Growth Hacking – Dan Martell – MicroConf 2012

0:04Right off the bat I want to thank everybody. I know I'm the only person standing between uh drinks, so I will try to do my best to speed things through. I also want to thank everybody for coming today. Absolutely humbled to be invited to speak, and I also want to thank um uh my fiance who always asks me why I never mention her, Renee. Um she's We're actually expecting, so she's 5-month

0:25pregnant. Thank you. Exactly. I was going to say I'm not a virgin, but I could I was like, "Which picture she going to allow me to put on my slides?" So, um I'm Canadian. Anybody that meets me within the first few seconds I usually drop that in. I don't have an accent like a lot of the Canadians, but I will say eh quite a bit in a boot. Uh I've been doing startups pretty much since I was 19. I'm onto my fifth company, Clarity. Prior to that, um I did a web hosting company, so much like Heaton I learned the lesson there, don't

1:00start a web hosting company. Uh I then did a vacation travel site. Lesson I learned there was think bigger. It was actually called atlanticvacations.com, which was the region I was from. Um and then in 2004, I was fortunate enough to uh start a company called Sphere Technologies that focused on enterprise social applications, and uh it was kind of like a consulting company with a product, and over 4 years we grew it uh by 150 plus percent to 30 employees, and then we got acquired in 2008. Uh that was an awesome year. It happened right before the crash. Some people ask me if I was like I saw the market and I knew

1:36it was going to happen. I had no clue whatsoever. It was definitely luck. Uh but that year I decided to move to San Francisco and see if any of my crazy ideas would actually hold water with some of the smartest technology entrepreneurs in the world. And in 2009, I started a company called Flowtown, uh which I'll talk more about. Had a great ride with that. We actually got acquired last October. Um and then uh 2 months into that I realized that I wasn't living my passion. And we did earlier um they were talking about Steve Jobs, and it was really around that time where I I

2:06when Steve Jobs passed away and I asked myself like, "Am I working on my most meaningful impactful stuff?" And uh we haven't announced yet, but I'm working on a new startup called Clarity. And the high level is Clarity is the easiest way to give and get advice. I believe the best advice you can get are from people that have been successful in the thing

2:23you're about to do for the first time. Um not turning to your parents, your co-workers, or your friends, because at the end of the day they don't want you to screw up, so they're always going to let you play safe. So, that's Clarity. So, the clicker's not working. So, the Flowtown evolution. Flowtown um actually has quite a long history that's relevant to the growth hacking and kind of how we made it work. In the first uh few days I had a co-founder called

2:48Ethan. Um Ethan was 23 when we started the company. He's now only like 26, so he's not that old. Um but we both had a passion for helping small businesses solve marketing problems. It was back when social media was starting to take off, and I I noticed a lot of people selling social media expert advice, and I thought to myself, "Why isn't there a better solution that people can just self-serve and use much like people do with email? They don't have to hire an email consultant, they can just use a product like Mailchimp and be on their

3:17way." Um and trying to do what we thought was lean startup, and we actually launched as a a consulting company in disguise. And we said from day one, "We're going to launch this company called Flowtown. We're going to focus on small business marketing, and after we're going to try to get 15 customers to pay us between 500 and 1,000 dollars a month to solve their small business marketing needs, and from that experience extract these product ideas." And we did that. In over 3-month period, we went out to the market, worked with a lot of customers, and we iterated and prototyped up to

3:50seven different applications. Um and then there was the day we had to decide like, "What product do we lead with?" And that was uh that was actually a really hard decision. I think for a lot of people in this room, you have a lot of ideas and you're like, "Which one should I work

4:03on?" So, after thinking through some stuff, um we decided to build a product called landing pages. And if you've ever used unbounce.com, which uh full disclosure I'm actually an investor in today, it was very much like unbounce, but way before unbounce. And we worked on it for 2 months. So, we actually fired all of our customers. So, blog like, "Thanks for coming out." We transitioned them all off to uh other people that could help them in the specific areas that we we worked with. And then we worked on the product, and then we launched. And we were pumped. We thought for sure

