├── 01.zh-si.md ├── 02.zh-si.md ├── 03.zh-si.md ├── 04.zh-si.md ├── 05.zh-si.md ├── 06.zh-si.md ├── 07.zh-si.md ├── 08.zh-si.md ├── 09.zh-si.md ├── 10.zh-si.md ├── 11.zh-si.md ├── 12.zh-si.md ├── 13.zh-si.md ├── 14.zh-si.md ├── 15.zh-si.md ├── 16.zh-si.md ├── README.md └── original ├── 01.md ├── 02.md ├── 03.md ├── 04.md ├── 05.md ├── 06.md ├── 07.md ├── 08.md ├── 09.md ├── 10.md ├── 11.md ├── 12.md ├── 13.md ├── 14.md ├── 15.md └── 16.md /10.zh-si.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Tim Brady - Building Culture 2 | 3 | Tim Brady:Good morning. 4 | 5 | 蒂姆·布雷迪：早上好。 6 | 7 | My name is Tim Brady. 8 | 9 | 我叫蒂姆·布雷迪。 10 | 11 | I am a partner here at YC, a group partner. 12 | 13 | 我是YC的合伙人，集团合伙人。 14 | 15 | Which means I work with the companies during the batch closely. 16 | 17 | 这意味着我在批次期间与公司密切合作。 18 | 19 | I have started three things prior, one of which was Yahoo back in 1994. 20 | 21 | 我之前已经开始做三件事，其中之一是1994年的雅虎。 22 | 23 | So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today stems from that experience. 24 | 25 | 所以我今天要讲的很多东西都来自于这段经历。 26 | 27 | As Kevin said, I want to talk about building culture. 28 | 29 | 正如凯文所说，我想谈谈建设文化。 30 | 31 | How to think about it at this stage of your company and why it's important. 32 | 33 | 在贵公司的这个阶段如何思考它，以及为什么它很重要。 34 | 35 | Now, culture can be pretty broadly defined, so let me be super clear on what I'm talking about. 36 | 37 | 现在，文化可以被非常宽泛的定义，所以让我非常清楚我所说的是什么。 38 | 39 | Really to me, culture is just behavior. 40 | 41 | 对我来说，文化就是行为。 42 | 43 | And company culture is that implicit set of behaviors inside of your company. 44 | 45 | 而公司文化就是你公司内部的一套隐含的行为。 46 | 47 | They should inform your employees on how to behave. 48 | 49 | 他们应该告诉你的员工如何举止得体。 50 | 51 | I guess, when done right, they should inform the employees inside of your company how to behave when it hasn't been explicitly laid out for them. 52 | 53 | 我想，当处理得当时，他们应该告诉公司内部的员工，当公司没有明确地为他们制定计划时，他们应该如何行事。 54 | 55 | And the good news, if you do it right, if you get the right culture, the right behaviors will support a good business, and hopefully a great business. 56 | 57 | 好消息是，如果你做得好，如果你有正确的文化，正确的行为将支持一个好的企业，希望是一个伟大的企业。 58 | 59 | And over the course of your company, over the history of your company, it will support that in a lot of intangible ways that are hard even to describe, but that's why it's important. 60 | 61 | 在你公司的过程中，在你公司的历史上，它将以很多无形的方式支持这一点，这些方式甚至很难描述，但这就是为什么它很重要。 62 | 63 | That's how you should think about it at this stage. 64 | 65 | 这就是你在这个阶段应该如何看待它。 66 | 67 | Don't over-complicate it. 68 | 69 | 别太复杂了。 70 | 71 | Right? That's really it. 72 | 73 | 对吗？真的是这样。 74 | 75 | So you're probably asking yourselves, at this stage of the company you have so many things on your plate, you're so busy, it almost seems like a luxury to be thinking about culture. 76 | 77 | 所以你可能会问自己，在公司的这个阶段，你有这么多事情要做，你太忙了，思考文化似乎是一种奢侈。 78 | 79 | Right? You're not wrong to be asking that question. 80 | 81 | 对吗？你问这个问题没有错。 82 | 83 | And the reason is that when your company gets going, these are three phases that you'll be going through as you build your company. 84 | 85 | 原因是，当你的公司开始运营时，这三个阶段是你建立公司时要经历的三个阶段。 86 | 87 | All of you really are at this top stage that I call the idea stage, right? Talking to customers, iterating the product, experimenting, iterating the product. 88 | 89 | 你们所有人真的都在这个顶端阶段，我称之为想法阶段，对吗？与客户交谈，迭代产品，试验，迭代产品。 90 | 91 | Hopefully you'll raise some money at some point to allow you to continue to do that. 92 | 93 | 希望你能在某个时候筹到一些钱，让你能够继续这样做。 94 | 95 | And at some point in the future, you're going to reach product market fit, right? If you think back on the product market fit talk that Michael gave a couple of weeks ago. 96 | 97 | 在未来的某个时候，你会达到产品市场的适合度，对吗？如果你回想一下迈克尔几周前给出的关于产品市场适合度的讨论。 98 | 99 | And when you do that, hopefully you'll raise a whole lot more money and begin scaling the company. 100 | 101 | 当你这样做的时候，希望你能筹集到更多的钱，并开始扩大公司规模。 102 | 103 | Now scaling the company almost always requires hiring a lot of people, right? And the people that you have inside of the company prior to hiring a lot of people are really your cultural DNA. 104 | 105 | 现在，扩大公司规模几乎总是需要雇佣很多人，对吗？在雇佣很多人之前，你在公司内部的人就是你的文化DNA。 106 | 107 | Those are the people that are going to be involved in hiring and training that next wave of people. 108 | 109 | 这些人将参与雇佣和培训下一波人。 110 | 111 | So it's super important that you get it right. 112 | 113 | 所以非常重要的是你要把它弄对。 114 | 115 | That's why it is subtitled kind of the first 20 employees that you get. 116 | 117 | 这就是为什么它的字幕是你得到的前20名员工。 118 | 119 | And there's no magic to the number 20, it's really that set of employees that are in place when you begin scaling the company. 120 | 121 | 数字20并没有什么神奇之处，当你开始扩大公司规模时，确实有一组员工已经到位。 122 | 123 | Because again, those folks are going to be highly involved in hiring and training this next wave. 124 | 125 | 因为再一次，这些人将高度参与下一波的招聘和培训。 126 | 127 | So if you get it right, if those first set of employees embody kind of the culture and the values that you want inside your company, you have a much higher likelihood of building a strong and coherent culture. 128 | 129 | 因此，如果你做对了，如果第一批员工体现了你希望公司内部的某种文化和价值观，你就有更高的可能性来建立一个强大而连贯的文化。 130 | 131 | The reverse is also true, right? If you make mistakes, if you get the wrong types of people inside of the company early on, they're going to be involved in hiring and training. 132 | 133 | 反之亦然，对吧？如果你犯了错误，如果你很早就在公司内部找到了错误类型的人，他们就会参与招聘和培训。 134 | 135 | And those mistakes are going to get propagated, and it'll be much harder later on to kind of correct course and try to build a coherent company. 136 | 137 | 这些错误将会传播开来，以后要想走正确的道路，试图建立一个连贯的公司，将会变得更加困难。 138 | 139 | Right? So that's why it's important to be thinking about now. 140 | 141 | 对吗？所以这就是为什么现在思考是很重要的。 142 | 143 | I know you have a lot on your plate in starting this company, but what you need to do doesn't take a whole lot of time. 144 | 145 | 我知道你在创办这家公司方面有很多事情要做，但你需要做的并不需要花太多时间。 146 | 147 | For the most part, it's just some conversations with your co-founder. 148 | 149 | 在大多数情况下，这只是与你的联合创始人的一些对话。 150 | 151 | And so I came up with a list of six things that you can do now to help you, or to help the likelihood of you building a strong and coherent culture. 152 | 153 | 所以我列出了一份清单，列出了你现在可以做的六件事来帮助你，或者帮助你建立一个强大而连贯的文化。 154 | 155 | First one, be proud of the problem you're solving. 156 | 157 | 第一，为你正在解决的问题感到骄傲。 158 | 159 | Kind of seems silly to say. 160 | 161 | 这么说有点傻。 162 | 163 | But you need to, right? If you don't have the problem yourself, you need to identify with the people that do have the problem, and you need to be really proud of the fact that you're solving it for them, right? Because building, as I'm sure you're going to, if you've heard already, and you'll continue to hear, building a company's hard. 164 | 165 | 但你需要，对吧？如果你自己没有问题，你需要认同那些确实有问题的人，你需要为你为他们解决这个问题而感到非常自豪，对吧？因为建设，我相信你会这样做，如果你已经听说了，而且你还会继续听到的话，建立一家公司是很难的。 166 | 167 | It's a long process, and there will be some really difficult times. 168 | 169 | 这是一个漫长的过程，会有一些非常困难的时期。 170 | 171 | And if you're not proud of what you're doing, it's really hard to maintain the level of energy and enthusiasm you need to sustain the company. 172 | 173 | 如果你对自己正在做的事情不感到自豪，那么很难保持你维持公司所需的能量和热情水平。 174 | 175 | Right? Sometimes where we see founders go wrong is they choose an idea with their ego. 176 | 177 | 对吗？有时候，我们看到创始人的错误在于他们用自我选择了一个想法。 178 | 179 | They choose an idea because it sounds good to tell their friends at a party, right? And when times get tough, it's really hard to maintain that level of energy. 180 | 181 | 他们选择一个想法是因为在聚会上告诉他们的朋友听起来很好，对吗？当形势变得艰难时，很难保持这样的能量水平。 182 | 183 | And the reason energy, enthusiasm, is important, not just for sustaining the company, but everyone around you will see how you feel about the company, and to a large degree that will set the tone for your culture. 184 | 185 | 能量和热情之所以重要，不仅仅是为了维持公司，而且你周围的每个人都会看到你对公司的感觉，并且在很大程度上这将为你的文化定下基调。 186 | 187 | A couple of batches back, we had a YC alum come and tell his story. 188 | 189 | 几批回来后，我们有一位YC校友过来讲述他的故事。 190 | 191 | He went through the YC program a few years back. 192 | 193 | 几年前他参加了YC项目。 194 | 195 | He applied with four other guys with the idea of helping retailers liquidate their excess inventory. 196 | 197 | 他和另外四个人一起申请帮助零售商清理过剩的库存。 198 | 199 | That was the idea they started with. 200 | 201 | 这就是他们开始时的想法。 202 | 203 | And they did all the right things. 204 | 205 | 他们做了所有正确的事情。 206 | 207 | Talked to customers, iterated, experimented, and he raised some money, and he got to to search for product market fit, and he continued to to search for product market fit. 208 | 209 | 与客户交谈，反复，试验，他筹集了一些资金，他得到了搜索产品市场匹配，他继续搜索产品市场匹配。 210 | 211 | Ultimately, they had a good business for a little while, but they also ultimately ended up in the business of makeup for teenage girls. 212 | 213 | 最终，他们有一段时间的生意很好，但他们最终也进入了为十几岁的女孩化妆的行业。 214 | 215 | Right? They didn't identify with the problem. 216 | 217 | 对吗？他们没有意识到这个问题。 218 | 219 | And when times got tough, they just didn't want to be there. 220 | 221 | 当日子变得艰难时，他们就是不想去那里。 222 | 223 | Right? They didn't identify with their customers. 224 | 225 | 对吗？他们不认同他们的顾客。 226 | 227 | And he told the story of where the employees around him, they actually came up to him and said, hey, it doesn't look like you're enjoying what you're doing. 228 | 229 | 他讲了他周围的员工的故事，他们实际上走到他跟前说，嘿，看起来你并不喜欢你所做的事情。 230 | 231 | And ultimately they ended up shutting down the company. 232 | 233 | 最终他们关闭了公司。 234 | 235 | Next. 236 | 237 | 下一个。 238 | 239 | When you do find the right problem to solve, one that you're proud of, create a longterm vision that others will follow. 240 | 241 | 当你找到了正确的问题要解决，一个你引以为豪的问题，创造一个长期的愿景，其他人将遵循。 242 | 243 | It's much easier to create a great culture if people who identify with the problem you're solving know you're solving it. 244 | 245 | 如果认同你正在解决的问题的人知道你正在解决它，那么创造一个伟大的文化就容易得多。 246 | 247 | They'll raise their hand and say, hey, I want to be part of what you're doing. 248 | 249 | 他们会举起手说，嘿，我想成为你正在做的事情的一部分。 250 | 251 | Right? You can call it a North Star for the company. 252 | 253 | 对吗？你可以称之为公司的北极星。 254 | 255 | And say it in a way that will inspire people. 256 | 257 | 并以一种能激励人们的方式说出来。 258 | 259 | It should give purpose to the work you're doing. 260 | 261 | 它应该给你正在做的工作带来目标。 262 | 263 | It shouldn't describe the work, but it should talk about the purpose of that work. 264 | 265 | 它不应该描述工作，但应该谈论工作的目的。 266 | 267 | And let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. 268 | 269 | 让我举几个例子来说明我的意思。 270 | 271 | Tesla. 272 | 273 | 特斯拉 274 | 275 | To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. 276 | 277 | 加速世界向可持续能源的转变。 278 | 279 | Pretty inspiring, right? No mention of an electric vehicle. 280 | 281 | 很鼓舞人心，对吧？没有提到电动汽车。 282 | 283 | You know, if you said, oh, we're building the world's best electrical vehicle, that's good. 284 | 285 | 你知道，如果你说，哦，我们正在建造世界上最好的电动汽车，那很好。 286 | 287 | You'll inspire a handful of engineers who implicitly understand kind of the technical challenges that come with that. 288 | 289 | 你将激励一些工程师，他们隐含地理解随之而来的技术挑战。 290 | 291 | But if you're going to build a big company, you need to attract kind of a broad array of people. 292 | 293 | 但如果你打算建立一个大公司，你需要吸引各种各样的人。 294 | 295 | This does that. 296 | 297 | 这个可以做到这一点。 298 | 299 | Another example, Microsoft's original. 300 | 301 | 另一个例子，微软的原创。 302 | 303 | A computer on every desk in every home. 304 | 305 | 每家每张桌子上都有一台电脑。 306 | 307 | It's kind of laughable now, but in the early eighties, this was crazy talk, right? Computers were only for businesses and hobbyists. 308 | 309 | 现在有点可笑，但在80年代初，这是疯狂的谈话，对吧？计算机只适用于企业和业余爱好者。 310 | 311 | But this vision, laid out by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, attracted the right type of people to their company. 312 | 313 | 但比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)和保罗·艾伦(Paul Allen)提出的这一愿景，吸引了合适类型的人加入他们的公司。 314 | 315 | Right? The hobbyists that had the capability to help them build the type of company they needed to build saw this and were excited about it. 316 | 317 | 对吗？有能力帮助他们建立他们需要建立的公司类型的业余爱好者看到了这一点，并对此感到兴奋。 318 | 319 | It attracted and allowed them to kind of build the type of culture that they needed at Microsoft. 320 | 321 | 它吸引并允许他们在某种程度上建立他们在微软需要的文化类型。 322 | 323 | Last one. 324 | 325 | 最后一个。 326 | 327 | One you're all familiar with. 328 | 329 | 一个你们都很熟悉的人。 330 | 331 | Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. 332 | 333 | 组织世界上的信息，使其普遍可用和有用。 334 | 335 | Again, no mention of the product. 336 | 337 | 再说一遍，没有提到产品。 338 | 339 | Doesn't say we're building a kick-ass search engine. 340 | 341 | 并没有说我们正在建立一个非常棒的搜索引擎。 342 | 343 | All right. 344 | 345 | 好的。 346 | 347 | So once you're able to come up with kind of an inspiring vision to attract the right people to your company, the next thing you should do is have a conversation with your co-founder about the types of values and behaviors you want to cultivate inside of your company. 348 | 349 | 所以，一旦你能够想出一个鼓舞人心的愿景来吸引合适的人加入你的公司，你应该做的下一件事就是与你的联合创始人就你希望在公司内部培养的价值观和行为类型进行一次对话。 350 | 351 | Right? Ultimately, the purpose of this at this stage in your company is to use as a filter for the hiring process. 352 | 353 | 对吗？最终，在贵公司的这一阶段，此操作的目的是将其用作招聘流程的筛选器。 354 | 355 | Right? It should be a short list, and at this stage it's fine that it's informal. 356 | 357 | 对吗？这应该是一个短名单，在这个阶段，它是非正式的很好。 358 | 359 | If you're lucky enough to to move on and grow, like ultimately, maybe this list becomes a more polished corporate values list. 360 | 361 | 如果你足够幸运地继续前进并成长，就像最终，也许这份清单会成为一份更精美的公司价值观清单。 362 | 363 | This is probably the seed of that. 364 | 365 | 这可能就是那个的种子。 366 | 367 | But at this stage, it doesn't need to be polished, right? You don't need to publish a blog post on it. 368 | 369 | 但是在这个阶段，它不需要抛光，对吧？你不需要在上面发表博客文章。 370 | 371 | It's just a short list. 372 | 373 | 这只是一个很短的名单。 374 | 375 | Less than five things. 376 | 377 | 不到五件事。 378 | 379 | And this will help you during the hiring process to make sure that you're letting the right type of people inside the company. 380 | 381 | 这将帮助你在招聘过程中确保你让正确类型的人进入公司。 382 | 383 | Right? This is in addition to that skill list that you'll need. 384 | 385 | 对吗？这是对你需要的技能列表的补充。 386 | 387 | You know, job description, the skills that person needs. 388 | 389 | 你知道，工作描述，人需要的技能。 390 | 391 | This is above and beyond that. 392 | 393 | 这是超越它的。 394 | 395 | So let me take you through a couple of examples. 396 | 397 | 让我来给你们举几个例子。 398 | 399 | And I apologize, these are actually more corporate value lists. 400 | 401 | 我很抱歉，这些实际上是更多的公司价值清单。 402 | 403 | They're a little more polished. 404 | 405 | 它们稍微擦亮了一点。 406 | 407 | Yours won't need to be this polished. 408 | 409 | 你的不需要这么擦亮。 410 | 411 | All right. 412 | 413 | 好的。 414 | 415 | Spotify. 416 | 417 | Spotify 418 | 419 | Innovative, collaborative, sincere, passionate, and playful. 420 | 421 | 创新，协作，真诚，热情，好玩。 422 | 423 | Right? You can see pretty clearly how you can use that set of lists that this lists to begin screening potential employees. 424 | 425 | 对吗？您可以非常清楚地看到如何使用该列表集开始筛选潜在员工。 426 | 427 | Atlassian. 428 | 429 | 亚特兰大。 430 | 431 | Right? This is a little different, the way they make the list. 432 | 433 | 对吗？这是一个有点不同的方式，他们的名单。 434 | 435 | It doesn't have to be just adjectives like the Spotify one was. 436 | 437 | 它不必像Spotify那样只是形容词。 438 | 439 | Open company, no bullshit. 440 | 441 | 开放公司，不要胡说八道。 442 | 443 | Build with heart and balance. 444 | 445 | 用心和平衡来建设。 446 | 447 | Don't fuck with the customer. 448 | 449 | 别他妈的和顾客在一起。 450 | 451 | Play as a team. 452 | 453 | 作为一个团队踢球。 454 | 455 | And be the change you seek. 456 | 457 | 成为你所寻求的改变。 458 | 459 | Right? They said it a little different. 460 | 461 | 对吗？他们说的有点不同。 462 | 463 | You can see how this came from a conversation between co-founders, right? Like I don't want to work in an environment that's highly political. 464 | 465 | 你可以看到这是如何从联合创始人之间的对话中得出的，对吧？就像我不想在高度政治化的环境中工作。 466 | 467 | No bullshit. 468 | 469 | 不是胡说八道。 470 | 471 | Right? That translates into kind of a hiring filter of just like if someone seems political in any way, let's not let them in the company, him or her in the company. 472 | 473 | 对吗？这就转化为一种招聘过滤，就像如果某人看起来有任何政治色彩，我们就不要让他们进入公司，让他或她进入公司。 474 | 475 | So come up with this list. 476 | 477 | 所以想出这张清单。 478 | 479 | Right? Again, a short list. 480 | 481 | 对吗？再说一遍，一个简短的名单。 482 | 483 | What type of company do you want to build? What type of behaviors will support the business you're building? And then create that list. 484 | 485 | 你想建立什么样的公司？什么类型的行为将支持您正在构建的业务？然后创建该列表。 486 | 487 | But don't let it just be a piece of paper. 488 | 489 | 但不要让它只是一张纸。 490 | 491 | Right? Don't put it in a drawer and wait for the marketing department to polish it a few years later. 492 | 493 | 对吗？不要把它放在抽屉里，等着营销部门在几年后擦亮它。 494 | 495 | You have to model that behavior. 496 | 497 | 你必须模仿这种行为。 498 | 499 | For better, for worse, the early employees will look to you for the cultural cues, right? You can't say, do as I say, not as I do. 500 | 501 | 无论是好是坏，早期的员工都会向你寻求文化暗示，对吗？你不能说，做我说的，而不是我做的。 502 | 503 | Right? You have to walk the walk. 504 | 505 | 对吗？你必须走自己的路。 506 | 507 | They will take their cues from you. 508 | 509 | 他们会从你那里得到提示。 510 | 511 | Four. 512 | 513 | 四。 514 | 515 | When thinking about this list, to the extent you can, make sure it's externally focused. 516 | 517 | 当考虑这个清单的时候，尽量确保它是外在的。 518 | 519 | It's much better to build a culture that's focused on the customer than it is on how you treat one another inside the company. 520 | 521 | 建立一种以客户为中心的文化，而不是在公司内部如何对待他人，这要好得多。 522 | 523 | Look, your shortlist can have both. 524 | 525 | 听着，你的入围名单可以两者兼得。 526 | 527 | But the more important ones are having it externally focused. 528 | 529 | 但更重要的是让它专注于外部。 530 | 531 | Over the long haul, that will serve you much, much better. 532 | 533 | 从长远来看，这将为你提供更好的服务。 534 | 535 | And let me give you an example of of what I mean by this. 536 | 537 | 让我给你们举个例子来说明我的意思。 538 | 539 | So, move fast and break things. 540 | 541 | 所以，动作要快，要打破东西。 542 | 543 | You've heard this right? Facebook. 544 | 545 | 你听过这个对吗？脸谱。 546 | 547 | This is what I consider an internally focused thing. 548 | 549 | 这就是我所认为的专注于内部的事情。 550 | 551 | If you're a project manager or an engineer at Facebook trying to decide what to do next, this doesn't offer you a whole lot of guidance, right? Think back to kind of the definition I gave of company culture, right? It informs employees how to behave when it hasn't been explicitly laid out. 552 | 553 | 如果你是Facebook的项目经理或工程师，试图决定下一步做什么，这不会给你提供很多指导，对吧？回想一下我对公司文化的定义，对吧？它告知员工如何在没有明确规划的情况下如何行事。 554 | 555 | If you're deciding what next product to build, this doesn't help at all. 556 | 557 | 如果你在决定下一步要构建什么产品，这一点帮助都没有。 558 | 559 | It just tells you to move fast, right? Shouldn't be a surprise when you look at this that some of the privacy violations that they've been charged with have occurred at Facebook, right? I don't think for a second anyone at Facebook set out to violate anyone's privacy, but their culture certainly didn't help them, didn't give them the guide rails on where to stop. 560 | 561 | 它只是告诉你动作要快，对吧？当你看到他们被指控的一些侵犯隐私的行为发生在Facebook上时，你不应该感到惊讶，对吧？我不认为Facebook上的任何人会侵犯任何人的隐私，但他们的文化肯定没有帮助他们，没有给他们关于停在哪里的导轨。 562 | 563 | Right? Contrast that with kind of Google's early motto. 564 | 565 | 对吗？这与谷歌早期的座右铭形成了对比。 566 | 567 | Don't be evil. 568 | 569 | 别做坏事。 570 | 571 | Not particularly prescriptive necessarily, but it's outwardly focused, right? It lets the employees and the world know, hey, we're, we're a force for good. 572 | 573 | 不一定是特别规定的，但它是外在的，对吗？它让员工和全世界都知道，嘿，我们是一支为善的力量。 574 | 575 | And when you think about kind of that policy that Google has with its engineers, they're allowed to work 20% of their time on these independent projects. 576 | 577 | 当你想到谷歌和它的工程师们的政策时，他们被允许把20%的时间花在这些独立的项目上。 578 | 579 | It's pretty impressive that you haven't heard of any of those go astray. 580 | 581 | 令人印象深刻的是，你没有听说过其中任何一个误入歧途。 582 | 583 | Right? Pretty amazing, given the data they're sitting on. 584 | 585 | 对吗？非常令人惊讶，考虑到他们坐在上面的数据。 586 | 587 | Again, outwardly focused, right? It gives some guide rails to the employees on how to behave. 588 | 589 | 再一次，向外聚焦，对吗？它为员工提供了一些关于如何行为的指南。 590 | 591 | Next. 592 | 593 | 下一个。 594 | 595 | Have a conversation about diversity. 596 | 597 | 进行一次关于多样性的对话。 598 | 599 | And I'm not just talking about ethnic and gender diversity here. 600 | 601 | 我不只是在这里谈论种族和性别多样性。 602 | 603 | I'm talking about a diversity of opinions. 604 | 605 | 我说的是不同的观点。 606 | 607 | Can you create a culture where people with diametrically opposed opinions, strongly held, can coexist? Can you foster conversations that are loud, but then people walk away and are, okay? How important is that to your business? There's plenty of research out there that suggests that companies that are able to foster this type of environment, have a diverse environment, that isn't always agreeable, tend to be more creative. 608 | 609 | 你能创造出一种文化，在这种文化中，持有截然相反观点的人可以共存吗？你能培养大声的对话吗，然后人们就走开了，好吗？这对你的生意有多重要？有大量的研究表明，能够培育这种环境的公司，有一个多样化的环境，并不总是令人愉快的，往往更有创造力。 610 | 611 | They tend to be better problem solvers. 612 | 613 | 他们往往是更好的问题解决者。 614 | 615 | And the reason I put this up there is it's really hard, because most of the advice when you get going, when you're hiring the first set of employees is to, hey, tap your Rolodex, talk to friends, talk to former colleagues, right? Those people you know whether or not they're good engineers, you know whether or not they embody the values that you're trying to put into your company. 616 | 617 | 我把这个放在那里的原因是它真的很难，因为当你开始，当你雇佣第一批员工的时候，大多数的建议是，嘿，点击你的Rolodex，和朋友聊天，和以前的同事聊天，对吗？那些你知道他们是否是好工程师的人，你知道他们是否体现了你试图给你的公司带来的价值观。 618 | 619 | They're known quantities. 620 | 621 | 它们是已知数量。 622 | 623 | And at that stage it's a good thing. 624 | 625 | 在那个阶段，这是一件好事。 626 | 627 | But there are also probably a lot like you, right? And you can find pretty quickly that you've built a pretty homogeneous environment in trying to hire too quickly. 628 | 629 | 但也可能有很多像你一样的人，对吧？而且你很快就会发现，你已经建立了一个非常同质的环境，试图过快地招聘。 630 | 631 | So have this conversation. 632 | 633 | 这段对话也是如此。 634 | 635 | How important is it to you, to your company, to have diversity? Because if you think you're going to wake up at a hundred employees and then start a diversity program, you're fooling yourself. 636 | 637 | 多样性对你，对你的公司来说有多重要？因为如果你认为你会在一百名员工中醒来，然后开始一个多元化计划，你是在愚弄自己。 638 | 639 | It's way too hard. 640 | 641 | 太难了。 642 | 643 | It's too late by then. 644 | 645 | 到时候已经太晚了。 646 | 647 | So have that conversation. 648 | 649 | 那次谈话也是如此。 650 | 651 | It's tough. 652 | 653 | 这很难。 654 | 655 | I don't have the right answers on what that looks like. 656 | 657 | 我对那看起来像什么没有正确的答案。 658 | 659 | But have it, it's important. 660 | 661 | 但是拥有它，这很重要。 662 | 663 | So once you've done all that, had those conversations, put a hiring plan in place. 664 | 665 | 所以，一旦你完成了所有这些，进行了这些谈话，就把招聘计划放在适当的位置。 666 | 667 | Right? Don't just let it happen. 668 | 669 | 对吗？别让它发生。 670 | 671 | From the very first employee, make sure you're following a process. 672 | 673 | 从第一个员工开始，确保你遵循的是一个流程。 674 | 675 | There's a ton of stuff online about hiring processes beyond the scope of this talk, but consider all those conversations you had with your co-founder, the type of values you're trying to instill in the company, and the type of diversity you want, and make sure that's part of the process from day one. 676 | 677 | 网上有很多关于招聘流程的内容超出了本文的讨论范围，但请考虑一下你与联合创始人的所有谈话，你试图向公司灌输的价值观类型，以及你想要的多样性类型，并确保这是从第一天起就是过程的一部分。 678 | 679 | Right? And make sure you assess whether it's working, especially the early employees. 680 | 681 | 对吗？并且确保你评估它是否有效，特别是早期员工。 682 | 683 | Right? After you hire your first couple of people, make sure you get back together with your co-founder a month or two after and discuss whether it did what it should have. 684 | 685 | 对吗？在你雇佣了最初的几个人之后，确保一两个月后你和你的联合创始人重归于好，并讨论它是否做了它应该做的事情。 686 | 687 | Did it filter the right way? Do you have the right type of people in your company at this point? And if it didn't work well, improve it. 688 | 689 | 它过滤的方式正确吗？在这一点上，你的公司有合适的人吗？如果效果不好，改进它。 690 | 691 | Plan on evolving it. 692 | 693 | 计划发展它。 694 | 695 | Right? You want it tested by the time you get to the point where you have to scale fast. 696 | 697 | 对吗？您希望在达到必须快速扩展的点之前对其进行测试。 698 | 699 | Right? You want a process that you know works by then. 700 | 701 | 对吗？你想要一个你知道在那时起作用的过程。 702 | 703 | So that's it. 704 | 705 | 所以就这样了。 706 | 707 | Right? Again, not too early. 708 | 709 | 对吗？再说一遍，不要太早。 710 | 711 | You have a ton on your plate. 712 | 713 | 你有很多事要做。 714 | 715 | And, again, what I've given you, hopefully, are just a few simple things that aren't too time consuming. 716 | 717 | 而且，再一次，我希望我给你的只是一些不太耗时的简单事情。 718 | 719 | Just conversations you can have, kind of thought experiments, with your co-founder that can help kind of build a solid foundation for building a culture later on. 720 | 721 | 你可以和你的联合创始人进行一种思想实验的对话，这可以帮助你为以后的文化建设打下坚实的基础。 722 | 723 | Thanks everyone. 724 | 725 | 726 | 谢谢大家。 727 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /12.zh-si.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Kevin Hale - How to Improve Conversion Rates 2 | 3 | 4 | Kevin Hale:So this presentation on improving conversion rates, it's designed to mostly focus on like landing pages. 5 | 6 | 凯文·黑尔：所以这个关于提高转化率的演示文稿，旨在主要关注登陆页面。 7 | 8 | But all of the principles and ideas that I'll talk about in this talk actually can help you improve the conversion rates of almost anything, any user interface. 9 | 10 | 但我将在这次演讲中谈到的所有原则和想法实际上可以帮助你提高几乎任何东西，任何用户界面的转换率。 11 | 12 | So keep that in mind. 13 | 14 | 所以记住这一点。 15 | 16 | This is a typical example, conversion rate funnel, and when you're trying to improve in conversion rate, you're basically, you're trying to improve the efficiency of going from one step to the next. 17 | 18 | 这是一个典型的例子，转化率漏斗，当你试图提高转化率时，你基本上是在试图提高从一个步骤到下一个步骤的效率。 19 | 20 | And the thing is, why we care about conversion rate is because it's part of two different aspects of growth. 21 | 22 | 问题是，我们之所以关心转化率，是因为它是增长的两个不同方面的一部分。 23 | 24 | The two main sort of drivers. 25 | 26 | 两种主要的驱动程序。 27 | 28 | And so growth is the balance between conversion and churn. 29 | 30 | 因此，增长是转换和流失之间的平衡。 31 | 32 | And basically growth happens as a gap between the two. 33 | 34 | 基本上，增长是作为两者之间的差距发生的。 35 | 36 | Something to keep in mind is that working on churn is actually much easier than working on conversion. 37 | 38 | 需要记住的一点是，处理混杂实际上要比处理转换容易得多。 39 | 40 | So in this talk we're working on the harder thing. 41 | 42 | 所以在这个演讲中，我们要做的是更难的事情。 43 | 44 | It's the thing that [inaudible] are going to get started. 45 | 46 | 这是[听不见]将要开始的事情。 47 | 48 | When I talk to a company and I'm trying to help them with their conversion rates, the first thing I usually try to figure out is do we even need to be working on this at all? So the only time you should be working on and improving your conversion rate is because you have a leaky bucket. 49 | 50 | 当我与一家公司交谈时，我试图帮助他们提高转化率，我通常首先要弄清楚的是，我们是否需要在这方面进行工作？因此，唯一的时间，你应该在工作和提高您的转换率是因为你有一个漏水的桶。 51 | 52 | So I'd like to just talk about a couple of benchmarks in the industry so that we all kind of sit on the same page and understand whether we should be working on this or working on something else, like putting more things into the top of the funnel. 53 | 54 | 所以我只想谈谈行业中的几个基准，这样我们就可以坐在同一个页面上，了解我们是应该在这方面工作，还是在其他方面工作，比如把更多的东西放在漏斗的顶端。 55 | 56 | Shareware, conversion of rate here is about 0.5%. 57 | 58 | 共享软件，这里的转换率是0.5%左右。 59 | 60 | So basically, this is old school like before the internet. 61 | 62 | 所以基本上，这是老派，就像互联网之前一样。 63 | 64 | If people just release software out for free and they just hope that somebody will pay for it out of their own goodwill. 65 | 66 | 如果人们只是免费发布软件，他们只是希望有人会出于他们自己的善意而付费。 67 | 68 | This is the conversion rate you can expect. 69 | 70 | 这是您可以预期的转换率。 71 | 72 | Casual download games, it's about 2%. 73 | 74 | 随便下载游戏，大约是2%。 75 | 76 | So stuff that you sort of play on and off while waiting in line. 77 | 78 | 所以当你排队的时候，你可以断断续续地播放一些东西。 79 | 80 | Most companies care about this one freemium software as a service companies, they range between 1.5 and 5%. 81 | 82 | 大多数公司关心这一免费增值软件作为服务公司，他们的范围在1.5%到5%之间。 83 | 84 | On average it's about 3%. 85 | 86 | 平均约为3%。 87 | 88 | So once I talk to a company and they have pages that are converting at about 3% and that is from out of 100 visitors that visit your page, two to 3% sign up, I usually say you probably don't need to spend that much more time on this. 89 | 90 | 所以，一旦我与一家公司交谈，他们的页面的转化率约为3%，这是来自访问你的页面的100名访问者中的2%到3%的注册，我通常会说你可能不需要在这上面花费更多的时间。 91 | 92 | There's probably other things you should work on instead. 93 | 94 | 也许你应该做些其他的事情来取而代之。 95 | 96 | That being said, you can do much better than that. 97 | 98 | 话虽如此，你可以做得更好。 99 | 100 | Flicker, back in the heyday had a conversion rate between five and 10%. 101 | 102 | 闪烁，在全盛时期有一个转换率在5%到10%之间。 103 | 104 | Adult FriendFinder, So depending on what you're selling, people wanted a whole lot more. 105 | 106 | 成人FriendFinder，所以根据你卖的是什么，人们想要更多。 107 | 108 | So 10 to 22% for sex and end of loneliness. 109 | 110 | 所以10%到22%的性生活和结束孤独。 111 | 112 | Even better. 113 | 114 | 甚至更好。 115 | 116 | So these are, if you don't recognize them, children social networks and so basically this is the conversion rate to get your kid to shut the fuck up, right? To leave you alone. 117 | 118 | 所以这些是，如果你不认识他们，儿童社交网络，所以基本上这就是让你的孩子他妈的闭嘴的转换率，对吧？让你一个人呆着。 119 | 120 | Turbo Tax online, the monster 70% conversion rate. 121 | 122 | 涡轮增值税在线，怪物70%转化率。 123 | 124 | Basically you're going to turbo tax, you're downloading that software, you are paying for it. 125 | 126 | 基本上你会去涡轮增值税，你正在下载那个软件，你正在为它付费。 127 | 128 | It is very, very high intact. 129 | 130 | 它完好无损的非常高。 131 | 132 | Every conversion rate problem looks like every other user interface problem and the concept or framework that I like to use to explain how to solve any user interface problem is using something called the Knowledge Spectrum. 133 | 134 | 每个转换率问题看起来都像其他用户界面问题一样，我喜欢用来解释如何解决任何用户界面问题的概念或框架是使用称为知识频谱的东西。 135 | 136 | This was created by amazing interface designer name, Jared Spool and basically the Knowledge Spectrum says that this represents all knowledge on a spectrum and on this side represents zero knowledge, no knowledge, you don't know anything and on the other side is God-like, all knowledge. 137 | 138 | 这是由令人惊叹的界面设计师Jared Spool创建的，基本上知识频谱说这代表了频谱上的所有知识，这边代表零知识，没有知识，你什么都不知道，另一边是上帝般的，所有的知识。 139 | 140 | Your product and your user sits on two points on that line. 141 | 142 | 你的产品和你的用户坐在那条线上的两个点上。 