Startup School 9: Alex Schultz, How to Grow | Hacker News Reader

Startup School 9: Alex Schultz, How to Grow

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131 pointssama10 comments

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.

mind sharing what you felt were his most valuable new insights? thanks!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Anyone know where I can find the Slideshare?

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

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.

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