How to Start a Startup: Getting started, getting press, and doing things that don't scale

When you started, it seems so obvious to you. You're wondering why has no one done this. What's your answer now, looking back? Yeah. I mean, looking back, I think.

I think the biggest thing is, is mobile. The fact that now everyone has one of those in their pocket. And we kinda saw that trend. And and thought, you know, what if you can design, you know, a delivery system that was entirely based off mobile. You know, where you don't have an You didn't have to have to have any infrastructure or delivery fleets.

Instead, you could, you know, instead of hiring drivers full time, purchasing vehicles, what if you can tap into a more of an on demand pool of independent contractors? And only send orders to them when when they have time. So so that's kind of the the insight we had. We Everything was done through mobile.

Yeah. Did you know we were gonna be a startup or we're just making some money on this side? Of course. Yeah. Mean, at the time we just wanted We're all really passionate about building technology for small business owners.

And and honestly this delivery thing came out of a experiment, right, with the landing page. Like, it was it was literally an experiment. We we didn't We weren't expecting anything. And it just took off and and we went with it. And logistics was always something we were really passionate about as well.

You know, like logistics, transportation, and it's kind of the perfect fusion of, you know, how do you help small business owners through delivery.

Back. Yeah. Do you launch the mobile app first or the website? And how long did it take from idea to.

the first launch? Yeah. Was We started with this this this landing page right here. Took us an hour to launch.

How does DoorDash stand out in a space built with Fluff, Postmates and Seamless and other companies?

Yeah. The question was, how does DoorDash stand out among a very competitive space? I mean, I mean, at the beginning I mean, for us consumer demand has never been the problem, even up until now. So for us it's just about, you know, finding a need and and just focusing on serving that serving that demand. In the beginning competition doesn't really matter when you're getting started.

How long did you, did it take to incorporate into a company after you first delivered? Yeah. Question was how long it took for us to incorporate into a company when we went through YC. So we launched in January 2013. And then we did YC that very summer. And we When we decided to take this idea through YC, we incorporate it.

Stephanie, let's do one more question. One more?

Yeah,.

you. What do you plan to do next? Or where do you plan to go with this besides like food delivery?

Yeah. I mean, the question was where do we plan to go beyond food delivery? I mean, us the, when we started DoorDash it was always, you know, like I said about, you know, helping small business owners and figuring out, you know, how do you serve this for any local merchant. Whether you're a macaroni store or a restaurant or a furniture shop. I mean, like that's still our focus.

That's like the long term vision. For now, we're just focused on restaurant delivery as a way to scale. But ultimately, that's where we wanna end up in. Cool. Thanks. Okay. Next is Walker Williams from Teespring. Teespring went to YC.

You're in Africa? You like that? Yeah. I almost rejected them.

It sounds like a dumb idea. But now they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year of revenue, so very luckily I did not. And Walter's gonna talk also about doing things on scale.

Alright. Thank you guys for having me. My name is Walker. I'm the CEO and founder of Teespring. For those of you guys who don't know what Teespring is, we're an e commerce platform that allows entrepreneurs to launch products and apparel brands without risk, cost or compromise. Today, the company is about a 80 folks and we ship tens of thousands of products each day.

And I wanna talk to you about one of the most fundamental advantages you have as a start up. And that's that you're able to do things that don't scale. And I define things that don't scale as things that are sort of fundamentally unsustainable. They will not last. They will not bring in the millionth user. And where they break, it's it's usually time. But it could be a number of other things.

But it's really growth strategies that won't take you to a million users. And there's three real places I wanna focus on today. The first one is finding your first users. The second one is turning those users into champions. And the third one is finding your product and market fit. So finding your first users.

The first thing you have to understand is that there is no silver bullet for user acquisition. You know, everybody, and and this includes me when we got started. You look for that, that dream solution. That pay per click campaign that has tremendous ROI. Some accelerating partnership that's gonna springboard you into the stratosphere. An affiliate agreement. Something that solves it for you.

But the reality is for the vast majority of companies, and in fact for every company that I've had the chance to speak to the CEO of. That's just not possible. Those are unicorns and most of the companies that from the outside look like they've had this dream growth curve. The reality is that those first users were impossibly hard to get.

And let me tell you about the story of a ridiculously unsustainable business. So this is Teespring in 02/2012. When we first got When we first launched, the the business couldn't have looked worse. It took days of meetings. We had to offer free design, days of revisions back and forth. We'd have to launch the product ourselves. We'd have to do the social media.