143 | 144 | Just two dimensions. 145 | 146 | 只有两个维度。 147 | 148 | Your user sits here at what we call the current knowledge point and your interface, your landing page, the thing you want them to do is it's here at the target knowledge point. 149 | 150 | 你的用户坐在这里，我们称之为当前知识点和你的界面，你的登陆页面，你想让他们做的事情就是在这里的目标知识点。 151 | 152 | And every interface problem that's trying to be solved is trying to close what we call the knowledge gap. 153 | 154 | 每个试图解决的界面问题都试图弥合我们所说的知识鸿沟。 155 | 156 | That's it. 157 | 158 | 就这样。 159 | 160 | You don't need to go to a complicated design school to know how to solve these problems. 161 | 162 | 你不需要去复杂的设计学校才能知道如何解决这些问题。 163 | 164 | You either are going to increase the amount of knowledge that is needed by your user or you need to decrease the amount of knowledge needed to use your product or interface. 165 | 166 | 您要么要增加用户所需的知识量，要么需要减少使用产品或界面所需的知识量。 167 | 168 | That's it. 169 | 170 | 就这样。 171 | 172 | Whenever I'm looking at anyone's design problem, I'm trying to figure out do I need to increase knowledge or do I need to decrease it? So the most helpful exercise that I will use from this, once I understand this concept when I'm trying to design a landing page or to improve it, is to simplify things very, very simply. 173 | 174 | 每当我看到任何人的设计问题时，我都在试图弄清楚我是需要增加知识还是需要减少知识？因此，在我尝试设计或改进登录页面时，一旦我理解了这个概念，我将使用的最有帮助的练习是将事情简化得非常简单。 175 | 176 | And what I imagine is something called the one button interface. 177 | 178 | 我想象的是一种叫做一键式界面的东西。 179 | 180 | So let's imagine that we reduced our landing page, our product to just one button on a page. 181 | 182 | 所以让我们想象一下，我们把我们的登陆页面，我们的产品减少到一个页面上的一个按钮。 183 | 184 | The question becomes, what do I have to put on this page to get someone to push the button? What's the minimum amount? That's what you ideally want to have on there. 185 | 186 | 问题变成了，我必须在这个页面上放什么才能让别人按下按钮？最低限额是多少？这就是你理想中想要的东西。 187 | 188 | And is there any information that I put on this page that keeps me from pushing the button or is there any lack of information that keeps me from pushing the button? Now for every time that I deal with any page that I'm looking at that I'm trying to help improve, I basically go through a series of seven questions, for every single one. 189 | 190 | 我放在这个页面上的任何信息让我无法按下按钮，或者是否缺少任何信息让我无法按下按钮？现在，每当我处理我正在查看的、我试图帮助改进的任何页面时，我基本上都会经历一系列的七个问题，每个问题都是这样的。 191 | 192 | And then through the series of seven questions, I look very smart. 193 | 194 | 然后通过一系列的七个问题，我看起来非常聪明。 195 | 196 | You now can be smart on your own. 197 | 198 | 你现在可以自己变聪明了。 199 | 200 | The first question I ask is, what's the call to action? Is the button, is the thing I most want my user to do? Is it super obvious? Where do I find it? And the thing to keep in mind about the call to action is it should be really, really close to a concept I like to call the magic moment. 201 | 202 | 我问的第一个问题是，行动的号召是什么？是按钮，是我最希望我的用户做的事情吗？这是不是很明显？我在哪里能找到它？关于行动号召，需要记住的是它应该非常接近一个我喜欢称之为神奇时刻的概念。 203 | 204 | The magic moment is basically the experience, the knowledge, the information, the interaction that someone has with your startup, and all of a sudden they get tingling and inside the light bulb goes off and they go, "Holy fuck. 205 | 206 | 这个神奇的时刻基本上就是某人与你的创业公司之间的经验，知识，信息，互动，突然之间，他们感到刺痛，灯泡内部熄灭了，他们说，“他妈的太棒了。” 207 | 208 | I've been waiting for this my whole life. 209 | 210 | 我这辈子都在等这个。 211 | 212 | I now get it. 213 | 214 | 我现在明白了。 215 | 216 | This is super exciting. 217 | 218 | 这太令人兴奋了。 219 | 220 | I can't wait to use this." And your call to action should be as close to that magic moment as possible. 221 | 222 | 我迫不及待地想使用这个。“而你的行动号召应该尽可能接近那个神奇的时刻。 223 | 224 | That when I click that button, I'm going to be taken to that point. 225 | 226 | 当我点击那个按钮时，我会被带到那个点。 227 | 228 | So often I go through a design critique with someone and I'm like, "What's your magic moment?" And then somehow the call to action is like 27 steps away from whatever it is that makes someone feel special or gets really excited about your product or app. 229 | 230 | 所以我经常和某人一起经历设计评论，我想，“你的神奇时刻是什么？”然后，不知何故，行动号召就像是距离任何让人感到特别或对你的产品或应用程序真正感到兴奋的东西相距27步之遥。 231 | 232 | So you should be as close to zero as possible from your call to action. 233 | 234 | 因此，你应该尽可能接近零，从你的行动号召。 235 | 236 | The six other questions we're going to go through relatively quickly and then we're going to go through two examples from people participating in startup school to just watch them in action. 237 | 238 | 其他六个问题，我们将相对快速地讲完，然后我们将通过两个例子，来自参与创业学校的人，只是观察他们的行动。 239 | 240 | The next question is, what is this? What is this magic moment, right? And my tests for this, my lips ... 241 | 242 | 下一个问题是，这是什么？这个神奇的时刻是什么，对吧？我的测试，我的嘴唇.。 243 | 244 | My test is like, can I just copy paste a sentence on this page, the landing page that I can put into an email and send it to my mom and my mom goes, "I understand what this is." 99% of the time I look at people's websites and they're so filled with MBA marketing jargon and talk that there's no sentence that exists on that page that it lets me to very clearly understand what it is that this company does. 245 | 246 | 我的测试是这样的，我能不能复制粘贴一句话到这个页面上，我可以把登陆页面放到电子邮件中发送给我妈妈，我妈妈会说，“我明白这是什么。”99%的时间我浏览人们的网站，他们充满了MBA营销术语和谈话，页面上没有任何句子，它让我非常清楚地了解这家公司是做什么的。(这句话的意思是“我明白这是怎么回事”。 247 | 248 | Is it right for me? So people who are super in a rush, impatient trying to solve their problems, they're quickly trying to identify themselves. 249 | 250 | 对我合适吗？所以那些急于解决问题，急于解决问题的人，他们很快就会试图表明自己的身份。 251 | 252 | This is like, am I in the wrong place? Is this the right product? And the way they're trying to determine that is see like is there any reflection of themselves in this or any reflection of their problems? Look at it anywhere on the page. 253 | 254 | 这就像是，我是不是走错地方了？这是正确的产品吗？他们试图确定这一点的方式是看，在这件事上有没有反映他们自己的情况，或者他们的问题有什么反映？在页面上的任何地方都可以看到它。 255 | 256 | Is it legit? So the threshold is very low here. 257 | 258 | 合法吗？所以门槛很低。 259 | 260 | Just can't look like a Russian spamming website. 261 | 262 | 只是不能看起来像俄罗斯的垃圾邮件网站。 263 | 264 | Right? Outside of that, you don't need to overthink this. 265 | 266 | 对吗？除此之外，你不需要想太多。 267 | 268 | Thanks to tons of templates and themes out there. 269 | 270 | 多亏了大量的模板和主题。 271 | 272 | You should be able to get over this bar very, very quickly. 273 | 274 | 你应该能够非常快地通过这个酒吧。 275 | 276 | Who else is using it? So a lot of people are uncomfortable using a product unless they know that there's something else out there and you might think it's a variation of legit, but again, this bar is completely different. 277 | 278 | 还有谁在使用它？所以很多人使用一个产品会感到不舒服，除非他们知道有其他东西在那里，你可能会认为它是合法的变体，但同样，这个酒吧是完全不同的。 279 | 280 | It's letting me know, "Oh a shortcut for is it right for me and is it legit?" And basically a shortcut for trust. 281 | 282 | 它让我知道，“哦，这是我的捷径吗？它合法吗？”基本上是信任的捷径。 283 | 284 | And people often are trying to say like, "Oh, if so and so is already using this, then I should actually give this a chance." How much is it? What's the catch? This is the one that so many B2B enterprise, companies are afraid to put on their website. 285 | 286 | 人们经常试图说，“哦，如果某某已经在使用这个，那么我应该给它一个机会。”多少钱？有什么窍门？这是一个如此之多的B2B企业，公司都不敢放在他们的网站上。 287 | 288 | Which is why we've paired this talk up with pricing. 289 | 290 | 这就是为什么我们把这个话题和定价结合起来。 291 | 292 | And basically you should have some empathy. 293 | 294 | 基本上你应该有一些同理心。 295 | 296 | How many times do you go to a website and go like, "ell I'll use this without knowing how much it costs. 297 | 298 | 有多少次你会去一个网站，然后说，“好吧，我会使用这个，但不知道它要花多少钱。” 299 | 300 | Sounds good to me. 301 | 302 | 听起来不错。 303 | 304 | Let's just do it." No one does that, and so you shouldn't be surprised that your conversion rates are affected because you don't tell people how much it costs or what's the catch. 305 | 306 | 我们就这么做吧。“没有人这样做，所以你不应该对你的转化率受到影响感到惊讶，因为你没有告诉人们它的成本是多少，或者有什么收获。 307 | 308 | So let's say you're giving away something for free and really your business models, you make money some other way. 309 | 310 | 所以，假设你免费赠送一些东西，实际上是你的商业模式，你通过其他方式赚钱。 311 | 312 | You should explain that to people because otherwise people feel paranoid or worried or feel kind of weird. 313 | 314 | 你应该向人们解释这一点，因为否则人们会感到疑神疑鬼或担心，或者感觉有点怪异。 315 | 316 | And then lastly is where can I get help? There's always a percentage of users who go to your website and it doesn't matter that you have all the FAQs, you've written everything down, you've created these few beautiful video documentation, they will just go like, "I just want to ask someone. 317 | 318 | 最后一个问题是我在哪里可以得到帮助？总是有一定比例的用户访问你的网站，不管你有没有所有的FAQ，你已经写下了所有的东西，你创建了这几个漂亮的视频文档，他们会说，“我只是想问某人。 319 | 320 | I just need to talk to somebody. 321 | 322 | 我只是需要找个人谈谈。 323 | 324 | I need someone to tell me directly." And part of it is some people are just like, "I just want to see if there's a real person behind this." That's number one, or some people just can't be bothered and sometimes it's easier for them to just directly ask then navigate through the website. 325 | 326 | 我需要有人直接告诉我。“部分原因是有些人会说，”我只是想看看这件事背后有没有一个真正的人。“这是第一，或者有些人就是不能被打扰，有时他们直接询问然后浏览网站会更容易。 327 | 328 | And if you don't make it really easy to find and contact you or make it look like that you were going to help them, if they start using the product, they probably won't use it. 329 | 330 | 如果你不能很容易地找到和联系你，或者让它看起来像是你要帮助他们，如果他们开始使用这个产品，他们可能就不会使用它了。 331 | 332 | This talk is so short. 333 | 334 | 这个演讲太短了。 335 | 336 | So that's basically it. 337 | 338 | 基本上就是这样。 339 | 340 | Those are the seven questions. 341 | 342 | 这就是七个问题。 343 | 344 | We are now going to go through two examples of startup school companies that sent their stuff to me and I don't really have their permission, but they did submit it when they asked to have a design critique done in the startup school forums. 345 | 346 | 我们现在要看两个创业学校公司把他们的东西发给我的例子，我真的没有得到他们的许可，但他们确实提交了，当他们要求在创业学校论坛上做设计评论时。 347 | 348 | So I feel like we're going to be okay. 349 | 350 | 所以我觉得我们会没事的 351 | 352 | Okay. 353 | 354 | 好吧。 355 | 356 | So the first one we're going to do is meetingroom.io. 357 | 358 | 因此，我们要做的第一个是Meetingroom.io。 359 | 360 | All right. 361 | 362 | 好的。 363 | 364 | First question, what is the call to action? What is it that this company most wants me to do? And then what I do is I basically then try to do that thing and just follow it all the way through and just see how far away am I from the magic moment. 365 | 366 | 第一个问题，行动的号召是什么？这家公司最希望我做的是什么？然后我所做的基本上就是我试着去做那件事，然后跟着它一直走到最后，看看我离那个神奇的时刻有多远。 367 | 368 | So these guys create virtual meeting room platforms, so basically we don't have a copy paste on this, but basically it's like you want to meet in VR space with someone. 369 | 370 | 所以这些人创建了虚拟会议室平台，所以基本上我们没有复制粘贴，但基本上就像你想要在VR空间里和某人见面一样。 371 | 372 | You can use this to help create that space and create that sort of meeting. 373 | 374 | 您可以使用它来帮助创建该空间，并创建那种会议。 375 | 376 | Imagine it is, get a virtual room right now. 377 | 378 | 想象一下，现在就得到一个虚拟房间。 379 | 380 | There's a lot of things that are sort of competing with it for all the call to actions on this page, and then we don't repeat it down here. 381 | 382 | 在这个页面上，有很多东西在与它竞争所有的行动号召，然后我们在这里不再重复它了。 383 | 384 | That reminds me where to go. 385 | 386 | 这提醒了我该去哪里。 387 | 388 | So let's go to the most efficient, get a virtual meeting room right now. 389 | 390 | 所以让我们去最高效的地方，现在就得到一个虚拟的会议室。 391 | 392 | And then on here we have competing calls to actions to download, and then we have managed rooms. 393 | 394 | 然后在这里，我们有竞争的行动号召下载，然后我们有管理室。 395 | 396 | And then there's a start here to get to your virtual room, which is a carousel that walks you through seven steps to finally get to making a room. 397 | 398 | 然后这里有一个开始进入你的虚拟房间，这是一个旋转木马，带你通过七个步骤，最终得到一个房间。 399 | 400 | But none of these are the actual forms to do it. 401 | 402 | 但这些都不是实现这一目的实际形式。 403 | 404 | So you have to then go here and then hopefully you will remember all of those seven steps in the carousel and then you'll walk all the way through it. 405 | 406 | 所以你必须走到这里，然后希望你能记住旋转木马中的所有七个步骤，然后你会一路走过去。 407 | 408 | So things that I would recommend would be like I want to have always one button. 409 | 410 | 所以我推荐的东西就像我希望总是有一个按钮。 411 | 412 | That's a very, very clear. 413 | 414 | 这是非常清楚的。 415 | 416 | That is what I want you to do on any given page. 417 | 418 | 这就是我希望你在任何给定的页面上做的事情。 419 | 420 | Number two, I don't think this makes it easy to understand and I can't keep it in my head to follow. 421 | 422 | 第二，我不认为这使它容易理解，我不能把它留在我的脑海中跟随。 423 | 424 | It's good that they know all the steps, but I would probably imagine that there's something that's going to help me experience that magic moment much sooner. 425 | 426 | 他们知道所有的步骤是好的，但我可能会想象有什么东西会帮助我更快地体验那神奇的时刻。 427 | 428 | And what I imagine is that magic moment happens when I finally make a booking and I meet with someone in a room together and we start interacting and we're solving something. 429 | 430 | 我想象的是神奇的时刻发生了，当我最终预订房间，我和一个房间里的人见面，我们开始互动，我们正在解决一些问题。 431 | 432 | And I feel like if I can't do that right away, then I want to have them be able to experience it some way. 433 | 434 | 我觉得如果我不能马上做到这一点，那么我希望他们能够以某种方式体验到这一点。 435 | 436 | So I would totally add some kind of video, I think they have that here. 437 | 438 | 所以我完全会添加一些视频，我认为他们在这里有这样的视频。 439 | 440 | They'll kind of show it off. 441 | 442 | 他们会有点炫耀的。 443 | 444 | This video is kind of long and it doesn't get us to that magical place. 445 | 446 | 这个视频有点长，它不能把我们带到那个神奇的地方。 447 | 448 | So that's number one. 449 | 450 | 所以这是第一位。 451 | 452 | Second, what is this? So virtual meeting room platform, but if I copy and pasted that, I wouldn't quite know. 453 | 454 | 第二，这是什么？所以虚拟会议室平台，但如果我复制和粘贴，我不会很清楚。 455 | 456 | Also you see this carousels kind of moving around. 457 | 458 | 你还可以看到这个旋转木马在四处移动。 459 | 460 | Carousels don't work very well because you're hiding information that I might want to have to answer any one of my seven questions. 461 | 462 | 旋转木马不能很好地工作，因为你隐藏了我可能需要回答我七个问题中的任何一个问题的信息。 463 | 464 | And secondly, Oh God, I can't figure it out ... 465 | 466 | 其次，天哪，我搞不懂. 467 | 468 | We do this thing where he calls it an open beta and so the legit part here starts getting you affected. 469 | 470 | 我们做这件事，他称之为开放测试版，所以这里的合法部分开始让你受到影响。 471 | 472 | It's like, "Oh I can't rely on this." And the later on the signup page it talks about entering into the closed beta. 473 | 474 | 就像是，“哦，我不能依赖这个。”后来在注册页面上，它谈到了进入封闭的测试版。 475 | 476 | And so these are all things that indicate, is like I'm not ready for you to experience this. 477 | 478 | 所以这些都表明，就像我还没有准备好让你们经历这件事。 479 | 480 | Don't use me for any real meetings is what this telegraphs. 481 | 482 | 不要用我做任何真正的会议就是这个电报。 483 | 484 | And so if this basically works, would try to move that straight forward to that. 485 | 486 | 所以如果这个基本奏效的话，我会试着把它直接推向那个方向。 487 | 488 | Down here we're trying to look for who else is also using it. 489 | 490 | 在这里，我们试图寻找还有谁也在使用它。 491 | 492 | So we don't have a list of customers, instead we have a bunch of other logos here in terms of featured in a bunch of press that we have partners, but I don't know what that means, and then we have a bunch of awards, but none of them are actual people using it. 493 | 494 | 所以我们没有客户名单，相反，我们在这里有一堆其他标志，在一堆媒体上我们有合作伙伴，但我不知道这意味着什么，然后我们有一系列奖项，但没有一个是真正的人在使用它。 495 | 496 | And so it's so many logos of other things that it would make me nervous that no one's really using this as a result. 497 | 498 | 所以它是如此多的其他东西的标志，它会让我感到紧张，因为没有人真的使用它作为结果。 499 | 500 | And then lastly, where do I get help? We've gotten an intercom in the lower right and then we also have no help page, no documentation to quickly look at to see how this works. 501 | 502 | 最后，我在哪里可以得到帮助？我们在右下角有一个对讲机，然后我们也没有帮助页面，没有文档可以快速查看，看看它是如何工作的。 503 | 504 | And then the last one is going into pricing. 505 | 506 | 最后一个问题是定价。 507 | 508 | So here we get to this point and I realize, oh, okay. 509 | 510 | 所以我们到了这一点，我意识到，哦，好吧。 511 | 512 | I see this pricing, if I need 12 people in a room, it's going to be $99 a month, and then I can start sort of working on it. 513 | 514 | 我看到这个定价，如果我需要12个人在一个房间里，它将是99美元一个月，然后我就可以开始工作了。 515 | 516 | And it's one page over and if I go for the free again, we'll go through all this whole process. 517 | 518 | 它只有一页，如果我再次免费，我们将经历整个过程。 519 | 520 | So a bunch of little things. 521 | 522 | 所以一堆小事。 523 | 524 | We just go through all the questions. 525 | 526 | 我们只是把所有的问题都看完了。 527 | 528 | We're going to see a bunch of non-optimal stuff on this page. 529 | 530 | 我们将在这个页面上看到一堆非最佳的东西。 531 | 532 | Let's go to our second example. 533 | 534 | 让我们来看第二个例子。 535 | 536 | It'll be a little bit different. 537 | 538 | 会有点不同。 539 | 540 | So this is a company called Divjoy. 541 | 542 | 这是一家名为Divjoy的公司。 543 | 544 | And so they describe themselves as a react codebase generator and then he has this, one description is just like use our free web-based tool to create the perfect codebase for your next project. 545 | 546 | 所以他们把自己描述为一个反应代码库生成器，然后他有这样的描述，一个描述就像使用我们免费的基于网络的工具为你的下一个项目创建完美的代码库。 547 | 548 | So my first question I'm trying to figure out is like what's the call to action he most wants me to do? And so as I scroll down this page, there's actually nothing that looks like a giant button. 549 | 550 | 所以我想弄清楚的第一个问题是，他最想让我做的行动号召是什么？所以当我向下滚动这一页时，实际上没有任何东西看起来像一个巨大的按钮。 551 | 552 | And actually the big thing he wants me to do is click on one of these templates, these screenshots that are supposed to be the button. 553 | 554 | 实际上，他想让我做的最大的事情就是点击这些模板中的一个，这些截图应该是按钮。 555 | 556 | So we have sort of an affordance problem and then we go into here and my magic moment is when I get over and realize it's like, oh, it's not just like landing page templates, but it's like a dashboard. 557 | 558 | 所以我们有一个负担的问题，然后我们进入这里，我的神奇时刻是当我超过并意识到它就像，哦，它不只是像登陆页面模板，而是像一个仪表板一样。 559 | 560 | It's like a sign in page, a pricing page. 561 | 562 | 就像一个登录页面，一个定价页面。 563 | 564 | It's like the entire project for building a SAS app is all located here, which I think is really amazing and nothing just tells me that that's what's all here. 565 | 566 | 就像构建SAS应用程序的整个项目都位于这里，我认为这真的很令人惊叹，没有什么只是告诉我这里就是这样。 567 | 568 | And I might not find out until I export code, and then I hit download and then I'll get the code. 569 | 570 | 我可能不知道，直到我导出代码，然后我点击下载，然后我会得到代码。 571 | 572 | Yeah. 573 | 574 | 嗯。 575 | 576 | So we're so many steps away from sort of experiencing that, and also I feel like it's so not explicit that I might miss how amazing what he's built here is in terms of what he's offering. 577 | 578 | 所以我们离这种体验太远了，而且我觉得它太不明确了，我可能会错过他在这里建造的东西在他所提供的方面是多么令人惊叹的东西。 579 | 580 | One thing he does kind of well is he doesn't have logos of customers, but he has shown how many people have created or downloaded the templates. 581 | 582 | 他做得很好的一件事是他没有客户的徽标，但他已经展示了有多少人创建或下载了模板。 583 | 584 | So this number kind of sets it like Oh there's people actually using this and finding it useful. 585 | 586 | 所以这个数字有点像，哦，有人在使用这个，并且发现它很有用。 587 | 588 | Down here, he tries to get at this, everything you need is included. 589 | 590 | 在这里，他试图做到这一点，你需要的一切都包括在内。 591 | 592 | And then he adds all this other texts. 593 | 594 | 然后他又加上了其他所有的文字。 595 | 596 | But all that text is there and the odds are your users aren't going to read them. 597 | 598 | 但是所有的文本都在那里，而且很可能你的用户不会去阅读它们。 599 | 600 | So because it's located into that copy, it gets kind of lost. 601 | 602 | 因此，因为它位于那个副本中，所以它有点丢失了。 603 | 604 | And then again we have an intercom, but there's just not enough information in terms of like FAQs, right? And about page. 605 | 606 | 然后，我们有一个对讲机，但就像FAQ一样，没有足够的信息，对吗？关于佩奇。 607 | 608 | That just makes me go like, oh that this is more than a side project, and so in terms of how much I can sort of invest in this and how much I can rely on this down the road in the future is going to be minimal. 609 | 610 | 611 | 这只会让我想，哦，这不仅仅是一个辅助项目，所以就我在这方面可以投资多少，以及我在未来可以依赖这个项目的程度而言，这将是最小的。 612 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /13.zh-si.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Kevin Hale - Startup Pricing 101 2 | 3 | Kevin Hale:This was a highly requested talk from last year. 4 | 5 | 凯文·黑尔：这是去年要求很高的一次演讲。 6 | 7 | Lots of people who had questions about pricing were really confused. 8 | 9 | 很多对定价有疑问的人真的很困惑。 10 | 11 | It actually was well requested both at YC itself, that's a very, very popular workshop that we run. 12 | 13 | 这实际上是YC本身都很好地要求的，那是我们经营的一个非常受欢迎的研讨会。 14 | 15 | And so we're going to go over a lot of basic fundamentals for pricing that hopefully will just help you understand how to approach your pricing and monetization from first principles, and then you help you help yourselves. 16 | 17 | 因此，我们将复习许多定价的基本原理，希望这些基本原理将帮助您了解如何从第一原则开始进行定价和货币化，然后您可以自己动手。 18 | 19 | Same thing with the landing page. 20 | 21 | 登陆页面也一样。 22 | 23 | So we're going to go over first principles for pricing. 24 | 25 | 所以我们要回顾一下定价的基本原则。 26 | 27 | We're going to go over why is pricing particularly hard for startups, for people making innovative products and new markets? Like why is it extra difficult? How do you do price optimization? Like how do you actually do it? What does that actually look like? And just kind of demystify that whole process. 28 | 29 | 我们将讨论为什么对初创企业，对那些创造创新产品和新市场的人来说，定价特别困难？比如为什么特别难？如何进行价格优化？比如你到底是怎么做的？那实际上看起来像什么？并且在某种程度上揭开了整个过程的神秘面纱。 30 | 31 | When we look at the challenges of pricing, you start recognizing why certain types of customer segments that you're going after are difficult, like SMB. 32 | 33 | 当我们看到定价的挑战时，您开始认识到为什么您要追逐的某些类型的客户细分很困难，例如SMB。 34 | 35 | And we'll talk a little bit about that. 36 | 37 | 我们会稍微谈一谈这一点。 38 | 39 | We're going to talk about how pricing affects your acquisition strategy. 40 | 41 | 我们将讨论定价如何影响您的收购策略。 42 | 43 | It changes what you can do and what you cannot do and it's extremely important because a lot of companies get caught up doing the wrong acquisition strategy or wasting too much money because their price is incorrect. 44 | 45 | 它改变了你能做什么，你不能做什么，这是极其重要的，因为很多公司会因为价格不正确而陷入错误的收购战略或浪费太多的钱。 46 | 47 | And then I'm going to give you some rules of thumbs, some pricing tricks, just to help make it a lot easier when you're encountering different pricing problems. 48 | 49 | 然后我会给你一些经验法则，一些定价技巧，只是为了帮助你在遇到不同的定价问题时容易得多。 50 | 51 | I call them pricing tricks sprinkles. 52 | 53 | 我称之为定价技巧。 54 | 55 | Okay. 56 | 57 | 好吧。 58 | 59 | There are three levers you can pull to improve growth. 60 | 61 | 有三个杠杆你可以拉来促进生长。 62 | 63 | So in the last talk I talked about conversion rate and churn, but monetization is actually the big dog. 64 | 65 | 所以在上一次演讲中，我谈到了转换率和流动率，但货币化实际上是大狗。 66 | 67 | It's the one that I really like. 68 | 69 | 这是我真正喜欢的。 70 | 71 | Now, there was a survey done with over 500 SaaS companies and they talked about sort of like amount of effort that they put into each one of these strategies and the returns that they got as a result of it. 72 | 73 | 现在，有一项对500多家SaaS公司进行的调查，他们谈到了他们在每个战略上投入的努力以及由此获得的回报。 74 | 75 | Now acquisition is really fun and exciting. 76 | 77 | 现在收购真的很有趣和令人兴奋。 78 | 79 | It's the one that everyone kind of understands simply. 80 | 81 | 这是一个每个人都能简单理解的东西。 82 | 83 | It's like, "I get more customers, I get more logos, gives me more growth." Retention of course is about keeping customers, and monetization is about getting more money per customer. 84 | 85 | 这就像是，“我得到了更多的客户，我得到了更多的标志，给了我更多的增长。”留住客户当然是为了留住客户，而货币化则是为了让每个客户获得更多的钱。 86 | 87 | Now if you increase just your efforts or resources by 1%, your work on acquisition usually get a return of about 3.32%. 88 | 89 | 现在，如果你只增加你的努力或资源1%，你的收购工作通常会得到大约3.32%的回报。 90 | 91 | In retention it's about 6.7 and when you're optimizing pricing that gives you your biggest bang for your buck in terms of impact on your business. 92 | 93 | 在保留率方面，大约为6.7，当您正在优化定价时，就对业务的影响而言，这会给您带来最大的性价比。 94 | 95 | Yet and it's the one that is most neglected and I think it's the one that everyone is so afraid to touch because they're so scared that if they get the pricing wrong that they will lose all their customers. 96 | 97 | 然而，它是最被忽视的一个，我认为它是每个人都不敢碰的，因为他们太害怕了，如果他们定价错误，他们会失去所有的客户。 98 | 99 | Now the first principles, the basic idea about pricing, the thing, the concept that really opened up in my head, how to think about pricing, how to understand the problems that people are facing and why startups get it wrong, is to use a concept called the pricing thermometer. 100 | 101 | 现在，第一个原则，关于定价的基本思想，这个东西，我脑海中真正开启的概念，如何思考定价，如何理解人们面临的问题，以及为什么初创企业会出错，是使用一个叫做定价温度计的概念。 102 | 103 | And so you have to understand that when you price something there's actually two other factors at play. 104 | 105 | 所以你必须明白，当你给某样东西定价时，实际上还有另外两个因素在起作用。 106 | 107 | And so there's a cost, there's the price and then there's the value. 108 | 109 | 所以有成本，有价格，然后有价值。 110 | 111 | And the interplay and relationship between these items affects how growth happens inside of your company. 112 | 113 | 这些项目之间的相互作用和关系会影响公司内部的发展。 114 | 115 | Now the gap between price and cost, that is your margin, that is your incentive to sell. 116 | 117 | 现在价格和成本之间的差距，那是你的利润，那是你出售的动机。 118 | 119 | And so the bigger that gap is, the more you are driven to want to push your product to your customers, to have your salespeople, et cetera. 120 | 121 | 因此，差距越大，你就越想把你的产品推向你的客户，让你的销售人员等等。 122 | 123 | This gap here between price and value, is incentive to buy. 124 | 125 | 这里的价格和价值之间的差距，是购买的动机。 126 | 127 | And the larger that gap is, the easier it is to have your customers to want to sign up or use your product. 128 | 129 | 而且差距越大，就越容易让您的客户想要注册或使用您的产品。 130 | 131 | Now to figure out price, there's really two ways to go about it. 132 | 133 | 现在要计算价格，实际上有两种方法。 134 | 135 | You either start with the cost if you know what it is and you figure out where your price is based off of that. 136 | 137 | 你要么从成本开始，如果你知道它是什么，并找出你的价格是基于这一点。 138 | 139 | That is called cost plus. 140 | 141 | 这就是所谓的成本加成。 142 | 143 | The other way to do it is figure out what is the value of your company or product or service and then you figure out your price from that and that is called value based pricing. 144 | 145 | 另一种方法是找出你的公司或产品或服务的价值，然后你从中计算出你的价格，这就是所谓的基于价值的定价。 146 | 147 | In startups and almost pretty consistently across all businesses, everyone will tell you, you should strive for value-based pricing. 148 | 149 | 在初创企业中，几乎所有企业都非常一致，每个人都会告诉你，你应该努力实现基于价值的定价。 150 | 151 | It allows you to charge a whole lot more. 152 | 153 | 它允许你收取更多的费用。 154 | 155 | It allows you to manipulate this incentive to buy. 156 | 157 | 它允许你操纵这种购买动机。 158 | 159 | The problem is because people do not understand their relationships or even understand what are their costs and what are the value that the customer is going to think about their product, they put their price in a kind of arbitrary place and they don't know what are the forces at play that drives it. 160 | 161 | 问题是因为人们不了解他们的关系，甚至不知道他们的成本是什么，以及客户会考虑他们的产品的价值是什么，他们把他们的价格放在一种随意的地方，他们不知道是什么力量在起作用，推动他们的价格。 162 | 163 | And it results in four different types of mistakes. 164 | 165 | 它导致了四种不同类型的错误。 166 | 167 | The first one is startups will price their products too low. 168 | 169 | 第一个是初创企业会将他们的产品定价过低。 170 | 171 | Basically you consistently undercharge. 172 | 173 | 基本上你总是少收费。 174 | 175 | It's the number one piece of advice we give to most startups, to fix their pricing. 176 | 177 | 这是我们给大多数初创企业的头号建议，解决它们的定价问题。 178 | 179 | And I'll talk a little bit about why most companies fall into that trap. 180 | 181 | 我将略微谈一谈为什么大多数公司会落入这个陷阱。 182 | 183 | You underestimate your costs, and the result is you have a problem where your margins aren't enough to cover sort of acquisition. 184 | 185 | 你低估了你的成本，结果是你遇到了一个问题，你的利润率不足以支付某种收购。 186 | 187 | You don't understand your value. 188 | 189 | 你不明白自己的价值。 190 | 191 | You don't understand how your company thinks about the problem that you're solving for them or how they value it. 192 | 193 | 你不明白你的公司是如何看待你为他们解决的问题，或者他们是如何看待这个问题的。 194 | 195 | And either they don't understand your value or you don't know how to convince them of the value that you think you offer. 196 | 197 | 要么他们不理解你的价值，要么你不知道如何让他们相信你认为你提供的价值。 198 | 199 | And as a result you can't get the price that you want. 200 | 201 | 结果，你不能得到你想要的价格。 202 | 203 | And lastly you focus on the wrong customers. 204 | 205 | 最后，你把注意力放在了错误的客户身上。 206 | 207 | That you think, "Man, if I built a better product and I charge half the competition, I win." The thing is that almost never happens, and the reason is because you as a startup, you as working on something to create a new market are working on innovative products. 208 | 209 | 你认为，“伙计，如果我制造了一个更好的产品，我收取一半的竞争费用，我就赢了。”事情是这样的，几乎从来没有发生过，原因是你作为一家初创公司，你正在致力于创造一个新的市场，你正在致力于创新产品。 210 | 211 | You are focused on the wrong customers. 212 | 213 | 你关注的是错误的客户。 214 | 215 | They are not the mainstream people who are going to look at the price and make most of the determination based off of that. 216 | 217 | 他们不是主流的人，他们会考虑价格，并在此基础上做出大部分的决定。 218 | 219 | This is the sales and profit over a product's life from inception to demise, that's what it's called. 220 | 221 | 这是一个产品从诞生到消亡的整个生命周期中的销售额和利润，这就是它的名字。 222 | 223 | All you need to know is that these are five different stages of a company and this is what sales might look like over different stages and what profits might look like over those different stages. 224 | 225 | 所有你需要知道的是，这是一个公司的五个不同阶段，这就是不同阶段的销售情况，以及不同阶段的利润情况。 226 | 227 | You who are in startup school, you who are getting seed funding, you are in the first two stages, product development stage, introduction. 228 | 229 | 你是初创学校的学生，你是获得种子资金的人，你处于前两个阶段，产品开发阶段，介绍阶段。 230 | 231 | You are not in the growth phase. 232 | 233 | 你不是在成长阶段。 234 | 235 | And the thing to keep in mind is that the customers in the first two stages, the ones that you're going after, they don't look like mainstream customers that you find in growth and maturity stages. 236 | 237 | 需要记住的是，前两个阶段的客户，你要追求的那些，他们看起来不像你在成长和成熟阶段找到的主流客户。 238 | 239 | They're not mature customers, they're early adopters. 240 | 241 | 他们不是成熟的客户，他们是早期采用者。 242 | 243 | And thing to know about early adopters is you don't really get a lot of momentum and growth until you get past the first two to 5% of potential buyers of your market. 244 | 245 | 关于早期采用者需要知道的是，在你通过市场的前2%到5%的潜在买家之前，你不会真的获得很大的动力和增长。 246 | 247 | These people in that two to 5%, they're called early adopters. 248 | 249 | 这些人占2%到5%，他们被称为早期采用者。 250 | 251 | And a thing that drives them is very different from mainstream people. 252 | 253 | 驱使他们的东西与主流人有很大的不同。 254 | 255 | So one, there's a couple of things that keep in mind about pricing innovative products. 256 | 257 | 首先，关于创新产品的定价，有几件事要牢记在心。 258 | 259 | What you are trying to do fundamentally is require users to change their pattern. 260 | 261 | 你试图从根本上做的是要求用户改变他们的模式。 