with them. Create a platform for yourself (personal website) to market yourself the way you want to and host your music. Regularly schedule posts on social, be active in communities where people share music, partner and work with small music blogs and podcasts to get your name out there. You have to start somewhere. Also optimize your website for SEO and make sure that its a user friendly experience. Also look into building an email list for your supporters.
3. Yes. The strengths were proof of traction, having a product developed in place, lack of vanity metrics, and an authentic passion for what we were doing. The weakness was that we should have had better reasoning for exactly why we needed the money and what we were going to use it for. Not just because you need money or running out of money. A lot better at pitching now.
45
Not focusing on enough on product development or really taking the time to get qualitative insights back from their target audience. Also making sure that your attribution is correct in your analytics dashboards.
46
very good question and very much a case of riding on people's coat tails at the beginning, so I was very strategic in terms of selecting guests that had large following who had significant distribution channels that we could distribute the content to, for example, our first interview was with the amazing @guykawasaki who has over 2m followers on Twitter! We also used viral hacks such as click to tweets in the podcast description and really optimised for podcast search engine optimisation.
47
frameworks and rigorous process are what works best.
48
It's smart to make sure you can keep growing your market share, quantifiably in your first market before aggressively moving to another one. This also ensures you get closer to having repeatable processes and ideally a playbook before moving on to new territories.
49
I like to call it "self-funding" not bootstrapping. Paid channels are very easily measurable from a ROI perspective. I don't know the market you are in but if there's opportunity to acquire via paid channels and measure ROI, I would do experiments with paid channels as soon as you can to understand whether they can be viable for you or not. For starters, just find out how much it costs you to get a sign up.
50
in a business you need two things:
1. A great product
2. Great distribution
I haven't seen two companies (even if they are in the same market targeting the same customers) approach these things in the same way.
51
I'm always impressed when a company gets a ton of word of mouth on twitter and facebook or anyone else that's appropriate for their business. If your product is truly great for your customers, they can't help but talk about it. So, in that regard, measuring word of mouth and responding to people is pretty important in the early stages.
52
oy. thats a beast. the metric i like is engagement. I focus on people waznting to live on or with the products we invest in and the founders just know their space. we are wrong of course a lot but thats what I care about early. I am pretty old so diving into metrics all day is a tough skill to learn and there is so much false data in metrics that is not discussed. Intuition is underrated.
53
The toughest part about building community on consoles is that there is no keyboard. Back and forth communication is so key to that sense of community that finding ways to deal with that limitation are key. Overdog also has to strike that balance about building community versus the end objective of going to play a game.
54
1. predictable payback period on assets - whether it's inventory or CAPEX, you need to have a handle on the payback period
2. debt financing to manage cashflows so you're not using equity financing (expensive!) as a way to handle ongoing cashflow ins and outs
3. margins that get better with scale. an asset-heavy business with margins that don't increase at scale is a tough biz to venture back
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Question
Summary
Summary
Aaron Harris
Wanted to hear your opinion on early vs later monetisation for an early stage startup.
Aaron Levie
What type of struggles and roadblocks did you face building Box in the very beginning?
Aaron Levie
Box's stock price hit an all-time low today even though you guys seem to be headed in a good direction. How frustrating is this for you?
Alex Wilhelm
I wanted to know your thoughts behind it in terms of reach/engagement vs. ad revenue. Which do you value higher?
Andrew Chen
Hi Andrew, what are some underrated channels to use right now to promote your product?
Andrew Chen
Hey Andrew - love your blog and thank you so much for doing this live chat.
Andy Dunn
Hey Andy besides having a product people really liked.......What drove the early success of bonobos? Did you put a focus on paid customer acquisition? Social buzz? Where was the focus and what is driving sales today? I look at companies like Bonobos & Polar Stuff and find it really impressive how they are able to create such a following over instagram.
Andy Dunn
Great meeting you here at this AMA. I have 2 questions: 1) Biggest struggles to get bonobos name out there during its early days. How did you market it? 2) Any suggestion for fashion tech companies that are entering the market now?
Anjula Acharia
What's ways did you find were the best way to scale and gain traction early on in company?
Arianna Huffington
How did you got traction and growth in the early days? As once in a while the Huffington Post were also a startup ;-)
Arun Pattnaik
What you think is the best way to start Signup process before long forms. Obviously it's better to start with a boost to user journey with quickly asking for Email & Password at once. And in next pages presenting those forms in front of him. But what you prefer: 1) Asking for Email & Password with a modal. 2) Or staring the journey by asking Email & Password on a new fresh page. How and where modals makes U easy? Where they are irritating?
Ash Maurya
Hey Ash, thanks for joining us! When looking at metrics, what time frame would you suggest making decisions based on?
Ash Maurya
What are your favorite tools, tactics and strategies for measuring and adjusting a) product/market fit b) pricing for a product/service?
Ashton Kutcher
It seems to me that two of the significant benefits you bring as an investor are your celebrity and your experience building your own brand. do you think your involvement in a startup is more beneficial earlier in the company's life, where your experience building your brand may be more relevant, or later when the company needs to grow and your celebrity can help increase awareness.
Bo Ren
Can you please tell me about the process of validating new business ideas (in this case new products / features). What are the key steps that take you from an idea to going live? What is your main metric during that process?
Branden Harvey
What would you suggest for brands to do who are just starting out on Snapchat?
Branden Harvey
What is the most effective method you have found to promote your followings on social media? Which is your fave platform to use also?!
Brenden Mulligan
Brenden! You and the team have transition from Cluster (a series of photo-sharing apps) to LaunchKit (a suite of tools to help mobile app builders). Both are very different products. What inspired you to switch directions?
Brian Fanzo
What is the secret to scaling a community?
