11 ms·

The best way to launch your startup [video]

110 points by O__________O 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ldoughty 4y ago
This was a very interesting video. Thank you for sharing it. I'm not launching anything anytime in the upcoming future, but I often dabble on side projects for fun with a dream of "launching something, someday", and I thought this was helpful / encouraging, especially early in the video where founders-wanting-to-be-perfect-to-launch was discussed! I think suggestions like this are great to be sharing with the community. Thanks YC!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem 4y ago
I always love this video, it's an updated one from the older one from Startup School, also by YC. It's really true, people don't really remember launches, in the long run, it's all about sustained usage of the product.
Lokalpod 4y ago
I’m working on mehungry dot app that I launched last week. It’s the 1 hour mvp and after some positive feedback, now I’m working on my next milestones with tons more features. My goal is to simplify healthy eating and improve nutrition habits. I asked people outside various grocery stores and most folks do not know how to read nutrition labels nor identify healthy foods. My dad was able to practice some healthier eating habits and get his BP from hypertension to normal. Please feel to reach out if you have any questions or advice for me. I’m new to this so I appreciate your message. YC videos have been instrumental for me as someone who is a self taught engineer and wants to build useful software.
- shubb 4y ago
  This looks useful, nice mvp. Assuming you have a normal diet are the recipes it generates pretty healthy?
- sph 4y ago
  As someone that has had high BP from their 20s, I would not trust any app to give me good advice, because I found that mainstream dietary advice, especially surrounding circulatory problems, is utter nonsense. In my deep dive into the world of low carb, I learned that elevated levels of fructose/uric acid reduce the synthesis of nitric oxide, a known vasodilator, among other mechanisms (did you know that the explosive nitroglycerin is an effective vasodilator?). High blood pressure is reversible by reducing the amount of insulin spikes and ingested simple sugars, and low carb is the most effective method. Yet most apps tend to pride themselves in "medically approved science here!", which means the usual story of eating less meat and saturated fat, and exercising more. "Leafy vegetables!" The problem is that medically approved science that your GP offers tends to be about 25 years out of date, so we're at least a generation away before we have apps that tell you to stop eating bread, cereals for breakfast and heaping bowls of fruit, but instead eating real, non-sugary foods and not to shy away from saturated fat. Now I am 50kg overweight than my first hypertensive diagnosis in my early 20s, and I have better blood pressure in about 2 weeks of eating fewer carbs than I did at the time when I was fit as a trout, but with tight arteries. And don't get me started on cholesterol and statins, because I'll be here all day. A link to get you started, if you want to base your app on up-to-date research: https://youtu.be/KlHPmJTihBc https://youtu.be/KlHPmJTihBc
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    What is your diet like, especially protein? What about the type of carbs in oatmeal, those are better right?
  - stevespang 4y ago
    [dead]
  - stikit 4y ago
    I respect your enthusiasm and journey to get healthy. My experience is I went on a low fat, low simple carb, low sugar diet (commonly referred to as vegetarian) and lost over 30 pounds and reduced my LDL by 60 points over 4 months. I think it’s unfortunate that the Keto industry has chosen to brand themselves low carb/high fat. Rarely do they distinguish good fat from bad fat and good carbs from bad carbs. Keto gets its benefit from low simple carbs , not high saturated fats.
hugodutka 4y ago
Together with a friend we recently started working on https://hocus.dev https://hocus.dev, a self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces. It automates the provisioning of cloud development environments on your own infrastructure. YC content has been extremely helpful to us in choosing what to focus on initially (customer outreach), and what outcomes we should expect from our efforts. They also have a video on how to do initial marketing, and what really makes a difference is setting up analytics and paying attention to it. It’s a huge motivation boost to see actual people looking at what you made.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  I'm just one person, but some feedback - the first sentence in your comment ("a self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces") was far clearer than the main text on your landing page ("Stop waiting for code to build. Save 4 hours a week.").
  - hugodutka 4y ago
    Thanks for taking a look. We’ve found that most people who we show the page to have no idea what Gitpod or Github Codespaces is, so we decided to go with outlining the benefits first. But maybe we should put this line in the subheading.
    - two_handfuls 4y ago
      As someone who has no idea what Gitpod or Github Codespaces is, I found the explanation online plenty clear: it’s a VM on the cloud pre-configured for a variety of common development needs. My one piece of feedback is in the diagram for your system with the two boxes (“choose project”, “start coding”) I felt an urge to press the “choose project” box to see what templates you have. You could leverage that, make the box actually go there if someone presses it. Of course leave the normal call for action that’s at the bottom of the page.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  > They also have a video on how to do initial marketing Have a link, is it here? https://www.ycombinator.com/library/9h-how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers https://www.ycombinator.com/library/9h-how-to-get-your-first...
O__________O 4y ago
