SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders 721: 543 Upvotes Got Him on HackerNews Front Page
Jul 15, 2017
21:30
Owen Sadeghpour. A year ago, he was the technical employee or founder at an earlier company and has raised over $50M. Now, he's working at a successful company. He's also got a different project called You Exec.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – Blue Ocean Strategy and How to Win Friends and Influence People
- What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
- Favorite online tool? — Squarespace
- How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-10
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "The older you get the more you realize that human relationships are 50% of your work"
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:05 – Nathan introduces Owen to the show
- 01:46 – You Exec is a community of professionals that are looking to improve their careers or the way they have relationships with people
- 01:57 – You Exec creates incredible resources for free and for paid members
- 02:13 – The paid members have the advantage of more features than the free members
- 02:26 – Paid members pay $4/month
- 02:43 – You Exec also takes insightful books, like The Lean Startup, and summarizes them
- 03:30 – You Exec's content is usually posted on many different channels
- 03:56 – You Exec has a mailing list that people subscribe to
- 04:25 – You Exec used to be something else
- 04:33 – As a technical person, Owen would write technical articles which were posted on Hacker News, a Y-combinator news stream
- 04:43 – Owen's article landed on the front page
- 04:59 – Owen's first article was Google and Facebook Ad Traffic is 90% Useless
- 05:20 – Nathan shares how he found Owen and what piqued his interest in him
- 05:50 – Owen has been a follower of Hacker News
- 06:02 – The first article wasn't intentionally made to blow up
- 06:49 – When Owen submitted the article, it got 30 upvotes only after a few minutes
- 07:03 – The readers were mostly looking at the tools that Owen featured
- 07:16 – By the time Owen got 50-60 points, Owen noticed that it wasn't getting on the front page which was supposed to happen
- 07:27 – Owen got some coffee and after 6 hours, he got tons of emails and the article was on the front page
- 08:20 – Owen's objective in creating the article was to share with engineers that they're wasting their money
- 09:10 – The article got a total of 30K views
- 09:47 – Owen wants people to see You Exec's value; that's why they sign up
- 09:51 – Owen doesn't share You Exec's numbers
- 10:40 – You Exec has around 1k signups on the paid membership
- 11:11 – Owen has Google Analytics on while working so he saw where the referrals are coming from
- 11:56 – The first article still gets around 10 readers a day
- 12:20 – Owen focuses on insights to bring traffic
- 12:50 – Owen is passionate in improving patients' lives
- 13:08 – Owen believes that a media company is great, but his passion lies in helping individuals
- 13:44 – You Exec also pays for resources
- 14:25 – When You Exec pushes out a weekly newsletter, they include references to the creditor
- 14:50 – The article should save You Exec's members hours of work
- 15:25 – You Exec pushes out all the sources of things
- 16:44 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- Create something of value and people will stick with you.
- More and more people are finding ways to shave hours off their workload WITHOUT sacrificing their quality of work.
- Relationships with your colleagues are KEY to having a great work experience.
Resources Mentioned:
- The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
- Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
- Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
- Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
- Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
- Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
- Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives