Hello Founders!

Hello Founders!

Considering every startup confronts this question at some point, I was surprised by how little has been written about it. Particularly anything actionable. So I decided to do my own digging. I spent the past month personally reaching out to founders, scouring interviews, and tapping the Twitterverse. Below, you’ll find first-hand accounts of how essentially every major consumer app acquired their earliest users, including Tinder, Uber, Superhuman, TikTok, Product Hunt, Yelp, and over a dozen more. Enjoy!

Topic: Go to market strategies for new products Brianne is the Founder & Managing Partner of WorkLife Ventures, an early stage venture fund building a better work life through new tools, services, and ways for people to make money. She's an investor in Webflow, Tandem, Command E and 30+ startups. Brianne was previously on the go-to-market team at Zendesk focused on self-serve product, platform integrations and built Zendesk for Startups.

A go-to-market strategy is what's going to help you catapult your new product into the hands of buyers, and we've got the examples + templates you need.

Mike and Rob outline customer acquisition plans for bootstrappers.

It's rarely a straight line to product/market fit. Here are ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia's hard-won tips for marketplace startups that helped her guide her company from a near-bust to a $470M game-changer.

Product-market fit is “the only thing that matters” early on in the startup journey, wrote Marc Andreessen in June 2007. Conventionally, product-market fit comes down to early signals that the market has voted your product as the best solution to its problem. In the enterprise, undeniable evidence of product-market fit shows up when an early...

A revenue model is "the system design by which a business monetizes its services". That comes from Wikipedia. I like that definition. Short, sweet, and to the point. I am going to spend the next couple months talking about revenue models for online businesses. We've started off this series by crowdsourcing a list of the […]

The idea of peer producing a comprehensive web/mobile revenue model list was a success. The hackpad I created and linked to last week got a ton of contributions. I took the time this morning to clean it up a good deal. I will outline the high level changes I made in a bit. But since […]

By: Gefen Skolnick and Miki Reynolds

INTRO takes the guesswork out of what your options are and who to talk to. Our software presents you with a menu of financial products that you can explore and better understand before asking for an INTRO to a financial partner. Brought to you by Indie.vc.

Startup founders must make an important decision: whether to use bootstrapping or VC funding as a way to take their businesses to the next level. This article gets into the benefits and drawbacks of each method.

The inner-workings of one of the most powerful growth tools in email.

Arielle Jackson has experience crafting marketing campaigns at Google, Facebook and Square. This is her messaging toolbox.

David Perell runs a writing school called Write of Passage. Matthew Kobach is the Director of Social Media for the New York Stock Exchange. David's Twitter: https://twitter.com/david_perell Matthew's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkobach In this 100 minute workshop, Matthew Kobach (Director of Social Media for the New York Stock Exchange) and I present our techniques for success on Twitter. We discuss: How to curate your Twitter feed to maximize influence and inspiration What formats and content make quality Tweets How to be a good citizen of Twitter How to find your niche and use data to cultivate an audience How to use Twitter to become a “lighthouse for like-minded people” Q+A 0:00 Backstory of what happened 1:57 What Matthew does for work 3:01 Introducing the panelists 3:25 Will course manager for write of passage introduces himself 5:13 Ana alumni of write of passage 7:56 David starts his presentation. Starts with 3 quotes from Bill Gurley, and Alisson Allen. 10:20 Why VC's are successful (they are contrarian enough to give insight without being abrasive). 11:35 Writing good tweets has 4 things in common - checklist is Compression, No Spam, Simplicity and Novelty. 16:39 Curate your feed 21:47 Your Twitter presence 28:34 Matthew talks about having a test account and testing format and content. 44:32 Matthew shares his presentation on Twitter 1:13:17 Q and A starts 1:13:30 David talks about perfectionist paralysis. 1:15:56 Scheduling Tweets. 1:16:59 How much is too much tweeting? 1:18:06 How do you get stuff done all day with tweeting 1:20:20 If you were starting from 0 or starting from scratch advice? 1:29:08 Hashtags on Twitter. 1:29:29 Sharing your stuff without being too self-promotional. 1:31:50 engaging and replies vs your own articles and tweets. 1:33:05 Lists or following directly? 1:35:03 Question about profile pictures/display pictures. 1:37:48 What's with Matthew changing his name with brands? This workshop has a mix of practical ideas as well as philosophical principles to enhance your Twitter presence whether you have one hundred followers or one million. Learn More About David: Write of Passage: https://writeofpassage.school/ Read David's Essays: https://www.perell.com/blog David's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/david_perell David's Online Workshops: https://www.perell.com/writing-workshops David Twitter Email Course: https://ageofleverage.com/twitter David's Online Writing Email Course: https://ageofleverage.com/course

A step-by-step guide to successfully setting up and running an interactive workshop in Zoom - no matter your audience or topic.

Bailey Richardson (an early Instagram hire and current partner at People & Company) has studied ordinary people who started extraordinary communities. Here, she shares the nuts and bolts of how startups should approach community building, highlighting eight valuable lessons on how the best communities start, gain steam, and evolve as scale takes hold.

It seems we have product-market fit. What marketing channels should we invest in? This is probably the most common question in the startup community (right after “should we do an ICO?”). After answering it a couple of dozen times in one-on-one sessions and workshops I now think I have a solid answer, the equivalent of…

Eli Schwartz - https://twitter.com/5le - is the Director of SEO and Growth at SurveyMonkey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/. He came in to answer commonly asked questions about SEO. Eli blogs about SEO and growth at http://www.elischwartz.co/ The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon *** Topics 00:00 - Does SEO matter in 2018? 2:00 - Where should a company start with SEO? 3:30 - Who’s doing SEO well? 4:25 - Why is Amazon doing SEO well? 5:25 - How should you crosslink? 7:10 - Paying for links 7:35 - SEO don’t dos 8:15 - Things that are no longer useful in SEO 9:20 - Keywords 12:45 - Reviews 13:25 - Content 17:25 - Images 22:45 - Link building 28:00 - How much time to give SEO? 28:30 - Mobile 30:35 - Ranking 31:45 - International SEO 33:45 - Translation 37:15 - International search 39:30 - GDPR 41:50 - Hiring someone to do SEO 43:45 - What to do when you organic SEO disappears 46:30 - Metrics for an SEO hire 48:30 - Tools for SEO 50:00 - Getting started in SEO

A framework for building enduring products