Office Hours With Paul Graham At TC Disrupt
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
PG:You don’t know where people are going unless you expect them to tell you all the time. You have to find a subset of people who super-want to talk to one another. Enough to seek out and sign up for something they aren’t using. If I were you i’d stat over. You’ve spent 60 days on this. Plenty of companies start over after 60 days. The very best startups solve problems that founders themselves have. What is the worst problem in my life.
First idea that popped into my head: frequent fliers who like to sleep around and/or cheat on their spouses. If you're always on the go, away from home (for better or worse), an app connecting like-minded people easily might have a viable group of customers. Basically, a mobile/geo version of AdultFriendFinder.com. Want to share a hotel room to fool around in, and save some money by doubling up? Stranded out of town with nothing to do? Etc...
People will go out of their way for sex, including logging into an app and planning ahead. The question is, how big is the customer base, and what are they willing to pay? Do you end up with too many men and not enough women? Perhaps it's different between W4M, M4W, M4M, W4W.
Mentioning user checkin counts and or active users in the airport would prompt interest. If people are comfortable with creating their own profiles that are publicly available you can then scan to see if someone's in your line of work or interests.
Bonus points if you could create groups so that people coagulate and increase the comfort of meeting people knowing that everyone is a stranger and it buffers you from weirdos as it's more likely some people are normal/interesting/cool.
Just my two cents.
Of course in order to make this happen you'd probably need to build a general-purpose "meet people with common interests" app, just to provide some plausible deniability (either to others, or to one's own self). "Oh no, that's not a random gay sex app, I just like to meet other... model railroad enthusiasts..."
One more thing: by the time you've done all this, there's no point in restricting it to airports, is there?
called "GRINDR".
You might be able to partner with local hotels and/or restaurants and offer discounts for couples who use the app. But you need to to structure it so the "free meal" voucher thing goes to a woman, but she can only use it if she goes with another person.
It might alienate the M4M market though.
They have solved the chicken-egg problem in a very clever way, by mining the web for info about people you'd like to meet, who are where you are, and who don't necessarily use the service. "Sonar is useful even if no one else is on Sonar".
Presentation by Sonar's founder here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/arrington-sonar-which-took-...
(I understand that you're talking about a way to use Flytivity for sex, but you could certainly use Sonar in this way too).
Flytivity is less like Sonar in that frequent flyers will share their travel itinerary before they travel, through the portal or most likely through TripIt. Flytivity pushes profiles of other business people that they might want to connect with in the airport, at the conference or traveling to that city via email the day before you travel; from there they can see how their connected (via linkedin (1st, 2nd 3rd level) or twitter) as well as other commonalities they might have with someone totally unconnected. You will also be able to initiate direct message right from the email.
Within the app the user can build a trip, check out who they might meet on future trips, see who's in town on a current trip as well as post in the city/conference forum about events.
With 460 million business trips on the books for this year, Flytivity was created with the business class traveler in mind. We know status and upgrades are important. We know you don't want to talk to just anyone, which is why you talk to no one. We also know that one face to face meeting can grow your business or career. We want to help make that happen.
If that's the real problem you're trying to solve, it seems sites like LetsLunch.com do a better job of this, partially b/c they don't have to deal with the artificial constraint of having people be in transit somewhere.
2 minutes into his first "office hour" and all of my doubts are out the window. pg really does know what he's doing. He asks questions that seem blatantly obvious, yet nobody else seems to be asking them. He doesn't let something go if he wants to know more - he keeps nagging. He understands how markets work and where people spend money, but also has the technological know-how. I am thoroughly impressed, and can't wait to gather his insight for the next 42 minutes of this video.
1. Who is gonna want to use this?
and
2. Yeah, but really, who is gonna want to use this?
A lot of ideas seem pretty half-baked. You sit there in front of a TV, you're not so sure exactly what you're watching, and you suddenly think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could point your iPhone at the TV and find out what you're watching?" And the answer is: yeah, sorta, kinda, occasionally, but multiply the number of people who want such a thing by the frequency with which they want such a thing by the amount they really care and you're looking at a pretty darn low care factor.
I don't care what anyone says about how ideas are cheap and implementation is hard. Good ideas are hard. That narrow Venn diagram overlap between "problems that people really want to solve" and "problems that are actually possible to solve" is really small.
This entire clip gave me massive flashbacks to sessions with my PhD supervisor. His manner is incredibly similar as well.
