Archive for 2011
When Do You Throw in the Towel On Your Struggling Project?
December 12, 2011|Comments|customer development process, data analysis, startups
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
One of the hardest decisions you have to make, as an entrepreneur, is deciding when to give up on your current struggling project. It’s made especially difficult because you always seem to have an exciting new idea rattling in the back of your head.
The difficulty of the decision is further exacerbatedby:
- Conflicting accounts from previous startups.On the one hand, you hear about how AirBnB struggled for years before finally making it. But, then you also hear how the founders behind Stickybits, after struggling for almost a year, dropped the project and built Turntable.fm.
- Sunk cost. You’ve spent so much time on your current project, can you really walk away now? Do you want to tell your friends and family that you’re, yet again, starting on a new project? Do you want to admit you “failed” again?
- New ideas seem better than they are. Your new idea is in the “informed pessimism” stage. It probably has all sorts of complications you haven’t thought about.
What if you quit right before your startup was about to take off? What if that other idea in your head is your Turntable.fm?
You Need a Framework
With such an emotional decision, it’s best to try to be as systematic and rational about it as possible.
The key to making this decision comes down to: (1) quickly iterating the product based on learnings and (2) consistently measuring each iteration based on a defined success metric.
Since things like frameworks work better with examples, I’m going to imagine I had the idea for TaskRabbit, the app where you can post tasks for people to do at a price, and that I was just getting started with the idea and struggling.
Defining a Success Metric
There are many possible success metrics and it depends on your business.
One of the more popular generic success metrics is the net promoter score. Basically, the score tells you how likely your users are to recommend your app. If the majority of your users aren’t “promoters”, you’re not going to make it. For more on this metric, see Eric Ries’s excellent post.
Here’s the net promoter score of some well-known apps:
But, you can use almost any metric like:
- Conversion rate of people who, after clicking on a facebook ad, create an account after demo-ing your product
- Percentage of people that invite friends on your “invite” friend step after they’ve used your product
- Percentage of people that return to the site a week after signing up
- If you are selling something to consumers or businesses, then your success metric is percentage of people who agree to pay for the product
For my fictitious case study (TaskRabbit), I would go to craigslist and find people asking for help and tell them they should put their request on my new site TaskRabbit. My success metric would be the percentage of people who added the task and perhaps, after putting the task up, I would give them a net promoter score survey.
With my success metric defined, I’d be ready to start iterating.
Why You Need to Iterate
Where some entrepreneurs stumble is they are never willing to iterate their product. They have an idea for the product, they put it out, people don’t like it and they throw in the towel. It’s incredibly hard to get it right the first time. You have to iterate.
Other entrepreneurs believe their product will magically work after a while. Unless they are iterating, it’s very unlikely it’s just going to magically take off. You have to iterate, you have to do so quickly, and you have to make sure the iterations are significant.
The changes you need to make must address the fact that your project must not be delivering enough value to the user at the cost you are requesting of them. For example, your emails aren’t valuable enough for them to bother opening. They don’t like it enough to recommend to their friends. They didn’t like it enough to take time out of their day to check it again a week later.In my fictitious TaskRabbit case, it could be that just a few people on craigslist are actually putting up their tasks on TaskRabbit and my net promoter score is negative.
At this point, people will tend to think they have a marketing problem. Not enough people know about it. But, it’s almost certainly that you have a product problem.
Iterating
Before you go trying to fix your product, you should diligently note down where you currently rank your chosen success metrics. You need to make sure you get a big enough sample size to make sure your stats are accurate which can be hard to do by just talking to people in person.
Once you’ve noted your metrics, your goal is to find out why you have a product problem. You need to dig deep into the user psyche and pull out that reason.
You can give people online surveys to take, you can pay people $10 to get on the phone with you and, even better, you can bring in people to talk to you in person (via craigslist, buy their coffee at starbucks, etc.).
In my fictitious case, I finally muster up the courage to find out why TaskRabbit isn’t working. It turns out that potential users don’t trust the people who will be doing the tasks.
So, you go back to your apartment, implement a fix to the problem and release it again.
Compare Success Metrics for Each Iteration
Whatever methodology you used previously, you should do it again with new users andmeasurewhere your new product ranks on your chosen success metric.
You may find that your success metric is hugely improved and the product is taking off.
More likely, you’ll find that your success metric improved a little bit, stayed flat, or depressingly gone down.
Regardless, you need to get in touch with these new users and find out why they still don’t really want/need your product. You may find that you didn’t actually solve the problem you thought you were solving.
In the TaskRabbit example, I could have added a small bio next to TaskRabbits to make them seem more trustworthy. But, if the metrics didn’t improve, then I was wrong. I either didn’t actually address their concerns or there were other concerns that I didn’t know about.So, I could do something more dramatic like stating that all TaskRabbits have undergone a thorough background check.
Back to your apartment to iterate again.