Main issue I see with advice given is that it’s focused more on identifying list of potential context to launch instead of acknowledging that every new cohort based on a significant change to a product or service is potentially a new launch and that compiling various reasons to launch is generally meaningless. Said another way, every new significant variation based on real customer feedback is your next MVP (minimal viable product) with the goal of reaching PMF (product market fit) — where PMF is ultimately the true MVP.
revskill 4y ago
The best way, is to stand on shoulder of the giants. You can clone an existing app, and make it more scalable, more UX friendly, more extensible,...
- ericmcer 4y ago
  Maybe not clone… but I have suffered in the past by not using competitors products. One of the easiest UI/UX steps you can do is use a bunch of products solving similar problems and see what you like and don’t like. It’s insane how often I see people asking for UX tips and people tell them to hire a designer.
  - revskill 4y ago
    We called those "clones" as competitions ?
- rexreed 4y ago
  That approach is called the "fast follow" strategy in business vs. the "first mover" strategy. There are some advantages in fast follow vs. first mover but also some key disadvantages, especially in markets of winner-take-most, or when you need a large amount of capital and the early leaders generally take the haul. That being said, for bootstrap projects, side hustles, and other projects, I've really come around to your way of thinking. For those projects where being another alternative does have good economics, "copy first, innovate later" is a solid strategy.
xpiyush 4y ago
Thanks I am working on saas product and useful to me
pqdbr 4y ago
Totally off-topic, but does anyone know what model of camera / lens I should buy to get this quality of image and bokeh effect at the background?
- blcArmadillo 4y ago
  Probably any lens and any modern camera can achieve this quality and look. The soft background is achieved by using a lower f-stop. In this example the background isn't really too blurry though so you shouldn't need anything special. You'll need to spend more time on lighting than anything else to reproduce the overall feel.
  - fsloth 4y ago
    This! Good lighting (studio lamps) makes all material better. There are lots of guides online for various setups.
- yawnr 4y ago
  Really anything with a fast (low) aperture will give you the ability to do it in most environments. Something under 3 is usually a safe bet.
- browningstreet 4y ago
  It’s also about proper lighting and good color grading. But a basic setup can do this. And use Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve for existing/grading. Premier too, but less recommendable to start.
- ttul 4y ago
  If you’re thinking of producing content that looks and sounds this good, proper lighting and sound reflection deadening is key. When I have hired cinematographers to produce content like this, they show up with a whole lot of lights, reflectors, etc. along with high quality microphones.
bambax 4y ago
OT but she's obviously reading a prompter, and combined with that forced super-enthusiastic smile like she's telling us we finally defeated cancer (or announcing the second coming?), it's quite off-putting. Why can't people talk normally.
- ttul 4y ago
  She is not a seasoned media personality. Talking into a camera is a learned skill. It’s harder than it looks.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Thousands of YouTubers beg to differ
rexreed 4y ago
A 21 minute video and the term launch was never really defined. What exactly is a launch anyways? Is it a press release? Getting a website up? Email blasts? A big PR blitz? Or are each of those things separate launches in themselves? There seems to be an implicit expectation that the audience of this video understands what a launch is, and that might be part of the problem. Now there is a section that goes over the types of launches, but perhaps that should have been first in the presentation and go over what exactly is a launch and when do you do it? Launches originate from the idea of a boat that's ready for sailing, and the first launch comes out of the dry dock. But even in that case, ships need many more months before their first sea trials (a different kind of launch), and then something else before ready for whatever their purpose is. Like many other YCombinator videos, I think these assume much more understanding of terminology, lingo, and perception than the audience might actually have. Also, I have a major problem with launching to "friends and family". In my experience, friends and family provide very poor advice and they're much more prone to be encouraging or want to provide emotional or moral support, without actually telling you if your business idea sucks. I burned years doing something that sucked, and when I stopped doing it, my friends and family told me they never thought it was a good idea. I asked them why they didn't stop me. And they said it would have been not nice to be completely honest. Ever since then, I've ignored friends and family and focus where it matters: on the customers who I want to buy stuff. I don't get why the recommendation for the 2nd launch after an MVP landing page is Friends and Family launch.
- tough 4y ago
  For me a launch is having a system in place to take customers money. Once you start taking money, congrats you've launched.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Sure that might be the case, but what about Twitter, did it even launch until they went public?
    - tough 4y ago
      In that case, launching your website to capture the attention you will later sell. I did found an ad powered business when I was 16. You build a site. You create content. You spam the site wherever you can. You get organic traffic. If you're lucky you get SEO gods to pick you up and if you have a good product people will share it. You can put -ads- whenever you want, but that will have consequences. I wouldn't choose to build an ad-powered business in 2023 tbh, I hope ads die some die in the future as the lies they mainly are. Also if you're doing that, you're probably prepping up your initial users to be sold as cattle to your future enterprise customers. Not cool.

