
Startup School 9: Alex Schultz, How to Grow - sama
https://www.startupschool.org/videos/9
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tobessebot
Really appreciated this one. He obviously repeated some of the key things from
his talk in the last one, but still had very valuable new insights. Can't say
that about all of them, Aaron Levie's talk even had the same joke about
college dropouts in it.

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codelitt
If Levie or Altman end up reading this thread, I have some constructive
criticism: I really think the first 30 minutes of Levie's talk were too much
of a pitch for Box. I don't need to be sold on the company or technology when
I'm learning. Simply stating what it is and how successful it has been grabs
my attention and validates it's worth listening to. I found myself skipping
forward over and over to get to the meat.

I enjoyed the latter half more. I think cutting the pitch down to 5 minutes
and diving deeper into the lessons learned along the way could bring that talk
up a level.

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wonderous
I've watched a number of Schultz's presentations - but this one felt rushed to
me. Really wish he'd clarify a number of the points he made in a followup blog
post instead of suggesting the listener figure out what he meant.

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pilingual
Well maybe other people on HN have something provoking to contribute, so why
not ask your questions here?

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wonderous
Around 19:25 is one time he makes the request for the listener to figure out
what he meant, related material appears to start around 18:15.

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pilingual
Here Alex is specifically talking about retention and not growth. He uses ad
sales as an example and talks about the first 250 days as a snapshot of what
retention looks like. Recall earlier he mentions that if you have a social
network and your retention is 5% it probably isn't going to work out, but if
you have a high end apparel business 5% retention could mean a good business.

The graph he presents has a blue line which demonstrates number of people in
the system (100% today, 0% 250 days ago).

The pink line is the total revenue of everyone using the ad service on the
30/31st day divided by the number of signups 30/31 days ago. If the curve
starts declining, why is it declining? Does the advertiser need to be pinged
with email every week? Etc. So the goal is to make sure the curve asymptotes
early on so you know it is a viable business. You could imagine Facebook
trying to sell apparel with "FACEBOOK" on it and the retention curve would
decline; not a good business.

After this he begins to talk about growth. You can’t have growth without first
identifying product/market fit.

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jkkorn
Anyone know where I can find the Slideshare?

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nvalleysilico
I'll take Google's growth lessons over facebooks, snapchat, myspace any day of
the week.

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s3r3nity
Why? Facebook has been a crazy positive growth story for so long now, and has
> 1.9Bn people on the platform (monthly active users I believe?)

Not saying that FB's growth approach is better than Google's - I'm just not
sure why the dismissal.