Target States
With your various iterations, you’re trying to get to two potential states:
- Success metric takes off. Your product will take off along with it. For net promoter score, it becomes positive.
- Your success metric improvement stalls. You’ve iterated several times and, while they slightly improved your metrics, it hasn’t been enough. You’ve also run out of ideas on how to continue iterating. It may be that people don’t really have the problem you’re trying to solve. Or, the way you’re solving the problem is too demanding on the user and you don’t know how to make it easier for them.
The key takeaway is that if every iteration is improving your success metrics, keep iterating. You only stop iterating when you can’t seem to improve it any further.
It’s Okay to Start Something New
Hopefully your various iterations will take your project to where it needs to be to take off with your audience.
However, if you are iterating, your metrics aren’t improving and you’ve run out of ideas on how to address your users’s concerns about the product, it’s okay to throw in the towel and start working on a new project. You’ll have learned a tremendous amount from your first go around and will be in a much better position to make your next idea successful.
See discussion on Hacker News.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success
September 12, 2011|Comments|startups, yipit
Hustling from our shared workspace cubicles
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
“So, what do you do?”
Ugh. I hated that question.
The truth was that we were trying to start a new venture but we hadn’t really made any progress.
But, instead of just muttering something, I would force myself to enthusiastically pitch our current struggling idea. They would nod along but the skepticism on their face was hard to ignore.
And, when I was done, they would sometimes hit me with: “So, is that your full-time thing?” Ugh. What that really meant was: you’re trying to tell me that you spend all your time working on that ridiculous idea?
The Grind
We left our finance jobs in the summer of 2007, and we worked really, really hard. By February of 2010, it had been over two and half years of hustling on no salary. What did we have to show for it? Nothing.
We hadn’t made a dollar of revenue. We had been rejected by every investor we talked to. We hadn’t been able to recruit anyone to join our team. We hadn’t gotten traction with any of our ideas.
We had failed to get more than 10K monthly unique visitors for Yipit for the last two years despite trying several ideas with it. We were going sideways:
On a personal level, my life savings wasdisappearing. I kept getting hit with late penalties on my credit card. Not because I didn’t have the cash to pay it, but because I just didn’t want to think about it. It was too depressing to look at my depleting bank account that I had worked so hard to build up. I remember withdrawing all the money from my 401K account and having to confirm that I did, in fact, understand the massive penalties I would incur for doing so.
In all honesty, I probably would have given up earlier. The only reason why I didn’t was out of loyalty to my co-founder, Jim, who had also quit his finance job. He had passed up many amazing job opportunities to work alongside me and I wasn’t going to quit on him.
Everything Changes
So, it’s now February of 2010, over two and half years since we started, and we have yet another idea: build an aggregator for the early but quickly growing daily deal industry. The idea was sound, timely and right up our alley since we had been doing local deal aggregation for the last 9 months.
And, in just three days, everything changed.
We launched the new idea in a three-day scramble, got some initial press, users loved it, and four months later raised $1 million from amazing investors. A year after that, we’ve raised $6 million, made real revenue, attracted hundreds of thousands of users, and recruited amazing people to join our team (we’re hiring! join us!). And, best of all, we’re just getting started.
So, what happened in those three days?
I’m convinced that if we had the idea for a daily deal aggregator back in 2007 or 2008 or even 2009, we wouldn’t have gotten traction because we would have messed it up.
But, after two and half years of failing and learning, we knew exactly what to do:
- Product strategy. We had become a part of the lean startup movement. I had gone to the New York lean startup meetups from the beginning, read Four Steps to Epiphany, and knew we just needed to build a minimum viable product.
- Coding the prototype. I had taught myself web development over the last few years and Jim had taught himself front-end development. We didn’t need to find an outsourcer, we just quickly built it ourselves.
- Designing the user interface. We had already designed a bunch of prototypes. We knew how to design the landing page to collect user email addresses, the sign-up flow to collect preferences and to ask our new users to spread the message.
- Getting initial press. We knew how to craft our story in a way that would get journalists interested. We got featured on TechCrunch and Wired giving us a strong initial boost
- Getting investors interested. We had built relationships with many New York angel investorsover the last few years and we were able to quickly drum up some interest based on our traction since they already knew who we were.
- Building buzz. We had become involved in the New York tech community and our friends in the industry really helped us build initial buzz for Yipit
Now that I look back, I realize that I was wrong to think that we had nothing to show for two and half years of hustling. While we didn’t have outward signs of success, we had learned something very important: the art and science of starting a new venture. It took us almost three years to know what exactly we had to do during those three days.
And, so, to everyone out there who’s struggling and feels like they have nothing to show for it, I hope this post keeps you going. You’re learning every day. And, when the inspiration strikes, you’re going to be ready to pounce on it.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company
August 3, 2011|Comments|startups, yipit
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group.
It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physical labor, I felt like I had really made it. My job was challenging (making investing decisions always is) and I worked with some really smart and motivated people.
