By personally visiting and interacting with their hosts, the founders of the company disguised as hired photographers for Airbnb were able to gather valuable insights about customer challenges and product usage. This hands-on approach enabled them to discover issues such as UI bugs and functionality problems that they wouldn't have recognized just by being in front of a computer. Despite the impracticality of scaling such interactions to all customers, the in-person visits provided invaluable knowledge that improved their product and customer experience.
We've cut down the fourth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First a lecture from Kat Manalac. Kat is a partner at YC. Her lecture focuses on how startups should think about launching and why you should do it repeatedly.
Then a lecture from Gustaf Alströmer. Gustaf is also a partner at YC and in his lecture he covers how to measure product market fit and growth channels.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
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Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Kat Mañalac - How to Launch (Again and Again)
1:51 - Ways to launch
2:14 - Why launch continuously?
3:15 - Silent launch
4:25 - Friends & Family
5:40 - Strangers
7:03 - Online communities
12:08 - Request access
13:29 - Social media
15:13 - Pre-order
16:13 - New Product or Feature
17:42 - Build your own community
19:20 - Launching isn't one moment in time
19:48 - Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups
21:06 - Most startups have nothing
22:13 - Do things that don't scale
27:13 - Startups take off because founders make them take off
28:23 - Measuring product market fit
31:20 - Retention
34:33 - Worse ways to measure product market fit
35:23 - Bad metrics to measure as product market fit
36:18 - Growth channels and tactics
38:17 - Conversion rate optimization
41:26 - Growth channels to explore
45:33 - Referrals and vitality
48:05 - Paid growth
50:09 - Search Engine Optimization
53:00 - Making decisions using A/B testing
55:02 - Summary