All to sell like 50 shirts for a local non profit, and generate a thousand dollars of revenue. Anybody looking in would have said, you guys need to give up. This is a terrible idea. But as time went on, those users start to add up.

And you know, I I think something you have to understand is that when when you first launch a company, just by virtue of the fact that it's a new product, you're gonna be bad at selling it. Right? You've got no idea what the pain points of customers really are. You've never sold it before. You don't have any success stories to point to or testimonials.

Those first users are always going to be the hardest. And so, it's your responsibility as a founder to do whatever it takes to bring in your first users. And, you know, it's gonna be different for every company. The common thread that I hear is founders need to spend personal time and effort. A lot of their personal time and effort to bring those users in themselves.

You know, could mean a number of thing. Everything from sending a hundred emails a day. Getting on the phone and just calling as many people as you can. Going through a network. If you have a network like Stanford or Y Combinator. Anything you can do to get that first user. And, you know, I really equate it to pushing a boulder up a hill.

And if you think of like a very sort of smooth hill, the When you get started, the incline is the steepest and those first inches are the hardest. And over time, as you get farther and farther, the incline steadies out. It gets easier. And hopefully, eventually you reach a point where you're at the top of the hill and the boulder starts to roll on its own.

And so those first users, you just cannot focus on ROI in the sense of time. Do not expect to spend an hour and return thousands of dollars. Maybe Stanley is one of those unicorns. That was a pretty incredible story. But for for most of us, those first users are going to take a lot of hand holding, a lot of personal love. And that's okay. That's essential for building a company.

And the one sort of caveat of that is that, I don't recommend giving away your product for free. And there's plenty of exceptions to this rule. But in general, cutting costs or giving the product away is an unsustainable strategy I wouldn't recommend. You need to make sure that users value your product.

And you know, people have a different, they treat products that are free in a much different way than a paid product. And often times, it can give you a false sense of security of, oh, we're getting all these users. Surely, we can convert them over to paid. The second aspect is, what happens when you get those users? How do you turn those users into champions?

And a champion is a user who talks about and advocates for your product. And I'm a firm believer that every company with a great growth strategy has users who are champions. And so really the easiest way to build, turn a user into a champion is to delight them with an experience they're gonna remember. So something that's unusual or out of the ordinary, exceptional experience.

And the easiest way to do this early, and again, something that is completely unsustainable, it's not gonna scale forever, is to just talk to those users. And people will say this all the time and you hear it. It's one of the sort of core tenets of Y Combinator is talk to users. But I I cannot stress how important it is that you spend a large chunk of your time talking to users.

And you should do it constantly, every single day, and as long as possible. Today at Teespring, I'm still the catch all email address. So anytime somebody misspells support or writes an email address that doesn't exist, I get that email. And so I still do about 12 to 20 customer service tickets every single day.

I spend hours each night reading every single tweet, probably a little bit OCD, but that's okay. I read through all the Teespring communities. You're never gonna get a better sense for your product than actually listening to real users.

And especially in the early days, you're just The product you launch with and the feature set you launch with is almost certainly not going to be the feature set that you scale with. And the quicker you talk to users and learn what they actually need, the faster you can get to that point. So there's three ways to talk to your customers. You can run customer service yourself.

Up until Teespring was doing about a hundred and 30, a hundred and 40 thousand dollars a month. My co founder Evan and I did everything in customer service. This is one that there's gonna be an instinct to quickly pass off. And that's because it's painful. Even today, when I open our customer service portal, I I have like an emotional reaction where my stomach sinks.

Because it sucks talking to users who have had a terrible experience, and it's painful. It's something that you love, and you've put so much effort into, and you've gotten it wrong, or they've had a terrible experience, or somebody didn't treat them right. But it's so important that you go through that and learn what you need to build, what you need to fix.

The second step is to proactively reach out to current and churned customers. And churned customers are customers who have left. And this is one that that often falls by the wayside in sort of the pursuit of new customers. But you wanna make sure that your customers are having a consistent good experience.

You don't wanna just leave those current users as sort of, you don't wanna take them for granted. And then when a user actually leaves your service, you wanna reach out and find out why. Both because that personal outreach can make the difference between leaving and staying. Sometimes people just need to know that you care and it's going to get better.