But, beyond “making it”, I was comfortable. After a year of private equity investing, I felt like I was good enough to do it for the long haul. While I’m sure there would be a few unexpected twists and turns, I sort of knew what the next 20 years of my life were going to be like and it looked pretty good.
There was only one little issue. It turned out that I didn’t really love money.
After 18 years, my mom had successfully passed along an immigrant guilt towards buying anything lavish for myself. So, my expenses weren’t really growing in proportion to my income. And, at least for me, I didn’t see money as a metric of success the same way Warren Buffet does. When it’s all said and done, I didn’t want to be measured by how much money I had accumulated but by what I had built.
But, when you’re making more money than you know what to do with, you tend to procrastinate on any big decisions. Well, at least until you’re reminded of what else is possible.
How I Woke Up
My company, Quadrangle, organized a private conference every year for the media and telecom industry. This was not just another conference, it was ridiculous.
I realized how ridiculous it was when I got an email with the list of attendees. Every major media company executive was coming. Brian Roberts from Comcast, Steve Ballmer from Microsoft, Jeff Zucker from NBC and media celebrities like Katie Couric, Jerry Seinfeld and Harvey Weinstein. While journalists weren’t allowed to cover the conference, Andrew Ross Sorkin, of the NY Times, was given permissions to write-up a quick blurb about the conference.
I was really excited and had barely slept the night before. The dress code was business formal and I walked into the Pierre Hotel wearing my best suit and power red tie.
I soaked in the scene for a few seconds trying to find the first person I was going to talk to. And, then, it hit me. Why would they want to talk to me? They were the heads of major media companies, I was a 25 year-old finance guy. They didn’t want to talk to me, they wanted to avoid me. I wasn’t doing anything important, anything that could impact their companies. They didn’t care about my suit or my power red tie.
So, for the next 30 minutes, I just awkwardly walked around the room trying to listen in on the conversations people were having. When the panels started, I took a lonely seat in the back.
After listening to a few panels comprised of 50+ year-old media executives, the audience was looking forward to the fresh perspective of the next panel on new media.
The two guests were in their 20’s. I almost couldn’t believe that two people roughly my age had been invited to talk in front of all of these important people. And then, even more shocking, they had all of their undivided attention.All of the 50+ year-old media executives were mesmerized, excited and scared of what they had built and what it meant for them.One was Chad Hurley, fresh off his recent sale of YouTube to Google, and the other, wearing sandals, was a still unknown pre-“The Social Network” Mark Zuckerberg.
When the panel ended, media executives came up to them to talk about working together, get advice on their business. I just stood in the background watching.
I was floored.
They were building something. They were changing how the world communicated. And, they had done it in just a few years without raising significant capital to get started. They willed their services into existence.
What was I doing? Could I do what they had done? Could I build something as significant as they had?
Yeah, right.
I had never built a tech startup. I had never even built a website. What did I know about product management, web development, and user interfaces?
I had a high-paying finance job. I was on my way. It was too late. I had no idea what it meant to start a company and the most likely outcome was failure.
On an expected value basis, the obvious decision was to stick with finance.
I was where I should be.
But, as the days went by, I kept thinking back to the conference. A scary idea started creeping into my thoughts: what if I could build something? Wouldn’t I always wonder? Wouldn’t I regret it? Wouldn’t it eat away at me over the years?
And, that’s when I realized that I didn’t actually know if I was good enough because I hadn’t really failed in life (at least not professionally). Most people don’t really fail. We tend to take the job that we think we’ll succeed in. We are hesitant to reach. And, if we do reach and succeed, then we don’t reach again.
The only way to know how good you might be at something is to fail trying it.
And, that’s when I decided it was time to test my limits. It was time to really reach. It was time to quit my safe job and walk straight into almost certain startup failure.
I had no idea how to start a successful tech company, but I was going to try. I was going to step into that arena. And, whether or not I triumphed or got knocked down, I didn’t really care much. I wanted to know the bounds of my abilities.
So, What Happened?
It’s now 4 years since I left Quadrangle. Did I fail? Hell, yes. I got knocked down many, many times. For the first 2 years, I had no idea what I was doing and was just swinging blindly. But, every time I fell, I learned why.
After two and a half years of failure, we launched the third version of Yipit and it took off. We’ve now raised funding twice including the most recent $6 million round this summer. Yipit is growing, we have a strong vision of where we’re going and we’re building an amazing team (join us!).
But, perhaps, one of the sweetest moments was that I was invited to the latest Quadrangle conference. Not as a panel speaker, we’re nowhere near that. But, as part of a session where three startups pitch Barry Diller for 3 minutes and then he grills you with questions in front of the entire audience of media executives. It was clearly terrifying but it went well. At the end of the session, Barry picks the startup he thinks is most like to succeed and he picked Yipit.
When I stepped off the stage, still kind of shaking from the presentation, media executives came up to me talk about what we were working on and how we might be able to work together. I couldn’t believe they were coming to me (and I wasn’t even wearing my power red tie).