262 | 263 | To stop doing it the old shitty spreadsheet way and do it in the new better your way. 264 | 265 | 停止用旧的糟糕的电子表格方式，用新的更好的方式来做。 266 | 267 | And getting someone to change their pattern is actually difficult. 268 | 269 | 让某人改变他们的模式实际上是困难的。 270 | 271 | Right? Especially if they're a mature person. 272 | 273 | 对吗？特别是如果他们是个成熟的人。 274 | 275 | Partly because the average user lacks information needed and the trust in you or whatever it is that you're making to make that change, to take that risk. 276 | 277 | 部分原因是普通用户缺乏所需的信息和对你的信任，或者是你做出改变、承担风险的任何东西。 278 | 279 | You are entrepreneurs, you're comfortable taking risks. 280 | 281 | 你们是企业家，你们乐于承担风险。 282 | 283 | Your customers are not entrepreneurs for the most part, they're probably less comfortable taking risks. 284 | 285 | 你的客户在很大程度上不是企业家，他们可能不太愿意冒险。 286 | 287 | And so in the beginning you're going after people who are willing to take a risk, and those are early adopters. 288 | 289 | 所以在一开始，你要找的是那些愿意冒险的人，而这些人都是早期的采用者。 290 | 291 | Those are people who care about benefits above all else. 292 | 293 | 这些人关心的是利益高于一切。 294 | 295 | That the highest value to them is beating their competition, doing something much better and taking a chance that something new will give them that edge over anybody else. 296 | 297 | 对他们来说，最高的价值是击败他们的竞争对手，做得更好，并抓住机会，让新的东西给他们带来优于任何人的优势。 298 | 299 | Those early adopters therefore are not price sensitive. 300 | 301 | 因此，这些早期采用者对价格并不敏感。 302 | 303 | If anything, if you've built a better product and you charge less, it looks like you have reputation risk. 304 | 305 | 如果有什么，如果你已经建立了一个更好的产品，你收费较低，看起来你有声誉风险。 306 | 307 | It's like why is it too good to be true? What is the catch? And what will end up happening is it takes much longer to get them to understand. 308 | 309 | 就像为什么这件事好得不像是真的？陷阱是什么？最终会发生的是需要更长的时间才能让他们理解。 310 | 311 | This is basically all price optimization. 312 | 313 | 这基本上都是价格优化。 314 | 315 | This is those complicated way that you can try to show price optimization. 316 | 317 | 这是那些复杂的方式，你可以尝试显示价格优化。 318 | 319 | This is the demand yield curve, and what you have on this side is different prices, and on this side you have sales unit sales and basically what you are trying to figure out when you're optimizing the price that you're charging your customers is like, "Basically what is the perfect balance between how much I charge and how much sales volume I get?" And then your price optimization is basically that. 320 | 321 | 这是需求收益曲线，你在这一边有不同的价格，在这一边你有销售单位销售，基本上你试图找出当你优化你向客户收费的价格时，“基本上，我收取的费用和我得到的销售量之间的完美平衡是什么？”然后你的价格优化基本上就是。 322 | 323 | Try different prices and then see what the effect is. 324 | 325 | 尝试不同的价格，然后看看效果如何。 326 | 327 | When I have my companies optimize their prices, they just use a very simple table. 328 | 329 | 当我让我的公司优化他们的价格时，他们只使用一个非常简单的表格。 330 | 331 | You don't need to try to figure that weird-ass graph. 332 | 333 | 你不需要试着去画那个奇怪的屁股图。 334 | 335 | Basically you want to have a column that says these are the prices I'm going to try, and then what is the result in conversion rate, what is the result in sales volume? And then how much revenue did I generate? That's all it is. 336 | 337 | 基本上，你想要有一个专栏，说这些是我要尝试的价格，然后换算率的结果是什么，销售量的结果是什么？然后我产生了多少收入？仅此而已。 338 | 339 | And so let's say I have prices at these different price points and I get these different conversion rates, and I get this sales volume, I should immediately be able to see who the winner is. 340 | 341 | 假设我有这些不同价格点的价格，我得到这些不同的转换率，我得到这个销售量，我应该马上就能看到谁是赢家。 342 | 343 | Here we go. 344 | 345 | 我们开始吧。 346 | 347 | Now, the one thing to keep in mind once we have figured out something like this on a simple product is that these areas at lower prices, if you can afford them in terms of your margin are actually lost opportunities. 348 | 349 | 现在，一旦我们在一个简单的产品上找到了类似的东西，需要记住的一件事是，这些价格较低的区域，如果你能负担得起你的利润率，实际上是失去了机会。 350 | 351 | And what you want to understand about these, are these are what you're going to see if you offer discount pricing or offer tiered pricing at different price points. 352 | 353 | 关于这些，你想要了解的是，如果你提供折扣定价或在不同价格点提供分层定价，你将会看到这些。 354 | 355 | Another exercise I like to go with companies when dealing with pricing is help them understand like are you in a danger zone? And so what I usually do with my companies is I have them sort of calculate what would their business look like or what does it going to look like to be a billion-dollar company. 356 | 357 | 在处理定价问题时，我喜欢与公司一起进行的另一个练习是帮助他们理解，比如你是否处于危险区域？所以我通常对我的公司做的是，我让他们计算一下他们的业务会是什么样子，或者是一个十亿美元的公司会是什么样子。 358 | 359 | And usually the rule of thumb there is to be doing $100 million a year in sales and revenue. 360 | 361 | 通常情况下，经验法则是每年销售和收入达到1亿美元。 362 | 363 | And so that basically is like at your price that you give, how many customers do you need to have to make a $100 million in that year? So let's have a bunch of different price points. 364 | 365 | 所以基本上就像你给的价格，你需要多少客户才能在那一年赚到1亿美元？所以让我们有一堆不同的价格点。 366 | 367 | Then we know, "Okay, great. 368 | 369 | 然后我们就知道，“好的，太好了。 370 | 371 | I need these number of customers in order to make this formula work." You understand what that looks like, at a hundred-dollar price point, with a potential of about million users, right? This is consumers. 372 | 373 | 我需要这些数量的客户来使这个公式起作用。“你知道在100美元的价格点上看起来是什么样子，有大约100万用户的潜力，对吧？这就是消费者。 374 | 375 | That's what that consumer space looks like. 376 | 377 | 这就是消费空间的样子。 378 | 379 | And you know what this down here it looks like. 380 | 381 | 你知道这下面是什么样子的。 382 | 383 | $100,000 here, we call this enterprise. 384 | 385 | 在这里，我们称这个企业为10万美元。 386 | 387 | This area here is the part that a lot of companies are in and really, really struggle. 388 | 389 | 这一领域是很多公司所处的领域，而且真的，真的很挣扎。 390 | 391 | They're on the struggle bus and it tends to be SMB. 392 | 393 | 他们在斗争公交车上，而且往往是SMB。 394 | 395 | These are people who treat their money like consumers, but they look like they might be an enterprise. 396 | 397 | 这些人像对待消费者一样对待他们的钱，但他们看起来可能是一个企业。 398 | 399 | And the reason why this is such a danger zone is because it will tend to fit in the wrong place on my next diagram. 400 | 401 | 之所以这是一个危险区域，是因为它会倾向于在我的下一个图表上放在错误的位置。 402 | 403 | So let's imagine that this vertical axis represents price. 404 | 405 | 让我们假设这个垂直轴代表价格。 406 | 407 | You can charge either a high price or a low price for your product and this represents complexity of your sales process. 408 | 409 | 你可以为你的产品收取高价或低价，这代表了你的销售过程的复杂性。 410 | 411 | Low complexity to high complexity. 412 | 413 | 从低复杂度到高复杂度。 414 | 415 | If you are having a product that is $2,000 or less and is basically self-serve, then you have something in this quadrant here. 416 | 417 | 如果你有一个2000美元或更少的产品，并且基本上是自助服务，那么你在这个象限中有一些东西。 418 | 419 | And this affects completely what you can do in terms of what drives your business, what you can spend on to get that sort of growth, that price point here at $2,000. 420 | 421 | 这完全影响了你可以做什么，你可以做什么来推动你的业务，你可以花多少钱来获得这样的增长，这里的价格点是2，000美元。 422 | 423 | It needs to have almost all marketing be inbound. 424 | 425 | 它需要几乎所有的营销都是内向的。 426 | 427 | You can't spend a lot of money outbound on ads, et cetera. 428 | 429 | 你不能在广告上花很多钱，等等。 430 | 431 | Your support has to be completely self-serve or very, very minimal. 432 | 433 | 你的支持必须是完全自助式的，或者是非常少的。 434 | 435 | You have no sales team at this price point. 436 | 437 | 在这个价位上，您没有销售团队。 438 | 439 | You can't afford it. 440 | 441 | 你买不起。 442 | 443 | But conversions can happen on the same day, must be in a self-serve model. 444 | 445 | 但是转换可以在同一天发生，必须在自助模式下进行。 446 | 447 | Transactional, so between two and $10,000 when you're able to charge this, you're able to have a few new toys at your sleeves and so marketing now can be focused on generating qualified leads. 448 | 449 | 交易，所以当你能够充电时，你可以在2到10，000美元之间，你可以有一些新的玩具在你的袖子里，所以营销现在可以专注于产生合格的线索。 450 | 451 | Your customer support can now offer SLAs or you could start paying for training [inaudible] people get onboarded. 452 | 453 | 您的客户支持现在可以提供SLA，或者您可以开始为培训[听不见]人员支付入职费用。 454 | 455 | For sales, you can't hire a dedicated salesperson, but maybe you could have an inside sales rep to sell within companies or within your customers. 456 | 457 | 对于销售，你不能雇佣专职的销售人员，但也许你可以有一个内部销售代表在公司或客户内部销售。 458 | 459 | You could maybe have an SDR and you can maybe have someone dedicated to giving product demos. 460 | 461 | 你可能有一个特别提款权，你可能会有一个人致力于提供产品演示。 462 | 463 | Sales cycle here should not be longer than one to three months. 464 | 465 | 这里的销售周期不应该超过一到三个月。 466 | 467 | Enterprise, so over $25,000. 468 | 469 | 企业，所以超过25，000美元。 470 | 471 | Now for marketing, you can start spending things on branding, on building up trust with customers. 472 | 473 | 现在对于市场营销，你可以开始在品牌上花钱，建立与客户的信任。 474 | 475 | Your support is very, very high touch that you can afford. 476 | 477 | 你的支持是你能负担得起的非常高的触觉。 478 | 479 | You can do phone support, you can have a customer success person dedicated to the client. 480 | 481 | 你可以做电话支持，你可以有一个客户成功人士专门为客户。 482 | 483 | And for sales, you're going to start thinking about sales managers, dividing stuff into territories and having sales engineers that participate in terms of conversion and the sales calls. 484 | 485 | 对于销售，你将开始考虑销售经理，将员工划分为不同的区域，并让销售工程师参与转换和销售电话。 486 | 487 | These will have a sales cycle of about six to 12 months. 488 | 489 | 这些产品的销售周期约为6至12个月。 490 | 491 | This is the garbage zone, right? And you know, if you're potentially in this, and this is the big wake up call for you, if it's taking you months and months and months to close someone, but you're not making a lot of money to cover it, you have a process where your acquisition costs are just too high for you to be sustainable and you have to get yourself out of that problem. 492 | 493 | 这是垃圾区对吧？你知道，如果你有潜在的机会，这对你来说是一个很大的警钟，如果你花了几个月的时间来关闭某人，但你赚不到很多钱来支付它，你的收购成本太高了，你无法持续下去，你必须让自己摆脱这个问题。 494 | 495 | All of your work should be towards increasing the perceived value of your product or service. 496 | 497 | 你所有的工作都应该是为了增加你的产品或服务的感知价值。 498 | 499 | I'm going to end on a good rule of thumb. 500 | 501 | 我将以一个很好的经验法则结束。 502 | 503 | So if you are starting with some kind of price but you don't know how to sort of optimize it or figure it out, then here's a good place to get going. 504 | 505 | 所以，如果你从某种价格开始，但你不知道如何优化它或弄清楚它，那么这里是一个很好的地方。 506 | 507 | The first thing is, I like to have things where the value is 10X the price of whatever it is I'm charging. 508 | 509 | 第一件事是，我喜欢价值是我所收取的任何价格的10倍的东西。 510 | 511 | And I want to have it so that the value is easily understood to be a 10X. 512 | 513 | 我想拥有它，这样这个值就很容易理解为10X。 514 | 515 | So for example, if I charge for a product that is $10, then it should be in terms of perceived value by my customer that it's worth $100 to them. 516 | 517 | 因此，例如，如果我对一个10美元的产品收费，那么它应该是我的客户的感知价值，它对他们来说价值100美元。 518 | 519 | If they do not immediately understand the 10X value of the price, it's going to be hard to get them to move. 520 | 521 | 如果他们不立即了解价格的10倍价值，就很难让他们搬家。 522 | 523 | Their incentive to buy might be too low. 524 | 525 | 他们的购买动机可能太低了。 526 | 527 | Once you have any kind of price, and this is particularly important for people who are doing B2B or enterprise sale, you should start practicing raising prices. 528 | 529 | 一旦你有了任何一种价格，这对于做B2B或企业销售的人来说尤其重要，你应该开始练习提高价格。 530 | 531 | And I like to just start by raising prices by 5%. 532 | 533 | 我喜欢先把价格提高5%。 534 | 535 | If you feel really confident, jump it up by bigger numbers if you want, but this is a pretty safe way to do it so that you can feel comfortable with it. 536 | 537 | 如果你真的感到自信，如果你愿意的话，可以增加更多的数字，但是这是一个非常安全的方法，这样你就可以感觉很舒服了。 538 | 539 | And you want to keep raising prices until you're losing 20% of your customers. 540 | 541 | 你想不断提高价格，直到你失去了20%的客户。 542 | 543 | That's about a good balance to have in terms of understanding that like, "I have a good price here. 544 | 545 | 这是一个很好的平衡，就像“我在这里有一个很好的价格”这样的理解。 546 | 547 | I'm losing 20% of my deals. 548 | 549 | 我失去了20%的交易。 550 | 551 | It's not too high, it's not too low." In summary for pricing. 552 | 553 | 它不是太高，也不是太低。 554 | 555 | Pricing gives the most bang for your buck. 556 | 557 | 定价给你的钱带来最大的冲击。 558 | 559 | You should work on pricing. 560 | 561 | 你应该在定价上下功夫。 562 | 563 | If you've never touched the pricing of your product, then you're losing out on lots of potential growth. 564 | 565 | 如果你从未接触过你的产品的定价，那么你将失去很多潜在的增长。 566 | 567 | Understand the variables. 568 | 569 | 了解变量。 570 | 571 | Do you really understand your cost? Do you understand why you've played the price where it is, and do you understand the value? When you go into a sales meeting or a call, do you talk to people or you basically say, "I know exactly what this is going to be worth to you." So when I tell you what the price is going to be, you're going to be like, "Damn, that's totally worth it." Go after early adopters. 572 | 573 | 你真的明白你的代价吗？你知道为什么你要在这个价格上下注吗？你知道它的价值吗？当你参加销售会议或电话时，你是和别人交谈还是基本上说，“我确切地知道这对你来说有多大价值。”所以当我告诉你价格是多少时，你会说，“该死，这完全值得。”追查早期采用者。 574 | 575 | Remember as a startup, that is who you're going after. 576 | 577 | 记住，作为一家初创企业，这就是你要追求的人。 578 | 579 | So when you are talking to customers and they are taking a really long time to make a decision, or they're wanting to have a lot more proof that other people are using it, you are not talking to an early adopter. 580 | 581 | 因此，当你与客户交谈时，他们需要很长时间才能做出决定，或者他们想要有更多证据证明其他人正在使用它，你并不是在和早期采用者交谈。 582 | 583 | You're wasting a lot of time on non-believers. 584 | 585 | 你在不信教的人身上浪费了很多时间。 586 | 587 | Go after them first. 588 | 589 | 先去追他们。 590 | 591 | Don't take it personally when these people who are much more mature aren't ready for your product. 592 | 593 | 当这些成熟得多的人还没有准备好接受你的产品时，不要认为这是针对个人的。 594 | 595 | They were never going to be. 596 | 597 | 他们永远都不会是。 598 | 599 | Your job is to get through that first two to 5% of the market. 600 | 601 | 你的工作是通过前2%到5%的市场份额。 602 | 603 | Those early adopters care more about benefits than price, so don't undercharge your products when you have something that is of value and easily understood to have value. 604 | 605 | 那些早期采用者更关心的是利益而不是价格，所以当你拥有价值的东西并且很容易被理解为有价值时，不要低估你的产品。 606 | 607 | Get organized. 608 | 609 | 组织起来。 610 | 611 | When you're doing price optimization, it's really, really easy. 612 | 613 | 当你在做价格优化的时候，它真的，真的很容易。 614 | 615 | Don't over complicate things. 616 | 617 | 别把事情搞得太复杂了。 618 | 619 | Figure out a bunch of different price points you want to check, understand sales volume, conversion rate, and the revenue that's involved, and that will help you make the best pricing decision. 620 | 621 | 找出一堆你想要检查的不同价格点，了解销售量，转化率和涉及的收入，这将帮助你做出最好的定价决策。 622 | 623 | Your price will determine your acquisition strategy. 624 | 625 | 你的价格将决定你的收购策略。 626 | 627 | If you realize that your sales cycle or all the things that you're spending on is way too much for the amount of money that you're charging, you either need to increase the price, [inaudible] reduce your acquisition strategy costs. 628 | 629 | 如果你意识到你的销售周期或你所花费的所有东西对于你所收取的钱来说太多了，你要么需要提高价格，[听不见]降低你的收购战略成本。 630 | 631 | Use the 10/5/20 rule. 632 | 633 | 使用10/5/20规则。 634 | 635 | Set a price that is 10X, that has a 10th of the value. 636 | 637 | 将价格设置为10X，即价值的十分之一。 638 | 639 | Increased prices by 5% until you're losing 20% of the deals. 640 | 641 | 将价格提高5%，直到你失去20%的交易。 642 | 643 | Thank you very much guys. 644 | 645 | 646 | 非常感谢你们。 647 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 2 | * [Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas pt.1](01.zh-si.md) 3 | * [Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users](02.zh-si.md) 4 | * [Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals](03.zh-si.md) 5 | * [Ilya Volodarsky - Analytics for Startups](04.zh-si.md) 6 | * [Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP](05.zh-si.md) 7 | * [Anu Hariharan - Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want](06.zh-si.md) 8 | * [Kat Manalac - How to Launch (Again and Again)](07.zh-si.md) 9 | * [Gustaf Alstromer - Growth for Startups](08.zh-si.md) 10 | * [Kirsty Nathoo - Startup Finance Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them](09.zh-si.md) 11 | * [Tim Brady - Building Culture](10.zh-si.md) 12 | * [Dalton Caldwell - All About Pivoting](11.zh-si.md) 13 | * [Kevin Hale - How to Improve Conversion Rates](12.zh-si.md) 14 | * [Kevin Hale - Startup Pricing 101](13.zh-si.md) 15 | * [Kevin Hale - How to Work Together](14.zh-si.md) 16 | * [Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time](15.zh-si.md) 17 | * [Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt.2](16.zh-si.md) 18 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /original/01.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas pt.1 2 | 3 | Kevin Hale:Okay, so this is how to evaluate startup ideas, and this is actually a new set of content that we've developed based on a lot of feedback that we saw from the last startup school, and what we noticed is a lot of people's challenges. 4 | 5 | So last year's curriculum actually had a lot of content that ended up being, when we looked at the data for who's participating in startup school, was like, "Oh, this is much more advanced, it's much further along." A lot of people, for instance, like, "I had no idea." Or like, "I have too many ideas." That they don't know which one to pursue. 6 | 7 | Because a main reason why a lot of people are only able to work on their startup sometimes part-time, yes, they might be stuck without resources, but they didn't have conviction. 8 | 9 | They didn't know like, "Oh, what would I have to believe in order to say, 'I want to quit my job'?" This is also a really great sort of skill to sort of have, because if you are realizing you need to pivot, how do you evaluate if you need to do that? And then also if you're pivoting to something else, how do you evaluate whether something is worth going to? And if you already have a launch company, then you might have problems with like, "Why isn't this growing?" Or, "How do I improve it?" And evaluating your start up, especially in the way that sort of investors evaluate startups ideas, we find it's going to be really, really useful. 10 | 11 | This is like myth about Y Combinator is that people think YC only funds companies who have tons and tons of traction. 12 | 13 | That nowadays the only way to get into YC is you have to have lots of revenue, or tons of users already. 14 | 15 | And part of that has to do with the press and then the exposure of the companies that make it to demo day; those are the stories you tend to hear. 16 | 17 | But that being said, there's lots of great examples of companies who actually got accepted just with an idea. 18 | 19 | And so, Zenefits is a really good classic one, Parker was a single, non-technical founder who pitched an idea to YC and he got in that way; we also had Reddit. 20 | 21 | So, technically, they were forced to pivot right away, so they hadn't written a single line of code. 22 | 23 | And then my experience in YC is actually exactly the same. 24 | 25 | So when I founded Wufoo, and we entered that second batch, we also had not written a single line of code; PG had invested us at just the idea stage. 26 | 27 | And so I feel fully committed now, as a partner, to always be trying to find and dedicate time and energy to funding companies who are just at the idea stage. 28 | 29 | A lot of our efforts here for working on startup school, is to help you work on how to talk and think about your startup. 30 | 31 | And that if we can fix that, it can help you sort of inspire us to be like, "Oh yeah, I can believe in what you're doing." And a lot of times, founders get in the way when they're telling their narrative. 32 | 33 | So how can I predict if an investor will like my idea? That's, ultimately, what I'm trying to figure out. 34 | 35 | And the answer is really easy. 36 | 37 | And so for us at YC, the definition of a startup is a company that is designed or created to try to grow very quickly. 38 | 39 | So if you're not trying to build a company that grows very, very fast, then you're just building a normal company; it's a small business. 40 | 41 | And there's nothing wrong with that, but these companies are the ones that investors are interested in. 42 | 43 | So if you're hoping to build something that will have tons of users, that will have huge valuations, that'll be able to attract venture funding, then the evidence that we want is evidence that shows that your company can grow quickly. 44 | 45 | I have a confession to make, if you ever meet me, or talk to me about your startup, and kind of recruiting, or at one of these events, I will never tell you that I do not like your idea. 46 | 47 | And there's a reason for that, it's not to be nice to you, it's not to blow smoke up your ass. 48 | 49 | I learned this way of thinking from Paul Graham, he says like, look, "The average investor, or a lot of the investors that you see, when you talk to them about your idea, it feels like they're trying to poke holes in your idea. 50 | 51 | They're trying to figure out what's wrong with it, and then they're trying to show, sometimes, just how smart they are." And he explained that his job, and the way he sees our work at YC, is that it's not to figure out what's wrong with company, but to figure out how it could possibly win. 52 | 53 | Because our bets, the ones that win, are the ones that are non-obvious. 54 | 55 | And so for us to figure out the non-obvious stuff, it's going to not sound obvious when they first tell you. 56 | 57 | And so we have to work on our imagination, we have to work on our optimism to figure out, "Oh what is the way that whatever story that they're telling me could become a billion dollar company?" And then a great investor pitches that back to the founder. 58 | 59 | I figure out all the ways that I think whatever you're doing could possibly become big, and then I'm trying to convince you that this is what needs to happen so that I would have the evidence, or that you will be on the right path to having a company that grows quickly. 60 | 61 | A startup idea is, basically, a hypothesis and this is the way you should think about it. 62 | 63 | It's a hypothesis about why a company could grow quickly. 64 | 65 | And your job is to figure out how to construct your hypothesis, basically the pitch, to the investor so they understand how it can go grow quickly. 66 | 67 | A lot of times, people make the mistakes of trying to just accurately describe or over describe a lot of different parts. 68 | 69 | So I'm going to break this down. 70 | 71 | So just like a normal hypothesis has a pretty decent structure for this, this will, hopefully, help you sort of workshop like understanding, "Oh this is exactly all the reasons why this should succeed." And so even before we start even building anything, we can have an understanding of like, "Oh, here's the potential path of this company." Or, "Here's the things I need to prove that show that this comedy could do well." So the first is the problem, so the startup idea's composed of three parts, the first part is a problem; and it's basically the initial conditions. 72 | 73 | You have to explain to me, "What is the setting for this company that allows it to be able to grow quickly?" The second is the solution. 74 | 75 | So this is, basically, what is the experiment that you're basically running, within those conditions, for it to grow really quickly? And the third is what's your insight? So what's your explanation why the thing that you're going to try, your experiment, is going to end up being successful? Those are the three components that I'm always trying to figure out when I'm listening to someone's pitch. 76 | 77 | Here's a tip for talking about the problem, or to know whether your problem, your initial conditions, are correct. 78 | 79 | The first is good problems, they're popular; so a lot of people have the problem. 80 | 81 | You want to avoid problems that there's a small number of people that have it. 82 | 83 | We like problems that are growing so, therefore, the market basically, is it growing at a rate that more and more people are going to be having the problem? And it's growing faster than other people's, or other types of problems? We like problems that are urgent, ones that need to be solved very, very quickly. 84 | 85 | We like problems that are really expensive to solve, because if you're able to sort of solve it, then you can charge a lot of money, potentially. 86 | 87 | We like problems that are mandatory so, therefore, it's like, "Ah, people have this problem, and they have to solve it." And then we like problems that are frequent, ones that people are going to encounter over, and over, and over again; and often in a frequent time interval. 88 | 89 | So what you want to have is some aspect of the problem that you're working on, at least one of them, and it's ideal if you have multiple of them. 90 | 91 | You don't have to have all of them, but it's one of those things where it's like if your company isn't growing, or if someone's not as excited about the problem, it's probably missing some of these characteristics. 92 | 93 | The last one about frequency is super important because I like problems, and you'll find a lot of YC partners like problems, a lot, that gives people a lot of opportunities to convert. 94 | 95 | Part of that has to do with some theory, so B. 96 | 97 | J. 98 | 99 | Fogg, he's a researcher at Stanford, and he tosses this formula up all the time. 100 | 101 | And he says basically, "If you're trying to change someone's behavior, you have three things you need to have in place. 102 | 103 | You need to have the motivation, the ability, and the trigger; they need to all happen at the same time." So the motivation is like, "I have this problem, I need to solve whatever it is." The ability is your startup, and the last is the trigger. 104 | 105 | What's going to be the thing that gets them to all of a sudden realize, "Oh, I need to solve it with your thing?" And so a lot of companies will have like, "Oh I built something but, for some reason, no one's signing up." Or like, "They're not using it, they're not engaged, I have no retention." And a lot of the times is because it's you're hoping that they will somehow just remember, on their own, that they have the problem, and to start using you. 106 | 107 | And, oftentimes, most companies don't send enough, for example, email notifications, or triggers, or reminders, or figure out ways to come back into the app, or figure out ways to be back in front of the user at the right time. 108 | 109 | And if you can't figure out those opportunities, it's really hard to get people to switch over to using your solution, service, or product. 110 | 111 | So our ideal problems are millions of users, millions of people have it. 112 | 113 | That's why people like to work on consumer companies, that's why some investors like to focus on them. 114 | 115 | We like markets that are growing 20% a year; the problem is growing quickly. 116 | 117 | We like problems where people were trying to solve it right now, immediately. 118 | 119 | We like problems that just cost a ton of money; so billions of dollars. 120 | 121 | Or at least they all add up to some billion dollar total addressable market. 122 | 123 | We like problems where the law has changed, and regulation is put up there, and now people have to solve a bunch of problems. 124 | 125 | You saw a ton of healthcare startups were born after Affordable Care Act was passed. 126 | 127 | And a lot of that had to do with there was now, all of a sudden, opportunity; this problem that all these hospitals and clinics had to solve. 128 | 129 | And then we like problems that people need to solve multiple times a day, or will use it multiple times a day. 130 | 131 | [inaudible 00:10:35]'s a good classic example, but people also really love Slack, because it's like, "Oh, I'm going to be engaged in using it multiple times a day during the workday." Solution. 132 | 133 | So there's pretty much only one piece of advice I really have for the solution that's the best advice that you could ever follow, and that is don't start here. 134 | 135 | So what I mean by that is, at YC we have an acronym for a problem that we try to avoid or, basically, an application that we have to go like, "Oh man, I wish they had started with the problem first." And we call it 'SISP', and it means Solution In Search of a Problem. 136 | 137 | And often what happens is you're an engineer, you're excited about technology, some new technology has come on the scene. 138 | 139 | Let's say it's Blockchain, let's say it's like React Native, or whatever the new thing is and you're like, "I want to build something with this." It's a large reason why you start working on a startup project. 140 | 141 | And then you go like, "Okay, what kind of problem can I solve now? I want to use this no matter what." And then you try to shoehorn a problem into the solution. 142 | 143 | And what ends up happening is that's a much more difficult way to grow the company. 144 | 145 | It's not impossible for companies to grow this way, it's super inefficient. 146 | 147 | It's much better to be like, "Let me see what problems people have, and I will use whatever is necessary to solve them." And, therefore, it's much more likely that you will grow as a result. 148 | 149 | Because the other way around, is you might have to go and try to drum up the problem, or you have to brand a problem as something that people have, and it's so much more difficult, and you end up growing much more slowly as a result. 150 | 151 | So look at what you're building right now, or look at the reason why you're trying to do this startup, and is it because you only care about the technology and building something in that? Or have you started with a problem, you go like, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to solve people, user's, customer's issues." The last one's a little tricky. 152 | 153 | It's what is the insight? What's the reason why this solution is going to work? And this is where a lot of companies sort of get tripped up. 154 | 155 | Because it's really about like what is your company's unfair advantage? Why are you going to win versus everyone else? Why are you going to be the fastest one to sort of grow? Because that insight is what's needed for the investor to choose you over anyone else, and it has to be related to growth. 156 | 157 | You have to have an unfair advantage that explains why you're going to grow quickly. 