4:33like, "Finally we got this great idea. We're going to put out the market." And we worked our ass off to get registered users. And we got up to 400 subscribers to this product, and not one paying customer. It was like just like not There was nothing we could do to get anybody to upgrade. I remember this one day Ethan calls me on my cell phone and he's like, "Dude, you wouldn't believe what happened." I'm like, "What? Tell me the

4:57news." He's like, "Somebody upgraded." I was like, "What's his name?" He's like, "This guy VK from India." I was like, "Yes!" I was like, "What's he selling?" He's like, "Oh, some spammy I Chi Berry thing." I was like, "Crap." Right? I was hoping it was a small business owner. It wasn't. Anyways, um so we self-funded that company from the service revenue, plus I put in close to about 100,000 dollars at time. We hired

5:20a developer. We built the product. And um you know, it was like we had like 2 weeks of runway before I had to write another check. And I went to Ethan's house and um when in his kitchen I was like, "What are we going to do? Like, clearly this product's not working. We got to figure

5:36it out." And he's like, "I don't know." And we had built these other prototypes. And I'm like, "Well, the one lesson I've learned is try to solve the problem that you have." And I just asked him like, "What tools do you use every day?" He goes, "Well, I actually use Headway." And Headway was a product that lets you put an email address in and get all the social and demographic data for that email. And I was using it every day cuz I was doing biz dev, and Ethan was using it every day cuz he was doing customer support. And here we are both using this product, and I had no clue that he was

6:04using it. And I was like, "Well, let's let's change this around. How can we figure out how to what we should build without actually going to market?" And that's when we actually like sat down and really studied Eric Ries and Steve Blank's stuff on lean startup and customer development, and we built um essentially uh product screenshots, high-fidelity product screenshots, and we went out to our friends in the market and said, "Hey, here's what we're thinking of building." And essentially the idea was really simple. Give us an email or connect it to your sign-up form, and we'll actually let you set up notifications for when somebody important signed up. Cuz we can go from

6:36an email to Twitter, and then from Twitter to Klout and tell you if somebody with a Klout score of above 40 signed up, so you could actually reach out to them personally. And we pre-sold that to 20 people. Then we built a landing page that took that concept a bit further, still didn't build a whole lot of the product. And uh that landing page let people upload a bunch of emails, and then we'd tell them how much it was, and then had an option to pay. We just charged 5 cents an email, and we sent it to 100 people and we saw how many people signed up. And we

7:04actually got 25% conversion to people that would pay. And then we opened up that further. And eventually we decided to um invite every of our other users to that product, and things took off. Right? But there was a 7-month period where we were working, we had no clue what we were doing. We thought we had the right product, we put it out there, it didn't

7:25work, and um we just kind of re-tooled. And this is vanity metrics, but we ended up doing in 2 months we got to break even. We're doing 20,000 a month in revenue in 2 months. And this is what the growth curve looked like. Right? And there's a quote that I like to use, which is often wrong, never in doubt. Right? And this is great for men telling their wives cuz like at the end of the day, I knew that there was something there, and maybe I was going to be wrong, but I was never doubtful

7:56that we would figure it out. And within a few weeks after we got to our 20,000 a month in revenue, we actually raised 750,000 dollars. We grew the business by 33% month over month for 11 months, getting almost to 100,000 a month in revenue. Um you know, our VCs were happy and all that stuff, and then we got shut down. Facebook changed their terms of service in some of the ways we were aggregating the data, and they called us us up and said you have 2 months to stop doing

8:25what you're doing. Right? There were some other bad actors in the market working on stuff, and essentially uh we got wrapped up in it. So, we went back to the whiteboard. The reason I tell you guys this is because I went through that process several times in one company. So, we went to the whiteboard, came up with three ideas we were passionate about, worked on them. One product was called uh Timely, another product product was called Spiderman, which was for social aggregation and content. And another one was this idea of gift marketing. Initially it was called Ambassador. Right? How can we allow

8:56companies to give products to people? We then took that idea and realized that was the one we were going to follow, and grew that back up our revenues, and eventually got acquired again like 12 months later. Right? And the one thing that I've always joked was for me, the product is the ante to get into the startup. Give me a product and I can help it grow, but before that, um you need to figure out what you you want to build. So, what I'm going to talk about is kind of two things that I do to