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
The Invisible Hand of the Internet
July 13, 2011|Comments|Uncategorized
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, talked about an“invisible hand“.
Basically, by businesses pursuing their own interests, they end up helping society much more than they had intended, led by an “invisible hand”.
“…he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by aninvisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention… By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”
This same “invisible hand” is behind the success of many of the most popular web and mobile services that exist today. And, by understanding how it works, it can dramatically change your initial product decisions.
What is the Invisible Hand of the Internet?
The best way I can explain is to use an example almost all of us are familiar with: Delicious.
The amazing thing about delicious wasn’t that it allowed you to save and tag your bookmarks on a site. I liked that functionality and it was useful.But, ultimately, not everyone really needed that service.
The truly remarkable thing about delicious was that when enough people saved and tagged their bookmarks, you could see what the most popular bookmarks were for a tag like “python“. That collective wisdom was truly amazing.
But, users weren’t really uploading their bookmarks to the site and tagging them so that others could benefit from them. They were uploading their bookmarks out of their own self-interest. People wanted to save a bookmark with tags so that they could easily search for them next time they needed it. If people really didn’t need to tag their bookmarks, most of them wouldn’t have done it just for the benefit of the overall site.
The self-interested actions of delicious users ended up promoting the interests of the delicious community much more than they had intended to, led by the same “invisible hand” Adam Smith talked about in 1776.
How Does it Affect You?
I was recently talking to some struggling founders. They were telling me about how great their startup was going to be.
Founder A: “Once users start doing X, imagine how awesome the aggregated data will be for everyone.”
Me: “That does sound interesting but why would a user do X in the first place?”
Founder B: “Because they will be contributing to the aggregated data.”
Me: “But, if you assume they are selfish and busy, why would they do it?”
Founder A: “I guess we’re still working on that.”
People are largely driven by their own self-interests. As entrepreneurs, it’s too easy to fall into the mentality that people will use your product because it will help the overall community of your product. They won’t.
Do not get caught underestimating how much your product needs to personally reward a user for their actions. People’s time is a zero sum game and you’re competing against Facebook, YouTube, pictures of LOLcats, and way much more.
Before you can start thinking about how big your network effect will be, you need to really nail the single player interaction.
And, hopefully, if enough people use it, you can create an even more powerful service by leveraging all of their individual uses, just like Delicious did.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
How to Know If Your Startup Idea is the Next Big Thing
April 25, 2011|Comments|customer development process, startups
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
How do you know if your startup idea is the next next big thing?
It’s easy. It isn’t.
Most Great Companies Started With Bad Ideas
Most great companies started off with very different ideas that were either not very good or impractical. Very rarely does a startup actually start with the idea that makes them the next big thing.
Here are just a few examples of successful companies that had very different and troubled initial ideas:
- Initial idea: Allow groups of people to band together to accomplish a goal called ThePoint
- Eventually: Groupon
- Initial idea: HTML5 supported location-based service
- Eventually: Instagram
- Initial idea: Web-based massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending
- Eventually: Flickr
- Initial idea: Compare two people’s pictures and rate which one was more attractive
- Eventually: Facebook
- Initial idea: People to share photos and get grouped based on locations in an app called Color
- Eventually: To be determined
At Yipit, our initial idea was a local search site focused on furniture in New York. Today, we are the leading aggregator of daily deals like Groupon, LivingSocial and the 485 others.
What Does This Mean For You?
When you stop expecting that your startup idea has to be the next big thing, you can draw some valuable conclusions:
- Stop waiting for the perfect idea. The perfect idea isn’t coming. You just have to pick a problem you are passionate about and start working on it. Over time, you will evolve your startup into the next big thing
- Your idea isn’t the real value, it’s you. The value lies in your ability to learn from potential customers, iterate based on those learnings. Those iterations will determine whether or not your startup will be successful, not the initial idea
- Don’t worry that your first idea will fall flat. It falls flat for almost everyone. Your idea is based on so many assumptions, it’s bound to be full of issues. Figure out what’s wrong and fix it.
- Get your prototype out there as soon as you can. Don’t spend six months releasing your first prototype. It’s going to fall flat. Instead, get a prototype into the hands of your potential customers as soon as you can. You need to learn as quickly as possible what’s wrong with the idea so you can fix it.
- Don’t write a business plan. Within a month, your business plan will be irrelevant. Instead of spending that time writing a business plan, spend it getting your prototype into customers hands.
Your initial startup idea isn’t the next big thing and that’s okay. Just get out there and start working on a big problem that you’re passionate about and you may eventually turn it into the next big thing.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Two Cold-Emailed TechCrunch Pitches That Worked
March 28, 2011|Comments|Uncategorized
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Your launch will have very little to do with your startup’s eventual success and you probably spend way too much time worrying about it.
That being said, a successful launch can be used to gain thousands of early usersif you did your job right when they show up. It won’t make or break your startup, but it will help.