158 | 159 | If it's not related to that, then it's not going to be something that an investor is going to find valuable. 160 | 161 | And the last one is, you need one. 162 | 163 | You can't just be like, "I have a problem, I'm solving it." And then have no explanation why. 164 | 165 | Without that last sort of explanation, I can't use my imagination, I can't evaluate just solely on how well you've thought through this problem. 166 | 167 | And so let's go through the types of unfair advantages that your company have. 168 | 169 | So there's five different types and companies do not have all of them. 170 | 171 | Really great ones, not surprising, will have all of them and we'll go through two examples. 172 | 173 | But you want at least one, and it's nice if you can have two or three; but for most of you, it's probably just one. 174 | 175 | So the first one, so how do you know if you have a founder unfair advantage? And so, all of these will be connected to numbers actually, which will help this make this really easy. 176 | 177 | Is like are you one in 10 of all the people in the world who can solve this problem; are you a super expert? And 99% of the people we fund at YC, do not fall into that category. 178 | 179 | And so if you think it's like, "Well, I'm a product manager at Google." There's a lot of product managers at Google. 180 | 181 | If you say you're an engineer at Microsoft, there's a lot of engineers at Microsoft. 182 | 183 | It's like great, but it's not one that will make me think, "Oh, you have a greater unfair advantage than someone else." If you've done a PhD and, let's say, you've done it on some kind of crazy biotech research, and you have a special patent to be able to cure some kind of disease; then you have a founder advantage. 184 | 185 | Your market. 186 | 187 | Is it growing 20% a year? By default, if you just build the solution in the space, you should just automatically grow, because you're just following a trend. 188 | 189 | If this is your only company advantage, then it's one of the weakest ones that you could have. 190 | 191 | It is great to be in that space, but you want to have something in addition to this. 192 | 193 | You're going to do better than average because you've picked the right problem space, and the right set of customers that want your problem. 194 | 195 | But again, if you're in a market that is stagnating or shrinking, then you're going to have investors worried about the longterm viability of your company as a result. 196 | 197 | Product. 198 | 199 | So this is super simple. 200 | 201 | Is your product 10x better than the competition? If it is, then you, potentially, have an unfair advantage; and it has to be very, very clear. 202 | 203 | Someone should be able to look at your product and go like, "Oh shit, this is so much better than everything else I've ever seen. 204 | 205 | It is 10x faster, it is 10x cheaper, etc." And if it's not an order of magnitude, let's say, it's just like 2x or 3x, again, that's nice, but it's not enough for an investor to go like, "Oh, this is a slam dunk." In regards to that 10x product and showing that you are able to have that ... 206 | 207 | Later in startup school, I'm going to do a lecture on pricing. 208 | 209 | And we'll talk things about cost and value, and that'll help you sort of better understand is like, "Oh, how to better prove out that 10x multiple using sort of metrics and numbers and pricing." Acquisition. 210 | 211 | So, a lot of people think that if you go to investor and you've done a bunch of Facebook, or Twitter, or Google ads and you show your CAC and LTV, that you will able to prove that you have a sustainable sort of acquisition model. 212 | 213 | And I want you to know that if paid acquisition is the only way that you are able to grow your company, then I'm going to discount that channel of growth greatly. 214 | 215 | That is because if you actually get really popular, you've actually start being someone significant, let's say, becoming a $100 million revenue company, then you're going to attract a lot of competitors in this space, and that advantage is going to quickly dwindle over time. 216 | 217 | Blue [inaudible] is a really good example of this. 218 | 219 | Almost all their acquisitions in paid, and then once they ate through that, there's almost nowhere else for them to sort of go. 220 | 221 | You want to find acquisition paths that costs no money. 222 | 223 | And my favorite companies, the ones that become really great, are the ones that can grow by word of mouth; this is a good percentage of the way they grow. 224 | 225 | And so in the early days of a startup, if you don't have any money, that's actually very great way of exercising, "How do I grow this without having to pay for it?" And so in the beginning, we tell you to do things that don't scale, but this is what you sort of want to accomplish. 226 | 227 | It's like, "Do I have an advantage that is free?" And the last one is, do you have a monopoly? And so we don't mean this in the monocle Monopoly game sense, so we mean it as as your company grows, is it more difficult for you to be defeated by competitors, do you get stronger? And so good examples of that are like companies with network effects and marketplaces. 228 | 229 | Where marketplaces where it tends to be a 'winner takes all', one company will tend to win. 230 | 231 | And network effects is just, basically, as my network grows, the strength of my company, and the value of the product or service also grows with it. 232 | 233 | Not every company has it, well when when you do have that, works out great. 234 | 235 | There's something to keep in mind, also, as other things I'm looking to believe about a company, and that is something that trips up a lot of founders. 236 | 237 | And so there's two types of beliefs that I have about a company. 238 | 239 | And so there's the threshold belief, which is like, "What's the default just for them to even succeed?" So oftentimes, for me, it's like, "Oh, them building it, can they even build it?" That's a threshold belief. 240 | 241 | If they can't even build it, none of it even matters. 242 | 243 | And so, to me, that question is not the most important. 244 | 245 | What will determine whether ... 246 | 247 | "I'm going to win the lotto." Is a miracle belief. 248 | 249 | That like, "Oh my God, if I believe that they can do this, that actually going to be able to take off really well." And sometimes they're really simple, so if you are heavy engineering team, or doing a B2B, or enterprise startup, again the default is you have to build it. 250 | 251 | So if you can't even build it, then it's not even going to work, so I don't spend actually a lot of time looking at that. 252 | 253 | For me, I'm trying to figure out success will be determined by how well you can do sales, how well you can tell the story, how well you can actually convince customers, and work through a sales process. 254 | 255 | I want evidence that shows that you know have to work through that and make that happen. 256 | 257 | And so, all of my work with most of those companies is like not working on product, it's like, "Hey, all right, let's prove this other thing." That if you have that, that'll be the thing that actually will help people go like, "Oh shit, they have this super combo." Let's go some quick examples. 258 | 259 | So YC is a good one, because we like to think of YC as a startup. 260 | 261 | So the problem. 262 | 263 | The way we'd word this is it's hard for founders to raise money without knowing someone in venture capital. 264 | 265 | So at the time that it was started, you basically had to be an insider, and that was the only way you can sort of get money; and that super sucked. 266 | 267 | And the solution that, basically, Paul Graham came up with is like, "Invest in companies through an open application, you don't need to know anyone. 268 | 269 | You just tell us your idea, tell us a bit about yourselves, and that should be enough for you to get funding." Now there's a bunch of unfair advantages that YC had. 270 | 271 | Number one, the founders are pretty incredible. 272 | 273 | So Paul Graham had wrote a textbook on Lisp RTM, wrote the very first worm; he's like amazing programmer. 274 | 275 | And they had built and sold the first SAS company that was via web to Yahoo. 276 | 277 | So they were kind of experts at both evaluating technology, and also understanding kind of startups in that whole process. 278 | 279 | The market. 280 | 281 | Basically believe that future billion dollar companies will be technology companies; they'd be powered by software. 282 | 283 | And the wonderful thing about tech companies, especially at that time, was Moore's Law was making it cheaper and cheaper for software companies to be started and, therefore, they needed a whole lot less money, and he could make a lot more bets as a result. 284 | 285 | The product. 286 | 287 | So basically, they pay the founders, they come for three months, they get some advice, they work on their product for a relatively small amount of money. 288 | 289 | And then at the end of the time, instead of offering co-working space, they work from their own home, and then they pitch to a bunch of different investors. 290 | 291 | And the idea was that would be so valuable to a potential founder who had no connections, that it would attract a lot of really great minds, or a lot of people who were hungry to get into the space. 292 | 293 | Acquisition. 294 | 295 | So most of you don't realize this, is PG was able to sort of build up YC and attract the right talent because he had a huge reach, or audience, when he got started. 296 | 297 | He had written that textbook, yes, but he also wrote all these popular online essays, and he had a large audience of his target users, hackers to come and evaluate his product. 298 | 299 | And he could acquire them relatively cheaply just by making a website and letting it be known. 300 | 301 | And then the last one is, something he didn't even realize when he started YC, and that is that as the YC alumni network grew, it got more powerful and more valuable over time. 302 | 303 | The results are funded thousands of companies, there's 4,000 founders, they're the CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world. 304 | 305 | They are over 15 companies worth over $1 billion. 306 | 307 | There's 93 companies with over $100 million, and our total market capitalization is over $100 billion. 308 | 309 | I'm going to do one more example with you guys. 310 | 311 | So Wufoo, this was my startup, and it's an online form and survey builder. 312 | 313 | And so for us, it was, basically, if your website needs to collect some kind of data, at some point, but you need to know how to code or hire a programmer to be able to do it. 314 | 315 | And so the solution was to build something that what they see is what they got. 316 | 317 | Like, basically, a drag and drop visual editor, and that any non-technical person sort of create. 318 | 319 | And then if we did that, we would solve that sort of specific problem. 320 | 321 | So very quickly, the market. 322 | 323 | It's kind of ridiculous, we were asked in the early days calculate our TAM, but it was like, "Every website needs a form, I don't really understand, what website doesn't need a form eventually?" It allowed us to grow really, really quickly, our product was easily shown to be 10x faster against the direct competition with other builders, because it was so much faster to do the drag and dropping and visually see. 324 | 325 | And then it'll usually 100x faster than a lot of traditional routes for very custom forms, for hiring a programmer very cheaper, because we had this freemium model. 326 | 327 | That also led to an acquisition unfair advantage. 328 | 329 | And so we actually had started off with building a blog and building an audience as well. 330 | 331 | Started off with 100,000 developers subscribed to our blog, we launched it out to them after building up that audience for a year; and that's actually what we applied to YC with. 332 | 333 | Is we had built up this audience, we had proved that all these other things are in place. 334 | 335 | And then, part of the other acquisition model is that you could embed these forms on people's websites, and then our users basically spread our form and software for us as a result; so we never had to hire any sales people. 336 | 337 | And the results are, our product was used by every industry, market and vertical you can imagine. 338 | 339 | Tons of super large companies, and we did this with a relatively small amount of team. 340 | 341 | When we were acquired, we were a weird outlier compared to all the other acquisitions. 342 | 343 | The average company raises like $25 million before an exit, and this is their average return. 344 | 345 | And for Wufoo, we only raised $118,000 for the whole life of the company, and our returns are over 30,000%. 346 | 347 | Okay, so in the end, this is very simple exercise, but super enlightening once you actually go through it, and to try to figure out that narrative and story. 348 | 349 | So I turn it back to you, go through and try to answer those questions about problems, solution, your unfair advantage. 350 | 351 | Figure out, "Where are my holes, do I have one?" And then the question becomes, "Oh, what do I need to prove, what do I need to work on to make that happen?" Your startup idea is a hypothesis about why you're going to grow quickly. 352 | 353 | For our next lecture, we're going to talk about the first ways we try to prove it out to, basically, test our hunches, and that is by talking to users. 354 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /original/04.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Ilya Volodarsky - Analytics for Startups 2 | 3 | Ilya Volodarsky:Hi everyone. 4 | 5 | My name is Ilya. 6 | 7 | I'm one of the co-founders at Segment. 8 | 9 | And I'm here to talk to you about how to set up analytics and the analytics foundation to build your MVP, and to measure these primary and secondary metrics. 10 | 11 | So this is going to be a little bit more of a tactical guide around what tools are there in the analytics space, in the marketing space, which ones should we actually be using? How do I set them up? Cool. 12 | 13 | Just before I get started, a lot of you may not know what Segment is. 14 | 15 | It's an analytics API where you can send analytics data, and then toggle on different tools. 16 | 17 | So we sit in the cool market position where we can actually see what tools startups are using. 18 | 19 | And we can bring that information to you. 20 | 21 | And secondly, we've been around for about six years. 22 | 23 | And so we have information about a lot of different startups as they grew and what tools they used. 24 | 25 | So we're going to be sharing a lot of those today. 26 | 27 | Cool. 28 | 29 | So why talk about ... 30 | 31 | Why even focus on the analytics? Obviously primary and secondary metrics drive the MVP and product market fit process. 32 | 33 | And you're using that to actually test product market fit. 34 | 35 | You're also using it once you get out of product market fit strict search, to actually focus the team. 36 | 37 | So maybe there's going to be an acquisition issue in the company that's preventing your growth. 38 | 39 | Or maybe the users that you're getting aren't as engaged, or maybe you're having some monetization issues. 40 | 41 | And so the funnel actually is a forcing function to understand your business and where founders should be actually spending their time. 42 | 43 | And then finally, all the way from a two, three person team to a Google with 1 million employees, you're actually using metrics to operate and drive teams. 44 | 45 | So eventually you have an engineering team, you have a marketing team. 46 | 47 | And so what goal do you set in front of the marketing team? Use analytics for that. 48 | 49 | Okay, so today we're gonna cover a few different things. 50 | 51 | So first you always start with the funnel when you're thinking about analytics. 52 | 53 | So that's the sequential series of steps that your users go through to actually get value, and then pay you as well. 54 | 55 | Then we're going to talk about collecting data for your analytics tools. 56 | 57 | Then we're going to talk about the top three metrics. 58 | 59 | So these will include primary and secondary metrics that work for most products. 60 | 61 | And then a product market fit methodology that you can apply on top of that. 62 | 63 | And then finally we'll make recommendations about what tools are the best in the market right now that help the product market fit journey. 64 | 65 | Okay. 66 | 67 | So to start, always start started the funnel. 68 | 69 | So we'll make an example funnel for Netflix, which is a company that we're all super familiar with. 70 | 71 | Any B2B product or B2C product actually has this type of funnel where you acquire a user, you engage a user over a period of time. 72 | 73 | That loop is called retention. 74 | 75 | And then finally you monetize the user. 76 | 77 | And then metrics, both primary and secondary are performance indicators on top of each stage in the funnel. 78 | 79 | So on top of acquisition you can ask yourself, "How many net new users did I get this week versus last week? And what's my growth rate there?" For engagement, you take a cohort of users. 80 | 81 | So from Sunday to the following Monday you have 16 people sign up. 82 | 83 | And then you can track that cohort of users week over week and see what percentage of them are still using the product four weeks later, which is a good example of how to track retention. 84 | 85 | And then we talk about monetization, which is, "How much net new revenue did I make this week versus last week?" Okay. 86 | 87 | And then you apply your own custom business funnel to this. 88 | 89 | So if you're Netflix, we're all familiar that users sign up for Netflix. 90 | 91 | Then they play videos in a loop. 92 | 93 | Netflix is obviously very sticky, watching it a lot. 94 | 95 | And then finally when the trial runs out, you do subscription upgraded, and you get access to more content. 96 | 97 | Okay. 98 | 99 | So how do you collect data once you have this funnel? So there's analytics APIs out there. 100 | 101 | I'm using Segment as an example. 102 | 103 | You basically want to say user one, two, three in this case has done user sign up event, and they happen to be an organic user, which means they're not invited by someone else. 104 | 105 | Then if you're Netflix, you might say the users video played, and eventually subscription upgraded. 106 | 107 | And so this is how you instrument your tracking in your mobile app or your or your web app. 108 | 109 | Then you think about event properties. 110 | 111 | So imagine you're Netflix and you're holding one of these video played events in your hands. 112 | 113 | And you're wondering questions about it. 114 | 115 | So what video is the user actually playing? How long is the video? How far did the person get inside of the video? Right? Equivalently if you're holding a subscription upgraded event, you're going to want to derive monetization as a north star metric. 116 | 117 | So if you're a subscription business, you want to send your monthly recurring revenue. 118 | 119 | If you're a transactional business like e-commerce or retail, you want to send the actual value of the transaction. 120 | 121 | Okay. 122 | 123 | So then you push this out into your web app, your mobile app. 124 | 125 | Then you start seeing the data come in. 126 | 127 | You look at the debugger. 128 | 129 | You see, "Okay, user signup is here. 130 | 131 | Everything looks good." You add your first analytics tool. 132 | 133 | We'll use Amplitude as a good example here. 134 | 135 | Amplitude and Mixpanel are pretty awesome analytics tools out in the market right now. 136 | 137 | And then you start seeing data flow inside of one of these analytics tools. 138 | 139 | So this is Amplitude. 140 | 141 | You can start seeing user signups growing as soon as you launched the real mobile or web app. 142 | 143 | Okay. 144 | 145 | So now that you have analytics set up, it's them to focus on three different metrics. 146 | 147 | The first one is the acquisition metric, signups per week. 148 | 149 | It's really nice if you're a B2B business to cut this by the invite type. 150 | 151 | So you have organic users which are just signing up from coming to your website, direct signup. 152 | 153 | And then some users are inviting other users. 154 | 155 | So those are invite type, right? So when you're thinking about growth, it's really important to think about the organic user in that case, right? Another example of why event properties are important. 156 | 157 | The way you create this is you go to Amplitude, you say, "Event segmentation report, user signup. 158 | 159 | Next." Here's your graph, right? So it's as easy as that. 160 | 161 | Just website, send data, gets to Amplitude. 162 | 163 | And then you can see the amount of organic users every week. 164 | 165 | And then if you're working on the acquisition step as a secondary metric, you can basically say, "Today 218 users organically signed up in the last week. 166 | 167 | But by the end of the month, we want that to be at 300. 168 | 169 | And we're going to execute projects A, B, and C this month. 170 | 171 | And then we're going to watch this graph every single day on a T.V. 172 | 173 | Dashboard in our office or our apartment, wherever we work. 174 | 175 | And then we're going to see if our efforts are actually driving this," right? So that's an idea of data-driven operation of a team. 176 | 177 | You set a metric and a goal, and then you drive towards that every day. 178 | 179 | Okay. 180 | 181 | The second one is retention cohort. 182 | 183 | So someone recently asked about retention. 184 | 185 | We'll talk about that right now. 186 | 187 | So with retention, you want to think about cohorts of users. 188 | 189 | So you want to say Monday to Sunday, let's say December 10 through December 17th, 16 users signed up. 190 | 191 | And then you look at those 16 users as they use your product on a week zero which is their signup week, week one, week two, week three and a week four. 192 | 193 | And the general idea here is you can convince your mom or your grandma to use your product once. 194 | 195 | But even your mom or your grandma won't continue to come back and use your product over time every single week, right? And so if you see users that are addicted, that are coming back week over week, that's a really good sign of product market fit. 196 | 197 | So this business can see that the December 10th cohort, only 6.25% of those users are still around on week four. 198 | 199 | And that's a pretty low amount, right? So you probably want that to be somewhere between 20 or 30 at least. 200 | 201 | And so you can set a goal saying, "I'm going to talk to a bunch of these target users and try to figure out why they're not getting value out of the product. 202 | 203 | And then make some changes as well." Okay. 204 | 205 | So what metric do you actually pick? This is taken from one of Gustav's slides. 206 | 207 | Pretty awesome. 208 | 209 | You think about what value your company is giving to your users. 210 | 211 | So Airbnb gives you value by letting you stay at different rental properties around the world, right? And they want you to do that at least one time a year, otherwise they consider you a churned user. 212 | 213 | Equivalently, Facebook gives you value by letting you look at the newsfeed and connect with your friends. 214 | 215 | And they want you to do that at least daily or monthly once. 216 | 217 | And so when you think about product market fit, you basically have these two different curves that happen. 218 | 219 | So we have that cohort of 16 users that signed up in one week ,and we track them over time. 220 | 221 | And so what ends up happening is for products that don't have product market fit, they end up tending to go to zero, because people just don't care about the product, right? And that's definition of product market fit. 222 | 223 | For those tools and the products that do have product market fit, you'll see some kind of natural plateau. 224 | 225 | Don't mind this axis. 226 | 227 | It should be somewhere between 20 and 30% at least. 228 | 229 | Okay. 230 | 231 | So how do you create this graph? It seems kind of complicated, right? Luckily both Mixpanel and Amplitude have really awesome reports for this. 232 | 233 | So in Amplitude it's a retention analysis report. 234 | 235 | You say, users enter the cohort with the user signup. 236 | 237 | And then they returned with the video played or the subscription upgraded event, that's the value event. 238 | 239 | And then you press Next and out comes this graph. 240 | 241 | And then you could look at four week retention for cohorts, improve the product and watch as new cohorts that strike the four week mark do better or worse, right? And that shows you whether your changes week over week or actually improving. 242 | 243 | Okay. 244 | 245 | Finally revenue. 246 | 247 | So this is the primary metric that you want to be thinking about. 248 | 249 | You'll use for a subscription business, the subscription upgraded event. 250 | 251 | You'll do a property sum over new plan, monthly recurring revenue. 252 | 253 | You press Next, and outcomes your weekly net new revenue graph. 254 | 255 | And then you could set monthly goals on top of this to make sure you're growing at the rates that you to be. 256 | 257 | Okay. 258 | 259 | Finally, if you have a founding team, it's really good to basically put all this stuff on a dashboard, and then put this dashboard on a T.V. 260 | 261 | In your office. 262 | 263 | It's incredibly, incredibly important. 264 | 265 | Basically, this is kind of the difference between being a data driven team and not a data driven team. 266 | 267 | A lot of founders actually set up their analytics, but then don't look at them ever again because it can be painful, right? While data driven team will put it on a T.V. 268 | 269 | And talk about projects, talk about what those projects are actually changing the metrics that they're trying to drive. 270 | 271 | And then just completely understand the business every single day, right? And this kind of company and this kind of founder will actually scale to build better high performance companies, because the next team of employees they hire will also be looking at that same T.V. 272 | 273 | Dashboard and be driven off those same metrics. 274 | 275 | So really important, get a T.V. 276 | 277 | Next what you want to do is have some kind of social accountability around your metrics. 278 | 279 | So if you have your friends, your parents, your advisors, your investors package up how your business is doing into an email. 280 | 281 | This helps you synthesize what is actually happening. 282 | 283 | And then send it out to those advisors and tell them where the business is struggling, and what your plan is to fix it. 284 | 285 | This allows the advisors to quickly understand the business, and then respond back with a much more appropriate advice. 286 | 287 | Cool. 288 | 289 | And now we'll go into the startup stack. 290 | 291 | So these are tools that we recommend that help this kind of tactical process of setting up these metrics. 292 | 293 | So I'm going to talk a little bit about that MVP business workflow that Michael talked about earlier. 294 | 295 | So initially you're building an MVP segment. 296 | 297 | Built about seven different MVPs before we actually found Segment. 298 | 299 | And all of those failed. 300 | 301 | And eventually we found one that worked. 302 | 303 | And the process of actually building the MVP is incredibly important. 304 | 305 | So once you have that little experiment built, you want to enter private beta. 306 | 307 | Which basically just means getting 10, 20, 30 customers to actually try this product, and then having very direct lines of communication open with them. 308 | 309 | What Segment does nowadays, every new product we ship, we open Slack channels with each one of our customers. 310 | 311 | And we have the product managers sit in those Slack channels and talk with the customers. 312 | 313 | For the products that don't get product market fit, the customers just stop responding and we're asking, asking, asking and they're not responding, right? And for the products that do have product market fit, the customers are immediately being like, "Oh, why don't you have this feature? This is broken. 314 | 315 | I tried inviting my team. 316 | 317 | Man, this is not working." So instead of you kind of pulling out the customer, the customer starts pulling at you. 318 | 319 | That's a good feeling of product market fit. 320 | 321 | Okay. 322 | 323 | So at some point the private beta is going well. 324 | 325 | You feel like people really care about this. 326 | 327 | You understand your target customer. 328 | 329 | Then you want to get a larger market segment to use it. 330 | 331 | That's the launch that we talked about earlier. 332 | 333 | Try to get there as quickly as possible. 334 | 335 | And then a launch is just more users that you get to test product market fit on. 336 | 337 | And so if you feel product market fit there, then you can start scaling the company, right? And you hire sales people and you start doing paid marketing and things like that. 338 | 339 | So different tools will guide you throughout this process. 340 | 341 | So as you're building an MVP and you're about to give it to the first group of customers, install Google Analytics, install Amplitude. 342 | 343 | Google Analytics will tell you who's coming from the internet to your website. 344 | 345 | And then Amplitude will tell you which features are they using, how engaged are they with that feature set. 346 | 347 | Unless you're able to stand over the shoulders of all of your users a 100% of the time, Analytics is the next best alternative for that. 348 | 349 | We also install live chat on the page. 350 | 351 | So either Slack with your customers. 