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

**Author:** Stanley Tang, Walker Williams, Justin Kan
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JL-how-to-start-a-startup-getting-started-getting-press-and-doing-things-that-don-t-scale
**YouTube ID:** oQOC-qy-GDY

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This lecture features three expert speakers:

  - Stanley Tang, co-founder of Doordash, covers how to get started
  - Walker Williams, co-founder of Teespring, covers doing things that don't scale.
  - Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch and former partner at Y Combinator, covers getting press.

## Transcript

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Sam.
I'm Stanley. I'm the founder of DoorDash
and it's really amazing to be here because it wasn't
actually that long ago where I sat in your seats I
was class of 2014. Graduated in CS, as well as
my co-founder, Andy. And, for those of you who
don't know what Doordash is, we're building an on-demand
delivery network for local cities. And I wanna start off with
this photo that I took just a few months ago,
and I think

this was the night when we
just raised our series A. And I took this photo as I
was walking back to where I lived. I actually lived in Robly at
the time, on campus. And, I took this photo
because I realized just how ridiculous the combinations
of things I was holding in my hand at that time, and I was holding my CS 247
homework. And then, I had my tax
forms, since it was April and I had
to fill out taxes. And then also that yellow
speeding ticket, and then right below that
was a $15 million

dollar piece of paper I just
signed from Sequoia. And that kind of summarizes
just how ridiculous our journey has been, you know,
starting at Stanford. Doing this while I was at
Stanford, and then transitioning this into
an actual startup, and I want to share that story
with you today. It all began two years ago,
actually, in a macaron store, it was
my junior year at Stanford. This was fall quarter, and at that time, I was really
passionate about, you know,

how do you build technology
for small business owners? And I sat down Chloe, the
owner of, you know, Chantal Guillon, a macaron store in Palo Alto
at that time. Just interviewing her, you
know, trying to get feedback on
this product prototype we'd been working on. And also just learning
about, you know, what her problems
were in general. And it was during this
meeting when Chloe first brought up this problem of
delivery. You know, I remember she
took out this really, really thick booklet. And she showed me pages and
pages of delivery orders.

And a lot of these orders
she had to turn down because there's no way she could
have fulfilled them, as she had no drivers and
she was the one who ended up having to personally deliver
all these orders. And that was a very
interesting moment for us. And then we felt next, over
the next course of, over the course of the next
few weeks, we talked to, you know, around another
150, 200 small business owners,
and when we brought up this idea of delivery, they
kept, you know, they kept, you know, agreeing with us,
saying yeah,

this is a really big problem
for us, you know. We don't have a delivery
infrastructure. It's such a huge pain for
us. There's not any good
solutions out there. And which led us to wonder,
you know, delivery is such a common
thing. You know, it's such an
obvious thing. Why hasn't anyone solved
this before, right? Like, we must be missing
something here. So, we thought maybe because
people have tried this in the past, right. But they failed because
there wasn't consumer demand for this. So we thought, okay, how can
we test this hypothesis? You know, we were just a
bunch of college kids at

that time. You know, we didn't own
trucks or delivery infrastructures, or
anything like that, right. We can't just spin up a
delivery company overnight. So, how can we test this
assumption we had? So we decided to create a
simple experiment with restaurant delivery. We spent about an afternoon
just putting together a really quick
landing page. And, when I went on the
internet, I found some PDF menus of,
you know, restaurants in Palo Alto
stuck it up there and

then had a phone number at
the bottom, and which was our personal phone
number, actually. And that was it, we put up
the landing page, we called it
PaloAltoDelivery.com. And this is actually what it
looked like. You know, super, super, you
know, simple, ugly, like honestly, we weren't
really expecting anything. We just launched it. And all we wanted to see
was, you know, would we get phone calls
from this? And if we got enough phone
calls, then maybe

this delivery idea was
something worth pursuing. So we put it up there, we weren't really expecting
anything, and we were driving back home. And all of a sudden we got a
phone call, you know? Someone called, they wanted
to order Thai food. And we're like, oh wow, this
is a real order. Like, you know, we have to do something
about it, right? So, so we were in our cars,
and we're, like, okay, like, we're not doing
anything right now. Might as well just, let's
just swing by, you know, Siam Royal, pick up some Pad
Thai and

let's just deliver it to
this person, and let's try to learn how this
whole delivery thing works. And we did.
We delivered to this guy up in
Alpine Road. I remember, he told us, I
was asking, oh, how did you hear about us? What do you do? And he told us he was a
scholar. And then he handed me his
business card, and it said he was the author of a
book called Weed the People. And that was like our first
ever delivery, right? It was like the best
delivery, first delivery/worst delivery you
could have asked for.