There’s great advice out there on how to pitch a tech blogger. My favorite is this post by Mark Hendrickson, a former TechCrunch blogger.
However, it can also be helpful to look at actual examples of pitches that worked. So, I’m including here two tech pitches that Jim Moran, my co-founder, and I submitted to TechCrunch for two projects we worked on before Yipit.
A Little Background
Before we launched Yipit, we worked on two side projects called 140it and UnHub. We built both in a weekend and were looking to get some broader exposure for them.
The problem was that we didn’t have an “in”. It’s always best to get a warm intro to a blogger from an investor or friend. We just didn’t have it.
So, we decided to try TechCrunch’s startup submission form which didn’t look promising. I pictured the other side as an endless stream of terrible pitches that TechCrunch authorsdreaded and probably didn’t look at.
Less than an hour after submitting 140it via their form, we get out this email from TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid:
Hi Vinicius, looks cool, am trying it now and writing up a post. Please lift the password in around 20 minutes or so (let me know once you have).
Thanks,
Jason
It was up on TechCrunch shortly after and thousands of people tried out the site, got the bookmarklet, tweeted about it, and started using it. While we never intended to turn 140it into a business, it was a great experience and gave us the confidence to keep pushing forward.
Months later, TechCrunch also covered UnHub.com, another weekend project of ours. Again, we applied via their submission form.
Key Tactics
I’ve included both TechCrunch pitches below but wanted to highlight the key tactics we used in our submission:
- Tell a Story. For UnHub, we reference the much talked about new Skittles corporate website had just launched as a decentralized experience. UnHub was a way for anyone to create that Skittle experience.
- Ride Current Trend. For 140it, in 2009, lots of people were building Twitter tools to “fill holes”.
- Reference Blogger’s Previous Posts. For both UnHub and 140it, you’ll see that we picked out a previous TechCrunch post where the author had made a point that was consistent with the project we were pitching.
- Exclusivity. TechCrunch would much rather cover a new startup that hasn’t been covered before. So, we password protected both 140it and UnHub and told them we wanted them to cover our project first.
- Concise. Do not go off and write huge essays. Get to the point of what your startup does right away.
- Humility. With both 140it and UnHub, we were careful to admit the simplicity of the project.
- Admit competitors. You have competitors, admit them. The blogger will have to look them up if you don’t. That means they will have to do more work reducing the chances they cover your startup.
- Give them assets. If the site is private, give them beta invites. Create a demo video so they can add it to their post about you (we did that for both 140it and UnHub). They don’t have to be professionally done. Just record yourself using the site with a voiceover. If it makes sense, create an example account on behalf of the blogger as we did with UnHub for Michael Arrington. Throw in some screenshots if you don’t have a demo.
Below are the two pitches we submitted.
140it TechCrunch Pitch
Company Name: 140it
Website:http://140it.com
Submitted: January 26, 2009 at 11:55 AM PSTDescription: 140it helps twitter users reduce their tweets to less than 140 characters. It abbreviates words, converts company names to their StockTwits ticker and shortens URL’s usingbit.ly. Its intended use is as a bookmarklet so that the user can use 140it without ever having to leave Twitter. Please see our demo video athttp://140it.com (The password for the video is 140.)
Note: http://140it.com is currently password protected. The login credentials are:
username: friends
password: 140Additional Info: This was a weekend project for us and we aren’t trying to make money off of it. We just wanted to give back to the Twitter community.
We were inspired by a recent Arrington post where he said: “this is the way to fix Twitter, directly via the user interface, not from a third party site that users will forget to go to.”
We built 140it to work as a bookmarklet so that the user would never have to go to our site. We also made it a bookmarklet so that it would work on all browsers including Chrome which has become our de-facto browser.
Also, we would love to get 140it to as many people as would like it and are thus happy to have TechCrunch be the first to reveal the project.
Competitors: Twonvert:http://www.twonvert.com/
TweetShrink:http://tweetshrink.com/But, unlike our competitors, we made our utility work as a bookmarklet. We also convert company names to their StockTwits tickers and shorten URL’s using thebit.ly API.
Tags: twitter, utility, bookmarklet
UnHub TechCrunch Pitch
Company Name: UnHub
Website:http://unhub.com
Submitted: March 6, 2009 at 11:16 AM PSTDescription: We were really excited about the new Skittles website, so we made a way for anybody to have one. Your UnHub URL allows others to navigate your profiles, photostreams, channels, etc with a persistent bar at the top of their screen. When we saw the Skittles’ website on Monday, we thought its user interface would work well for individuals who wanted to showoff their web presence; and, three days later, we are releasing UnHub.
Your UnHub URL makes a lot of sense for the “Web” entry on your Twitter page. As an example, we made one for Michael Arrington:http://unhub.com/MichaelArrington and we also made one for Josie’s Restaurant here in New York: http://unhub.com/josies
Overall, we wanted UnHub to be a dead simple, lightweight way to display your “decentralized me” to others. On that topic, we enjoyed your post (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/30/friendfeed-the-centralized-me-and-data-portability/) and some earlier discussions by Robert O’Brien, Loic Le Meur, et al.
