
Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing - bjenik
http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec04/#
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soneca
I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than
the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we
are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out
of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so
basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake.

Underestimating this initial process, taking it for granted, we create the
perfect environment to trick ourselves in not doing it. We might tell
ourselves that our product is a SaaS for a very specific crown that we can
only find online, and there is no street fair or postal office where we can
find them. We might tell ourselves that a $100 Facebook Ads campaign is good
for testing our assumptions. Or that is not necessary to get really immersed
on our industry, because we already know what is wrong and how to solve.

These are all little lies that convince ourselves that our particular context
is different. Sure it is. Sure you might not find your customers on the
streets, but that is no excuse to not talk online to your customers, be
constant presence on a forum, and arrange meetings with those who happens to
be on your city.

Most of advice for startups out there are for those who already have some
traction, a few employees. So people might skip the skills and attitude
necessary to go from 0 to 100 users or customers. This is the perfect lecture
for this crowd.

~~~
clairity
this lecture definitely has the most practical advice so far (not that the
others weren't good as well).

adora also spoke at the female founders conference
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eP3-ra8nZY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eP3-ra8nZY))
and her story about her and her brother's persistence in systematically
climbing the learning curve of product/market fit was one of the most
memorable. you can tell that she was speaking from real, hard-earned
experience for each of the lessons she related in this lecture.

and i love that she threw in a basketball reference, even though you don't
usually just throw the ball around. =)

~~~
rajensanghvi
agree on the basketball reference, the analogy definitely made it easy to
understand

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rajensanghvi
30 Quotes from the Adora Cheung's lecture here: [https://medium.com/how-to-
start-a-startup/30-quotes-from-ado...](https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-
startup/30-quotes-from-adora-cheung-on-building-product-talking-to-users-and-
growing-99be820b6ad7)

One reason why I think this lecture probably hasn't generated as many
comments/upvotes is because there may have been too many topics put into just
1 lecture. I think it may have been more effective if the content was split
out into maybe 2 or 3 separate lectures that went into a bit more depth like..
-Building a product (covering the MVP, the decision process around what
features are most important and what's not, etc) \- Customer
Development/talking to users (the environment to interview them, types of
questions to ask them, types not to ask,etc) \- Growth (different types of
growth, what Homejoy focused on at each stage, potential challenges they went
through etc)

I recognize that since it's a Stanford course, they are probably capped with
the amount of time they have during the semester as well.

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howradical
Timestamped notes: [https://timelined.com/how-to-start-a-
startup/lecture-4-how-t...](https://timelined.com/how-to-start-a-
startup/lecture-4-how-to-start-a-startup)

------
xiaoma
The interesting thing to me is that the "n00b approach" is basically what
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and friends did at Paypal.

 _1\. build product in secret

2\. exclusive press launch

3\. wait for users

4\. buy users

5\. give up_

They built the product in secret and raised money. They did a huge press
launch "beaming" money from PDA to PDA. They waited for users, expecting Palm
Pilots to be huge only to see they weren't. They decided to focus on eBay
sellers and literally _bought_ users for $20 each. The difference is they
didn't give up.

Palantir and Space X also started by building products in secret, press
launches and then lengthy sales cycles to get users. Ditto for Apple's
"restart" in the late 90s and early 2000s. Maybe a relentless n00b approach is
the way to build more transformative products and companies.

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jonalmeida
Notes: [http://jonalmeida.com/posts/2014/10/01/htsas-
lec04/](http://jonalmeida.com/posts/2014/10/01/htsas-lec04/)

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jaoued
I would love to know how many sign-ups and customer appointments did Homejoy
get after this lecture, across the 5 countries it covers. Am sure the ROI on
this 50 minutes lecture will give more sign-ups than any FB or google ad
campaign :-). What a cunning way to grow!

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akbar501
Adora's talk was very well done. Her use of metrics and graphs to explain
various parts of a startup's life was valuable. Frankly, each type of company
she discussed (B2B, consumer, etc) could be expanded into their own talks.

One point that rang true was when she said that you may hit a point where the
economics of a specific business don't make sense. IME, the economics of a
business often look one way before you start, but become increasingly real as
you gain early experience with the business. I'm not sure if she was trying to
hint that a pivot discussion needs to happen after the real economics of an
idea become known, but that's what I got from this point.

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prostoalex
The reasoning behind the ad campaign is that if the ad price multiplied by
conversion is below LTV, it's worth it.

This seems to be fine in a market with few other competitors, but in heavily
contested categories (e.g., SaaS) shouldn't you be multiplying that by
customer churn? Seems a bit presumptions to assume that once a customer signs
up, they're going to spend 100% of assumed LTV with you and you only.

~~~
mdda
LTV normally incorporates churn as part of the calculation. If it didn't then
unless you have a time-value-of-money discount in there, the LTV of a customer
would be infinite. Perhaps you're positing that the LTV refers to the actual
physical Lifetime of a customer - but, statistically, that just turns into a
churnrate too (sad to say, even 100% of a consumer's lifetime is more than a
0.5% churn rate spread across the whole population).

~~~
prostoalex
Thanks for the clarification, makes sense.

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kartikkumar
I finally got around to watching the fourth lecture and I have to say, this
has been the best of the lot so far! The preceding classes have come across to
me as a collection of (humorous) soundbites. This class felt much more
relatable and, as much as a lot of it could be cast as common sense, it was a
fantastic synopsis of what works in reality.

Definitely going to rewatch this lecture soon!

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randomsearch
Loving these lectures so far. Anyone involved in or thinking about a startup
should watch them. The recommended reading is also excellent.

MOOCs are notorious for fast drop-off in the size of their engaged audience.
It will be interesting to see if the same applies to this lecture series (I
realise it's not a MOOC!). Perhaps this explains the reduced number of
comments.

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andrewchambers
This girl seems like a cool person. I originally didn't watch this because she
wasn't "famous". But personally I found this one of the more inspiring talks
after watching it.