You couldn't make this stuff
up. And, again, in the next day, we got, you know, two more
phone calls. But yet, the day after that,
we got five, and then it became seven, and
then it became ten. And then, soon, we started
gaining traction on campus with paloaltodelivery.com
which was pretty crazy. Because think about it, right, this was a landing
page. You have to look up PDF
menus to place your order, and they have to call in. This isn't exactly the most
professional looking site,

yet people were still, we
kept getting phone calls. We kept getting orders. And, that's kind of we knew
we were on to something, when people were willing. All right.
We knew we found a need people
wanted, when people are willing to
put up with all this. So I think another key point
to remember is we launched this in about an
hour, right. Like we didn't spend, you
know. We didn't have any drivers. We didn't have any
algorithms. We didn't spend, you know.

We didn't have a back-end. We didn't spend 6 months building like a fancy
dispatch system. We didn't have any of that. We just launched. Because at the beginning, none of that is necessary,
right? At the beginning, it's all
about testing your idea, trying to get this thing off
the ground. And figuring out whether
this was something people even
wanted. And it's okay to hack things
together at the beginning. At YC there's a mantra, we
like to talk about is doing things
that don't scale. So at the beginning we were
the delivery drivers.

Now, we would, you know, go
to class and then after class we'll go,
you know, deliver food. We were the, you know,
custom support. Like, I sometimes had to take phone calls during
lecture. We spent afternoons just
going down University Avenue passing out flyers about,
kinda promote DoorDash. I mean, we didn't have any
dispatch systems. So what we had to do was,
you know, we used Square to charge all
of our customers. We used Google Docs to keep
track of our orders.

we used Apple's Find My
Friends to keep track of where all of our drivers
were. You know, stuff like that. Just figuring out like
what's, just hacking together
solutions, just trying to get this
thing off the ground. In fact, at one point we
were growing so fast that Square actually shut our
account down because we were under suspicions for
money laundering. >> Think about it, we were
getting small chunks of like $15, $20 orders coming
in at a rapid pace. It was, yeah. Luckily, my co-founder Tony
worked at Square, so he just

e-mailed some buddies there
and everything was solved. >> Yeah, and another thing
about doing things that don't scale, is
that it also allows you to become an expert in your
business. Right?
Like driving, helps us understand how the
delivery process worked, you know. We used that as an
opportunity to talk to customers, talk to our
restaurants. We did dispatching which
helped us figure out, you know, how we manually
dispatched every driver.

And that helped us figure
out, you know, what our driver assignment
algorithm should look like. We did customer support
ourselves, you know? Getting real time feedback
from our customers. I remember, you know, for the first few months when we
got started, we would manually e-mail
every single one of our new customers. And at the end of every
night, and just asking them oh, how was your first delivery,
how did you hear about us? And we would personalize all
these e-mails, right? Like if I see someone order
chicken skewers from

Oren's Hummus, I would say
oh, like, I love Oren's hummus. You know, how were your
chicken skewers? How did the first delivery
went? You know, just feedback like
that was really valuable and customers really, really
appreciated that. And I remember one time, this is during YC, we were
out of, we just came out of a meeting with one of our
restaurant partners, and, you know, we wanted, we
heard about this ice

cream store that just opened
up, you know, on University Avenue, called
Cream, and we wanted to go try it out. And then, all of a sudden,
our co founder back at our, you know, office/house
texted us saying, oh we need drivers on the road, we, we
got a huge spike and demand. So we debated for maybe, you
know, ten seconds like should we
go get ice cream or should we go deliver? Obviously, we went and
delivered. But that kinda became our
motivation on, you know, scaling, right. Like if we can scale then,

you could go get ice cream
next time. So yeah, I think that kinda,
and now, of course, we've scaled up
across different cites. Now you have to worry about
building out automated solutions and
dispatch systems, and figuring out how do you
match demand and supply, and all that fancy
technology stuff. But none of that mattered at
the beginning. Because at the beginning, it's all about getting this
thing off the ground and trying to find product
market fit. So, just to summarize.