Additional Info: We don’t think UnHub is technologically remarkable in any way (iframes have been around for a long time). That said, we’re excited about it for the same reason we were impressed with Skittles: it could be a new way for companies and individuals to showcase their online presence.
In addition to individuals using UnHub, we also think businesses should take a page out of Skittles’ book. UnHub is a simple (and free) way for them to start. A restaurant’s UnHub could include a link to their current web page, but also to a google map of their location (for directions), yelp profile (for reviews), menupages (menu), opentable (reservation) and seamlessweb (ordering online). Seehttp://unhub.com/josies
Soon we’ll allow people to replace their UnHub URL with a custom domain name, which should make the experience more personal. We’ll also start delivering analytics.
Also, Twitter has temporarily disallowed iframes, so we’re redirecting to Tweetree for now.
As far as our backgrounds, please check our new unhub pages: http://unhub.com/vacanti andhttp://unhub.com/jdmoran
The site is password protected, so please use the following login information:
http://unhub.com
username: techcrunch
password: techcrunchWe had a great experience with techcrunch announcing our twitter tool 140it and would be thrilled to have you guys announce UnHub.
Competitors: Social network aggregators, and there are some great ones like Chi.mp, Power.com and Friendfeed, pull in content from other sources to a single profile page. However, our goal is to “stay out of the way” of dedicated sites that specialize in a single aspect of your web presence (e.g., Flickr for photos, Youtube for videos, etc.). We’d never be able to replicate the functionality of these specialty sites, nor effectively marry their diverse user experiences. That’s why we don’t have an UnHub profile page, just a persistent bar that sits on top of the ordinary browsing experience.
Also, you can include any site in your UnHub (e.g., your company website that was built 10 years ago or your Halo 3 player profile), not just those sites up to speed with Data Portability. Aggregators are great at bringing content into a single place, but UnHub is about sharing multiple places at once.
In theory, another competitor is blogs: some folks devote a lot of energy on their blogs and think of them as their primary web presence. They can designate their blog as “home” on UnHub, so when people follow their UnHub URL their blog will appear – in addition to a persistent navigation bar with which to explore their other locations (Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, etc). Blog widgets / links serve a similar linking purpose, though if a visitor clicks to a blogger’s Flickr stream, it’s unlikely the visitor will go back and check out other sites the blogger has invested in.
Tags: socialnetworkaggregator, sharing, identity, lifestream, socialnetworknavigator
Hope you find these two pitches helpful. If people have examples of other pitches that worked, let me know below in the comments.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users
February 24, 2011|Comments|Uncategorized
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
So, you have a startup idea. It’s going to be big.
You can see it now. Millions of people using your service. You’ve already figured out your mobile strategy. You know the neighboring sectors you’ll expand to first. Your read-write API will hail the transition of your company into a platform company. You’re going to change the world.
The only problem is that your vision is based on having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of happy users and, currently, you have zero happy users.
If your startup plan is directly based on this vision, you will struggle.
You need a different plan; a plan that doesn’t assume millions of happy users.
You need a first 1,000 users plan. This isn’t just about getting 1,000 users to try out your service. This is a plan about keeping those users.
Unfortunately, looking at how successful startups are currently executing (Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare) doesn’t help because their growth plans are based on the fact that they already have millions of users.
You have to look at their history.
- Focus on a Niche. By focusing on a small geographical area, a vertical or smaller group of people, it will be easier to build up a meaningful user base in that niche.
- Groupon just focused on local deals in Chicago, Foursquare was primarily in New York, Facebook was available just at Harvard College, Yelp launched in San Francisco
- StackOverflow started with Tech Q&A before they launched StackExchange
- Become a Super User. You should shamelessly become the biggest user of your own service. If your service requires user generated content, you should be supplying 10x what every other user is supplying. You need to do this long enough to kickstart everyone else on the site.
- Dennis and Naveen, the founders Foursquare, must have added 1,000 tips in New York. Every time I checked-in, I got a tip from one of them. Obviously, they couldn’t do that for the whole world. But, as an early user in New York, I had a great experience
- Yelp’s founders made all of their friends also become super users
- Scott Heiferman, co-founder of Meetup, started the largest and most succesful meetup himself (New York Tech Meetup)
- Wow Users. Your goal is to get 1,000 happy users and that means you can do some things that won’t work for users after 1,000
- Flickr used to email every user that signed-up to find out what their experience was like
- At Yipit, we personally over-responded to every customer service and unsubscribe (one of those got us featured on CNN)
- Yelp threw ridiculous parties for their first users. They still throw them today for their best users but not for all users
- Even though Foursquare is more about tips and friend-finding, it added a game layer of points and badges so that the early users could use the app even though their friends weren’t on it yet
- Get Their Social Graph. If you only have a 1000 users but they are all friends, that’s enough to get those friends happy
- By focusing on just Harvard college, Facebook’s first 1,000 users knew each other and didn’t care that there weren’t 50,000 people using the service
- Manually Create Marketplaces. If you’re a marketplace startup where you need both sides to come together, you should think about picking one of the sides and manually create it while you encourage the other side to show up
- Groupon started as a platform for getting people together for group benefits. But, they had success, when they manually created the group benefit by negotiating deals with local businesses and only asked that people sign-up for their email list
The common theme in all of these recommendations is to not be afraid to do some things that won’t scale past the first 1,000 users or aren’t part of your eventual vision.
