So today I am going to be talking about how to go

from zero users to many users.

I'm just assuming that you have many great ideas in

your head at this moment and

you're kind of thinking about what the next step is.

So I wrote this up early this morning,

and a lot of this is based off of mistakes I've

made in the past.

So as Sam mentioned, I went through YC in 2010 and

spent a number, three years basically, going back and

forth pivoting a bunch of times,

starting over a bunch of times.

And have learned a lot about what not to do if I

were to start another startup after Homejoy if

that should ever happen.

And so a lot of it comes from failure and

just telling you about what you shouldn't do and kind of

making generalizations of what you should do

from that.

So just a reminder that this is,

sort of, you know, all advice you should take as

directionally good guidance, like if all,

like it's, it's kind of in the right direction.

But every business is different,

you are different, I'm not you, and so

just take everything with, you know, that in mind.

So since this is a college course, you know,

when you start a startup you should basically have lots

of time on your hands to concentrate on the start up.

And I'm not saying you should you know,

quit school or you should quit work.

What I'm saying is you should have a lot of time,

compressed time in a row.

Really dedicated to immersing yourself in

the idea and developing problems, or developing

the solutions to the problem you're trying to solve.

So for example if you're in school, you know,

it's better to have one or

two days straight of per week on working on your idea

versus you know, spending two hours here and there

every single day during the course of the week.

It's sort of like, I think this is an engineering class

so it's sort of like coding.

Like there's a lot of context switching and

just being able to really focus, really, really focus

and immerse yourself is very very important.

So, like I said, I sort of first,

when I wrote this up was thinking what

are things that some people do or most people do that is

not the correct way to do a startup and sort of

the novice approach I think is what you see up here.

Which is, you know, I have this really great idea.

I don't wanna tell anyone about it.

I'm gonna build, build, build, build.

I'm gonna be telling one or

two people and then I'm gonna launch it on,

you know, I'm gonna launch it on TechCrunch or some,

somewhere like that, then I'm gonna get lots of users.

But what really happens is because you did not

get a lot of that feedback and stuff like that,

you know maybe you get a lot of people to your site,

but no one sticks around because you didn't get

that initial user feedback.

And then, you know, if you,

you know, if lucky enough you have some money in

the bank you might go buy some users but sort of,

it just whittles out over time and you just give up.

This is sort of a vicious cycle and

you know, I actually did this once, and

I did this while I was in YC,

and that was you know like, when I went through YC I

didn't even launch a product,

like I didn't even launch in TechCrunch which is a thing

you should definitely do.

And so you don't want to ever get into that

cycle because you'll just end up with nothing good.

So, the next thing is you know, you have an idea and

you should really think about what the idea

is really solving.

Like what is the actual problem?

And so their problem statements you should be

able to describe it in one sentence.

And then you should think,

how does that problem relate to me?

Am I really passionate about that problem?

And then you should think, okay, it's a problem I have,

is it a problem that other people have?

And sort of verify that by, you know, just going out and

talking to people.

One of the biggest mistakes I've made is you know,

we started, my co-founder and I,

who is also my brother, he and

I started a company called Pathjoy in 2009, 2010.

And our goal was basically to you know,

we had two goals in mind one is to create a company that

made people really happy, and create a company that

was very, very impactful, so a good proxy for

that is to just create a huge, big company.

And so we thought, okay,

here's sort of what we're gonna solve is you know,

make people happier, and we first went to the notion of

who are the people that made people happy?

And you know,

we came up with life coaches and therapists.

So it seemed kind of obvious to

just create a platform for life coaches and therapists.

And what happened as a result though was that you

know, when we started using the product ourselves we,

you know, we're not cynical people by any means,

but life coaches and therapists are just not

people we would use ourselves.

It was sort of useless to us.

And so, it wasn't even a problem we had, and

certainly wasn't something we

were super passionate about building out.

Yet we spent, you know,

almost a year trying to do this.

And so, if you just start, you know,

from tegel zero, just like think about this before you

even build any product.