So the three things I would
say that I learned from doing DoorDash is first,
test your hypothesis, you wanna treat your startup
ideas like experiments. T he second thing is launch
fast. We launched in, you know,
less than an hour, where we released a full
landing page. And finally, it's okay to do
things that don't scale. Doing things that don't
scale is one of your biggest competitive advantages when
you're starting out. And you can figure out how
to scale once you have the
demand. And, maybe once you've
scaled,

then you go get that ice
cream. Thanks. >> Sure. >> How did your first
customer hear about you? >> Yeah.
So the question was, how did our first customer
hear about us? Our very first one, I have
no idea. We just launched
PaloAltodelivery.com. We didn't do any marketing. So I assume he just must
have typed in Palo Alto delivery
into the web browser.

And then after that, we didn't do, we did barely
any marketing. I think I sent out like one
email to my dorm. And that was about it. It was all through word of
mouth and that kind of just validates. You know, just how strong of
a need you found. You know, when people just
start talking about you and they're willing to put up
with all this, you know, terrible user experience,
terrible design, and stuff like that. >> When you started, it
seemed so obvious that you were wondering why no one's
done this. What's your answer now?

With that. >> Yeah, I mean, looking
back, I think, I think the biggest thing is
mobile. The fact that now everyone
has one of those in their pocket. And we kinda saw that trend
and thought, you now, what if you can design, you
know, a delivery system that's entirely based off
mobile, where you don't 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 on demand pool of
independent contractors, and only send orders to them
when they have time. So, that's kind of the, the
insight we had, we, everything was done
through mobile. Yeah. >> Did you know you were
gonna be a startup, or just making some money on a
website, at first? >> Yeah, I mean, at the time
we just wanted, we're all really passionate about
building technology for small business owners.

And honestly, this delivery
things came out of an experiment, right, with
the landing page. Like it was literally an
experiment. We didn't, we weren't
expecting anything and it just took off, and we
went with it. And logistics was always
something we were really passionate about as
well. You know like logistics,
transportation. It was kind of the perfect
fusion of, you know, how do you help small
business owners do delivery? Back there. >> Do you launch the mobile
app first or the website? And how long did it take
from idea to

your first launch? >> Yeah, we started with this landing page right
here. Took us an hour to launch. >> How does DoorDash stand
out in a space filled with and
other companies. >> Yeah, the question was
how does DoorDash stand out among a very competitive
space. 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 just focusing on serving
that demand. So, in the beginning,
competition doesn't really matter when you're getting
started. >> 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 incorporated. >> 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 for us, when we
started door dash it was always like I said
about. Helping small business
owners and figuring out, how do you
service for

any local merchant, whether
you are a Macaron store or a restaurant or a furniture
shop. I mean, that's still our
focus, that's like the long-term
vision. For now we're just focused
on rush on delivery as a way to scale,
but ultimately that's where we
want it end up in. >> Cool. >> Thanks. >> Okay, next is Walker
Williams from Teespring, Teespring at the YC, you're
in Africa?

>> Yeah.
>> I almost rejected them. Sounds like a dumb idea but now they're doing hundreds
of millions of dollars a year of revenue so
very lucky to have him. And Walker's gonna talk also about doing things
non-scale. >> All right. 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
risks, costs or compromise.

Today the company is about
180 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 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
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. 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. Everybody 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 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
2012. When we first got, when we
first launched the business couldn't have looked worse
it took days of meetings. We had to offer free design
and days of revisions back and
forth. We'd have to launch the
product ourselves. We'd have to do the social
media. All the sell like 50 shirts
for a local non-profit, and generate $1,000 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 started to add up and I think something
you have to understand is that 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
paying 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 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, it can mean a number of
thing. Everything from sending 100
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
Standford or Y Combinator. Anything you can do to get
that first user and I really

equate it to pushing a
boulder up a hill and if you think of like a very
sort of smooth hill, when you get started. The incline is the steepest
in those first inches are the hardest and over time as
you get farther and farther. The incline stays out, it
gets easier and hopefully, eventually you
reached 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 most of us those
first users are going to take a lot of a
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 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 if 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 in to a champion
is to delight them with an experience their gonna
remember so something that's unusual or out of the ordinary an
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
tenants of why

combinators talk to users
but 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 products you launch
with, and the features 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 $130-$140,000 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 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 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 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 want 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 that 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
start-ups, 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 has had a
terrible experience on your platform is enough to
reverse the progress of ten 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 there's
examples in the early days where we would mess up
massive orders. We would print the colors
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, it's only a little bit off or it's not completely
wrong it'll be fine. But the reality is you've
just got to bite the bullet and make sure that's it
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 that is that I
mentioned this earlier. But the product you launch
with will almost certainly not be the product that
takes you to scale and so you're job in those early
moments or those early days of a
start-up. Is to progress and iterate
as fast as possible to reach that product that does have
market fit and as engineers you're instinct is gonna be
to build a platform with beautiful clean code that
scales right?