On your way to millions of users, don’t forget you have to get 1,000 happy users first.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Here’s an Amazing Reason to Apply to TechStars
February 15, 2011|Comments|product management, startups
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Getting feedback on early versions of your prototype is crucial to a startup’s success. You’ll learn more the first day a user tries out your product than the previous 2 months you’ve spent thinking about it.
But, aside from getting user feedback, we really benefited from getting the chance to show Yipit to experienced entrepreneurs and investors.
We would often come back from those meetings and make major changes to our initial prototype plans.
But, it’s hard, especially as a first-time entrepreneur, to get their attention. Their time is their most valuable asset and they can’t meet with everyone.
Plus, even if they do meet with you, it doesn’t mean they will spend real time thinking about your product — the kind of time it usually takes to yield breakthrough product and marketing ideas.
So, how do you get their attention? Well, it seems like one answer is to get into TechStars.
TechStars Mentors
This is my first year helping out with TechStars as a mentor and they have been emphasizing that what makes TechStars different from other programs is their impressivelist of mentors.
At first, I was definitely skeptical that the list of mentors was just that, a list.
I’ve come to see that the program, spearheaded by David Tisch, does a fantastic job of getting mentors involved.
They organize one-on-one meetings with the various companies in the program and get mentors to pick a specific startup to actively mentor.
I fully realized the power of the program when I get an email from one of the startups asking for feedback on their prototype.
I opened the email and the“to” field blew me away.
When I had sent a similar email about the first version of our prototype, it was to five college friends, my brother and my mom. His “to” field included:
- Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures
- Andy Smith, co-founder of Daily Burn
- Michael Galpert, co-founder of Aviary
- Rachel Sklar, Editor at Largeof Mediate
- Josh Stylman, co-founder of Reprise Media
- Nate Westheimer, NYTM organizer and formerly head of product at AnyClip
- Eric Friedman of Foursquare and former associate at Union Square Ventures
- Amish Jani, founder and managing directory of FirstMark Capital
- Matt Galligan, co-founder of SimpleGeo
- Jeremie Miller, inventor of Jabber
Seriously?! That’s a ridiculous list of people to send over your initial prototype.
Aside from getting great feedback from them (both on the product and vision), if some of them start using the product in ernest, they could bring many more additional users.
I wish we could have sent Yipit to a list like that.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
How To Get Your First 1,000 Users
February 8, 2011|Comments|customer development process, marketing, startups
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
The good news is that it’s easier than you think to get 1,000 people to try your site.
The bad news is that it’s really hard to get those people to turn into users,users that create an account, users that come back repeatedly and users that tell their friends about your site.
This post is about how to get 1,000 people to try your site so you can find out what isn’t working, iterate and keep trying to build a site that people, other than your mom, actually come back to.I’ll write a future post on how to retain those users.
Get Yourself a Domain Name and a Splash Page
You should set up your splash page today. Not tomorrow, today. In terms of the domain name, it’s okay if you don’t love your domain name; you can change it later though it’s always easier to pick a good one from the start.
Once you get your domain name, you should use a service like unbounce to create a simple splash page. You don’t need a programming background to create this page.
The goal of the splash page is to collect email addresses from visitors.How do you do that? The splash page tells a user very clearly what problem your site will solve for them. If the user submit their email address, you’ll give them early access to the site when it’s ready. For Yipit, the splash page said: “Get All the Best Daily Deals in Your City”. For Tumblr, it’s “The Easiest Way To Blog”.
Those email addresses become your early test users. When your prototype is ready to be tested, you’ll email a portion of these users and get them to test-drive your prototype. You’ll iterate and invite more users from your list till the product works.
Now, how do you get people to visit your splash page?
How To Drive People to Your Splash Page
There is no shortage of ways to get people to your splash page. The following are things we at Yipit did and things we’ve seen our friends do:
- Add Link to Your Email Signature. Seems obvious, but most people don’t do this. You should have your value proposition at the bottom of your email with a link to your splash page. For us, it was: “Get All the Best Daily Deals in Your City: http://yipit.com”
- Add Link to All Your Web Profiles. Add a link to your splash page on your Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and every other account you have. Now you might see why it helps to be a high profile social media user.