9:24try to understand, what am I building? Does my customer actually care? So, first one is called activity streams, and you can get this for free if you use a product like Kissmetrics that um Heaton built. Um or there's other tools out there. But the concept is simple is you want to And this is from day one. I built this for Clarity. From day one I said, "I want to watch what people do in our product. I want to log all that data so that I can actually do more qualitative um assessments of what

9:50they're doing and how they're doing it." And it's pretty much like a a for your product. And here's actually a screenshot. So, I can show this now that we got acquired and then uh Demandforce who acquired us just got acquired by Intuit for 450 million. So, I'm pretty sure all the legal trail is well figured out. So, um

10:09these are our Yeah, I don't have emails. Oh, I do. Anyways, um these are the users for a product we built called Timely. And what I would do as kind of like the product person is I would sit in front of the stream and try to look at people sign uh set up. So, what Timely does is it allows you to queue a bunch of tweets and then figure out throughout the day when uh it should tweet for you based on

10:33your history and the engagement. And um so, I was looking at this and and we're tracking our metrics and I'll talk about that. But uh I realized that people would sign up, but they would not schedule a tweet. And I was like, "Well, I don't get it. Here's a qualified user goes to the site, signs up, so they obviously know what we do and think that they want to solve that problem, connects their Twitter account, but then

10:54they never schedule a tweet." So, because we logged their emails, the best part of an activity stream is I just click the email and I would email them. Say, "Hey John, I noticed you signed up, but you didn't tweet." He's like, "Yeah, man, I love Timely." Have you ever had people say that? Like they use your product once, they love you, but they don't use it. Or even the better one is the ones that have never used it, but still love you. I mean, we live in a wild world, but I was uh I asked so I was like, "Why didn't you tweet?" And he's And And this is Users

11:20will say this and they're deceiving. Um "I got busy, but I'm going to check it out tomorrow." That means that there's something you didn't solve enough pain or make the flow fluid enough. And as I sent out these emails, over a dozen emails, I realized that they they wanted the solution, but they actually

11:37didn't have anything to say at the time. They didn't have anything to share. So, I brainstormed for a bit and I thought, "What's the like the most universal thing that you can give somebody to tweet?" And I thought it was quotes. So, with one feature change, we had like a 7% activation to tweet. We got up to 60 or 70 per 70 70% by adding one feature, which was as soon as they logged in, we would suggest these 10 quotes that they could add to their

12:02queue. And that got them tweeting. And to me, having the ability to understand what users are doing and how they're being successful through your product is the first thing you should be looking at to understand if you're actually adding value or creating a must-have product. The other concept um which I thought was like black magic, you know, cohorts and metrics and you hear about it, but you know, I I dare you to ask any one of these guys how cohorts work. I'll do my best attempt, but it's like one of these things where there's different ways to look at it. But uh from day one, uh I

12:34think it's very important to instrument your product to measure all the information. Even if you have no way to report on it, again, use Kissmetrics if you want to get it out of the box, but at the end of the day, you want to instrument how people are coming to your site and what they're doing with the

12:48product. And then you want to segment that information based on groups of users and when they do things and understand are you actually getting better? So, the best cohort to look at is age cohort. So, let's say you take the action signed up uh and then you want to figure out are people coming back? So, you look at the amount of people that signed up in the first week and then the

13:09second week, did those people come back? And then the week after, did they come back again in the third week and the fourth week and the fifth week? And hopefully, what will happen is you'll start with a bunch people come back the week before or the the first week and then it slowly drops down. Your business You know your business really sucks if

13:25you go to zero. Right? Cuz a lot of people don't want to run this report cuz it's kind of scary. But this is kind of what it looks like. And the metric that I like to ask entrepreneurs to try to report on is retention. If you're not charging for your product, the next best filter or proxy is looking at how many people got value from that first interaction and came back. If you can get to a 20% weekly retention or 15% uh weekly retention where it stops and it flatlines,

13:54you know you're doing something good. Um we had a um uh we were working on an idea for retention because at the beginning this is this is what happened to us, right? It flatlined. And the one feature that we added um after talking to our users, looking at the activity stream, was shared accounts. The ability for somebody to share their queue with other users meant that they could get the value of it in bringing in their friends or their

