@briannekimmel & @shl talking Growth - Notes
Read this for essential background to develop appreciation for Sahil’s journey.
Highlights:
Cold emails work
Post your project on HN and ask friends to upvote it, everybody does
How would the users who use the product call themselves? Was tough to use the word “creators” at first. It was ambiguous, stuck with it anyway and it’s simple now. Changed the terms throughout the product. Helped to have a single umbrella term that covered all personas, instead of serving using individual terms.
Users who use the product benefit other users. If there’s no fundamental value, it won’t stick.
Cold emails work.
People are risk averse and NEED social proof to try something out. No one cares about using your product and making it a success.
No code is appealing to technical makers too because it’s faster, easier and cheaper.
Find ways to make new users open to trying out the experience through low friction x low effort initiatives they can take.
Start with the people who somehow found your thing and are using it. Talk to them every week. Discuss new features with them and they’ll definitely be better.
Know the subreddit for what you’re building (!!!!!!). Find the community and engage with them.
Community as a platform is very important to launch a startup.
Community defined as group of people knowing each other. Legitimacy is often established by meeting IRL.
If you’re afraid of doing something, everybody else is probably afraid of it too. He mentioned tweeting and sharing songs.
Fixing bugs, performance improvements - what Kevin from Instagram said helped with their growth. (Perhaps the more abstract the app is in its potential usage, the more you can’t push users to do an action more and usage relies on the individual journey). The update logs usually mention this and people say it’s irrelevant but it is the most important thing.
Add features that truly add to the core part of the experience. Experiment and find out what these are. Craft the experience carefully over a long time once your core experience is sticky.
Raising money is extending your ante and hoping it works. It often doesn’t. You have to figure out the next market after one fits.
If you want to be successful, you need to build a thoughtful product for a community.
When people have to buy something without experiencing it, make sure every other part of the product/website needs to be awesome. Ensure there are first class and business class tickets to your product.
Raising money is game over from the beginning.
“There’s nothing like numbers to fuck up a good story.”
Took 100 hours to write the Gumroad post - talking to people, editing, thinking. Writing process started with Draft 1 (6000 words) -> showed to writing group he meets every week to be better at writing. If you want to be great at anything, do it often and get feedback often.
Best way to do anything is to be early at it - Twitter, YouTube, startups.
Sales is the process of educating the person on the thing they already know they want to do. No need to try to convince anybody they need to do something. (Importance of SEO)
He did videos with people who have a name and it didn’t work, perhaps because there wasn’t a popular brand effect going for Gumroad already.
Delete the features people don’t use if you can’t find a way to make it integral to the core experience.
P.S. Support makers by checking out Smoove by Farhan and Stream by Vidy. DM them your thoughts!