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 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 run the map 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
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 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 on-boarded, 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 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 100? When you're at 100, you
should think about 1,000.

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 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'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 that those
sort of bumps are just speed bumps and speed is so, so
important early. So, the lesson that I've
been learning lately is you want to 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 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'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 start up tee with
Sam. And all proceeds are going
to Watsi. I couldn't miss this
opportunity to sell. So if you guys wanna grab
one of the official tees, 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 So what made you, what convinced you, to
think this is a viable market even with all that's
going on in the world today? Sure. 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 think there's two factors
to it. So first, I completely
agree. From the outside, people
have been telling us that this is a silly idea
since day one. And sort of that 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, you can sort of feel the,
you can sort of feel the wind on your back
where people are adopting the product quickly, the
pain point is clearly there. It's not a met need. So, I would say that
oftentimes great ideas start

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 1,000 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. All right, now we'll have
Justin talk. Justin was the founder of
KeyCo, and then JustinTV,

which Twitch and is now and
he's going to talk about PR. Cool.
Well, while I wait for the 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 how do
you get it. How does it work? It's something, this is kind
of like an abridged version of what we talked
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, you know, journalists out
there like, trying to find the best
stories and really, you know, like,
discover the, 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 want to think about
is who you want to reach and like what's you 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 like you
did as an important company. And it turns out if you
don't have any goals you're not gonna achieve
them. Right?
I mean that's true of pretty much everything and
with press, if you just like, aimlessly
want to be covered, it's not really going to do
anything for your start up. So getting like, in the news
is nice because you can send it to your mom or your, 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 Social Cam, which is a
spin off of Justin TV, it was like an app that was
kind of like video Instagram. And our goal was really to
be known as a video, like Instagram app, and like be thought of in that
context when it was, you know, time to pitch to
our, like Silicon Valley
investors and influencers. And so, we really wanted to
get in, like tech press and

kind of be positioned as
this new, hot social app. With Exec, one of my goals
was a second, like to get customers. So, Exec was like, a cleanings, local cleaning
service and our goal was to get people
in San Francisco to use it. It wasn't like useful to get
the 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 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 was
ESPN for gaming or kind of like a live streaming
community of gamers. And our goal was to with
press was like to reach the gaming industry. Cuz like when we started now
it's like 55 million 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 know as
like a, you know, we were a very nascent small
gaming community. And 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
influences were, so we really targeted industry
trades and game depth logs. Places where like gamers
wanna have games speed, 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, start ups. Those are like product
launches, like you let us launch 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 $1 million seaground, pretty much you
can get that covered. Milestones or metrics like
you've achieved a $1 million dollars a week in revenue,
that one of our, the, the company that bought Exec
just announced that they, they achieved a $1 million
dollars a week in revenue and was covered
pretty widely. Business stories which
generally happen when you're already a successful
company.

Someone like New York Times
or New Yorker, business magazine will wanna cover
the story of your start up. Usually 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 of 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. Cuz they were like, PayPal
was like no, in the news for freezing, you know, like
various developers accounts.

And so that was like, you
know, widely covered. Because it was just so, you know, kinda of an
interesting thing and it really, 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 wanna 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 stuff
like that. So those are like, you know, basically any of those
things can be stories.