14:24coworkers actually fill up the queue. And we would have never even thought of doing that if we didn't realize that our users were actually not coming back cuz it's easy when you first get out there, you get a bunch of sign-ups, but you don't know if you're building something that has long-term value. So, OPN growth hacking. So, the first two things I want to talk about was more about like how do you identify if you're

14:44building anything people want? The second part of this is growth hacking. And OPN is a concept that I took from real estate. So, if anybody's done real estate, they call it OPM, other people's money. You get to buy houses by you know, getting money from your bank or investors. Um and there's and you can do the same thing with your startup. So, the other people's network is a concept and we talked about it or Heaton touched on it where you want to look at other social networks that your customers might be

15:11hanging out and pull them over. And And there's some real famous ones that most people don't know about. So, like PayPal did this with eBay. Right? And uh YouTube did this with MySpace. Right? MySpace um had all these, you know, social network type product and YouTube said, "We need to figure out a way to embed those videos into MySpace so that people would explore and see those videos and

15:36then come to YouTube." Uh there's been a lot of companies that do it on top of Craigslist. Uh one way we did it was actually on top of email clients. So, Flowtown had a product that allowed people to upload emails and we give them the social data. So, I was sitting there on the whiteboard asking myself, "What are the different ways uh who are the different people have emails?" And the no-brainer one was email marketing companies. So, the first uh email I sent out was to the CEO of Mailchimp and I said, "Hey, we've got this thing with social data and demographic information for email providers so they can easily

16:10segment their list." And the cool thing um because we we uh we were still bootstrapping then is uh he said, "Well, something we've been thinking about doing, but we're not going to do now." And I said, "Well, we can provide it now, but because we're early and we're bootstrapping, it'd be great if you know, somehow you could pay

16:25us for the integration." So, not only did we get distribution on Mailchimp, I actually made them pay for it and agree and this is the the winner to do a co-marketing agreement. You got to ask for it, which essentially is like, you know, cuz if you don't get that, I call them Barney relationships where you both like each other and you agree to hug, but nothing really

16:43happens. Right? You want to make sure that you get them to agree that when you do that integration, that they're going to promote it to their list. The Mailchimp uh integration then went to an uh Constant Contact integration to an iContact um to a Campaign Monitor. So, we did four of the email platforms, same concept, where the other emails? CRM applications. All right, Batchbook, Salesforce, Highrise. All right, where else? Uh form submission. Okay, let's do Wufoo, Formstack. Uh and then we eventually did Unbounce, right? So, I mean, the idea of thinking about where your customers are and what tools uh or what kind of platforms they're using and

17:22you can add value is a huge one. So, I call that concept OPN and I do it for a lot of companies I've invested in um to help them figure out their growth. The other one is um it's more of a story, but uh what you want to do and I was talking to some entrepreneurs earlier is you want to figure out who currently sells to

17:42your customer. If you're selling to enterprise clients, you want to figure out what are other products, what are other things, where are places these people go, what are other conferences they attend um so that you can try to figure out how to get yourself into that customer. So, when I started Spheric, the enterprise portal software company, um within 6

18:06weeks, we almost went bankrupt right? And I'm sure most first-time entrepreneurs, especially the technical ones in the room, they run into this. I hired four guys day one, I had clients, I thought I was awesome, next thing you know, I couldn't make payroll. And I had this guy Andrew that had a 2-year-old daughter. And And much like Peldi said when the guy was like, "You know, what if it doesn't work?" I just knew in my bones I could not not make it work. And what I did is I started thinking about, you know, where What do these people do before they spend millions of dollars on

18:36this enterprise software that we're specialists in? What do they do um that we can figure out? And my friend Bob told me a story about um the number one uh stationery sales guy. And the story goes uh that this young sales guy saw this older sales guy just dominating, right? like making all his numbers and he felt like he never worked. And one day he said, "Look, I'd love to, you know, buy you lunch to figure out how are you always making your numbers?" And the guy's like, "I'll tell you what. Meet me tomorrow morning

19:05at 9:00 a.m. and we'll go for a drive." So, he meets with this guy the next day at 9:00 a.m., goes for a drive, and he goes to the warehouse of their competitor and he sits in the parking lot. And he says, "Today is Thursday and every Thursday our competitor ship the product." And they followed all the companies that got the product shipped. And then the next day, he actually What he did is he noticed it was that day the next month, the day before they shipped, he actually called them up and