And because even if you can't bring them back, there's a chance that you can learn from the mistake you made that caused them to leave and fix it, so you don't churn users out the same way in the future. And the final one is, again, the one that I'm probably too OCD about, but it's social media and communities. You need to know how people are talking about your brand.

You need to reach out and make sure that when somebody does have a bad experience and they're talking about it, that you make it right. Problems are inevitable in startups. There's gonna be issues. You're not gonna have the perfect product. Things are gonna break. Things are gonna go wrong. That's not important. What's important is to always make it right.

To always go the extra mile and make that customer happy. One detractor who's had a terrible experience on your platform is enough to reverse the progress of 10 champions. It's all it takes is one person out there to say, no, you shouldn't use those guys for x y and z reason to ruin a ton of momentum.

So even if it's, you know, there's examples in the early days where we would mess up massive orders. We'd print the color slightly wrong. It would be the wrong size and it would be like half of our GMV for that month. And we would know we got it wrong. The customer would be unhappy and sort of this instinct is, well, you know, it's it's only a little bit off or it's not completely wrong.

It'll be fine. But the reality is you just gotta bite the bullet and make sure that it's right. And those customers, the customers that are often originally the most frustrated, tend to turn into the biggest champions and the longest term users. And the last one I wanna talk about is finding product and market fit.

And what I mean by that is that, you know, mentioned this earlier, but the product you launch with will almost certainly not be the product that takes you to scale. And so your job in those early moments, in those early days of a startup is to progress and iterate as fast as possible to reach that product that does have market fit.

And as engineers, your instinct is gonna be to build a platform with beautiful, clean code that scales. Right? You you don't wanna write sort of duct tape code that's gonna pile on technical debt. But you need to optimize for speed over scalability and clean code.

And and sort of an example of this is, in the early days, we had a couple enterprise customers come to us, sort of bigger non profits and say, hey, we really like your service, but you're missing these fundamental things, so we can't, we're not gonna use it. And we looked at sort of what it would take to build out those features.

And we weren't sure they were gonna work long term, but we wanted to try it. And my co founder Evan, who is our CTO and a million times better developer than I am, sort of ran the math and figured out that if we did it the right way, it was gonna take about a month to build out these features. And in a start up, a month, you you live in dog years, a month is a year and that just wasn't gonna do.

So he actually went out, duplicated the code base, duplicated the the database, and was able to basically build a completely different product that he didn't have to worry about the existing users for to serve these enterprise customers. We gave them the tool, they onboarded, they generate a lot of revenue. Eventually, we learned what features were core and we integrated them into the core product.

But what would have taken a month, we were able to do in, you know, three to four days. A great rule of thumb is to only worry about the next order of magnitude. So when you have your tenth user, you shouldn't be wondering, well, how are we gonna serve a million users? You should be worried about how are we gonna get to a hundred? When you're at a hundred, should think about a thousand.

It's it's one of those things where necessity is the mother of invention, of all inventions. So when you hit that breaking point, like the Twitter fail whale is a great example. And Teespring, there were months month stretches where every single night, the site would crash. Every night, and then during the day.

And every single person on the team would go to sleep with their phone on loud, under their pillow. So that inevitably, when the buzzer went off, we could quickly get up, restart the servers and go back to sleep. And this would happen daily, but the reality is that it was worth it. And you know, you'll end up with these huge pain points and all this technical debt and regret.

But it's worth it just to get to that end goal and that product fit faster. You will make it work. You will survive. Those sort of bumps are just speed bumps and speed is so, so important early. So the the lesson that I've been learning lately is, you know, you wanna do these things that don't scale as long as possible. There's not some magical moment. It's not the series a.

It's not when you hit a certain revenue milestone that you stop doing things that don't scale. This is one of your biggest advantages as a company. And the moment you give it up, you're giving your competitors that are smaller, that can still do these things, that advantage over you.

So, as long as humanly possible, as long as it is a net positive, you need to be spending time talking to your users. You need to move fast in development as fast as possible. But don't give it up willingly. It should be ripped from you. And so, sort of trying to practice what I preach. I wanna give you guys my email address.

If you guys have any questions, if you wanna learn about Teespring, if you wanna print some t shirts, fingers crossed, just shoot me an email. I I'd love to help and I'd love to speak to you. And the last thing is we've created an official how to start a startup tea with Sam and all proceeds are going to Watsi. I couldn't miss this opportunity to sell.