352 | 353 | Or if you can't do that then maybe have a live chat available. 354 | 355 | In the beginning of Segment, customers would ping us day and night. 356 | 357 | And that's where we got the most valuable feedback from them. 358 | 359 | So just as many open channels of communication as possible. 360 | 361 | Next, data warehouse. 362 | 363 | This is something that we recommend. 364 | 365 | It used to be expensive. 366 | 367 | It's no longer expensive today. 368 | 369 | Basically if you have a non-technical co-founder on your team, they'll want to ask questions around the data. 370 | 371 | And they'll always ask the technical co-founder who will have to provide the answers. 372 | 373 | So a data warehouse kind of democratizes the data, not only for the non-technical co-founders, but for everyone else in the company that you hire after. 374 | 375 | Company dashboards, obviously I should probably move that to the left. 376 | 377 | Email and push tools. 378 | 379 | So as soon as users sign up, you want to send them an email. 380 | 381 | I'll talk about that in a second. 382 | 383 | And then a help desk. 384 | 385 | So at some point you'll have so much support tickets if you start feeling product market fit. 386 | 387 | And if they're all going to your Gmail, one founder will just get overwhelmed and not be able to answer them. 388 | 389 | So you want to have a shared inbox where multiple founders can respond. 390 | 391 | Okay. 392 | 393 | Now I'm going to go through a few different recipes of these different tools that we found really helpful in product market fit. 394 | 395 | So the first one is improving product usability. 396 | 397 | Almost every product that's launched is unusable or highly unusable for the first three months while you have the kinks. 398 | 399 | And we see this with every single product, no matter how much effort we put into it ahead of time. 400 | 401 | As soon as customers hit it, they start using it in ways that you just don't expect. 402 | 403 | And so there's this tool called Fullstory, which helps you look at sessions of customers as they use your website. 404 | 405 | So I'll tell a quick story on this. 406 | 407 | This is a new feature in Personas, which is one of Segment's products. 408 | 409 | And we launched then, the metrics looked horrible. 410 | 411 | So customers were coming in, but they weren't actually completing it. 412 | 413 | They weren't using the product and we thought, "Oh, God. 414 | 415 | This likely doesn't have product market fit. 416 | 417 | We have to go back to the drawing board." Then one of the designers in our team had this amazing idea, "Let's look at the full story." And so we see this user going in about to start this creation workflow. 418 | 419 | They find this button. 420 | 421 | They clearly don't understand what the button does. 422 | 423 | They get so frustrated they just exit the page. 424 | 425 | And so we saw this with multiple different customers coming in. 426 | 427 | And so we're like, "Okay, we just have to fix that button." We fixed that button, immediately all the metrics got better. 428 | 429 | Right? And so that's why it's important to have this type of viewing, either stand over your customers' shoulders, which is great. 430 | 431 | What the Stripe co-founders did. 432 | 433 | Or get Fullstory, which is a more scalable way to do that. 434 | 435 | Okay. 436 | 437 | Call this the 43 Minute Founder Email. 438 | 439 | So when we launched Segment, we would wait about 43 minutes, and we would email the customer and say, "Hey, I'm Ilya. 440 | 441 | Thanks so much for signing up for Segment. 442 | 443 | Your next step here is to add a source to segment. 444 | 445 | And if you have any questions at all, please email me or call me anytime I'm available for you." Since we launched that email in 2013, we've had hundreds of thousands of responses to it. 446 | 447 | So it's the connection between you and the customer over email, that if they get confused, they'll respond to it. 448 | 449 | What you can use is a tool called CustomerIO. 450 | 451 | It's a behavioral email tool, which will say every time a user signs up, wait 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes, whatever. 452 | 453 | And then automatically send them this content. 454 | 455 | And then you could template the first name, the company name and so forth based off of your analytics data. 456 | 457 | So a huge recipe recommend. 458 | 459 | And then finally a for democratizing data access, I would say this is more advanced. 460 | 461 | So this is after you're in your MVP stage. 462 | 463 | You're feeling good about product market fit. 464 | 465 | You might want to install a data warehouse like Google BigQuery. 466 | 467 | And then Mode Analytics is a BI tool that works on top of it. 468 | 469 | This lets you ask questions on top of the raw data that you might not be able to do in Amplitude and Mixpanel. 470 | 471 | Just any kind of question you can ask with SQL. 472 | 473 | And then even the non-technical co-founders will eventually pick up SQL and then start asking these questions themselves. 474 | 475 | Okay. 476 | 477 | One common failure mode that we see with customers is trying to pick the perfect tool, Mixpanel or Amplitude, BigQuery or Redshift. 478 | 479 | And spending way, way, way too long thinking about that. 480 | 481 | The truth of the matter is, you shouldn't optimize for picking the right tool right now. 482 | 483 | Both Amplitude and Mixpanel will give you exactly the same result at your stage. 484 | 485 | Instead just get through that decision as quickly as possible, but set yourself up for change in the future. 486 | 487 | So this is an example, a diagram that shows a customer of segments. 488 | 489 | They use different tools over a period of about three years. 490 | 491 | And so you can see that they used about eight different tools between 2015 and 2017. 492 | 493 | Then they either hired someone or they decided that their tools are no longer doing the job. 494 | 495 | And they switch from one set of tools to another. 496 | 497 | So best in class tools change every two years. 498 | 499 | Just be prepared for change and don't spend too much time trying to perfect your your choice right now. 500 | 501 | Okay. 502 | 503 | This is my recommendation of what tools what are the best for the MVP process. 504 | 505 | I'll walk you through them right now. 506 | 507 | So Google Analytics is for understanding what users are coming to your website. 508 | 509 | Amplitude is for future analytics. 510 | 511 | Google BigQuery is to democratize data access for the data warehouse, which is just the database of data. 512 | 513 | Mode is the tool you use on top of that to ask questions on top of BigQuery. 514 | 515 | Intercom is like a list of all of your customers. 516 | 517 | They're a really good CRM for early stage folks. 518 | 519 | Fullstory is for improving product usability. 520 | 521 | And CustomerIO is for emailing your customers. 522 | 523 | Once you get big enough, you can start using Google ads, Facebook ads to actually do the a paid acquisition. 524 | 525 | Okay. 526 | 527 | So I'll just jump straight to the slide. 528 | 529 | When we were really young, we ... 530 | 531 | Or when we were in 2011, 2012 we didn't have a lot of money. 532 | 533 | And so we didn't want to use all these different tools. 534 | 535 | And so we used Google Spreadsheet for a CRM. 536 | 537 | We then use Asana or Trello, because there were too expensive. 538 | 539 | So we used emails. 540 | 541 | And the only things we paid for were basically GitHub and AWS to host our product, right? So today, happy to say that the Segment is now free for early stage startups. 542 | 543 | So for all you folks, there's a Bitly link down here though that we'll send out afterwards, and it's in the deals. 544 | 545 | And then also Segment went out and we did a bunch of deals with these customers, so that if you're early stage you can now get all of these tools for free. 546 | 547 | So enjoy that, and start using them to basically accelerate your product market fit process. 548 | 549 | Thank you. 550 | 551 | Thank you. 552 | 553 | Yes. 554 | 555 | I'll take some questions. 556 | Speaker 2:So what have you seen in terms of user base to make the numbers meaningful? Is I mean, 10% of a 100 is. 557 | 558 | Or 10% of 10 users is one. 559 | 560 | I don't [inaudible 00:18:36]. 561 | Ilya:You're asking you about growth rate? 562 | Speaker 2:Yeah. 563 | 564 | On any kind of [inaudible 00:18:43]. 565 | Ilya:So you're asking you if you're starting with a very small base of users, what growth rate do you need to be on to make growth meaningful? 566 | Speaker 2:Yeah. 567 | 568 | What have you seen that makes the numbers a bit more meaningful? I mean, should it be like 10,000 users before you- 569 | Ilya:Yeah. 570 | 571 | It completely depends on the product, right? So if you're an enterprise B2B company, then you're closing deals for 10, 15, $20,000 then only a few of those customers can make ... 572 | 573 | Can give you enough capital to hire more people to do more marketing, entire larger sales team. 574 | 575 | If you are selling shirts and pants, then you probably need higher volumes. 576 | 577 | So it totally depends on the kind of company you're building, 578 | Speaker 3:I have a question about you're going through all the retention and such. 579 | 580 | And it shows the charts have a by week, you're tracking your retention. 581 | 582 | But my product is more like an Airbnb product. 583 | 584 | It's more like an annual, maybe biannual, maybe even with our product we will change the trends. 585 | Ilya:Yeah. 586 | Speaker 3:But in history it's done biannual. 587 | Ilya:Yup. 588 | 589 | So the question is, what kind of retention period do you want to look at if you're renting properties like an Airbnb? So that's a really good question. 590 | 591 | Really those kinds of periods depend on the kind of company you're building. 592 | 593 | So I'm giving one presentation, but there's hundreds of different companies that need to apply the information slightly differently. 594 | 595 | So if you're Airbnb, you probably would expect people to at least come back to your app. 596 | 597 | How often do people travel? Right? They travel once a month, once a quarter, right? And so that's the period that you want to make sure that they come back- 598 | Speaker 3:You just check maybe quarterly and it's- 599 | Ilya:Yeah. 600 | 601 | So it's not like week is correct for everyone. 602 | 603 | But it's correct for the majority of companies. 604 | 605 | Yeah. 606 | Speaker 3:Right. 607 | 608 | So just keep a pulse, right? That's [inaudible 00:20:28]- 609 | Ilya:Exactly. 610 | Speaker 3:Yeah. 611 | Ilya:Keep a pulse. 612 | 613 | Yep. 614 | 615 | Wes? Awesome. 616 | 617 | All right. 618 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /original/05.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP 2 | 3 | Michael Seibel:My name is Michael, I work here at Y Combinator. 4 | 5 | I help run the accelerator, before that I did two YC startups, one in 2007 and one in 2012. 6 | 7 | And today I'm going to talk to you about Minimum Viable Products, so MVP. 8 | 9 | We always yell at founders to not use jargon, yet we have this whole set of stupid startup jargon, and MVP is one of them. 10 | 11 | When you think about an MVP, you just think about something ridiculously simple, this is the first thing you can give to the very first set of users you want to target, in order to see if you can deliver any value at all to them. 12 | 13 | That's all it is, it's extremely simple. 14 | 15 | I know you guys had a talk last week about how to come up with ideas, how to come up with problems you want to solve. 16 | 17 | What I will tell you is, that it is helpful to talk to some users before you decide to build your MVP. 18 | 19 | This doesn't mean you have to go into a three year kind of research situation, or you have to work in industry for 10 years, but some conversations are helpful. 20 | 21 | It's even more helpful if you're your own user, so you can tell whether your product's working for you. 22 | 23 | I always get this strange question of how do I get my first users, which always kind of confuses me, because theoretically you decide to solve a problem that you know someone has, so the way you get your first user is you talk to that person that you know has the problem. 24 | 25 | And if it's you, it's even easier. 26 | 27 | So if you are building a product for a mysterious set of users that you have no idea who they are, question that slightly, very slightly. 28 | 29 | Okay. 30 | 31 | So, the goal of a pre-launch startup is extremely simple. 32 | 33 | Step one, launch quickly. 34 | 35 | This is something that's been part of the YC ethos from the very beginning, and it's been great advice for 10 years, and it continues to be great advice. 36 | 37 | If you can walk away from one thing from this presentation, it's launch something bad quickly, that's it. 38 | 39 | Literally, the rest of what I'm going to say is basically going to be re-summarized versions of that same thing. 40 | 41 | The second thing that obviously a startup needs to do, is get some initial customers. 42 | 43 | Get anyone using your product. 44 | 45 | You don't have to have a vision of how you get everyone using it, but just anyone interacting and seeing if they get value out of the product. 46 | 47 | You'd be surprised at how many founders journeys end before a single user has actually interacted with a product they've created. 48 | 49 | It's very, very common, so please get past this step, it's extremely important. 50 | 51 | The next one is, talk to your users, any of them after you've launched this MVP, and get feedback. 52 | 53 | This is one that's also a extremely common mistake, because most founders in their heads have an idea of what they want to build. 54 | 55 | And so they kind of have this weird feeling that, if I haven't built the full thing yet, getting feedback on the shitty initial thing is kind of useless. 56 | 57 | Of course it's not going to work, it's not the full thing. 58 | 59 | The full thing is going to take three years, $10 million, a whole team, so feedback on the little thing is useless. 60 | 61 | The reality is that, in some ways the full thing is this really awesome idea in your head that you should keep in your head, but it should be very, very flexible, because it might turn out the full thing that you want to build, isn't what your customers want at all. 62 | 63 | So I have this saying, hold the problem you're solving tightly, hold the customer tightly, hold the solution you're building loosely. 64 | 65 | Last and most important, iterate, and I'd like to kind of distinguish between iterating and pivoting. 66 | 67 | A lot of founders, once they've figured out how to build something, fall in love with it. 68 | 69 | And so if it doesn't work for a certain set of users, they start thinking, "Well, I wonder what other problems this thing can solve? Well, the screwdriver is not actually good at screwing in anything, but I wonder what other problems it could solve." And then they go, "Maybe you can use it to cook, maybe you can use it to clean." And it's like, no, the problem was, I need to screw something in, the user was a mechanic, and if your screwdriver doesn't help the mechanic solve their problem, keep the mechanic, keep the problem, I need to screw something in, fix the fucking screwdriver. 70 | 71 | That's the thing that's broken, right? The broken thing is not the mechanic, and it's not the fact that they need to screw something in. 72 | 73 | So iterate, continue improving on your solution until it actually solves the problem. 74 | 75 | In most cases, most people should be building a very lean MVP. 76 | 77 | So by that we mean, you should be able to build it fast in weeks, not months. 78 | 79 | This can either involve software, or honestly, we see startups just start with a landing page and a spreadsheet, but most startups can start very, very fast. 80 | 81 | The second extremely limited functionality, you need to condense down what your user needs... 82 | 83 | What your initial user needs to a very simple set of things. 84 | 85 | A lot of times founders want to address all of their users problems, and all of their potential users, when in reality they should just focus on a small set of initial users and their highest order problems, and then ignore the rest until later. 86 | 87 | You should have a vision of everyone, you should have an MVP very small. 88 | 89 | All this is, is a base to iterate from, that's it. 90 | 91 | It's just a starting point, it doesn't... 92 | 93 | It's not special in any way, you just have to start. 94 | 95 | And so, please make sure you don't feel like your MVP is too special. 96 | 97 | Okay. 98 | 99 | Here is a classic example. 100 | 101 | This is one of Airbnb's first landing pages in 2008, I believe. 102 | 103 | One of the things that you might be interested in about in Airbnb's first product, is that there were no payments. 104 | 105 | When you found a place to stay on Airbnb, you had to exchange money with the host in person. 106 | 107 | Needless to say, that was a pretty fucking big problem, but they started without payments. 108 | 109 | No map view. 110 | 111 | You know how when you search Airbnb you can see where the house is in the city? You don't have that sorry. 112 | 113 | And, the person writing all the code made, was working part-time. 114 | 115 | Okay? So everyone tells these kind of magical stories about how everything was perfect from the beginning, Airbnb, not perfect from the beginning. 116 | 117 | The next one, Twitch. 118 | 119 | This was what Twitch looked like day one, not very familiar. 120 | 121 | Well, maybe a little familiar. 122 | 123 | There's some video there, and there's some chat there, other than that, nothing else. 124 | 125 | Twitch launched as Justin.tv, which was an online reality TV show. 126 | 127 | There was only one channel, Justin, you had to follow his life. 128 | 129 | If you didn't like his life, you had to leave the website. 130 | 131 | That's all there was. 132 | 133 | The video was extremely low resolution. 134 | 135 | It was funny, a founder asked me back in the day like, "Oh, wasn't it weird you guys had video in your apartment? Weren't there all these secret documents and things that people would be able to see?" And I was like, "You could barely recognize our faces, let alone documents that we had." And most importantly, there were no video games. 136 | 137 | No video games, except if we decided to play video games in our apartment. 138 | 139 | That was the only time video games appeared. 140 | 141 | And so, I'm going to say you can do that quickly. 142 | 143 | When you think about Twitch, it's much more complex now. 144 | 145 | Last, Stripe, which wasn't Stripe, it was called /dev/payments, because why not. 146 | 147 | Let's make a name that's really easy to remember. 148 | 149 | This was Stripe day one, no bank deals. 150 | 151 | I won't tell you exactly how they processed payments, but it was in a very startupy way. 152 | 153 | Almost no features. 154 | 155 | And even cooler, if you wanted to use Stripe, the Stripe founders would come to your office and integrate it for you. 156 | 157 | How nice is that? Half because they were just desperate to get anyone to use it, and half because it was a great way to find bugs before the users found bugs, integrate it yourself. 158 | 159 | So these are just three examples of extremely simple, extremely fast to build MVPs. 160 | 161 | All of these are a billion dollar companies, and they all started with something that most people would say, is pretty shitty. 162 | 163 | In very few cases you have to build a heavy MVP. 164 | 165 | I just invented that term, heavy MVP, when I made this presentation two days ago, so maybe it becomes a thing. 166 | 167 | If you're in an industry with significant regulation, like insurance, or banking, sometimes drones, although sometimes not, it's hard to launch. 168 | 169 | It's harder to launch. 170 | 171 | You have to pass through a bunch of regulatory bodies first. 172 | 173 | I you're doing hard tech, if you're building rockets, it is hard to build a rocket in a couple of weeks. 174 | 175 | Biotech, it is hard to invent a cancer drug in a couple of weeks. 176 | 177 | Moonshots, well fill in all the other blanks, it's hard to bore tunnels in the earth and have extremely fast vehicles that replace cars in a couple of weeks. 178 | 179 | So, if you're in that situation, please remember that your MVP can start with a simple, simple website that explains what you do. 180 | 181 | It's helpful when you talk to people and you interact with people, that they can refer back to something. 182 | 183 | So that can be your start, and you can build that simple website in days, not weeks. 184 | 185 | So in many ways maybe your heavy MVPs are faster than your lean MVPs in some weird strange way. 186 | 187 | Now, I want to talk about launching for a second, because a lot of founders have this misconception about launching. 188 | 189 | They see big companies launch stuff, and they assume that's what startups do. 190 | 191 | In fact, they see companies they kind of think about like startups. 192 | 193 | Facebook is not really a startup anymore, but they see them getting a lot of press, and getting a lot of buzz, and yada, yada, yada, and they have in their head that, that's what a successful company looks like when they launch. 194 | 195 | Well, let me ask you this question, how many here remember the day that Google launched? No. 196 | 197 | How about Facebook? Okay. 198 | 199 | How about Twitter? No. 200 | 201 | Great. 202 | 203 | So it turns out, that launches aren't that special at all, okay? So if you have this magical idea of your magical launch you want to do, throw it away, it's not that special. 204 | 205 | The number one thing that's really important, is to get some customers. 206 | 207 | So to make people feel better, let's use different terms. 208 | 209 | How about launch, is when you get any customers? And how about press launch, press launch, really impressive, is when people write about things and it's all exciting, and you get all this buzz? Let's push the press launch off, and let's push the, get any customers launch really, really soon. 210 | 211 | That's our goal here. 212 | 213 | It's a lot harder to learn from your customers when they don't have a product they can play with. 214 | 215 | You can talk to your customer all day, but you have no idea whether the thing you want to build can solve their problem. 216 | 217 | If you put the thing in front of them, and it doesn't solve their problem, you know right away. 218 | 219 | And so, all the research in the world is good, but until you can put something in front of people, you have no frigging idea whether it's going to work. 220 | 221 | So spending all that time on a pitch deck, is not as valuable as spending your time building anything that you can give to a customer. 222 | 223 | Finally, some hacks for building an MVP extremely quickly. 224 | 225 | First, time box your spec. 226 | 227 | So your spec is a list of stuff you need to build before you launch, time box it. 228 | 229 | Say, "Okay, what happens if I want to launch in three weeks? Okay, well, the only things that can be on my spec, are things I can build in three weeks." That makes your life a lot simpler, it allows you to remove all the features you can't build in three weeks. 230 | 231 | Second, write your spec. 232 | 233 | This seems really straight forward, but most people fuck this one up. 234 | 235 | It's really easy to change what you're working on before you ever launch it, because you never write it down. 236 | 237 | You start working on something, you talk to a user, they say, "Oh, I would never use that." Or, God forbid, you talk to a investor and they say, "Oh, that could never be a company," because investors know everything, and so you decide to change what you're working on. 238 | 239 | And because you never wrote it down, you don't even really realize you're changing it. 240 | 241 | And so, your three week plan turns into a three month plan. 242 | 243 | If you write shit down, at least you can be honest with yourself that you're changing your spec all the time. 244 | 245 | The next one is, cut your spec. 246 | 247 | A week into your kind of three week sprint, you probably realize that you added too many things to your spec, and you're not going to make your deadline, that's okay, just cut the stuff that clearly isn't important. 248 | 249 | And if there's no non-important things, start cutting important things. 250 | 251 | Most of the goal here, is just to get anything out in the world. 252 | 253 | Once you get anything out in the world, the momentum to keep anything going, is extremely strong. 254 | 255 | Once you have anything... 256 | 257 | If you don't have anything out in the world, it's very easy to just delay, delay, delay. 258 | 259 | And then last, don't fall in love with your MVP. 260 | 261 | So many people fall in love with the vision in their head, and none of the products I showed you before was the initial vision what it ended up being. 262 | 263 | So please don't fall in love with your MVP, it's just step one in a journey. 264 | 265 | You wouldn't fall in love with a paper you wrote in the first grade, and that's the level of impact often your MVP has. 266 | 267 | Okay, that's the talk, I have a little bit of time for questions. 268 | 269 | Any questions? Perfect, no questions. 270 | Speaker 2:I'm finding talking to users, I have several sub-type segments, and of course each one wants a particular thing, and another one wants a particular thing. 271 | 272 | So the numbers are so small that they kind of even out, so how... 273 | 274 | What- 275 | Michael:Great question. 276 | 277 | So you talk to users and they have all these things that you want to build, and there isn't a lot of overlap between them? So I will give you kind of the meta answer, never ask users for features. 278 | 279 | Never ask users to tell you what they want. 280 | 281 | It's not the users job to come up with features, that's your job. 282 | 283 | The users job is to give you problems. 284 | 285 | And so, I would assume that if you're talking to these users, there's some continuity in the problems that they have. 286 | 287 | They probably have no idea how to solve the problem, and so they're probably giving you a long list of potential features they think can solve the problem, as opposed to spending a lot of time just talking about what their problem is, how often do they experience it, how intense is it, are they willing to pay for a solution, do they know other people who have the problem. 288 | 289 | So those are the questions that we're trying to get out of someone, and if you see someone sneaking into a feature zone, like, "Oh, you know, I love Microsoft Word, but I wish that someone could build something that lets me do, blah, blah, blah, blah," right, then you've got to scoot it back down to, "Oh, well why do you want to do blah, blah, blah, blah? What problem do you have? How often do you encounter that problem," and get it back to problem. 290 | 291 | That's how you avoid feature death. 292 | 293 | It's extremely common. 294 | 295 | Yeah? 296 | Speaker 3:I find myself walking that very thin line between staying focused on my MVP, but changing it up because I'm finding one thing better. 297 | 298 | So I started off on my MVP, talking to all my potential users, and I'm, "No, no, no, let me add this, let me add this, we've got to add this." So do I take my ADT medication and just keep going with what I started with, or when do you stop and say, "Okay, this warrants a change?" 299 | Michael:Oh, yes, sorry. 300 | 301 | So the question is, I'm stuck in this cycle where I keep on changing my MVP and I don't launch. 302 | 303 | I see a lot of people who are stuck in that cycle, and there are a lot of startup problems where the answer is stop doing what you're doing. 304 | 305 | Just stop it. 306 | 307 | You don't have to keep on changing your MVP. 308 | 309 | One of the reasons why perhaps you're changing your MVP, is because you think it's special. 310 | 311 | If you didn't think it was special, you would stop changing it, you'd stop editing it. 312 | Speaker 3:I don't understand sir, explain that again. 313 | Michael:If you think your MVP is special, you think it has to be perfect. 314 | 315 | If you think it has to be perfect, you spend a lot of time messing with it. 316 | 317 | If you assume that it has to be really shitty, right... 318 | 319 | If you think, "Okay, I'm literally trying to find a shirt in my closet that I can paint with and then destroy," you don't spend a lot of time tailoring that shirt, right? So if you think your MVPs less special, you'll spend less time tinkering with it. 320 | 321 | Yeah. 322 | Speaker 4:Say you launch your MVP and you're looking for feedback, what are the key things you want to ask your [inaudible]? 323 | Michael:This is a really simple question. 324 | 325 | What's the key thing you want to learn when you want to get feedback on your MVP? Does it solve the problem I wanted to solve? That's it. 326 | 327 | You can find 80 different ways of answering that question, but if you clearly understand the problem you're trying to solve, then it's a pretty clear... 328 | 329 | Often times you don't have to ask. 330 | 331 | If it's in front of the user, you can see whether they're doing the thing you want them to do, or whether they're not. 332 | 333 | Often times you can see it in the numbers. 334 | 335 | If it's a problem you have every day and you introduce the user to it, did they come back the next day? I've never really seen a product that solves a problem people have every day, that actually solves the problem where a user just stops using it, because whatever. 336 | 337 | So there are lots of weird nuances here that are completely relevant. 338 | 339 | Does the user do the thing, solve the problem that you want them to solve? Other questions, in the back there. 