I think you can save yourself a lot of

headache down the road

from doing something you don't wanna do.

So, say you have a problem and you're able to state it.

Where do you start?

Like, how do you think of solutions?

So the first thing you should do is think of

what the industry that you are getting yourself into.

Whether it's big, whether it's huge,

you should really immerse yourself in that industry.

There's a number of ways to do this.

One is, you know, to really become a cog in

that industry for a little bit.

And so it might seem a little counter-intuitive to

do this, because most people say, you know,

if you really wanna disrupt an industry, you

should really not be this, you know, player in it.

You should, you know, someone who spent 20 or

30 years in an industry probably you know, is set in

their ways and is just used to the way things work and

really can't think about what the inefficiencies are

or the things that you can, quote, unquote, disrupt.

But, however as a noob like coming into the industry,

you really should take one or

two months just really understanding what all

the little bits and pieces of the industry are, and how

it works because it's when you get into the details,

that's when you start seeing things you can exploit.

Things you can really, things that are really,

really inefficient and provide you know huge

overhead costs that you can cut down.

And, so an example of this is, you know,

when we start Homejoy and we, we decided to go,

we started with the cleaning industry and when we

started, you know, we just were cleaners ourselves.

And we started to clean houses and

we found out really quickly was that

we were very bad cleaners.

And so as a result, you know, we said, okay, we

got to learn more about this and we went to buy books.

And we bought books about how to clean,

which helped maybe a little bit,

we learned a little bit more about cleaning supplies.

But it's sort of like basketball you know,

you can watch and you can learn,

or you can watch and you can read about basketball, but

you're not gonna get any better at

it if you don't actually you know, train and you know,

throw a basketball around and throw it into the hoop.

And so we decided one of us basically had to go and

learn how to clean.

And so we went or

get trained by you know, a professional, some sort of

a professional training programs that existed.

And that meant, we actually went to get a job at

a cleaning company itself.

And the cool thing was that you know, I learned how to

clean from you know, training for the few weeks

that I was there at the cleaning company.

But the even better thing was that I learned a lot

about how a local cleaning company worked.

And in that sense you know, I learned why a local

cleaning company could not become huge like Homejoy is

today and that's because they have, you know,

they're pretty old school and

they have a lot of things, just from anywhere from

booking the customer to optimizing the cleaner

schedules was just done very inefficiently.

And so there is, so, if you are in a situation like mine

where you know, there's a service element to it,

you should go and do that service yourself.

You know, if your thing is related to restaurants you

should become a waiter it's really to you know,

if it's painting you know become a painter kind of

get in the shoes of your customers from all angles of

what you're trying to build.

The other thing is there's also levels of obsessiveness

that you should have with it too as well.

You should be so obsessed to know what everybody in

the space is doing.

And it's things like, you know,

running a list of all the potential competitors or

similar types of companies, Google searching it, and

clicking on every single link and

reading every single article from like,

search result 1 to 1,000.

You know, I found all potential competitors,

big and small, and

if they're public, I would go read their S1's,

I would go read all their quarterly financials,

I would, you know, sit on the earnings calls.

There's, you know, most of these you don't get much out

of it, but there's just these golden nuggets that

you'll find once in a while and you can't,

you won't be able to find that unless you

actually go through the work of,

you know, getting all that information in your head.

So yeah, you should become an expert in the industry.

There should be no doubt when you're building this

that you are the expert so that people will trust you

when you're building this product.

The second thing is

identifying customer segments.

So you know, ideally at the end of the day,

in the end game, you built a product or

a business that everybody in the world is using.

But realistically in the beginning you kind of

want to corner off a certain part of the customer base so

that you can really optimize for them, and that's just

you know, it's just about a matter of focus and a matter

of you know, just catering towards whether it's

teenage girls or whether it's you know, soccer moms.

You would just be able to you know,

like I said focus a lot on their needs.

And, lastly before before you even create the product,

before you put code down, you should really storyboard

out the ideal user experience of how you're,

how you're gonna solve the problem.