So if if you guys wanna grab one of the official teas, just go to teespring. com/startup and it's supporting a great cause. Thank you. Sure. Go ahead. Yep.

The t shirt printing business, it seems like it has a lot of content. So what made convinced you to think this is a viable market even when Sure. Going well in issues? You know, so the question was.

the t shirt printing business has a lot of competition. What would convince us to get into the market? I I think there's two factors to it. So first, I I completely agree. From the outside, people have been telling us that this is a silly idea since day one. And sort of at every order of magnitude we reach, people will come and say, hey, that's a terrible, terrible idea. Why are you doing that?

But the reason that we launched Teespring is because we ran into a personal pain point where we had a need and we looked at the current solutions. I was a student at Brown and I was trying to create a remember the bar shirt for a dive bar that got shut down. And I realized that nothing needed, nothing matched my needs.

And so because I knew that I had that pain point, and I knew there was market fit, and I had seen people adopt the product. I knew there was something there. And it was also one of those things where you can sort of feel the You can sort of feel the wind on your back, where people are adopting the product quickly. Your, the pain point is clearly there. It's not a met need.

So, I would say that often times, great ideas start look, by looking like silly ideas. And then you can sort of feel out whether or not there's a scalable business here by how people are adopting it. Is it possible to bring customers aboard? Sure. Are non profits your biggest customer base? Like. No.

You know, today our biggest customer base are entrepreneurs who are trying to build brands and businesses. You know, we have a little over a thousand people that make their full time living on Teespring today via brands they've launched. And the other side is influencers.

So YouTube stars, Reddit communities, bloggers who want to add product merchandise as a way to sort of create a brand and and monetize that affinity. So those are our two biggest markets. We still do work with a lot of non profits and love working with them. It's still a part of our business, just not the majority. Thank you. Yeah.

Alright. Now we have Justin on Justin was the founder of Kiko. And then Justin TV, which goes to switch and is now part of Y Combinator. And he's going to talk about PR.

Cool. Well, while I wait for this slide to happen, I started a bunch of startups. But I think you've heard a lot of awesome, you know, kind of how did I get started stories. So I'm gonna talk about something very specific that people always have questions with, which is press, and like how do you get it? How does it work?

It's something, this is kind of like an abridged version of what we talk about at Y Combinator, and hopefully you guys will find it helpful. So, you know, a lot of people, I think when they first get started with entrepreneurship think about getting press and being in the press as something that happens magically.

They think about it as like something that journalists are like out there, like trying to find the best stories and really, you know, like discover them, like it's like a meritocracy. Which is like absolutely not the case. So before you think about press, one of the things you really wanna think about is who you wanna reach and like what's your actual goal. Right?

A lot of people like, I know when I got started I wanted to just be in the news because I thought that's what likely did as an important company. And it turns out, if if you don't have any goals, you're not gonna achieve them. Right? I mean, that's true of like pretty much everything. And with press, if you just like aimlessly wanna be covered, it's not really going to do anything for your startup.

So getting like in the news is nice because you can send it to your mom or, and say, hey, I have a real job. You know, look, we're in the New York Times. But if you don't have a actual goal for your, like a business goal with it, it's really just like not a good use of time. So, you know, there's many different goals.

One example is, you know, you might want to with with Socialcam, which was a spin off of Justin TV. It was like an app that was kinda like video Instagram. And our goal was really to be known as like a video, like Instagram app. And like be thought of in that context when it was, you know, time to pitch our like Silicon Valley Investors and and influencers.

And so we really wanted to get in like tech press and kind of be positioned as this like new hot social app. With exec, one of my goals was the second, like to get customers. So Exec was like a cleaning, local cleaning service, and our goal was to get people in San Francisco to use it. It wasn't like useful to get national press because you know, 99% of those people couldn't use it.

So we really targeted initially a lot of, you know, like SF Chronicle and a, like local San Francisco press that would directly talk to people who could potentially use our app. For Twitch, which is probably the thing that you guys mostly know. It was, you know, Twitch is a ESPN for gaming or kind of like a live streaming community of, of gamers.

And our goal was to, with press was like to reach the gaming industry. Because like, when we, when we started now, it's like 55,000,000 uniques and like people in the gaming industry know about it. But when we started, nobody really knew that like, it was a place to advertise and like, it wasn't like known as like a, you know, we were a very nascent small gaming community.