340 | Speaker 5:How long should an MVP last? I mean, you start growing and then what the next steps? 341 | Michael:Do you know what's fun about startups? I don't like thinking about timelines, and I don't like thinking about roadmaps. 342 | 343 | For people who are in the pre-MVP stage, who knows, launch something, figure it out. 344 | 345 | You decided to do a startup, and one of the characteristics of startups is that, how to get from A to Z is not going to be clear. 346 | 347 | And so, if you're too focused on, "Oh, well I understand getting an MVP is step B, but I'm really focused on step C, D and E," I would tell you, like, "Hey, how about solving the problem right in front of you first." Yeah? 348 | Speaker 6:So how do you balance, for example, improving the MVP to grow the retention of customers, versus betting on efforts to grow acquisition and lead generation in terms of problems? 349 | Michael:Post MVP, should you work on growth or should you work on retention? I love this question, it's the funnest question in the world, because it allows me to give a ridiculously canned answer. 350 | 351 | Both. 352 | 353 | Yeah. 354 | 355 | Here's what happens, a lot of sort of founders kind of fundamentally understand their startup is a Multi Variable Problem, but Multi Variable Problems are hard, so they try to reduce it to a single variable. 356 | 357 | So they ask the secret advisor, "Oh, what's more important, growth or retention?" What's more important, taking a shower or going to the bathroom and doing a number two? I'd like you to do both. 358 | 359 | Sorry, both are important. 360 | 361 | As a founder, you're going to have to juggle multiple things. 362 | 363 | Yeah? 364 | Speaker 7:Okay. 365 | 366 | Let' me share a story with a startup that didn't talk to the end users, with those end users won't talk about the problem, how do you overcome that, do you know? 367 | Michael:Let's be clear, the question is, how do you talk to your users if they have a problem they don't want to talk about? Why don't you tell me what that is. 368 | 369 | What's the problem? 370 | Speaker 7:Type Two Diabetes. 371 | Michael:Type Two Diabetes. 372 | 373 | I am perfectly confident that you can find 10 people who want to talk about their Type Two Diabetes. 374 | 375 | And I question you starting a startup to help Type Two Diabetes people if you don't know anyone who's got Type Two Diabetes who's willing to talk to you. 376 | 377 | So I think that's one of those false set ups, I reject the premise of the question. 378 | 379 | All right, next question, go ahead. 380 | Speaker 8:How many people would be enough to sign up, or how many active users would be good to have in the MVP before presenting to investors for example, based on which [inaudible] market size, or- 381 | Michael:That's a great question. 382 | 383 | If I were to summarize it, I would say how far along are you before you talk to investors. 384 | 385 | I'm also going plunt on that answer. 386 | 387 | I think there's going to be a whole lecture on when you should talk to investors, and so I will say, wait for that lecture. 388 | 389 | Whoever gives it, will do a great job at answering that question. 390 | Speaker 8:Okay, thank you. 391 | Speaker 9:My question is, what type of numbers or attraction should you look for before your 392 | Michael:I'll rephrase that question, how do you know when you have product market fit? Okay. 393 | 394 | The classic answer, which is actually correct and founders really hate, is that, if you're asking, you don't have product market fit. 395 | 396 | What tends to happen when you have product market fit is that, people start using your product so much, you transition from doing anything other than just keeping it online. 397 | 398 | That's what product market fit tends to look like. 399 | 400 | So you stop thinking about new features, you stop thinking about improving your conversion through funnels, you stop thinking about how to get better distribution, and you are literally just like, "Holy shit, I don't know how I'm going to serve the people who are coming to my product tomorrow. 401 | 402 | I'm at a loss. 403 | 404 | And next week, I'm at a loss. 405 | 406 | And I'm pretty sure that we're going die, because we have too many users." And what's funny is, when I put it that way, it's not hard to know whether you're there or not. 407 | 408 | And there's such a horrible reality is that, almost no-one gets product market fit. 409 | 410 | Almost no-one. 411 | 412 | Almost no-one. 413 | 414 | A lot of people like to throw around the terms, and a lot of people like to redefine it as, someone's using my product. 415 | 416 | That's not the term. 417 | 418 | The term for someone's using your product is, you have a user. 419 | 420 | That's good, but it's not product market fit. 421 | 422 | In the back. 423 | Speaker 10:The more users we talk to, the definition of the problem keeps on getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. 424 | 425 | So when thinking of MVPs where do we [inaudible]? We started working with just one user, and we tried to write a small experiment with them, but while doing that we learned more attributes of the problem itself. 426 | Michael:So what happens if you learn more about the problem and the problem expands as you start interacting with users? That's totally fine, that's expected in fact. 427 | 428 | What I would say though is that, where founders usually make the mistake, is they think they have to solve the problem for all users. 429 | 430 | And so, most importantly, if you have one user with a set of problems, a nice thing to do would be to try to figure out is there anyone else like them. 431 | 432 | And one fun thing you could do, is just ask them, "Hey, do you know anyone else whose got your exact same problem?" Any problem, when you kind of scoop back and you think about the vision of any founder, it actually encompasses a whole sub-set of problems. 433 | 434 | And I think the thing that gets people really screwed up with their MVP, is that they have a vision that's big and they're not willing to have an MVP that's small. 435 | 436 | They feel as though if they're not addressing all of the potential users up front, then they're somehow failing. 437 | 438 | And there are a lot of things that a startup has to do, or a founder has to do, where they're keeping two things in mind at the same time, right? Vision big, MVP small, right? Grow and retain. 439 | 440 | One thing we talk about at YC a lot, your investor pitch and your customer pitch, very different. 441 | 442 | And founders always want to smoosh these things together, or kill one, because it's so much easier to think of it as a single problem... 443 | 444 | A single thing in your head versus two opposing things in your head. 445 | 446 | How could it be true that we want to do payments for everyone, and have a little API that's so hard to use that we have to install it for people, right? And it's like both things are true, and you have to be comfortable with that. 447 | 448 | All right, one more. 449 | 450 | Yeah? 451 | Speaker 11:In the pharmaceutical space, would my users be other scientists or would they actually be patients? 452 | Michael:In the pharmaceutical space, who are your users? I think that, that's a question for you. 453 | 454 | You are starting the company, you know what you're building, you know the problem you're solving, you know who has the problem, I don't know any of those things. 455 | 456 | All right. 457 | 458 | It was great talking to all of you, thank you very much. 459 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /original/10.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Tim Brady - Building Culture 2 | 3 | Tim Brady:Good morning. 4 | 5 | My name is Tim Brady. 6 | 7 | I am a partner here at YC, a group partner. 8 | 9 | Which means I work with the companies during the batch closely. 10 | 11 | I have started three things prior, one of which was Yahoo back in 1994. 12 | 13 | So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today stems from that experience. 14 | 15 | As Kevin said, I want to talk about building culture. 16 | 17 | How to think about it at this stage of your company and why it's important. 18 | 19 | Now, culture can be pretty broadly defined, so let me be super clear on what I'm talking about. 20 | 21 | Really to me, culture is just behavior. 22 | 23 | And company culture is that implicit set of behaviors inside of your company. 24 | 25 | They should inform your employees on how to behave. 26 | 27 | I guess, when done right, they should inform the employees inside of your company how to behave when it hasn't been explicitly laid out for them. 28 | 29 | And the good news, if you do it right, if you get the right culture, the right behaviors will support a good business, and hopefully a great business. 30 | 31 | And over the course of your company, over the history of your company, it will support that in a lot of intangible ways that are hard even to describe, but that's why it's important. 32 | 33 | That's how you should think about it at this stage. 34 | 35 | Don't over-complicate it. 36 | 37 | Right? That's really it. 38 | 39 | So you're probably asking yourselves, at this stage of the company you have so many things on your plate, you're so busy, it almost seems like a luxury to be thinking about culture. 40 | 41 | Right? You're not wrong to be asking that question. 42 | 43 | And the reason is that when your company gets going, these are three phases that you'll be going through as you build your company. 44 | 45 | All of you really are at this top stage that I call the idea stage, right? Talking to customers, iterating the product, experimenting, iterating the product. 46 | 47 | Hopefully you'll raise some money at some point to allow you to continue to do that. 48 | 49 | And at some point in the future, you're going to reach product market fit, right? If you think back on the product market fit talk that Michael gave a couple of weeks ago. 50 | 51 | And when you do that, hopefully you'll raise a whole lot more money and begin scaling the company. 52 | 53 | Now scaling the company almost always requires hiring a lot of people, right? And the people that you have inside of the company prior to hiring a lot of people are really your cultural DNA. 54 | 55 | Those are the people that are going to be involved in hiring and training that next wave of people. 56 | 57 | So it's super important that you get it right. 58 | 59 | That's why it is subtitled kind of the first 20 employees that you get. 60 | 61 | And there's no magic to the number 20, it's really that set of employees that are in place when you begin scaling the company. 62 | 63 | Because again, those folks are going to be highly involved in hiring and training this next wave. 64 | 65 | So if you get it right, if those first set of employees embody kind of the culture and the values that you want inside your company, you have a much higher likelihood of building a strong and coherent culture. 66 | 67 | The reverse is also true, right? If you make mistakes, if you get the wrong types of people inside of the company early on, they're going to be involved in hiring and training. 68 | 69 | And those mistakes are going to get propagated, and it'll be much harder later on to kind of correct course and try to build a coherent company. 70 | 71 | Right? So that's why it's important to be thinking about now. 72 | 73 | I know you have a lot on your plate in starting this company, but what you need to do doesn't take a whole lot of time. 74 | 75 | For the most part, it's just some conversations with your co-founder. 76 | 77 | And so I came up with a list of six things that you can do now to help you, or to help the likelihood of you building a strong and coherent culture. 78 | 79 | First one, be proud of the problem you're solving. 80 | 81 | Kind of seems silly to say. 82 | 83 | But you need to, right? If you don't have the problem yourself, you need to identify with the people that do have the problem, and you need to be really proud of the fact that you're solving it for them, right? Because building, as I'm sure you're going to, if you've heard already, and you'll continue to hear, building a company's hard. 84 | 85 | It's a long process, and there will be some really difficult times. 86 | 87 | And if you're not proud of what you're doing, it's really hard to maintain the level of energy and enthusiasm you need to sustain the company. 88 | 89 | Right? Sometimes where we see founders go wrong is they choose an idea with their ego. 90 | 91 | They choose an idea because it sounds good to tell their friends at a party, right? And when times get tough, it's really hard to maintain that level of energy. 92 | 93 | And the reason energy, enthusiasm, is important, not just for sustaining the company, but everyone around you will see how you feel about the company, and to a large degree that will set the tone for your culture. 94 | 95 | A couple of batches back, we had a YC alum come and tell his story. 96 | 97 | He went through the YC program a few years back. 98 | 99 | He applied with four other guys with the idea of helping retailers liquidate their excess inventory. 100 | 101 | That was the idea they started with. 102 | 103 | And they did all the right things. 104 | 105 | Talked to customers, iterated, experimented, and he raised some money, and he got to to search for product market fit, and he continued to to search for product market fit. 106 | 107 | Ultimately, they had a good business for a little while, but they also ultimately ended up in the business of makeup for teenage girls. 108 | 109 | Right? They didn't identify with the problem. 110 | 111 | And when times got tough, they just didn't want to be there. 112 | 113 | Right? They didn't identify with their customers. 114 | 115 | And he told the story of where the employees around him, they actually came up to him and said, hey, it doesn't look like you're enjoying what you're doing. 116 | 117 | And ultimately they ended up shutting down the company. 118 | 119 | Next. 120 | 121 | When you do find the right problem to solve, one that you're proud of, create a longterm vision that others will follow. 122 | 123 | It's much easier to create a great culture if people who identify with the problem you're solving know you're solving it. 124 | 125 | They'll raise their hand and say, hey, I want to be part of what you're doing. 126 | 127 | Right? You can call it a North Star for the company. 128 | 129 | And say it in a way that will inspire people. 130 | 131 | It should give purpose to the work you're doing. 132 | 133 | It shouldn't describe the work, but it should talk about the purpose of that work. 134 | 135 | And let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. 136 | 137 | Tesla. 138 | 139 | To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. 140 | 141 | Pretty inspiring, right? No mention of an electric vehicle. 142 | 143 | You know, if you said, oh, we're building the world's best electrical vehicle, that's good. 144 | 145 | You'll inspire a handful of engineers who implicitly understand kind of the technical challenges that come with that. 146 | 147 | But if you're going to build a big company, you need to attract kind of a broad array of people. 148 | 149 | This does that. 150 | 151 | Another example, Microsoft's original. 152 | 153 | A computer on every desk in every home. 154 | 155 | It's kind of laughable now, but in the early eighties, this was crazy talk, right? Computers were only for businesses and hobbyists. 156 | 157 | But this vision, laid out by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, attracted the right type of people to their company. 158 | 159 | Right? The hobbyists that had the capability to help them build the type of company they needed to build saw this and were excited about it. 160 | 161 | It attracted and allowed them to kind of build the type of culture that they needed at Microsoft. 162 | 163 | Last one. 164 | 165 | One you're all familiar with. 166 | 167 | Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. 168 | 169 | Again, no mention of the product. 170 | 171 | Doesn't say we're building a kick-ass search engine. 172 | 173 | All right. 174 | 175 | So once you're able to come up with kind of an inspiring vision to attract the right people to your company, the next thing you should do is have a conversation with your co-founder about the types of values and behaviors you want to cultivate inside of your company. 176 | 177 | Right? Ultimately, the purpose of this at this stage in your company is to use as a filter for the hiring process. 178 | 179 | Right? It should be a short list, and at this stage it's fine that it's informal. 180 | 181 | If you're lucky enough to to move on and grow, like ultimately, maybe this list becomes a more polished corporate values list. 182 | 183 | This is probably the seed of that. 184 | 185 | But at this stage, it doesn't need to be polished, right? You don't need to publish a blog post on it. 186 | 187 | It's just a short list. 188 | 189 | Less than five things. 190 | 191 | And this will help you during the hiring process to make sure that you're letting the right type of people inside the company. 192 | 193 | Right? This is in addition to that skill list that you'll need. 194 | 195 | You know, job description, the skills that person needs. 196 | 197 | This is above and beyond that. 198 | 199 | So let me take you through a couple of examples. 200 | 201 | And I apologize, these are actually more corporate value lists. 202 | 203 | They're a little more polished. 204 | 205 | Yours won't need to be this polished. 206 | 207 | All right. 208 | 209 | Spotify. 210 | 211 | Innovative, collaborative, sincere, passionate, and playful. 212 | 213 | Right? You can see pretty clearly how you can use that set of lists that this lists to begin screening potential employees. 214 | 215 | Atlassian. 216 | 217 | Right? This is a little different, the way they make the list. 218 | 219 | It doesn't have to be just adjectives like the Spotify one was. 220 | 221 | Open company, no bullshit. 222 | 223 | Build with heart and balance. 224 | 225 | Don't fuck with the customer. 226 | 227 | Play as a team. 228 | 229 | And be the change you seek. 230 | 231 | Right? They said it a little different. 232 | 233 | You can see how this came from a conversation between co-founders, right? Like I don't want to work in an environment that's highly political. 234 | 235 | No bullshit. 236 | 237 | Right? That translates into kind of a hiring filter of just like if someone seems political in any way, let's not let them in the company, him or her in the company. 238 | 239 | So come up with this list. 240 | 241 | Right? Again, a short list. 242 | 243 | What type of company do you want to build? What type of behaviors will support the business you're building? And then create that list. 244 | 245 | But don't let it just be a piece of paper. 246 | 247 | Right? Don't put it in a drawer and wait for the marketing department to polish it a few years later. 248 | 249 | You have to model that behavior. 250 | 251 | For better, for worse, the early employees will look to you for the cultural cues, right? You can't say, do as I say, not as I do. 252 | 253 | Right? You have to walk the walk. 254 | 255 | They will take their cues from you. 256 | 257 | Four. 258 | 259 | When thinking about this list, to the extent you can, make sure it's externally focused. 260 | 261 | It's much better to build a culture that's focused on the customer than it is on how you treat one another inside the company. 262 | 263 | Look, your shortlist can have both. 264 | 265 | But the more important ones are having it externally focused. 266 | 267 | Over the long haul, that will serve you much, much better. 268 | 269 | And let me give you an example of of what I mean by this. 270 | 271 | So, move fast and break things. 272 | 273 | You've heard this right? Facebook. 274 | 275 | This is what I consider an internally focused thing. 276 | 277 | If you're a project manager or an engineer at Facebook trying to decide what to do next, this doesn't offer you a whole lot of guidance, right? Think back to kind of the definition I gave of company culture, right? It informs employees how to behave when it hasn't been explicitly laid out. 278 | 279 | If you're deciding what next product to build, this doesn't help at all. 280 | 281 | It just tells you to move fast, right? Shouldn't be a surprise when you look at this that some of the privacy violations that they've been charged with have occurred at Facebook, right? I don't think for a second anyone at Facebook set out to violate anyone's privacy, but their culture certainly didn't help them, didn't give them the guide rails on where to stop. 282 | 283 | Right? Contrast that with kind of Google's early motto. 284 | 285 | Don't be evil. 286 | 287 | Not particularly prescriptive necessarily, but it's outwardly focused, right? It lets the employees and the world know, hey, we're, we're a force for good. 288 | 289 | And when you think about kind of that policy that Google has with its engineers, they're allowed to work 20% of their time on these independent projects. 290 | 291 | It's pretty impressive that you haven't heard of any of those go astray. 292 | 293 | Right? Pretty amazing, given the data they're sitting on. 294 | 295 | Again, outwardly focused, right? It gives some guide rails to the employees on how to behave. 296 | 297 | Next. 298 | 299 | Have a conversation about diversity. 300 | 301 | And I'm not just talking about ethnic and gender diversity here. 302 | 303 | I'm talking about a diversity of opinions. 304 | 305 | Can you create a culture where people with diametrically opposed opinions, strongly held, can coexist? Can you foster conversations that are loud, but then people walk away and are, okay? How important is that to your business? There's plenty of research out there that suggests that companies that are able to foster this type of environment, have a diverse environment, that isn't always agreeable, tend to be more creative. 306 | 307 | They tend to be better problem solvers. 308 | 309 | And the reason I put this up there is it's really hard, because most of the advice when you get going, when you're hiring the first set of employees is to, hey, tap your Rolodex, talk to friends, talk to former colleagues, right? Those people you know whether or not they're good engineers, you know whether or not they embody the values that you're trying to put into your company. 310 | 311 | They're known quantities. 312 | 313 | And at that stage it's a good thing. 314 | 315 | But there are also probably a lot like you, right? And you can find pretty quickly that you've built a pretty homogeneous environment in trying to hire too quickly. 316 | 317 | So have this conversation. 318 | 319 | How important is it to you, to your company, to have diversity? Because if you think you're going to wake up at a hundred employees and then start a diversity program, you're fooling yourself. 320 | 321 | It's way too hard. 322 | 323 | It's too late by then. 324 | 325 | So have that conversation. 326 | 327 | It's tough. 328 | 329 | I don't have the right answers on what that looks like. 330 | 331 | But have it, it's important. 332 | 333 | So once you've done all that, had those conversations, put a hiring plan in place. 334 | 335 | Right? Don't just let it happen. 336 | 337 | From the very first employee, make sure you're following a process. 338 | 339 | There's a ton of stuff online about hiring processes beyond the scope of this talk, but consider all those conversations you had with your co-founder, the type of values you're trying to instill in the company, and the type of diversity you want, and make sure that's part of the process from day one. 340 | 341 | Right? And make sure you assess whether it's working, especially the early employees. 342 | 343 | Right? After you hire your first couple of people, make sure you get back together with your co-founder a month or two after and discuss whether it did what it should have. 344 | 345 | Did it filter the right way? Do you have the right type of people in your company at this point? And if it didn't work well, improve it. 346 | 347 | Plan on evolving it. 348 | 349 | Right? You want it tested by the time you get to the point where you have to scale fast. 350 | 351 | Right? You want a process that you know works by then. 352 | 353 | So that's it. 354 | 355 | Right? Again, not too early. 356 | 357 | You have a ton on your plate. 358 | 359 | And, again, what I've given you, hopefully, are just a few simple things that aren't too time consuming. 360 | 361 | Just conversations you can have, kind of thought experiments, with your co-founder that can help kind of build a solid foundation for building a culture later on. 362 | 363 | Thanks everyone. 364 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /original/12.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Kevin Hale - How to Improve Conversion Rates 2 | 3 | Kevin Hale:So this presentation on improving conversion rates, it's designed to mostly focus on like landing pages. 4 | 5 | But all of the principles and ideas that I'll talk about in this talk actually can help you improve the conversion rates of almost anything, any user interface. 6 | 7 | So keep that in mind. 8 | 9 | This is a typical example, conversion rate funnel, and when you're trying to improve in conversion rate, you're basically, you're trying to improve the efficiency of going from one step to the next. 10 | 11 | And the thing is, why we care about conversion rate is because it's part of two different aspects of growth. 12 | 13 | The two main sort of drivers. 14 | 15 | And so growth is the balance between conversion and churn. 16 | 17 | And basically growth happens as a gap between the two. 18 | 19 | Something to keep in mind is that working on churn is actually much easier than working on conversion. 20 | 21 | So in this talk we're working on the harder thing. 22 | 23 | It's the thing that [inaudible] are going to get started. 24 | 25 | When I talk to a company and I'm trying to help them with their conversion rates, the first thing I usually try to figure out is do we even need to be working on this at all? So the only time you should be working on and improving your conversion rate is because you have a leaky bucket. 26 | 27 | So I'd like to just talk about a couple of benchmarks in the industry so that we all kind of sit on the same page and understand whether we should be working on this or working on something else, like putting more things into the top of the funnel. 28 | 29 | Shareware, conversion of rate here is about 0.5%. 30 | 31 | So basically, this is old school like before the internet. 32 | 33 | If people just release software out for free and they just hope that somebody will pay for it out of their own goodwill. 34 | 35 | This is the conversion rate you can expect. 36 | 37 | Casual download games, it's about 2%. 38 | 39 | So stuff that you sort of play on and off while waiting in line. 40 | 41 | Most companies care about this one freemium software as a service companies, they range between 1.5 and 5%. 42 | 43 | On average it's about 3%. 44 | 45 | So once I talk to a company and they have pages that are converting at about 3% and that is from out of 100 visitors that visit your page, two to 3% sign up, I usually say you probably don't need to spend that much more time on this. 46 | 47 | There's probably other things you should work on instead. 48 | 49 | That being said, you can do much better than that. 50 | 51 | Flicker, back in the heyday had a conversion rate between five and 10%. 52 | 53 | Adult FriendFinder, So depending on what you're selling, people wanted a whole lot more. 54 | 55 | So 10 to 22% for sex and end of loneliness. 56 | 57 | Even better. 58 | 59 | So these are, if you don't recognize them, children social networks and so basically this is the conversion rate to get your kid to shut the fuck up, right? To leave you alone. 60 | 61 | Turbo Tax online, the monster 70% conversion rate. 62 | 63 | Basically you're going to turbo tax, you're downloading that software, you are paying for it. 64 | 65 | It is very, very high intact. 66 | 67 | Every conversion rate problem looks like every other user interface problem and the concept or framework that I like to use to explain how to solve any user interface problem is using something called the Knowledge Spectrum. 68 | 69 | This was created by amazing interface designer name, Jared Spool and basically the Knowledge Spectrum says that this represents all knowledge on a spectrum and on this side represents zero knowledge, no knowledge, you don't know anything and on the other side is God-like, all knowledge. 70 | 71 | Your product and your user sits on two points on that line. 72 | 73 | Just two dimensions. 74 | 75 | Your user sits here at what we call the current knowledge point and your interface, your landing page, the thing you want them to do is it's here at the target knowledge point. 76 | 77 | And every interface problem that's trying to be solved is trying to close what we call the knowledge gap. 78 | 79 | That's it. 80 | 81 | You don't need to go to a complicated design school to know how to solve these problems. 82 | 83 | You either are going to increase the amount of knowledge that is needed by your user or you need to decrease the amount of knowledge needed to use your product or interface. 84 | 85 | That's it. 86 | 87 | Whenever I'm looking at anyone's design problem, I'm trying to figure out do I need to increase knowledge or do I need to decrease it? So the most helpful exercise that I will use from this, once I understand this concept when I'm trying to design a landing page or to improve it, is to simplify things very, very simply. 88 | 89 | And what I imagine is something called the one button interface. 90 | 91 | So let's imagine that we reduced our landing page, our product to just one button on a page. 92 | 93 | The question becomes, what do I have to put on this page to get someone to push the button? What's the minimum amount? That's what you ideally want to have on there. 