19:33introduced himself to get their orders. Right? So, these are What you got to figure out is who sells to these companies that you want to get as customers. Right? When I went to Demandforce, the thing that I learned from day one and the reason why they were growing like crazy was that for every vertical they were in, they partnered with the number one or number two supplier for that vertical. When it was dental, they went to Dentrix. When it was automotive, they went to Napa. And they made an agreement with those companies to take the sales guy with their sales guy and

20:03walk them into the client. They could close a deal in 30 minutes that was worth $6,000. And for every one of your businesses, you have that. You just got to get creative about where to find it. Um sorry. This is actually a picture of my brother. And when I took this picture, the first thing my brother said was, "Don't you

20:24ever show it to anybody." Um luckily I got permission about to use it. But the reason why I want to talk about this is here's a guy that today is a home builder. Non-technical. I mean, my brother used a I don't want to knock on Windows, but he's on Windows before and I got him a Mac. But, you know, he didn't have a smartphone, super

20:42non-techy. And Pierre's story's an interesting one, where he started his career as a mechanic. And Pierre went for college as a mechanic, got his papers. I still find it crazy that in the technical world we can actually go work on really complicated systems without any certification, but as a mechanic he had to spend four years, get papers, be an

21:01apprentice. It was ridiculous. Anyways, um Pierre, like many entrepreneurs, went you know, he he was an entrepreneur. He went to work in a mechanic and intern there. And but he wanted to start his own shop. And the thing from day one he said to the owner, Ralph, he said, "Look, someday you're going to retire

21:17and I want to buy the shop from you." And Ralph's like, "Oh, that's such an awesome plan. We should definitely do that. You know, Pierre, if you work really hard, I'll give you equity in the company." So Pierre did that. He worked his ass off, right? Won awards actually as like a technician and all this stuff. First year he sits down, he like goes to Ralph and says, "Hey Ralph, love to sit down, figure out some paperwork." Ralph says, "Yeah, let's talk about it next

21:37year." This went on for two or three years. And then finally on the fourth year, Pierre goes to talk to Ralph, and Ralph says to him, "You know, Pierre, I know we agreed that someday when I retired you would take over, but I just don't see myself doing this. I don't think I'm going to retire." Cuz he was doing so well cuz

21:54Pierre was giving his heart and soul. And Pierre quit. And he calls me up. And I was about halfway through my company, Spear, and we were doing really well. And he goes, "Meet me at the house." And I was like, "Okay, what's going on?" He's like, "Just meet me at the house." So anyways, go to his house. He goes, "I quit." I was like, "Dude, how did you how did you quit? You just went to college." He goes, "You know what? I don't even like being a

22:16mechanic." And I was like, "Wow. It's kind of good that you realized this now before you actually got really deep into it." Cuz I want to do something else. And I was And I asked him, "Well, what are you passionate about?" He and he thought about it for a bit and he goes, "Well, I just finished helping my friend build a house and that was really an awesome experience. I thought it was really cool that every weekend for the last eight weeks we'd go work on his house, you know, drink some beers, and at the end of it this guy was going to live in this place. It'd be really

22:43cool to build houses." And I was like, "You should do that." He goes, "I don't know anything about building houses." I'm like, "That's cool, man. I didn't know [ __ ] about starting companies either. It's You'll you'll figure it out." And so he did that. I actually took all the money I had in my bank account at that time to finance my brother. Cuz I don't know about you guys, I'm passionate about helping people be

23:02successful. When it comes to my family, I'll do anything for them. So I gave him all the money I had in his my bank account and I went to the bank and co-signed all his loans. That's not a good idea, but anyways in hindsight I'm like, [ __ ] that was really risky, but um uh what's what what ended up happening is Pierre, like many entrepreneurs, wanted to compete on price. And so he decided he was going to build the like the best house for the cheapest money. And he went and he did that. And

23:36he built two houses. And I I used to ask him like once in a while, "How's things going?" He's like, "Good." And I'm like, "Have you sold any houses?" He's like, "No." I'm like, "Okay." And then um I remember he called me up and this is the day I took this picture, where I was walking through I went to his house and I went in the kitchen and I looked around and there

