Do Things That Don't Scale

“Brian and Joe were astonished to find, when establishing the company, that New York City, despite its tourist appeal, was underachieving.” “The graphics were fairly horrible,” co-founder Joe Gebbia recalls after browsing over their posts. People were taking Craigslist-style images with their phones. Surprise! No one was booking because you couldn’t see what you were paying for.” One of their early backers, Paul Grahan of YC, advised that the two attempt a low-tech, high-effort hack to boost bookings — but it was fast to deploy and was incredibly effective. Chesky and Gebbia rented a $500 camera and went door to door throughout the city, capturing as many listings as they could. They then compared the amount of reservations for the upgraded images listings to the rest of the Updated York ads and found that the updated photos led in two to three times more bookings, instantly doubling their profits from New York. After establishing their concept, they extended it to Paris, London, Vancouver, and Miami, with similar results. As a response, Airbnb decided to create a photography service that would allow hosts to hire a professional photographer to come to their home and photograph it. It began in the summer of 2010 with 20 photographers and grew to over 2000 freelance photographers by 2012, documenting 13,000 listings across six continents.”

"Reddit founders submitted links (wrote comments?) everyday using different usernames, to get the community going." "Following their gradation from Y-Combinator, Huffman and Ohanian continued to build Reddit. The initial product may of been bare bones but at least it was functional. At first there wasn’t even enough user submitted content to fill out the website. This required Ohanian and Huffman to submit content on behalf of fake accounts, giving the impression that the site had more people on it. Slowly more and more contributors began to trickle in and the site was finally functioning on its own. Initially, Reddit users could only post links and then up or downvote those links. This simple use case slowly evolved to bring on the features for which we are familiar, like sub-Reddits and comments."

"The best outbound campaign we ever ran at Brex (75% demo rate, 75% demo to close): Brex launched in 2018 as the first corporate card for startups. After launch, when we were still ~30 employees and near 0 rev, we ran the most successful outbound campaign I've ever seen. We ran a report in Pitchbook to determine seed through Series B startups in the Bay Area that raised a round in the last 6 months. We had a list of ~300 companies. We purchased 300 bottles of Veuve Clicquot at ~$50/bottle. We delivered the bottles along with a handwritten note from our CEO (this can be automated) to the founders of the companies that raised. The note read something like "Congrats on your recent fundraise! We know how hard it is to build a startup and we're rooting for you." Shortly after delivery, our CEO followed up with an email asking if they'd be open to a demo. 75% said yes (or had the right person in their company take the demo) and 75% of the demos converted to customers. 300 x .75 = 225 demos. 225 x .75 = 169 new customers. The total spend was ~$19k (15k for Champagne, 2k for handwritten notes, 2k for task rabbit delivery)."

"Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition. Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe. At YC we use the term "Collison installation" for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot."

"That's what Facebook did. At first it was just for Harvard students. In that form it only had a potential market of a few thousand people, but because they felt it was really for them, a critical mass of them signed up. After Facebook stopped being for Harvard students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. When I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School, he said that while it was a lot of work creating course lists for each school, doing that made students feel the site was their natural home."

“It all started at a launch party we threw (at my parents house, where I grew up, actually) with about 300 students from USC. In order to get in, you had to download Tinder. I actually stood at the door and told people they were not allowed in if they did not download the app. I think those were the first few hundred faces we had on the app. The following Monday, I went to all the sororities and fraternities at USC. I started with the sororities at the Monday night chapter meetings. I stood in line to make an announcement. My pitch was: ‘Do any of you have any crushes on anyone at school, and are you too afraid to go up to them and strike up a conversation? Do you have someone in a class you kind of want to get to know but don’t know if they feel the same way? Are you nervous that someone you like, doesn’t like you back? Do you feel like you’re seeing the same people every day and want to see new faces around here? Well, now is your chance! You can anonymously swipe on someone and if they feel the same, then it’s a match! All the cool people are on it. All your crushes are waiting for you. You don’t want to miss out, trust me!!’ Next we went to the fraternities, I would run, not walk, from house to house saying the same exact thing: ‘Who wants to find out who likes you on campus? Who wants to see a ton of new faces? Where are the sorority girls on campus? They are on Tinder. It’s not creepy, this is the new thing.’ I actually remember standing on a piano at some point and hearing a round of applause after a speech I made at a frat. People were so excited. I remember calling Justin, the CMO at the time, and he was counting the downloads for me. It was working. I replicated this at SMU the next week (because I went there for a year before USC, and still had all my friends there). After SMU was UCLA and UCSB. A week or two later was my University tour in Boston. There are so many colleges in that small little area. Downloads were skyrocketing. All the while, I was creating the ‘Tinder University Program’. We made it a program so that this exact recipe would take place at every school we picked, even if I could not be there myself. I would interview people, then choose a few influential students on every campus, send them a box of T-shirts, stickers, keychains, cups, you name it. Basically, a bunch of Tinder swag. And it was their job for that semester to be a tinder Brand Ambassador and to make Tinder popular on campus. I would measure their success with the percentage of people that would download the app within a certain area. It was a numbers game. The Tinder ambassadors would send me photos of events at every cool bar or club where they ‘had to download tinder to get in’. It was amazing. Once I felt an area was saturated enough, I would add another university. I had about 15 universities at a time. It was a domino effect. The more people on the app, the more people wanted to be on it. Total chain reaction. Next up was finding ambassadors outside of the US in different countries.” —Alexa Mateen Abdi, founding team and the head of US expansion