94 | 95 | And is there any information that I put on this page that keeps me from pushing the button or is there any lack of information that keeps me from pushing the button? Now for every time that I deal with any page that I'm looking at that I'm trying to help improve, I basically go through a series of seven questions, for every single one. 96 | 97 | And then through the series of seven questions, I look very smart. 98 | 99 | You now can be smart on your own. 100 | 101 | The first question I ask is, what's the call to action? Is the button, is the thing I most want my user to do? Is it super obvious? Where do I find it? And the thing to keep in mind about the call to action is it should be really, really close to a concept I like to call the magic moment. 102 | 103 | The magic moment is basically the experience, the knowledge, the information, the interaction that someone has with your startup, and all of a sudden they get tingling and inside the light bulb goes off and they go, "Holy fuck. 104 | 105 | I've been waiting for this my whole life. 106 | 107 | I now get it. 108 | 109 | This is super exciting. 110 | 111 | I can't wait to use this." And your call to action should be as close to that magic moment as possible. 112 | 113 | That when I click that button, I'm going to be taken to that point. 114 | 115 | So often I go through a design critique with someone and I'm like, "What's your magic moment?" And then somehow the call to action is like 27 steps away from whatever it is that makes someone feel special or gets really excited about your product or app. 116 | 117 | So you should be as close to zero as possible from your call to action. 118 | 119 | The six other questions we're going to go through relatively quickly and then we're going to go through two examples from people participating in startup school to just watch them in action. 120 | 121 | The next question is, what is this? What is this magic moment, right? And my tests for this, my lips ... 122 | 123 | My test is like, can I just copy paste a sentence on this page, the landing page that I can put into an email and send it to my mom and my mom goes, "I understand what this is." 99% of the time I look at people's websites and they're so filled with MBA marketing jargon and talk that there's no sentence that exists on that page that it lets me to very clearly understand what it is that this company does. 124 | 125 | Is it right for me? So people who are super in a rush, impatient trying to solve their problems, they're quickly trying to identify themselves. 126 | 127 | This is like, am I in the wrong place? Is this the right product? And the way they're trying to determine that is see like is there any reflection of themselves in this or any reflection of their problems? Look at it anywhere on the page. 128 | 129 | Is it legit? So the threshold is very low here. 130 | 131 | Just can't look like a Russian spamming website. 132 | 133 | Right? Outside of that, you don't need to overthink this. 134 | 135 | Thanks to tons of templates and themes out there. 136 | 137 | You should be able to get over this bar very, very quickly. 138 | 139 | Who else is using it? So a lot of people are uncomfortable using a product unless they know that there's something else out there and you might think it's a variation of legit, but again, this bar is completely different. 140 | 141 | It's letting me know, "Oh a shortcut for is it right for me and is it legit?" And basically a shortcut for trust. 142 | 143 | And people often are trying to say like, "Oh, if so and so is already using this, then I should actually give this a chance." How much is it? What's the catch? This is the one that so many B2B enterprise, companies are afraid to put on their website. 144 | 145 | Which is why we've paired this talk up with pricing. 146 | 147 | And basically you should have some empathy. 148 | 149 | How many times do you go to a website and go like, "ell I'll use this without knowing how much it costs. 150 | 151 | Sounds good to me. 152 | 153 | Let's just do it." No one does that, and so you shouldn't be surprised that your conversion rates are affected because you don't tell people how much it costs or what's the catch. 154 | 155 | So let's say you're giving away something for free and really your business models, you make money some other way. 156 | 157 | You should explain that to people because otherwise people feel paranoid or worried or feel kind of weird. 158 | 159 | And then lastly is where can I get help? There's always a percentage of users who go to your website and it doesn't matter that you have all the FAQs, you've written everything down, you've created these few beautiful video documentation, they will just go like, "I just want to ask someone. 160 | 161 | I just need to talk to somebody. 162 | 163 | I need someone to tell me directly." And part of it is some people are just like, "I just want to see if there's a real person behind this." That's number one, or some people just can't be bothered and sometimes it's easier for them to just directly ask then navigate through the website. 164 | 165 | And if you don't make it really easy to find and contact you or make it look like that you were going to help them, if they start using the product, they probably won't use it. 166 | 167 | This talk is so short. 168 | 169 | So that's basically it. 170 | 171 | Those are the seven questions. 172 | 173 | We are now going to go through two examples of startup school companies that sent their stuff to me and I don't really have their permission, but they did submit it when they asked to have a design critique done in the startup school forums. 174 | 175 | So I feel like we're going to be okay. 176 | 177 | Okay. 178 | 179 | So the first one we're going to do is meetingroom.io. 180 | 181 | All right. 182 | 183 | First question, what is the call to action? What is it that this company most wants me to do? And then what I do is I basically then try to do that thing and just follow it all the way through and just see how far away am I from the magic moment. 184 | 185 | So these guys create virtual meeting room platforms, so basically we don't have a copy paste on this, but basically it's like you want to meet in VR space with someone. 186 | 187 | You can use this to help create that space and create that sort of meeting. 188 | 189 | Imagine it is, get a virtual room right now. 190 | 191 | There's a lot of things that are sort of competing with it for all the call to actions on this page, and then we don't repeat it down here. 192 | 193 | That reminds me where to go. 194 | 195 | So let's go to the most efficient, get a virtual meeting room right now. 196 | 197 | And then on here we have competing calls to actions to download, and then we have managed rooms. 198 | 199 | And then there's a start here to get to your virtual room, which is a carousel that walks you through seven steps to finally get to making a room. 200 | 201 | But none of these are the actual forms to do it. 202 | 203 | So you have to then go here and then hopefully you will remember all of those seven steps in the carousel and then you'll walk all the way through it. 204 | 205 | So things that I would recommend would be like I want to have always one button. 206 | 207 | That's a very, very clear. 208 | 209 | That is what I want you to do on any given page. 210 | 211 | Number two, I don't think this makes it easy to understand and I can't keep it in my head to follow. 212 | 213 | It's good that they know all the steps, but I would probably imagine that there's something that's going to help me experience that magic moment much sooner. 214 | 215 | And what I imagine is that magic moment happens when I finally make a booking and I meet with someone in a room together and we start interacting and we're solving something. 216 | 217 | And I feel like if I can't do that right away, then I want to have them be able to experience it some way. 218 | 219 | So I would totally add some kind of video, I think they have that here. 220 | 221 | They'll kind of show it off. 222 | 223 | This video is kind of long and it doesn't get us to that magical place. 224 | 225 | So that's number one. 226 | 227 | Second, what is this? So virtual meeting room platform, but if I copy and pasted that, I wouldn't quite know. 228 | 229 | Also you see this carousels kind of moving around. 230 | 231 | Carousels don't work very well because you're hiding information that I might want to have to answer any one of my seven questions. 232 | 233 | And secondly, Oh God, I can't figure it out ... 234 | 235 | We do this thing where he calls it an open beta and so the legit part here starts getting you affected. 236 | 237 | It's like, "Oh I can't rely on this." And the later on the signup page it talks about entering into the closed beta. 238 | 239 | And so these are all things that indicate, is like I'm not ready for you to experience this. 240 | 241 | Don't use me for any real meetings is what this telegraphs. 242 | 243 | And so if this basically works, would try to move that straight forward to that. 244 | 245 | Down here we're trying to look for who else is also using it. 246 | 247 | So we don't have a list of customers, instead we have a bunch of other logos here in terms of featured in a bunch of press that we have partners, but I don't know what that means, and then we have a bunch of awards, but none of them are actual people using it. 248 | 249 | And so it's so many logos of other things that it would make me nervous that no one's really using this as a result. 250 | 251 | And then lastly, where do I get help? We've gotten an intercom in the lower right and then we also have no help page, no documentation to quickly look at to see how this works. 252 | 253 | And then the last one is going into pricing. 254 | 255 | So here we get to this point and I realize, oh, okay. 256 | 257 | I see this pricing, if I need 12 people in a room, it's going to be $99 a month, and then I can start sort of working on it. 258 | 259 | And it's one page over and if I go for the free again, we'll go through all this whole process. 260 | 261 | So a bunch of little things. 262 | 263 | We just go through all the questions. 264 | 265 | We're going to see a bunch of non-optimal stuff on this page. 266 | 267 | Let's go to our second example. 268 | 269 | It'll be a little bit different. 270 | 271 | So this is a company called Divjoy. 272 | 273 | And so they describe themselves as a react codebase generator and then he has this, one description is just like use our free web-based tool to create the perfect codebase for your next project. 274 | 275 | So my first question I'm trying to figure out is like what's the call to action he most wants me to do? And so as I scroll down this page, there's actually nothing that looks like a giant button. 276 | 277 | And actually the big thing he wants me to do is click on one of these templates, these screenshots that are supposed to be the button. 278 | 279 | So we have sort of an affordance problem and then we go into here and my magic moment is when I get over and realize it's like, oh, it's not just like landing page templates, but it's like a dashboard. 280 | 281 | It's like a sign in page, a pricing page. 282 | 283 | It's like the entire project for building a SAS app is all located here, which I think is really amazing and nothing just tells me that that's what's all here. 284 | 285 | And I might not find out until I export code, and then I hit download and then I'll get the code. 286 | 287 | Yeah. 288 | 289 | So we're so many steps away from sort of experiencing that, and also I feel like it's so not explicit that I might miss how amazing what he's built here is in terms of what he's offering. 290 | 291 | One thing he does kind of well is he doesn't have logos of customers, but he has shown how many people have created or downloaded the templates. 292 | 293 | So this number kind of sets it like Oh there's people actually using this and finding it useful. 294 | 295 | Down here, he tries to get at this, everything you need is included. 296 | 297 | And then he adds all this other texts. 298 | 299 | But all that text is there and the odds are your users aren't going to read them. 300 | 301 | So because it's located into that copy, it gets kind of lost. 302 | 303 | And then again we have an intercom, but there's just not enough information in terms of like FAQs, right? And about page. 304 | 305 | That just makes me go like, oh that this is more than a side project, and so in terms of how much I can sort of invest in this and how much I can rely on this down the road in the future is going to be minimal. 306 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /original/13.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Kevin Hale - Startup Pricing 101 2 | 3 | Kevin Hale:This was a highly requested talk from last year. 4 | 5 | Lots of people who had questions about pricing were really confused. 6 | 7 | It actually was well requested both at YC itself, that's a very, very popular workshop that we run. 8 | 9 | And so we're going to go over a lot of basic fundamentals for pricing that hopefully will just help you understand how to approach your pricing and monetization from first principles, and then you help you help yourselves. 10 | 11 | Same thing with the landing page. 12 | 13 | So we're going to go over first principles for pricing. 14 | 15 | We're going to go over why is pricing particularly hard for startups, for people making innovative products and new markets? Like why is it extra difficult? How do you do price optimization? Like how do you actually do it? What does that actually look like? And just kind of demystify that whole process. 16 | 17 | When we look at the challenges of pricing, you start recognizing why certain types of customer segments that you're going after are difficult, like SMB. 18 | 19 | And we'll talk a little bit about that. 20 | 21 | We're going to talk about how pricing affects your acquisition strategy. 22 | 23 | It changes what you can do and what you cannot do and it's extremely important because a lot of companies get caught up doing the wrong acquisition strategy or wasting too much money because their price is incorrect. 24 | 25 | And then I'm going to give you some rules of thumbs, some pricing tricks, just to help make it a lot easier when you're encountering different pricing problems. 26 | 27 | I call them pricing tricks sprinkles. 28 | 29 | Okay. 30 | 31 | There are three levers you can pull to improve growth. 32 | 33 | So in the last talk I talked about conversion rate and churn, but monetization is actually the big dog. 34 | 35 | It's the one that I really like. 36 | 37 | Now, there was a survey done with over 500 SaaS companies and they talked about sort of like amount of effort that they put into each one of these strategies and the returns that they got as a result of it. 38 | 39 | Now acquisition is really fun and exciting. 40 | 41 | It's the one that everyone kind of understands simply. 42 | 43 | It's like, "I get more customers, I get more logos, gives me more growth." Retention of course is about keeping customers, and monetization is about getting more money per customer. 44 | 45 | Now if you increase just your efforts or resources by 1%, your work on acquisition usually get a return of about 3.32%. 46 | 47 | In retention it's about 6.7 and when you're optimizing pricing that gives you your biggest bang for your buck in terms of impact on your business. 48 | 49 | Yet and it's the one that is most neglected and I think it's the one that everyone is so afraid to touch because they're so scared that if they get the pricing wrong that they will lose all their customers. 50 | 51 | Now the first principles, the basic idea about pricing, the thing, the concept that really opened up in my head, how to think about pricing, how to understand the problems that people are facing and why startups get it wrong, is to use a concept called the pricing thermometer. 52 | 53 | And so you have to understand that when you price something there's actually two other factors at play. 54 | 55 | And so there's a cost, there's the price and then there's the value. 56 | 57 | And the interplay and relationship between these items affects how growth happens inside of your company. 58 | 59 | Now the gap between price and cost, that is your margin, that is your incentive to sell. 60 | 61 | And so the bigger that gap is, the more you are driven to want to push your product to your customers, to have your salespeople, et cetera. 62 | 63 | This gap here between price and value, is incentive to buy. 64 | 65 | And the larger that gap is, the easier it is to have your customers to want to sign up or use your product. 66 | 67 | Now to figure out price, there's really two ways to go about it. 68 | 69 | You either start with the cost if you know what it is and you figure out where your price is based off of that. 70 | 71 | That is called cost plus. 72 | 73 | The other way to do it is figure out what is the value of your company or product or service and then you figure out your price from that and that is called value based pricing. 74 | 75 | In startups and almost pretty consistently across all businesses, everyone will tell you, you should strive for value-based pricing. 76 | 77 | It allows you to charge a whole lot more. 78 | 79 | It allows you to manipulate this incentive to buy. 80 | 81 | The problem is because people do not understand their relationships or even understand what are their costs and what are the value that the customer is going to think about their product, they put their price in a kind of arbitrary place and they don't know what are the forces at play that drives it. 82 | 83 | And it results in four different types of mistakes. 84 | 85 | The first one is startups will price their products too low. 86 | 87 | Basically you consistently undercharge. 88 | 89 | It's the number one piece of advice we give to most startups, to fix their pricing. 90 | 91 | And I'll talk a little bit about why most companies fall into that trap. 92 | 93 | You underestimate your costs, and the result is you have a problem where your margins aren't enough to cover sort of acquisition. 94 | 95 | You don't understand your value. 96 | 97 | You don't understand how your company thinks about the problem that you're solving for them or how they value it. 98 | 99 | And either they don't understand your value or you don't know how to convince them of the value that you think you offer. 100 | 101 | And as a result you can't get the price that you want. 102 | 103 | And lastly you focus on the wrong customers. 104 | 105 | That you think, "Man, if I built a better product and I charge half the competition, I win." The thing is that almost never happens, and the reason is because you as a startup, you as working on something to create a new market are working on innovative products. 106 | 107 | You are focused on the wrong customers. 108 | 109 | They are not the mainstream people who are going to look at the price and make most of the determination based off of that. 110 | 111 | This is the sales and profit over a product's life from inception to demise, that's what it's called. 112 | 113 | All you need to know is that these are five different stages of a company and this is what sales might look like over different stages and what profits might look like over those different stages. 114 | 115 | You who are in startup school, you who are getting seed funding, you are in the first two stages, product development stage, introduction. 116 | 117 | You are not in the growth phase. 118 | 119 | And the thing to keep in mind is that the customers in the first two stages, the ones that you're going after, they don't look like mainstream customers that you find in growth and maturity stages. 120 | 121 | They're not mature customers, they're early adopters. 122 | 123 | And thing to know about early adopters is you don't really get a lot of momentum and growth until you get past the first two to 5% of potential buyers of your market. 124 | 125 | These people in that two to 5%, they're called early adopters. 126 | 127 | And a thing that drives them is very different from mainstream people. 128 | 129 | So one, there's a couple of things that keep in mind about pricing innovative products. 130 | 131 | What you are trying to do fundamentally is require users to change their pattern. 132 | 133 | To stop doing it the old shitty spreadsheet way and do it in the new better your way. 134 | 135 | And getting someone to change their pattern is actually difficult. 136 | 137 | Right? Especially if they're a mature person. 138 | 139 | Partly because the average user lacks information needed and the trust in you or whatever it is that you're making to make that change, to take that risk. 140 | 141 | You are entrepreneurs, you're comfortable taking risks. 142 | 143 | Your customers are not entrepreneurs for the most part, they're probably less comfortable taking risks. 144 | 145 | And so in the beginning you're going after people who are willing to take a risk, and those are early adopters. 146 | 147 | Those are people who care about benefits above all else. 148 | 149 | That the highest value to them is beating their competition, doing something much better and taking a chance that something new will give them that edge over anybody else. 150 | 151 | Those early adopters therefore are not price sensitive. 152 | 153 | If anything, if you've built a better product and you charge less, it looks like you have reputation risk. 154 | 155 | It's like why is it too good to be true? What is the catch? And what will end up happening is it takes much longer to get them to understand. 156 | 157 | This is basically all price optimization. 158 | 159 | This is those complicated way that you can try to show price optimization. 160 | 161 | This is the demand yield curve, and what you have on this side is different prices, and on this side you have sales unit sales and basically what you are trying to figure out when you're optimizing the price that you're charging your customers is like, "Basically what is the perfect balance between how much I charge and how much sales volume I get?" And then your price optimization is basically that. 162 | 163 | Try different prices and then see what the effect is. 164 | 165 | When I have my companies optimize their prices, they just use a very simple table. 166 | 167 | You don't need to try to figure that weird-ass graph. 168 | 169 | Basically you want to have a column that says these are the prices I'm going to try, and then what is the result in conversion rate, what is the result in sales volume? And then how much revenue did I generate? That's all it is. 170 | 171 | And so let's say I have prices at these different price points and I get these different conversion rates, and I get this sales volume, I should immediately be able to see who the winner is. 172 | 173 | Here we go. 174 | 175 | Now, the one thing to keep in mind once we have figured out something like this on a simple product is that these areas at lower prices, if you can afford them in terms of your margin are actually lost opportunities. 176 | 177 | And what you want to understand about these, are these are what you're going to see if you offer discount pricing or offer tiered pricing at different price points. 178 | 179 | Another exercise I like to go with companies when dealing with pricing is help them understand like are you in a danger zone? And so what I usually do with my companies is I have them sort of calculate what would their business look like or what does it going to look like to be a billion-dollar company. 180 | 181 | And usually the rule of thumb there is to be doing $100 million a year in sales and revenue. 182 | 183 | And so that basically is like at your price that you give, how many customers do you need to have to make a $100 million in that year? So let's have a bunch of different price points. 184 | 185 | Then we know, "Okay, great. 186 | 187 | I need these number of customers in order to make this formula work." You understand what that looks like, at a hundred-dollar price point, with a potential of about million users, right? This is consumers. 188 | 189 | That's what that consumer space looks like. 190 | 191 | And you know what this down here it looks like. 192 | 193 | $100,000 here, we call this enterprise. 194 | 195 | This area here is the part that a lot of companies are in and really, really struggle. 196 | 197 | They're on the struggle bus and it tends to be SMB. 198 | 199 | These are people who treat their money like consumers, but they look like they might be an enterprise. 200 | 201 | And the reason why this is such a danger zone is because it will tend to fit in the wrong place on my next diagram. 202 | 203 | So let's imagine that this vertical axis represents price. 204 | 205 | You can charge either a high price or a low price for your product and this represents complexity of your sales process. 206 | 207 | Low complexity to high complexity. 208 | 209 | If you are having a product that is $2,000 or less and is basically self-serve, then you have something in this quadrant here. 210 | 211 | And this affects completely what you can do in terms of what drives your business, what you can spend on to get that sort of growth, that price point here at $2,000. 212 | 213 | It needs to have almost all marketing be inbound. 214 | 215 | You can't spend a lot of money outbound on ads, et cetera. 216 | 217 | Your support has to be completely self-serve or very, very minimal. 218 | 219 | You have no sales team at this price point. 220 | 221 | You can't afford it. 222 | 223 | But conversions can happen on the same day, must be in a self-serve model. 224 | 225 | Transactional, so between two and $10,000 when you're able to charge this, you're able to have a few new toys at your sleeves and so marketing now can be focused on generating qualified leads. 226 | 227 | Your customer support can now offer SLAs or you could start paying for training [inaudible] people get onboarded. 228 | 229 | For sales, you can't hire a dedicated salesperson, but maybe you could have an inside sales rep to sell within companies or within your customers. 230 | 231 | You could maybe have an SDR and you can maybe have someone dedicated to giving product demos. 232 | 233 | Sales cycle here should not be longer than one to three months. 234 | 235 | Enterprise, so over $25,000. 236 | 237 | Now for marketing, you can start spending things on branding, on building up trust with customers. 238 | 239 | Your support is very, very high touch that you can afford. 240 | 241 | You can do phone support, you can have a customer success person dedicated to the client. 242 | 243 | And for sales, you're going to start thinking about sales managers, dividing stuff into territories and having sales engineers that participate in terms of conversion and the sales calls. 244 | 245 | These will have a sales cycle of about six to 12 months. 246 | 247 | This is the garbage zone, right? And you know, if you're potentially in this, and this is the big wake up call for you, if it's taking you months and months and months to close someone, but you're not making a lot of money to cover it, you have a process where your acquisition costs are just too high for you to be sustainable and you have to get yourself out of that problem. 248 | 249 | All of your work should be towards increasing the perceived value of your product or service. 250 | 251 | I'm going to end on a good rule of thumb. 252 | 253 | So if you are starting with some kind of price but you don't know how to sort of optimize it or figure it out, then here's a good place to get going. 254 | 255 | The first thing is, I like to have things where the value is 10X the price of whatever it is I'm charging. 256 | 257 | And I want to have it so that the value is easily understood to be a 10X. 258 | 259 | So for example, if I charge for a product that is $10, then it should be in terms of perceived value by my customer that it's worth $100 to them. 260 | 261 | If they do not immediately understand the 10X value of the price, it's going to be hard to get them to move. 262 | 263 | Their incentive to buy might be too low. 264 | 265 | Once you have any kind of price, and this is particularly important for people who are doing B2B or enterprise sale, you should start practicing raising prices. 266 | 267 | And I like to just start by raising prices by 5%. 268 | 269 | If you feel really confident, jump it up by bigger numbers if you want, but this is a pretty safe way to do it so that you can feel comfortable with it. 270 | 271 | And you want to keep raising prices until you're losing 20% of your customers. 272 | 273 | That's about a good balance to have in terms of understanding that like, "I have a good price here. 274 | 275 | I'm losing 20% of my deals. 276 | 277 | It's not too high, it's not too low." In summary for pricing. 278 | 279 | Pricing gives the most bang for your buck. 280 | 281 | You should work on pricing. 282 | 283 | If you've never touched the pricing of your product, then you're losing out on lots of potential growth. 284 | 285 | Understand the variables. 286 | 287 | Do you really understand your cost? Do you understand why you've played the price where it is, and do you understand the value? When you go into a sales meeting or a call, do you talk to people or you basically say, "I know exactly what this is going to be worth to you." So when I tell you what the price is going to be, you're going to be like, "Damn, that's totally worth it." Go after early adopters. 288 | 289 | Remember as a startup, that is who you're going after. 290 | 291 | So when you are talking to customers and they are taking a really long time to make a decision, or they're wanting to have a lot more proof that other people are using it, you are not talking to an early adopter. 292 | 293 | You're wasting a lot of time on non-believers. 294 | 295 | Go after them first. 296 | 297 | Don't take it personally when these people who are much more mature aren't ready for your product. 298 | 299 | They were never going to be. 300 | 301 | Your job is to get through that first two to 5% of the market. 