23:58was no kitchen table. I thought, "This is weird." I was like screaming, "Hey Pierre, you got Where's your kitchen table, man?" He's like, "I don't want to talk about it. I'm in my office." I was like, "All right." So I walked down the into the living room and I look around, there's no TV,

24:11there's no couches. I was like, "Hey Pierre, I think somebody stole all your shit." He's like, "I don't want to talk about it. Just come to my my office." So I go down the hallway and start walking down this way and I look in his room, nothing in his room except an air mattress and a

24:24sleeping bag. And I could see Pierre and that's when I took out my camera cuz look at him, he's like smiling, but he's [ __ ] stressed out. I was like, "Dude, where's all your stuff?" He goes, "Man, I didn't want to tell you, um but I we haven't sold one house and we're about to like go under. And somebody a real estate agent told him that if he staged the houses, he might

24:49actually sell them faster." He took everything from his own house and moved it into one of the units. That was honestly the day I realized that no matter what, I went into business with a guy that was going to make it work. So I sat down with him and I was like, "Pierre, I don't know anything about building houses, but I know about building businesses. Let's talk about it." And we went through the same process I just talked to you guys about lean startup. I mean, the problem with Pierre is that he built a house that in the industry it's called having no curb appeal. And I don't care who you are and

25:20what price you're selling that house for. If it looks like this, this is the house. No dude is going to buy a house where his wife is not happy. Women make the decision.

25:39So so anyways, I roll up my sleeves and we start talking about it. And the first idea I had to him, I said, "Look, you don't know what you're building, right? Clearly. We we figured out how to get rid of these houses. Um but what you want to do is you want to talk to the market, right? Kind of like the activity stream. So what he did is he created these cocktail happy hours. He would invite a bunch of his female friends, like his girlfriends and other people, first-time home buyers, uh feed them martinis and actually drive around in a van and look at other people's open houses to figure out what

26:08they liked. And then they would all go back to his kitchen. He hired a girl to facilitate this so he wasn't involved. They would take all the pictures they took throughout the day and assemble the perfect house that they would just be totally ecstatic to buy. And he took all that information, gave it to an

26:23architect. He really started to understand who his customer was. First-time home buyers and women. I mean, Pierre understood it so much. This was the slogan or this is the house he ended up building, but this is the slogan that was on his booth at the trade show.

26:44I mean, people that like guys would walk by the booth and see it and like the woman would hit her husband and he'd be like, "Well." And he'd be like, "Well, I don't like that guy." Right? Like people in the industry, I come from a town of 100,000 people, other home builders. Pierre, I mean, just to give you an idea, things turned around so good. On average, most home builders in America built four homes per year, right? And that's everything from the guy that builds one for millions of dollars to the big national chains. In his first year after he figured it out, he built

27:1416. Right? Pierre got it so good. When we started talking about different ways to engage with the customers, he ended up doing things instead of giving away bottles of wine, he want he thought, "Well, my customers just bought their first home and it's the largest transaction financially they'll probably make for their whole life. Let's keep them going." And he said, "I'm going to" And he bought two tickets for the wife and the and the man to jump out of a plane

27:38on the day of the closing. Right? And you know what's cool is most of them never redeemed it, but holy [ __ ] did they tell everybody. "Honey, you going to do it?" "I don't know. I'll watch you do it." "Well, you can go with Bob." And he's like, "So." Word got out this crazy. He they did a thing for charity, Run for the Cure, right? Where they put pink mustaches on the front of all their trucks and drove around the city and raised thousands of dollars for

28:00Run for the Cure. He even thought, "Well, what's the other pain points that people have when they build a first-time house?" He's like, "Where the hell is my contractor?" If you've ever built a house yourself, and I just went through the process, and my brother built the house, obviously. Um you want to know where they're at and what they're doing. He put GPS tracking in all of the trucks with a video camera that you could click through. If you go to a site, you can click there. It's

28:23called Where Is My Contractor. Um he really really figured it out. And he's now building over 100 homes a year. This is only five years later. Right? Won awards. But the thing he did, I mean, just understanding his customer, he realized one day when he was watching they were working on a new subdivision that the customer from day one, when all there was is a foundation and a hole in the ground, would drive up every night