Our goal was to like, get people in the gaming industry, whether they were developers or advertisers, to think about us as like an important place where like influencers were. So we really targeted, you know, industry trades and game dev blogs and places where like gamers, you know, games beat, stuff like that the industry was reading. So you know, what's an actual story?

I think there's, you know, there's a bunch of different types of stories. But these are usually the ones that you see in you know, startups. Those are like product launches. Like you let, just launched a new version of your app. There's fundraising. For whatever reason you know, press loves to write about fundraising even though it's not very interesting.

So you know, like if you raise a million dollar seed round, pretty much you can get that covered. Milestones or metrics, like you've achieved a million dollars a week in revenue. That one of our one of our The the company that bought exec just announced that they they achieved a million dollars a week in revenue and it was covered pretty widely.

Like business stories, which generally happen when you're like, already a successful company. Someone, you know, like a New York Times or New Yorker or business magazine will like, wanna cover like, kind of the story of your start up. Usually you don't have to worry about that in the beginning.

What I like to call stunts, which are like I don't know if you guys remember, but a couple years ago, this YC company called WePay dropped a block of ice with money frozen in it outside of the PayPal, like a PayPal developers conference. Because they were like PayPal was like no, in the news for freezing you know, various developers accounts.

And so, that was like, widely covered because it was just so, you know, kind of an interesting thing. And and it really it it it got them in the story. Right? They wouldn't have been talked about in the context of PayPal at all, really. Hiring announcements. If you're a big enough company and you hire someone really important, people will want to cover that.

And then contributed articles like, you writing some sort of industry overview or some opinion piece in like maybe a tech blog or something like that. So those are like, you know, basically any of those things can, can be stories.

One of the things that people usually don't think about is that, you know, you really have to think about like, everything, when you start a start up, you think that everything you're doing is interesting. But that's not true for like, other people. Right?

Like, you, what you need, really need to think about is like, objectively, if I wasn't the founder of this company, would I wanna like read a story about what I'm pitching? Right? So, you know, your incremental feature release, your two point o one, you know, feature release might not be interesting if like, just because you added like, you know, find your contacts in Facebook or something.

Like, you have to, you really want to take a step back before you invest the time in like, actually trying to pitch a story and think, does anyone, will anyone actually want to read this? Because what people are, you know, journalists and bloggers are looking for is things that people actually wanna read. Right? The other thing is like, you don't actually have to be very original.

Your press in news doesn't have to be original. You know, like, you don't, you just have to be like, what I like to call original enough. Right? So you don't want to be the second cooler company to raise $5,000,000 on Kickstarter. Right? That's like, the the first guy gets like all the news.

But like, if you're the I think the first video game console to raise $10,000,000 on Kickstarter like Ouya was, that was like, where they raised like a million dollars in, in twenty four hours. That was like huge news because they were kind of like the first in that category. Right? Even though other people had raised a lot of money on Kickstarter before.

So just like, think about your stories in the context of like, where they are in the, like, what else has been written about. And if they're like, kind of novel enough and they haven't been something that was like, just written about in the news. So, one of the like actual mechanics of getting a story. This is like pretty tactical.

So, what, if you want to get your news in, you know, the the press, basically there's some easy, simple steps. So it's basically, getting press is like, you can think of it like a sales funnel. So you're gonna talk to a lot of people and not all of them are gonna convert. Right? And so you shouldn't be upset when someone like one individual person or reporter or whatever doesn't write your story.

The first thing is like, you have to think of a story. Right? It's gonna be one of those, probably one of those things that I listed up before. The second step is like, you wanna get introduced to a reporter or multiple reporters who are gonna write about your thing. It's like much, much easier, just like any sort of business development to actually get in touch with them through someone.

It's like, you know, rather than cold emailing them. The best thing to do, I found, is like, you wanna go to entrepreneurs who were just written about, like your friends who maybe started a startup and they were covered on TechCrunch. Get them to introduce you to your, you know, that reporter who wrote about them.

The reason that's good is because like, from the entrepreneur's perspective, like, the easiest thing to do in the world is introduce you to a reporter who already wrote about them. Right? They don't like, need anything else from that reporter. They're actually doing that person a favor if your story's interesting.

It's not like you're asking for interest to investors or potential you know, people that they wouldn't want to hire, employees. And then from the reporter's perspective, they're getting intro to someone who, you know, they already vetted as interesting. Like they're getting an intro from someone who they know, they thought was interesting enough to write about.