One of the things that
people usually don't think about. Is that, like, 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, what you 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, you have incremental feature
release or 2.01, you know, feature release might not be
interesting. Just because you added like,

you know, find your contacts
in Facebook or something. Like you have, 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 wanna
read this? Because what people are, you
know, journalist 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 these doesn't
have to be original. It just has to be like what
I like to call, original enough, right? So you don't wanna be the
second cooler company

To raise $5 million on
Kickstarter, right? That's like. That the first guy gets all
the news. But like if you're there, I think the first video game
console to raise $10 million on
Kickstarter like Ouya was, that was like, it was like
$1 million is 24 hours. That was huge news because
they were kinda like the first in
that category, right? Even though other people
have 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 what are the actual
mechanics of getting a story? This is like pretty
tactical, so what if you want to get
your news in, you know, the press, basically there's
some easy, simple steps. So it's basically, it's,
getting press is like, you 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 you have
to think of a story, right? It's gotta be one of those, probably one of those things
that I listed up before. The second step is, 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've
found is like, you wanna

go to entrepreneurs who were
just written about, like your friends who maybe
started a start up 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 for stories interesting. It's not like you're asking
for interest to investors, or
potential, you know, people that they would wanna
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
answer from someone who they know they thought was interesting
enough to talk 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 their doing to just write about
your news. So, a lot of people,
especially first time entrepreneurs will come and
say, like, Justin I'm watching
this product tomorrow. Like, can you get me in
this, you know, TechCrunch 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 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
up some sort of meeting and you really wanna get the
reporter to, like, invest time and effort
into you. Because they don't, like there's kind of a
sunk-cost fallacy at play. Basically if you, the more time they spend
with you, the more likely they are to like actually
write something. So you, the best thing to do
is to get a face to face meeting. 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 worse 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, like my ideal story and I
will 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 it,
like what I wrote will eventually be translated
into a actual story. And, you know, by preparing
you can actually you know, much more easily control the
conversation and not forget critical things
like, you know, your co-founder, mentioning
your co-founder's name. Or like, what all the features in
your awesome app are.

If it's, I'm doing this on
the phone, I will like, have this 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, they, they
take notes. They're gonna write the
story of this time. And then, the next thing is
like, follow up, like a couple days, or 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 like

maybe if you have like a
video or photos or something you want them to
include screen shots. 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 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, 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. You know. I strongly encourage people
to, like, try it themselves and kind
of 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 it can't
help you know what's interesting
about your company or very,

you know, I've never had
anyone whose been able to tell me what the stories
that I'm producing are. They've only been able to
tell me, you know, like you're you
know, like here's a the, here's a list of reporters
that you might wanna 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. You know, I think we were
spending between $5,000 and $20,000 a month which is
like a very, for various firms that's a lot
for a start up, right?

You should, it's generally. Not a good use of money, I
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
succesful companies. You know, like Google and Facebook, are covered in the
press all the time. But it 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 100, or
200, or 1,000 customers. But it's really not a
scalable user acquisition strategy, so it's something
that's really just like a, you know, a boot strap. 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 whole point about news
is that it's new, and so it's, it's pretty, pretty,
pretty hard, unless your Google, to get covered in
the press like every week, you know, with something.

to, you know, if you decide
it's worth it though, like you do wanna have like
a regular heartbeat of news. So that's like something
where, you know, you're planning out those
types of the, what, your thing about what your
doing, that matches those, you know, maybe seven story
types in the future like, you know, when I was You
know, working primarily on marketing and, and PR, it
would be, I would like, make a schedule on like a
calendar. Have 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 might really want
keep your, you know, contacts fresh. It 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 kind of like, you know,
when, when basically people, you know, you're more likely
to do something for someone you've, like,
already done something for. Yeah, you really, like,
it's, if you just, you know, I would try to establish
good, good relationships with a
couple reporters over time that you can go to to, you
know, break news.

And it, 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, The last thing is like, you know, it's kind of
Golden Rule really, or maybe more like a pay it
forward really applies here. Like, you should really 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, whenever
I'm meeting with reporters,

I 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 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 was a
former TechCruch reporter, just a really, really great
overview that covers a lot of 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 that, it's a. Might be valuable to take a
look at.

Cool, that's, that's
basically it. One question? Just 1?
>> 2, 2. >> 2 que, Okay, 2 questions. Or zero questions. >> When is the right time to
start worrying about press 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
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 where they
first launch their product will encourage them
to get out and just do one TechCrunch story
to, like, get a few people 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. All right, anything else. There. >> It seems like the biggest story
>> Yeah.

>> Great, so like much of a,
how much of a role did you guys actually
play in getting that out
>> so, Twitch, you know, had this
thing called Twitch plays Pokemon where developers set
up like a Pokemon, like Gameboy game that was
controlled by chat, so millions of people would be
typing in A or B, and like. The character would wander,
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 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 twit, 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, and so we kind of gave that story a
little more legs. But we didn't, you know,
originate it. It was the community really
who originated it. All right. I think that's it. Thank you very much.