28:49to watch that hole get built more. Like seriously, I don't know. I've got other stuff to do, but every night he'd watch these people drive up. So he said, "Well, why don't I just take pictures of the process, watermark them with our logo, and email them on a weekly basis, and then they could share it." I mean, you wouldn't believe the amount of social sharing that's going on with pictures that he takes, watermarks, and gives to his customers, and how excited

29:12they are to get those emails every week. So the lesson is just like figure out what your customers, who they are, what they're doing, and then try to figure out what's important to them and make that part of your core ethos or ethos of your company. You know, the last thing I want to talk about, I could have went really deep on all the the technical stuff about growth, but when I look at my history and success I've had as an entrepreneur, as an investor, doing a bootstrap company that grew to 30 people, to doing now two venture-backed companies, I realized that there's really this truth about success and it's and there's

29:50a story and maybe you've heard it before. I'm not going to you know share anything new but there's this young man that wants to be wealthy and he goes to the local guru and he says, "I want to I want to learn from you. I want you to teach me how you've been successful." And the guru is like "You want to learn from me?" He's

30:07like, "Yeah, I want teach me your ways. I want to be wealthy." He goes "If you want to learn how to be successful, meet me tomorrow morning at 4:00 a.m. at the beach." And the kid's like, "What are you talking about? I don't want to learn how to be a lifeguard. I want to learn how to be successful." He's like, "If you want to be successful, meet me tomorrow morning 4:00 a.m. on the beach." So the next day

30:27the kid shows up in a suit, right? Getting ready to learn from this guru business guy and the guru is like, "All right." Grabs the guy by the hand and starts walking into the water. And at that point he's thinking I probably should have worn shorts, right? And he gets him up to his waist and he's like, "What's this old man guru dude doing? Like this is crazy. Why are we walking in the water?" And he takes him from behind the back and kind of pushes

30:49him further. He gets up to his neck. He's like, "This is the most craziest thing in the world. What is he doing? Like I don't I want to learn how to make money. I don't want to learn how to swim. Like this is ridiculous." And then the guru takes the guy's head and puts it under water and holds it there. And the guy starts flailing and freaking out trying to figure out like what the [ __ ] is going on and the guru is holding his head down. And right before he passes out, the guru pulls his head up above water and and he asked him a question. He goes

31:18"When I had your head under water what was the one thing you wanted more than anything?" Does anybody know what that was? Just shout it out. To breathe. And he says to the kid, "When you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, you will have success." I don't know if anybody in this room has asthma but if you've ever had an asthma attack and you're wheezing and you're really trying to get a breath of air you don't care about parties, you don't care about lost, you don't care about your what your friends are up to. You want to freaking get a breath. And a lot of

31:55entrepreneurs I meet want to be successful but they would rather do anything else be successful. I know guys that would rather sleep than to succeed. Anybody that's had success, Peldi talked about it. There will be nights where you only get 5 hours, 4 hours, 3 hours of sleep. There'll be nights that you don't

32:14even go to bed. And if you and I know there's people in this room where you would rather eat. I know that I've gone moments where I forgot to eat cuz I'm heads down and I want to succeed cuz I know there's a moment and opportunity that if I don't execute it's going to be gone. And there's a quote that I read this morning that paraphrases everything on that story is from Michelangelo and he said, "If you only knew the amount of work that went into this painting, you

32:42wouldn't call it genius." So I wanted to leave you guys with that message cuz it's probably more important than all the other stuff is just make sure that you really want this. So I've got time for a few questions. I want to thank everybody for coming out today.

33:04All right. Questions.

33:15People want to drink.

33:24Uh so great appreciate the question. Your name is? Hey, thanks Matt. Oh, awesome. We're actually launching on Thursday so I'm really excited. I've been working on it since January and just so you guys know um my passion for clarity is connecting entrepreneurs cuz I came from a small town in Canada and I lived in San Francisco and I realized that my life changed as an entrepreneur when I started getting advice from

33:49people who've been successful before. Again, not your parents, not your friends. So to me and I know this is a really really hard problem connecting those two people, people that have the information that are super busy with the ones that need it in a way that respects both parties time. So I'm excited to get the product out there but I know there's going to be a lot of iterations but we launch on Thursday so yeah, super

34:09excited. Thanks for that.