And so, like, by the transitive property, you're basically gonna, they're gonna think you're, you know, probably interesting. So you get like an email that's like, you know, from this guy that introduces you to the reporter, and you want to get in contact with them with enough time that you can actually get them to like, write a story. Probably a week in advance or more.

Because they're not gonna like drop everything they're doing to just write about your news. So a lot of people, especially first time entrepreneurs will come and say like, oh Justin, I'm launching this product tomorrow. Like, can you get me in this, you know, tech crunch or something. And that's like probably not gonna happen unless you already have a relationship.

The best way to do it, so the best thing to do is like, give yourself some lead time. Get that intro in advance. And then so then you should like once once you've set a date for your news to go out, you're gonna launch your product like in two weeks. You have this intro. You set set up some sort of meeting. And you really want to get the the reporter to like invest time and effort in you. Right?

Because they don't like, there's like kind of a sunk cost fallacy at play. Basically, if you the more time and the they spend with you, the more likely they are to like actually write something. So you the best thing to do is get like a face to face meeting. Right? Lots of people, report bloggers actively don't want to meet you face to face. But like, if not that, then get like a phone call. Right?

And get on the phone with them. The worst thing to do is like just have an email exchange, right? Because it's very easy for them to like forget about it, ignore it. So you wanna like actually try to get in contact with them, set up a meeting. Okay. So then, the next step is actually pitch them.

What I usually do is actually write out all my new, like the story that I would want to see published, like in bullet points. And I like, will write out the story, my my ideal story and I'll memorize it. Like the entire, like, set of bullet points. And when I have a conversation with them, if it's in person, I'll like walk them through this.

Like, I'll have a conversation that's like structured like my outline, and they'll be like taking notes. Right? And then they'll go and transcribe those notes into a story. And so it's like a tell, like, what I wrote will eventually be translated into a actual story.

And you know, by preparing you can actually con, you know, much more easily control the conversation and not forget critical things like, you know, your co found, mentioning your co founder's name or like, what the, all the features in your awesome app are.

If it's, I'm doing this like on the phone, I will like have these bullet points in front of me and I will make sure to like walk through a conversation that includes all of those things. So, you know, you do that. They, you have a pitch. You take, they take notes. They're gonna write the story at this time. And then, the next thing is like follow-up.

Like a, a couple days or a day before your actual news goes out, you want to send them an email that says like, you know, this is the time we're launching the app. Like, thanks for meeting. Here's like collateral, media, if we, if you have like a video or photos or something you want them to include screenshots. Like how to spell your co founders names and your name.

Just like include all the information that I really care about and I bold it. Right? And then, that's it. Then hopefully the the day comes, you press submit on the release to the app store. And at the same time, they release their article on TechCrunch and you are famous. Okay. So a lot of people ask us about PR firms.

So, you know, I think in the beginning, it's kind of like everything else you do at a start up, you want to do it yourself before you hire someone else to do it. And it's actually pretty easy, especially with tech press who, you know, and bloggers who like constantly need new things to write about.

Know, you should, I strongly encourage people to like try it themselves and kinda get started by learning the process themselves before they hire anyone. One thing I'll say is that like firms can, can only help you with like, kind of the contacts and the logistics.

But they can't help you know what's interesting about your company or very, you I've never had anyone who's been able to tell me what the stories that I'm producing are. They've only been able to tell me, you know, like, your you know, like, here's a list of reporters that you might want to contact.

So, you know, you really have to be responsible for thinking about, like, what's interesting about your company and what are you doing? You know, what's the road map of interesting things that you're working on? They're also really expensive, know. I think we were spending between 5,000 and $20,000 a month, which is like, at very, you know, for various firms. That's a lot for a start up. Right?

You should, it's generally not a good use of money, would say, especially in the very early days. You know, getting press is is a lot of work. So you should really make sure it's worth it. You know, like I said, it really, getting press doesn't mean, it feels like, it's like a vanity metric. Right?

It feels like you're being successful because lots of successful companies, you know, like Google and Facebook are covered in the press all the time. But doesn't actually mean you're successful. It doesn't, you know, actually give you, you know, mean that you're getting, you're making money, you're getting users, you're making those users happy.

It's, you know, sometimes it's a really good strategy for getting your first hundred or 200 or a thousand customers. But it's really not a scalable user acquisition strategy. So it's something that's really just like a, you know, a bootstrap. You can't like just get like infinity articles written about you. Like eventually people are going to like get tired of hearing about your company.