- Create a Demo Video. Even if your prototype isn’t ready, create a demo video of what your prototype will be doing. Dropbox did this and their video appeared at the top of Digg giving them 100,000 email addresses wanting access to their site. You can also add this video to your splash page to help increase conversion of people submitting their email addresses
- Be Full Entrepreneur. When I went to tech events, friend’s drinks, family gatherings, I would pitch everyone on Yipit. Painful, yes. But, it got me good at pitching Yipit and those people would go home and sign-up to check it out.
- TechCrunch and other tech blogs. It will be hard to get press for your site if you can’t give the blogger a prototype to use. But, if you do have a working prototype, this the easiest way to get people to your splash page. For all three of our projects, 140it.com, UnHub.com and Yipit.com, we were able to get TechCrunch to write about us just by submitting it to through their news submission form. If you can give the bloggers some beta codes for their readers, that makes it more likely they’ll write about your site. Just make sure you’re ready for it. If you have a very good demo video, they might be willing to write about you without the prototype.
- HackerNews. HackerNews is a great community of entrepreneurs who are willing to give you good advice on your startup. You need to have a working prototype and let them look at the site directly, though. Here’s some great advice on how to submit to HackerNews.
- Facebook Ads and Google Adwords. This is actually really hard and often pretty expensive. We were never able to really pull this off despite several attempts.
- Start a company blog. The blog should be focused on providing helpful advice on the problem you are helping consumers solve. Kissmetrics, a startup focused on helping websites with analytics, runs an excellent blog on helping startups think through user acquisition. This strategy involves a lot of work so only do it if you have a really good idea for the content you want to create and think that users will appreciate it.
Some final tips and notes:
- Your list will get stale. The longer you wait to invite people to your prototype, the smaller the percentage that will respond to your invite email. You can try to keep the list active by sending them occasional updates on the product.
- I recommend you give the users a survey after they submit their email address where you collect information from them regarding what they are hoping your site will accomplish for them. I have heard good things about surveymonkey
- Encourage users to tweet, share on facebook, or email your site to their friends. One way people have done this successfully is to promise the user earlier access to the prototype if they invite 3 friends.
Now that you know how to get people to your site, I’ll write a future post on what you need to do to make sure those 1,000 people actually stay on your site.
If you have employed any other techniques that have worked well, comment below and I’ll add them to the list.
Like working with big data sets?
We’re aggressively expandingYipitDataand looking for:
- Data analysts (consultants, financial analysts)
- Data product managers (technical and can work with analysts and engineers to build a system)
- Data engineers (can build complicated systems to collect and process very large data sets)
Email me personally and we’ll meet up! I’m at vacanti at gmail dot com
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
Stop Saying ‘Let me know when works for you’
January 24, 2011|Comments|networking, startups
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
As a current oraspiringentrepreneur, you should be meeting with a ton of people (potential customers, investors, biz dev partners, employees, journalists).
You will often get introduced via email or you are cold-emailing them.
You are probably excited to meet with them and correctly assume that they are busier than you. So, like the nice person you are, you want to be as flexible as possible.
And, that’s when you make the mistake of saying: “I’m pretty free the next two weeks, let me know when works for you.”
You may think you are being nice and flexible; but, you’re actually frustrating them.
What you actually just said: “Hey, why don’t you spend some time going through your schedule, pick out some times that work and email them to me. I’ll then sit back and pick one that I like.”
If you really want to be respectful of their time (and you should), your goal is to have them do as little work as possible to get the meeting arranged.
Eric Friedman made some good suggestions on how to most effectively set up an appointment and I’ll reiterate them here with some additional tips based on my experience.
You should do this from the very first communication to reduce the back and forth.
Suggest Possible Times
Go through your calendar and suggest possible days and times that work for you. For instance, I do the following:
The following dates/times (EST) work for me:
Monday, 1/24: 11am – 12pm EST; 2pm – 3pm EST
Tuesday, 1/25: 2pm – 4pm EST
Friday, 1/28: 10am – 12pm EST; 2pm – 4pm EST
Some additional tips:
- The more time slots you suggest the better
- Make sure you specify your time zone (people will assume they are in your timezone)
- The busier the person is, the farther out your suggested time slots should be
Suggest Meeting Location or Phone Number
If it’s a phone call, I always say: “My number is 212-555-0001 but I”m happy to call you.” If you’re trying to set up a meeting with several people, you should get a free conference call number and include the dial-in information.
If it’s an in-person meeting, you should suggest going to their office (confirm their office address in the email) or picking two coffee shops or restaurants (if it’s a breakfast or lunch meeting) that are near their office.
If you do all of the following, not only will the meeting get quickly arranged but, by making it less frustrating for the person you are emailing, it also increases the chances of getting the meeting set up in the first place.
Update: Great comments over at hacker news including another reason to do this is that it suggests you respect your time. I know that sounds like a bad excuse but, unfortunately,appearancesdo matter.
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them bysubscribing via emailorvia twitter.
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