Yeah, that video does make it clear how good pg is at pointing out important stuff and asking pertinent questions. The only thing that struck me as a little dodgy, was his tendency to ask a question, then cut the other person off before they had barely started answering. I mean, I understand that he wants to cut to the chase in the interest of time, and that some people will ramble if you don't cut them off... but a couple of times that I found myself thinking that the conversation would have flowed more smoothly if he'd let the other person continue an existing train of thought a little further.
But his methods seem to work, so who am I to quibble? :-)
And to be fair to pg and everyone, that was a fairly unique situation... doing office hours on stage in front of all those people, etc.
At one point in a previous life, I had a chance to get coaching from one of the very top screenwriters in Hollywood on pitching a particular movie idea. That conversation was very much like these office hours, down to the guy's demeanor. But what the writer kept asking us over and over, in several different ways was this "Yeah, but what is it about your idea that's cool enough that people will want to see it?" He kept poking and poking at it. Reminded me of pg in this video a lot.
Then Paul jumped right to the "is this a penny auction site?" question and nailed it. I wonder if he hears from people running that angle a lot…
Also, I think from now on when someone describes how many users they have, my next question will be how many active users per day/week/month?
Fascinating for non-YC folk to see this live.
Our startup is Kongoroo (http://kongoroo.com). If anyone wants to be a mentor to us, we would deeply appreciate it. My email is in my profile. Thanks.
It really is fascinating to see how good PG is at zero-ing on the most essential stuff and asking the tough questions and how genuinely happy (almost excited) he seems when he comes up with a suggestion that the company can use.
Not that I had any doubts about YC before, but it definitely is here to stay.
Edit: I was also surprised at the quality of the startups that he spoke to. I expected wishy-washy 'social media' crap, but these guys seem to be onto something.
For investors, your pitch should include the problem you're trying to solve, the people who have this problem, and your solution.
For pg's office hours, you should strip away all that marketing talk and just say what it is in it's most barest technical essentials.
For pg's office hours, you should strip away all the buzz words and describe your business (customer, market, etc) in words someone outside of this industry would understand.
Basically, I got the feeling he was trying to pare away buzz words.
It took us two office hours to get this! In the beginning of our second, he asked us straight out -- "wait, stop selling me. What's the problem you're trying to solve here?"
Going with six ears helped too -- we'd always debrief after the office hours, and talk about what he said, and none of us had the full picture. The dude talks fast and covers a lot of ground!
-- Devoted PG fan
I take this issue very seriously because I just took some MBA classes regarding human resources. At a very basic level, this idea is designed to let potential employers prejudice potential hires. Job candidates are legally protected from this specific idea in the same way they're protected from job application questions like race, age, nationality, and other questions that are not directly job-related. In so many words, if the candidate is qualified for the job, the hiring manager doesn't legally get a choice as to whether he likes the way the candidate looks.
How is the person who was declined for the job even going to know they were discriminated against? Hiring discrimination goes on all the time. I am doubtful that VidAppy makes this any easier for hiring managers to do.
What every entrepreneur should do should be to build a "virtual PG" in their head (the way writers pretend to write to one person they actually know, and not in general).
Also, there is great potential for a fascinating reality TV show.
Instead of watching people eating bugs in Guatemala, how captivating would it be to follow a few startups going from nothing to world domination, their doubts, failures and successes, etc., and see how they're coached and what they learn along the way?
I would pay to watch such a show.
...so who wants to do it? I'm down.
Update: I checked IntoNow and this is what they say:
"IntoNow, which is based our patented platform SoundPrint, analyzes the ambient audio being generated from your television in three-second increments. The audio is then converted into a “fingerprint”—basically, the show’s unique signature for ID—that is matched on the back-end to our reference set (which covers 130 channels of live broadcasting and has more than five years history). Once we make a match, we return all the metadata associated with that show and episode—things like title, description, cast, and associate links. This all happens in seconds."
So it actually uses the audio, which is much better, although I watch a lot of TV with CC in bed.
The only hard part would be convincing shows and companies to participate. They have incentive but I imagine they'd want to see numbers in regards to cost vs viewer acquisition, or perhaps loyalty. Pretty interesting stuff..
Getglue has appeared in my feeds with increasing frequency over the past month. Admittedly, most of my friends are entertainment industry types and so predisposed, but it's been coming up much more often.
GRAPH DATABASE
So who uses it?
So it's for ___ ?
Can you give me an example, of all the people in the world, who needs you the most right now? Like what problem needs you the most right now?
Who has trouble with this problem now? Who wants to do ___ that would otherwise have problems with doing ___ ?
Is the ___ (latency) going to be a problem?
Is there anyone who has said yes? Is there anyone who wants to use this software?
Why do they need you? What's special about you?