And usually that happens pretty, pretty quickly. Right? The, the pull point about news is, it's new. And so it's pretty, pretty, pretty hard, unless you're Google, to like get covered in the press like every week, you know, or something. To, you know, if you decide it's worth it though, like, you do want to have like a regular heartbeat of news.

So that's like something where, you know, you're planning out those types of, what, you're thinking about what you're doing that matches those, you know, maybe seven story types in the future. And like, you know, when I was working primarily on marketing and PR, it would be, I would like make a schedule on like a calendar.

And if what, when we're gonna launch things and like make sure to space them out. But like have them, you know, appear regular, at regular intervals so that people like didn't want to forget about us. And we could kind of maximize our coverage. And you really wanna keep your, you know, contacts fresh. It's like really a relationships business.

So once you, someone writes about you, you should keep going back to them for, for more for writing about, you know, to write about you in the future. It's kinda like, you know, when when basically people, you know, you're more likely to do something for someone you've already like done something for.

You know, you really, like it's, if you just, you know, I would try to establish good good relationships with a couple of reporters over time that you can go to to break news and it will come in handy later if you ever have, are in the position.

If you're fortunate enough to be in the position where people are writing negative things about you, you know, having relationships will help you, you know, kind of get your side of the story out. And the last thing is like, you know, it's kind of golden rule really, or maybe more of like a pay it forward really applies here.

Like, you should help your fellow entrepreneurs get, get coverage, because they will help you get coverage. The best way to get covered is really through these like warm introductions. And so you know, when I'm, ever I'm, you know, meeting with reporters, always help like throwing out the names of like other things that I think would be interesting stories for them. And usually that comes back.

They, the the reporters like it because they, it's like helping them find interesting stories and you're more likely to get, you know, leads back from those entrepreneurs that you help out. So, if you're interested in learning more about press, here's two resources that I really liked.

Jason Kincaid, who is a former TechCrunch reporter, just wrote a really, really great overview that covers a lot of the things I just talked about in more depth and from the, you know, blogger side. That was a really great book. And then kind of an evil resource is this book, Trust Me I'm Lying, which was written by the, one of the, a former marketer at American Apparel.

And he talks about like a lot of ways that he pretty like, evilly actually manipulated the press. But I think it's a pretty good look into like the psychology of like how people, you know, things spread on the internet. You know, how stories spread on the internet and I It's it's Might be valuable to take a look at. Cool. That's, that's basically it. One question? Just one? Two.

Two. Two quest Okay. Two questions. Or zero questions.

So when is the right time to start worrying about altogether?

When is the right time to start worrying about press altogether? I think it's a really good way, like if you just the first time I launched, you know, my first products in our, in our first startup. For a lot of them, we got like zero attention and we didn't really know how to even get a hundred users.

I think it's a really fine way to get a hundred users and a lot of companies in YC when they first launch their product will encourage them to get out and just do one TechCrunch story to like get a few people to to see it. And it's good to get in the practice. I wouldn't like obsess over getting like coverage in multiple outlets or anything like that in the very beginning. Alright. Anything else?

It.

seems like the biggest story about Twitch was the Pokemon thing. Yeah. So like how much of a, how much of a role did you guys actually play in getting kind of Yeah. Depressed or was that just like, oh shit, like blew up awesome?

So, Twitch you know, had this thing called Twitch Plays Pokemon where developers set up a like a Pokemon, like Game Boy game that was controlled by chat. So, you know, millions of people would be typing in a or b and like, the character would run, run, run, wander around aimlessly. And that was like a huge news story and I think that what we did was, you know, there's a couple of parts.

One, we set the stage by having other news stories that, so when someone from the BBC would Google like Twitch and be like, what is this crazy thing that everyone on Reddit is talking about? They would like have some context. The other thing is like, we didn't come up with the idea for a Twitch. Right? That was like fortuitous.

But we helped like give it legs by, you know, making the company available to talk to the reporters and suggesting follow-up stories about like, you know, there were stories not just about Twitch Plays Pokemon because a hundred thousand people were watching this Pokemon game, but because you know, it finally, like, there were stories when they beat the game.

And there were stories when they launched Twitch Plays Pokemon, you know, Crystal or whatever the next Pokemon version was. And like, so we kind of gave that story like a little bit more legs. But we didn't, you know, originate it. It was the community really who, who originated it. Alright. I think that's it. Thank you very much.