Brian Lam, Jacqui Cheng & Ganda Suthivarakom
Thank you for joining today! Love Wirecutter. Quick question for you, how do you think about growing your business?
Brian Lam, Jacqui Cheng & Ganda Suthivarakom
What have you found to be the elements of the most read/shared things that make people react?
Brit Morin
How big is your team now? And what has been your toughest challenge in building an organization that functions well for Brit+Co (apart from hiring great people)?
Charlie Cheever
What key tricks did you use to kickstart the Quora community, and growth?
Clara Shih
What's the biggest missed social media opportunity for companies?
Cyril Paglino
What growth strategies could you share with other startup founders? I'm also curious, how well has forcing people to invite at least one friend worked for Tribe?
Daniel Brusilovsky & Jason Stein
Hi Daniel and Jason, what are some interesting ways you grew the userbase for imoji?
Daniel Pink
My question today is how do you get people to rally behind a cause or common goal?
Danielle Morrill
How do you balance the desire to expand to new customer segments with also the desire to achieve product market fit in the first couple?
Dave McClure
I see great applications and business solutions being made abroad which in my opinion would greatly work overseas. Shouldnt small tech companies lunch earlier overseas, maybe get traction in places they didnt expect?
Dave McClure
Do you think people get a false sense of achievement by just being part of an accelerator which may blind them from actually building something of value?
Dave Pell
I would love to hear what have been the most successful methods you have used to grow your email newsletter? What have been the major transition points?
David Skok
What are some growth tactics early stage startup founders can implement without a large budget?
David Spinks
how do you typically measure Community ROI?
David Spinks
which Community analytics folks are measuring and how that helps your overall goals.
Dennis Crowley
Apart from gamification what do you think brought your first 100k loyal users? How did you make checking in useful or exciting for them?
Eileen Burbidge
Scalibility vs Profitability! Do you roll your eyes at projected growth statistics? What advice would you give to people pitching, as to how to give 'evidence' for their numbers?
Elad Gil
what would be your advice for an entrepreneur trying to grow their user base? Also what would your advice be for an entrepreneur trying to make their start up more attractive to investors?
Elad Gil
Hi Elad, thanks for joining us today. What growth tips can you share with us from successfully cofounding your own companies?
Emmett Shear
Can you walk us through how you grew the sense of community from the first few users to the first thousand at Twitch? In what ways did you leverage the community for growth?
Emmett Shear
Would like to know what will your advice be for a startup to build its audience base?
Eoghan McCabe
Hey! How do you guys fight complexity, and over-engineering?
Eoghan McCabe
Thanks for taking the questions. What advise you would give SAAS companies on how to build their marketing & branding efforts, specially when they are bootstrapped and mostly technical? Any insights on pricing the product would also be very helpful
Everette Taylor
Hey Everette! In your opinion, what's the best way to improve ecommerce landing pages?
Everette Taylor
Hi Everette,
1. Hope your day's going well
2. What would your advice be to early-stage independent musicians looking to grow their brands through online marketing?
3. Did you ever have to make a pitch for seed funding? And if so, what were the strengths and weaknesses of your pitch
Everette Taylor
Hey Everette! Thanks for doing the AMA. What do you think that most startups are doing wrong when it comes to marketing/growth?
Harry Stebbings
How did you grow your audience?
Hiten Shah
What are 3 things that you have found to skyrocket growth/engagement in companies?
Hiten Shah
What are your thoughts on pursuing multiple markets at once vs hunkering down with the US and making sure we succeed there?
Hiten Shah
I am currently bootstrapping my startup and my question is regarding growth channels. What according to you is the optimal time to start investing in paid channels like fb and google ads, rather than religiously pursuing organic growth through your product. What are some metric to look out for when making that move from organic to paid growth channels. thnx
Hiten Shah
Startups are scrambling to find growth techniques, growth hacking, etc. In your experience, what are the tactics you feel every/any startup should just start with and "go from there"?
Hiten Shah
What are some top of funnel (ie general awareness) metrics that you think companies should monitor at the early stages?
Howard Lindzon
It seemed like that a16z post on metrics really struck chord with the startup community. My thought is that it was b/c people have a desire for some sort of standardization to benchmark themselves & make startup investing/raising seem a bit less random.
Is a more standardized approach to tracking metrics and reporting those metrics to stakeholders achievable in the startup market? Is is even a good idea? Obviously you have to contend with the cost of forcing compliance (startups don't have excess money to spend) as well as the incentives in the current set up where a bit of deceptiveness can be advantageous since due diligence is often lacking.
Hunter Hillenmeyer
Creating a community is a challenging goal, especially on a new platform such as Xbox One. What has been a valuable lesson that you learned over the years developing Overdog.
Hunter Walk
What are some strategies to scale an asset-heavy (like you own/manage the inventory of assets) startup venture?
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This is such a great question, but it's also super hard to answer without much more context. Some businesses can survive without charging their customers because their path to scale is rapid enough, and their funding large enough, to get them to the point of making money. Others need to make money sooner because of their costs.
6-8% a week is pretty good, but I'd generally edge towards at least experimenting with revenue so you start to have an idea of what you're going to do. Of course, if you're going to run out of money before you get to profitability...you might have to charge sooner!
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This is such a great question, but it's also super hard to answer without much more context. Some businesses can survive without charging their customers because their path to scale is rapid enough, and their funding large enough, to get them to the point of making money. Others need to make money sooner because of their costs.
6-8% a week is pretty good, but I'd generally edge towards at least experimenting with revenue so you start to have an idea of what you're going to do. Of course, if you're going to run out of money before you get to profitability...you might have to charge sooner!
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Question
Wanted to hear your opinion on early vs later monetisation for an early stage startup.