34:15So one Hello. One question that I've been meaning to ask you is that I always bring you up as an example of someone who does the lean stuff for real. And like I heard you maybe at LessConf where you had everybody check in and it went live immediately and you had automated rollback based on metrics. That stuff seems very fancy and uh how much work is that really? I mean it seems like you start off instrumented as you write the code, you write the instrumentation code as well but how

34:47much more time does that take? You know so that's a great question, Peldi. Um there there's this thing that Eric calls Eric Ries right time, right action and I think that's the most important part that doesn't get communicated. And yes, I think you know automated deployments and rollbacks based on metrics is something you could aspire to but you should not do that day one. I mean day one we do the activity stream, we do the cohort metrics, we do customer interviews, we do surveys and we do do continuous integration but maybe we don't deploy. So right now we don't do the automated deployment for clarity but we do have a build server

35:25that builds, runs all the unit tests and then if something fails, the team gets notified. So it's kind of like you want to figure out the right action at the right time based on where you're at because the truth is is I've done this so many times that I just assume I'm going to be wrong. Right? And that's a crazy like people like, "Well, how can you say as an entrepreneur?" It's like I believe in myself and the process but I'm just going to assume that maybe I'm wrong on the idea so that I'm humble and open to figuring out what is the right solution to that. So so you know at that point

35:53when we were talking about Flowtown, we were like into the product and we needed that to move faster. But thanks for the question. Do you have a follow-up? Uh something I read on the inflight magazine on the way here. Always learning new stuff from it. Um this uh this business guy who was doing customer development just by taking a competitor's marketing material and showing it to potential customers saying "Hey, you know, would you buy this if it

36:24had a little angle which was his angle?" So he spent zero on you know, he just took their website and said, "Okay, the the forget the name. It's going to be my name. Plus we're going to do this." I thought it was brilliant. It's like other people's marketing stuff. Yeah, there's actually two techniques that I use. One is from from competitors is open forums, user voice, um get satisfaction. Any open forum that your competitors have, go read the issues that the customers have because that's where you're going to find your opportunities to get a wedge in the

36:56market. And really that's what you need. You want to focus on a wedge and get that. Um so I use my competitors' information for that and then the other thing we did is for Timely because we knew it was scheduling, we asked ourselves what are the other Twitter tools in the market that do scheduling and let's approach customers that use those products using targeted Facebook ads and actually survey them to see if automating when it goes out is something they would want to bolt on to the

37:21scheduling. Again, I mean I think those are great ideas because it kind of it's called like hyper customer development. It's like the fastest way to fast track it. But yeah, good thanks for that question, Peldi. Yeah. So what if you're working with an entrepreneur that you realize, "Okay, they need to do cohort analysis." How do you kind of right now for my sake, can you explain to them what it is and why they need it and where what are the resources would you recommend for someone to learn it, you know, to really get good at

37:49understanding that realm of stuff? Yeah, so I still can't figure out a better way to explain how to how to think about it but it's really just the concept of how do you know you're getting better? Right? I think a lot of people they have like intuition, right? It's kind of like the art of the science. They're really good artists. That's why before people have been doing lean startup concepts for years. That's why they've been successful but they didn't know how or why they were doing it. To me the cohort stuff is um you know, really just groups of users and then actions they've done over time and segmenting them out that

38:21way so that you know like people that signed up the first week, they're doing the same action but how are they different than people the second week cuz you're improving your software, you're improving your marketing pages, you're improving the product. So are those improvements actually having an effect or are they actually making it worse? I've seen a company change their homepage and it actually screwed up their signups but because they weren't like paying

38:41attention, they never looked at it. Um so other tools um company called Totango that's doing it. I mean honestly Kissmetrics is the best one to do it out of the box and if you want to do it yourself, I can send you some code that I've written that makes it work but at the end the first thing you do is log everything, all the data cuz if you don't have the data, you can't actually go regression. You want and then you have to like wait for the data. Thanks for the question. Anyways, I'm going to let everybody get out tonight. Thanks

39:07again for coming today.