Are any of these people ready to pay you yet?
So they want to pay you because they need the product this much?
If they want to pay you, are they paying you? You never know if they are serious until you try to get [their money.]
[Money] will really impress investors. It's not so much that they care about the money. They care about money as evidence that people really want what you are building.
Who is going to use your ___ in production first? Cuz you won't really know if it's good until they are using it... good in the sense of helping them out. This is going to be a combination of how desperately they need you and how quickly they make decisions.
Find out who the users to use you first are and figure out the types of problems they are solving and describe yourself as solving those problems.
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VID APPY
How do they ____ (hire people now) now?
Is the problem that ___ (walk-in's don't scale)? (what is the problem with the current alternative.)
So how do you know ___ (what questions to ask)? (the tough part of the new solution that you hope to offer)
It's good for the end user too (people applying too.)
What's hard about what you're trying to do is ___ (establish a marketplace).
Which one is the harder quantity to get? (the retailers or the job applicants?)
Is this thing launched yet?
Maybe the way you get this started is ___ (go to a big retailer and tell them to tell their applicants to go to this url).
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DATA CURIOUS
Who needs it?
How are they going to use it? (On the fly report generation or prepared reports)
What do you think is going to be the most common ____ (query) that people will do?
I worry that this won't have a big enough gravity well to stay up in the top of people's heads. This is the sort of thing people would do occasionally and never come back.
If someone were to come back over and over, what ____ (queries) would they be doing (or running) over and over?
I wonder how many ___ (investors) that into ___ that are going to come back over and over again.
I worry that you're not going to be able to find enough (users who will want to use your solution over and over again.)
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TV TECH
So how?
Where is that going to be most used? Like if you imagine a year from now and you've launched, you're successful and people are using this a lot... everyone who has a business like that can say the biggest single case of people using this is for ___. So what is going to be the biggest single case of people using this?
You're going to decide what to show when I click on the stuff. (You're making assumptions on what they want when even they might not know what they want.) What if it's wrong?
I would test this on some actual people a lot. See if you can get them to the point where they won't ___ (watch TV) without this. Unless you can make it stick on them, it's not going to stick on other people.
You have the underlying technology to do ___. This doesn't have to be how you use it. There could be other ways to use it besides ___ (this thing that every consumer is clicking on).
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FLYITIVITY
How do you beat the chicken and egg problem? The way to beat a chicken and egg problem is to find a tiny subset of the market that is small but much more driven than normal.
I don't feel like ___ (airports) is the secret because they don't all want to solve this problem.
You have to find a subset of people really want to ___ ... enough to want to seek out and try this new thing that they are not already using.
What is the worst problem in your life?
If this really honestly is one of the biggest problems in your life than maybe you're not the only one.
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LUCKY CHIC
What do you do for them once they get to your site?
When a typical user shows up on your site, what do they see and what do they do?
What is the most common thing users do?
What's the biggest driver of traffic?
So far the one that they use is the ___ (penny auction)?
Can you grow while breaking even?
In a given day, how many people use it? Do they return?
What's the growth rate like?
You should figure out, what are you seeing people do or wanting to do among your existing users that you're not really suited for yet or that no one really gives them. Is there anything?
We ask ourselves all those pg questions. Get answers.
pg's question for finding a market need: "What is the worst problem in my life?"
Although I think Paul should've polled the audience on some of the ideas to see who would be interested. Especially the airport guy. It's not what normally happens during office hours. But hey, why not take advantage of the situation?
Not only great at shooting down leaky abstractions, understanding different customers but also at being non-judgemental - a rare combination.
People will seek out something they desperately need
One mechanism to evaluate opportunity appeal: f(how bad they need you, how fast they move)
Vacation Discovery....like StumbleUpon, but shows awesome places you can go within a certain budget..
maybe categories "Castles" "East Asia" "Tropical" "Waterfalls" "Jungles" "Deserts"
It would have to be:
1) Very picture-oriented, so you can fantasize and browse (escapism)
2) Able to filter by price easily, and include airfare
Good business model, fun to use, win win win.
I wonder what the economics of travel commissions are... If you get 5% of whatever it costs to book a vacation... and people are booking $1000 vacations ... that's $50.
And assume that 1% of visitors who visit the site end up using us to book a vacation thats 50 cents a user.
And I think you can target YUPpies on Facebook for around that
Of course, if the product's design is really compelling (crucial), it will be social/viral, people will use it when they're bored.
Commission rates depend on exactly what part of the travel industry you are going for. Hotels pay ~7%, coach holidays pay ~4%, car hire can go as low as 2%.