302 | 303 | Those early adopters care more about benefits than price, so don't undercharge your products when you have something that is of value and easily understood to have value. 304 | 305 | Get organized. 306 | 307 | When you're doing price optimization, it's really, really easy. 308 | 309 | Don't over complicate things. 310 | 311 | Figure out a bunch of different price points you want to check, understand sales volume, conversion rate, and the revenue that's involved, and that will help you make the best pricing decision. 312 | 313 | Your price will determine your acquisition strategy. 314 | 315 | If you realize that your sales cycle or all the things that you're spending on is way too much for the amount of money that you're charging, you either need to increase the price, [inaudible] reduce your acquisition strategy costs. 316 | 317 | Use the 10/5/20 rule. 318 | 319 | Set a price that is 10X, that has a 10th of the value. 320 | 321 | Increased prices by 5% until you're losing 20% of the deals. 322 | 323 | Thank you very much guys. 324 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /original/15.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time 2 | 3 | Adora Cheung:Hello, as Kevin said, my name is Adora. 4 | 5 | I'm one of the partners at YC and I'm going to talk about how to prioritize time. 6 | 7 | Time as you know is precious, especially when you're working on a startup. 8 | 9 | Time burns money and money is the very basic thing that keeps a startup alive. 10 | 11 | Not to be too philosophical about it, but even if your personal burn is super low, you can eat ramen days on end, which I don't suggest and you don't have to pay yourself for a very long time. 12 | 13 | There's always a high opportunity cost to doing your startup, so it's super important to use your time the best way possible to maximize your startup's chance for success. 14 | 15 | Which means you need to be really good at identifying and prioritizing tasks that are going to be the most impactful for your startup's progress, which I've noticed after going through thousands of weekly updates from startup school founders that a lot of founders are not doing this well. 16 | 17 | So hopefully this will be helpful. 18 | 19 | Let me first pre-face all of this by defining what time I'm talking about. 20 | 21 | So obviously there are 24 hours in a day and I'm not here to tell you how to allocate those hours across your startup versus everything else that is important to you. 22 | 23 | Sleep, family, friends, hobbies and so on and so forth. 24 | 25 | Everyone has different situations, so it's hard for me to, from up here, give you a good generic advice on how to allocate your time across these things. 26 | 27 | I'm just going to assume you're doing what's best for you, whether it's two, six, 12 hours a day that you decide to work on your startup. 28 | 29 | It doesn't matter to me, for the purpose of this lecture. 30 | 31 | I just want to help you figure out how to spend those two, six or 12 hours that you've decided to allocate your startup in the best possible way. 32 | 33 | All right, so when it comes to things to work on your startup, my guess is that you already have something like a task list in which you put new ideas to eventually work on and you update that very frequently. 34 | 35 | So let's start from there, that you have a task list of things to do. 36 | 37 | First, I want to make a real clear distinction between real and fake startup progress. 38 | 39 | This is the easiest way to classify whether a task goes into the should do or the should not do bucket. 40 | 41 | If it contributes to real startup progress, you should consider doing it, and if it doesn't, then don't. 42 | 43 | This seems trivial at first. 44 | 45 | Why would anyone do anything that amounts to fake startup progress? But let me explain further. 46 | 47 | So real startup progress is when you're really focused on things that really move the needle for your startup and in the beginning, the best way to show this is through growth, in particular growth of your primary KPI. 48 | 49 | I gave a whole lecture on this a few weeks ago on KPI and goals. 50 | 51 | If you haven't watched it yet, please watch it. 52 | 53 | I talk a lot about primary and secondary KPIs. 54 | 55 | There's always a balance between what to focus on. 56 | 57 | But for the purpose of this lecture, I'm just going to refer to the primary KPI as a thing to focus on growing. 58 | 59 | So to summarize, your primary KPI almost always is either revenue or active users and you should always be setting weekly goals for this. 60 | 61 | To move the needle on the KPIs, the highest leverage thing you can be doing always comes in the form of tasks that involve talking to users and building and iterating your product. 62 | 63 | Nothing else. 64 | 65 | This is in direct contrast with fake startup progress, which is when founders focus on things that are not directly related to growing your primary KPI. 66 | 67 | So common things I see in weekly updates are things like attending conferences, focusing on winning awards. 68 | 69 | Now [inaudible 00:03:40], optimizing the wrong metrics. 70 | 71 | While you may convince yourself these are good things to focus on, there are actually many steps away from delivering real value to your customer. 72 | 73 | And so if all the things you could be possibly doing, spending any significant time on any of these things is almost always a bad idea. 74 | 75 | The goal is not to optimize startup vanity, but actually delivering value to your customer. 76 | 77 | Doing the things that will help you directly help you increase your KPI. 78 | 79 | Now that we have one way to filter what tasks you should be working on, let's go a little bit deeper and figure out how to determine if you're prioritizing the right tasks. 80 | 81 | This at first also seems trivial. 82 | 83 | Presumably you're doing what you believe is high value work. 84 | 85 | I mean, nobody ever says, "Oh, let me do the thing that is going to help my startup the least." Right? But that's what I'm going to challenge. 86 | 87 | There are hundreds of things you could be possibly working on to increase your primary KPI. 88 | 89 | Is what you're working on right now, the best thing you can do to meet your weekly goal? Or have you tricked yourself into doing something else? The reason I'm skeptical is because it's actually quite easy for a low value work to unnoticeably, creep into your schedule. 90 | 91 | And it actually takes a lot of work and effort to not let this happen. 92 | 93 | So here's an experiment. 94 | 95 | Try journaling in great detail of each day in the past week, every single hour, so hour by hour, what is it that you were exactly doing? And be honest on what you thought the impact was before you actually did it and what it was in increasing your primary KPI. 96 | 97 | I think you'll be surprised by how much of it was actually low value work. 98 | 99 | And the reason is not because you're lazy or I hope not. 100 | 101 | It's more because we tend to be as humans on autopilot. 102 | 103 | So we don't give much thought to what we're doing with our time. 104 | 105 | And our natural instinct is actually to go for low value work because it's usually the easiest and quickest thing to accomplish. 106 | 107 | And it fulfills our desires to check as many things off of a list as possible, it feels really good to check things off. 108 | 109 | But once you're aware of this, preventing it is actually quite simple, but it does take time, thought and discipline. 110 | 111 | So first, if you aren't already, you should keep a spreadsheet of ideas that can move your primary KPI and not to be too repetitive, but these tasks are almost always a variant of two things, right? One, talking to users and two, building product. 112 | 113 | Talking to users helps you with three things, right? It converts them into customers and revenue or helps you convert them into customers and revenue. 114 | 115 | It helps you understand if you're on the right track or not, and It helps you figure out your product roadmap. 116 | 117 | And then building product actually delivers a solution to the user to see if it actually translates into more customers in revenue. 118 | 119 | So as you come up with these ideas, you should log them into your spreadsheet and keep doing that as every idea you get. 120 | 121 | But the key is don't do them right away. 122 | 123 | Just write them down. 124 | 125 | And this is important because always switching to the thing you just thought of, which always sounds better now than later causes a ton of whiplash for founders and it's the primary culprit in making no progress during the week. 126 | 127 | So now you're tracking this list. 128 | 129 | Then once we go through each item in your spreadsheet and grade the new and regrade the old items based on how impactful you think the task would be on achieving the weekly goal for your primary KPI. 130 | 131 | There are three grades you can give to each task on your list. 132 | 133 | High, medium, low. 134 | 135 | These definitions are a little arbitrary in the sense that it's all relative to whatever else is on your list, but in general, high means that's a task you believe that will help you meet your goal for the week. 136 | 137 | With high probability a medium is you're not sure but with okay probability you can hit your weekly goal and low is with very low probability. 138 | 139 | You'll see that it's actually pretty easy to figure out what those low and high value tasks are when you compare them against everything else you could be doing. 140 | 141 | Which is why this exercise, no matter how pedantic it is, is important to do. 142 | 143 | So let me go through an example. 144 | 145 | Let's say I am a founder of a SAS software, generic SAS software company and I just kind of launched it. 146 | 147 | My goal for the next week is just to get five new paying customers. 148 | 149 | So here's just a sliver of things I can do to reach that goal. 150 | 151 | At the top you'll see that the most impactful thing I can do is go to the offices of 10 potential customers who were actually intro'd to me by friends or whoever, and I know that if I show up to the office, just from experience, I have a very good chance of convincing them to buy my product. 152 | 153 | And so that's why that's at the top of the list. 154 | 155 | The next few are of medium impact because they involve me filling up my pipeline, which is one step away from landing new customers but necessary to do. 156 | 157 | I also have the second thing here. 158 | 159 | I also have video demos I can do, which for me aren't as effective as doing in person but worth doing as well because they do lead to some new customers. 160 | 161 | You'll notice that there are a couple items at the bottom of this which involve programming. 162 | 163 | So a very common mistake technical founders make is to build things first and then go talk to users. 164 | 165 | And according to this list to meet my weekly goal, this means they would be choosing the least impactful thing to do for that week. 166 | 167 | But with this method, if they're honest about it, they have no choice but to get off their butt and go talk to users instead. 168 | 169 | So along with the impact that it may have on helping you achieve your weekly goal, we also need to consider a second dimension of how complex the task is. 170 | 171 | That is, how long would it take for you and your team to complete it? Because there are mini tasks within each category of impact. 172 | 173 | For example, there's like four of here in medium and three in low. 174 | 175 | And so the question is how do I stack rank those within that category. 176 | 177 | And so this dimension of complexity helps. 178 | 179 | So we can [inaudible] complexity in three ways. 180 | 181 | Easy, medium and hard. 182 | 183 | An easy task is something that you can do in less than a day. 184 | 185 | That means you can do a bunch of easy tasks [inaudible] today. 186 | 187 | A medium task is something that takes one or two days for you to do. 188 | 189 | And a hard task is one that takes many days to do and you may not complete it within the week. 190 | 191 | So once you go grade all of them, you'll have again the second dimension here where you have impact and then also complexity. 192 | 193 | And so now you can easily stack rank all the tasks on your list, and it's pretty easy to choose what you should prioritize. 194 | 195 | So given, the directive is to hit your weekly goal, the obvious choice is always to go for the combos of high easy combos and high medium that is something attached that has high impact and is easy to do. 196 | 197 | You should always do those first and then go to high impact and medium complexity. 198 | 199 | And what you really don't want to do is focus on these bottom things here, right? Something that has probably very low probability in helping you achieve your goal and is very hard to do, takes a long time to do. 200 | 201 | There's really no point in doing any of those things. 202 | 203 | So just as important as selecting the right tasks to work on is making sure you don't try to do everything at once. 204 | 205 | Pick enough tasks that you can complete and do well. 206 | 207 | Doing too many things means you won't be able to complete much of the tasks with much conviction and makes it really hard to show progress from week to week. 208 | 209 | How do I know I am prioritizing my time well? Ultimately, you know you've done well if you're hitting your weekly goals consistently. 210 | 211 | So you're doing well if your graphs look like that. 212 | 213 | Sadly, most of us have graphs that look like this. 214 | 215 | These troughs of sorrow where it's decreasing and you're kind of like stable for a while at the bottom. 216 | 217 | That's when you start doubting yourself as like, "Am I working really on the right thing or not?" And so what can we do about this? Or how do we know? So one way is to do what you're already doing in startup school, which is writing weekly updates and being really consistent and honest about it. 218 | 219 | So the key components of weekly update is pretty straight forward. 220 | 221 | What was your weekly goal? Did you succeed? If not, what was the biggest blocker of the growth? What did you do and what was the predicted impact and what was the actual impact and what did you learn this week? What were the big learnings this week? And then by doing an ongoing evaluation of your weekly updates, it will help you improve how you select and prioritize tasks. 222 | 223 | Once in a while you should review all your weekly updates, like from beginning the first one you ever wrote for your startup to the current one, to the last one. 224 | 225 | And check for things like, do you feel like you're learning fast enough? Are you predicting the impact of each task well? Did you let low value work or even worse, fake progress creep into your schedule? Is your biggest blocker the same thing for every week? A lot of people actually get in a rough spot where they're not learning anything new and just doing the same thing over and over without realizing it. 226 | 227 | Reviewing your updates will help you realize that and will force you to try to get yourself out of bad loop. 228 | 229 | In terms, this last one, in terms of completing tasks, if you're finding yourself always running out of time to complete tasks, you felt was totally possible to complete in the week, I have two suggestions for you. 230 | 231 | One is perhaps your task is actually too complex and you should break it down into medium and easy tasks. 232 | 233 | The second one is, maybe it is that your schedule needs to be rejiggered a little bit. 234 | 235 | I recommend a modified version of what we call the maker's manager schedule, which was popularized by Paul Graham, the essay is linked in the startup school library. 236 | 237 | The basic idea is this, there are high context switching costs to different types of tasks. 238 | 239 | For example, coding and meetings, like talking to users. 240 | 241 | Meaning it's hard to restart and ramp back up on a task, especially like coding and it's costly to exit at a time when things are finally flowing and you're getting stuff done. 242 | 243 | So if you find yourself switching back and forth too much, it may be that you're wasting time and need to rejigger things so you have a continuous chunk of time devoted to each one. 244 | 245 | So many people will actually divide their week into days, right? So one full day they'll just spend coding and the next full day they'll spend meetings and talking to users and so forth. 246 | 247 | Instead of me having like one hour here, one hour there, one hour there. 248 | 249 | For people who need to get more stuff done in the day, then they'll do half the day they'll spend coding and the half the day they'll spend talking to users. 250 | 251 | So this is, for any solo founders out there. 252 | 253 | This is incredibly important for you because you don't have the opportunity to divvy up the work across multiple people. 254 | 255 | So it's really important to get your schedule correct. 256 | 257 | All right, so I'll end with one final piece of advice, which is moving fast. 258 | 259 | So in the beginning of your startup, your primary objective is to move as quickly as possible to prove that you're building something people want. 260 | 261 | The faster you figure this out, the faster you can pivot into something or have the confidence that you have product market fit and can start scaling and building a tremendous business. 262 | 263 | So making decisions thoughtfully and quickly is super important. 264 | 265 | Time is often wasted in indecisiveness. 266 | 267 | The key is to be okay with making a wrong choice and learning fast. 268 | 269 | So of course choosing the right thing to do at the get go is the best thing possible. 270 | 271 | But it's also the case that a person who chooses the wrong task to work on today but moves quickly, learns why it's wrong and moves to the right one is a better off than the person that takes forever to choose the right tasks to work on and as twiddling their thumbs working on low value stuff in the meantime, that's all I have today on how to prioritize time to summarize what you should be doing. 272 | 273 | Always be working on things that directly impact your primary KPI. 274 | 275 | Do the things that have the highest impact to meeting your weekly goal. 276 | 277 | And that usually always means what? Talking to users and building product. 278 | 279 | Any questions? 280 | Speaker 2:What do you think about using OKRs at this stage? 281 | Adora:So the question is what do I think about using OKRs. 282 | 283 | I think the concept of OKRs is good. 284 | 285 | Meaning you have key objectives and then tasks. 286 | 287 | I think at a startup you don't need them. 288 | 289 | You just need something much more simple than that, which is here is my weekly goal and here are the tasks I want completed. 290 | 291 | And then over the time as you build out your team and you have like 50 60 people and you need to manage that organization, OKRs are a great tool to use. 292 | 293 | Yeah. 294 | 295 | Yep, back there. 296 | Speaker 3:If you do not have product market fit and most users are turning, where should you focus? Like [inaudible] for example? 297 | Adora:So the question is, if you don't have product market fit and users are turning, what should you focus on? That's a good question. 298 | 299 | So you should focus on definitely finding what the problem is first. 300 | 301 | So what is the problem that you're solving and then what is the solution to solve that problem? And in that stream of thought, it's finding 10 users. 302 | 303 | Like the common advice we give is find 10 users that really love your product. 304 | 305 | Do that first before you start trying to grow. 306 | 307 | So there are some things that you need to do before you start, you know, trying to scale the business. 308 | 309 | Yep. 310 | Speaker 4:[inaudible] B2B hard tech and my first Prudential client requires like 400 times the amount the amount of production than I'm currently producing. 311 | 312 | How would you prioritize paying the funds? 313 | Adora:So the question is he's running a B2B hard tech company and to get users you just need a lot of funds to get going. 314 | Speaker 4:I have one, I mean he needs 400 times what I can actually [crosstalk 00:18:07]. 315 | 316 | [inaudible] funds. 317 | Adora:Okay. 318 | 319 | So he has one user but he needs funds to deliver the amount of product that the user wants. 320 | 321 | I think there's a long answer to this. 322 | 323 | I'm trying to figure out the short answer. 324 | 325 | The long answer. 326 | 327 | Well here's the short answer. 328 | 329 | There is a talk in startup school from the last one with Eric Migicovsky who is the founder of Pebble and he goes through all the steps that you should think about before you need funding so that you have enough proof when you do go to investors [inaudible 00:18:36]. 330 | 331 | But to more directly answer your question, I think what you want to do is start getting more customers in the sense that not delivering the product but in the sense of getting presales or contracts. 332 | 333 | Because if you get more of the, and it would be great if they're prepaid too, because getting a prepaid means that maybe you don't even need an investor to actually build the product. 334 | 335 | So try to do those presales and presales shows good demand, good demand, investors love. 336 | 337 | It de-risks the whole entire thing for them. 338 | 339 | And so it'd be much easier for you to do fundraising if you can get the prepaid contracts as well, then maybe you don't even need, you're in a much better position with investors for sure, but maybe you don't even need them. 340 | 341 | All right. 342 | 343 | Yep. 344 | 345 | Right here. 346 | Speaker 5:I'm a little [inaudible] in couple of things that you said. 347 | 348 | One mainly [inaudible] [inaudible] rush out and pick them up and go see 10 people and started learning from that and prioritizing your time. 349 | 350 | Right? And at the very bottom you had key features as being the ones that you took the least amount of effort, and 20% low key activity. 351 | 352 | But if your market is telling... 353 | 354 | Customers are calling you [inaudible] buy your product [inaudible] are there. 355 | 356 | [inaudible] that can become your priority rather than being at the very bottom? 357 | Adora:Okay. 358 | 359 | So I think the question is, I showed an example of which they're one of, one of the things that was up more at the bottom was I should build this key feature. 360 | 361 | And so the question is why don't you build that when, if that's what the market is telling you. 362 | 363 | So the way I think about progress in the startup is for one, not to get ahead of yourself. 364 | 365 | So the example I gave was, my goal is just to get five new customers. 366 | 367 | How am I going to get that? Building a key feature like that might get me a thousand customers, it might, but really, I just want to get five right now, but there was that low probability that it might get me a thousand customers and so I want to do the thing that are most sure to hit my weekly goal. 368 | 369 | At some point, my weekly goal is going to be a 1000 new customers in which I would probably stack rank that higher. 370 | 371 | Now the thing on the chart, actually, let me just go back to it, this chart, right? So what you'll see here is that I'm coding the big feature, but what I actually have here is I'm getting feedback from users on the big feature, so I don't really know that this is going to do anything, but if I go talk to all my existing users and go validate that first, then and I do validate that that's why it's medium up here, then I can pull up this task up much, much higher. 372 | 373 | All right. 374 | 375 | Yes. 376 | Speaker 6:You've probably seen this executed a lot of times. 377 | 378 | Do you have any examples of a startup kind of misinterpreting this structure? Like using it in a way that was ultimately less helpful or like doing it in a way that wasn't necessarily helping them get to that next small [inaudible 00:21:33]? How can this be misinterpreted? Like how do we avoid that? 379 | Adora:The question is how can this framework be misinterpreted and send them off in the wrong direction. 380 | Speaker 6:Have you seen it be misinterpreted or is this just pretty foolproof? 381 | Adora:I think the main thing is being honest with yourself about where the current state of your company is. 382 | 383 | What is your actual weekly goal, and how much time something actually takes. 384 | 385 | I think some people sometimes overestimate the time it takes, or again, they let other types of work get in the way of the one or two things that they need to do that week because it's just easy to do. 386 | 387 | So that's what I was saying, we just get on, like our brains go on autopilot all the time. 388 | 389 | And so the framework kind of whittles away over time and that's how it can get a little bit wonky. 390 | Speaker 7:Is this supposed to be like a company wide thing or is this more like four or five[inaudible 00:22:30] 391 | Adora:So the question is should this be a company wide thing or for like a small team? So when I talk, this is for like really early stage startups. 392 | 393 | You've just launched or about to launch and you've got these weekly goals. 394 | 395 | I think that these can be, this is a framework that you can use for teams also. 396 | 397 | So it's a little bit hard as you have many teams in a company and the structure gets more complex so it's a little bit hard to keep it that simple. 398 | 399 | But that's, when someone mentioned about OKR is it's like a good way to kind of structure progress in a company. 400 | 401 | Yeah, for sure. 402 | 403 | I'm talking about super early stage, whatever the stage most people are in startup school. 404 | 405 | All right, two more questions. 406 | Speaker 8:Yeah. 407 | 408 | Do you have any metric that you can decide and decide about that it is [inaudible] prioritizing time? Because you need more people in your team. 409 | Adora:So the question is, is there a way to tell, like a metric to tell whether you're, if you're not making progress, it's not because you're not prioritizing time. 410 | 411 | Well it's because you're actually just, you need people, you need bodies. 412 | 413 | I think if you go back to what I was saying like when you're evaluating all the weekly updates and there's really no room for improvements there, then that's a sign. 414 | 415 | I do hesitate to suggest that you just hire people to solve the problems. 416 | 417 | It might be that case, but hopefully it's something that the founders have done themselves already and that they can just off, like that's the thing that they need to offload versus something that maybe software can be done like software can solve or just you know, team is not working well together or you know, time is not being used well. 418 | 419 | Yeah. 420 | 421 | All right, last question right here. 422 | Speaker 9:You typically advice not to buy advertising at first. 423 | 424 | Just to speak with customers and try to get those customers. 425 | 426 | Talking to them. 427 | 428 | When is the right time to start really an advertising campaign for a start up? 429 | Adora:Okay, we at YC do not advocate you doing any kind of paid marketing like buying ads. 430 | 431 | And so the question is obviously there is at some point there's a right time for this and one is the right time. 432 | 433 | So for us what we say is the right time is usually when you have product market fit and you're ready to scale and you've already done the experiments necessary to show that your CAC is reasonable for whatever the revenue is coming during the per user basis. 434 | 435 | Usually what we see, when we say don't do paid advertising, what we really, really, really mean is what we... 436 | 437 | The mistake that people make is to get the first hundred users or the first, even first 10 users they got the go buy a lot of ads and I think it's a reflection of bad, usually a bad founder market fit if you don't know where to find those first 10 users, especially if it's a consumer company. 438 | 439 | But even for a B2B type enterprise company, hopefully you have talked to at least all those kinds of users and you are building, you've built something in which someone has at least committed to using the product and paying for the product. 440 | 441 | Cool. 442 | 443 | All right. 444 | 445 | Okay. 446 | 447 | Last question. 448 | Speaker 10:[crosstalk] teams trying to do everything [inaudible] 449 | Adora:That's a good question. 450 | 451 | So should we follow up with our team to make sure we're all on track? I think weekly stand ups are great. 452 | 453 | It depends on how, I don't know, like for a 100% company. 454 | 455 | That's too many for [inaudible 00:00:26:14], but say four or five, six person team weekly stamps are great. 456 | 457 | Some people would do daily stand ups or some people do even two stand ups a day. 458 | 459 | Personally I think those are not as effective because to make progress, it takes time. 460 | 461 | And so even if you are making progress, it's hard to see it like in one day chunks. 462 | 463 | But for sure one week stand ups are great. 464 | 465 | And reviewing this with everybody and getting everyone on the same page. 466 | 467 | Getting everyone on the same page in your company, by the way, on the definition of your primary KPI is super important. 468 | 469 | You'll be surprised how many companies where team members just have varying levels of definition. 470 | 471 | And then once you get that set, then having everyone understand what the goals of the company are and then what are the tasks we should be working on. 472 | 473 | So cool. 474 | 475 | All right. 476 | Speaker 11:Thanks Adora. 477 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------