110 points by O__________O 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

This was a very interesting video. Thank you for sharing it. I'm not launching anything anytime in the upcoming future, but I often dabble on side projects for fun with a dream of "launching something, someday", and I thought this was helpful / encouraging, especially early in the video where founders-wanting-to-be-perfect-to-launch was discussed! I think suggestions like this are great to be sharing with the community. Thanks YC!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

satvikpendem 4y ago

I always love this video, it's an updated one from the older one from Startup School, also by YC. It's really true, people don't really remember launches, in the long run, it's all about sustained usage of the product.

Lokalpod 4y ago

I’m working on mehungry dot app that I launched last week. It’s the 1 hour mvp and after some positive feedback, now I’m working on my next milestones with tons more features. My goal is to simplify healthy eating and improve nutrition habits. I asked people outside various grocery stores and most folks do not know how to read nutrition labels nor identify healthy foods. My dad was able to practice some healthier eating habits and get his BP from hypertension to normal. Please feel to reach out if you have any questions or advice for me. I’m new to this so I appreciate your message. YC videos have been instrumental for me as someone who is a self taught engineer and wants to build useful software.

shubb 4y ago
This looks useful, nice mvp. Assuming you have a normal diet are the recipes it generates pretty healthy?
sph 4y ago
As someone that has had high BP from their 20s, I would not trust any app to give me good advice, because I found that mainstream dietary advice, especially surrounding circulatory problems, is utter nonsense. In my deep dive into the world of low carb, I learned that elevated levels of fructose/uric acid reduce the synthesis of nitric oxide, a known vasodilator, among other mechanisms (did you know that the explosive nitroglycerin is an effective vasodilator?). High blood pressure is reversible by reducing the amount of insulin spikes and ingested simple sugars, and low carb is the most effective method. Yet most apps tend to pride themselves in "medically approved science here!", which means the usual story of eating less meat and saturated fat, and exercising more. "Leafy vegetables!" The problem is that medically approved science that your GP offers tends to be about 25 years out of date, so we're at least a generation away before we have apps that tell you to stop eating bread, cereals for breakfast and heaping bowls of fruit, but instead eating real, non-sugary foods and not to shy away from saturated fat. Now I am 50kg overweight than my first hypertensive diagnosis in my early 20s, and I have better blood pressure in about 2 weeks of eating fewer carbs than I did at the time when I was fit as a trout, but with tight arteries. And don't get me started on cholesterol and statins, because I'll be here all day. A link to get you started, if you want to base your app on up-to-date research: https://youtu.be/KlHPmJTihBc https://youtu.be/KlHPmJTihBc
- moneywoes 4y ago
  What is your diet like, especially protein? What about the type of carbs in oatmeal, those are better right?
- stevespang 4y ago
  [dead]
- stikit 4y ago
  I respect your enthusiasm and journey to get healthy. My experience is I went on a low fat, low simple carb, low sugar diet (commonly referred to as vegetarian) and lost over 30 pounds and reduced my LDL by 60 points over 4 months. I think it’s unfortunate that the Keto industry has chosen to brand themselves low carb/high fat. Rarely do they distinguish good fat from bad fat and good carbs from bad carbs. Keto gets its benefit from low simple carbs , not high saturated fats.

hugodutka 4y ago

Together with a friend we recently started working on https://hocus.dev https://hocus.dev, a self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces. It automates the provisioning of cloud development environments on your own infrastructure. YC content has been extremely helpful to us in choosing what to focus on initially (customer outreach), and what outcomes we should expect from our efforts. They also have a video on how to do initial marketing, and what really makes a difference is setting up analytics and paying attention to it. It’s a huge motivation boost to see actual people looking at what you made.

nmfisher 4y ago
I'm just one person, but some feedback - the first sentence in your comment ("a self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces") was far clearer than the main text on your landing page ("Stop waiting for code to build. Save 4 hours a week.").
- hugodutka 4y ago
  Thanks for taking a look. We’ve found that most people who we show the page to have no idea what Gitpod or Github Codespaces is, so we decided to go with outlining the benefits first. But maybe we should put this line in the subheading.
  - two_handfuls 4y ago
    As someone who has no idea what Gitpod or Github Codespaces is, I found the explanation online plenty clear: it’s a VM on the cloud pre-configured for a variety of common development needs. My one piece of feedback is in the diagram for your system with the two boxes (“choose project”, “start coding”) I felt an urge to press the “choose project” box to see what templates you have. You could leverage that, make the box actually go there if someone presses it. Of course leave the normal call for action that’s at the bottom of the page.
moneywoes 4y ago
> They also have a video on how to do initial marketing Have a link, is it here? https://www.ycombinator.com/library/9h-how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers https://www.ycombinator.com/library/9h-how-to-get-your-first...

O__________O 4y ago

Main issue I see with advice given is that it’s focused more on identifying list of potential context to launch instead of acknowledging that every new cohort based on a significant change to a product or service is potentially a new launch and that compiling various reasons to launch is generally meaningless. Said another way, every new significant variation based on real customer feedback is your next MVP (minimal viable product) with the goal of reaching PMF (product market fit) — where PMF is ultimately the true MVP.

revskill 4y ago

The best way, is to stand on shoulder of the giants. You can clone an existing app, and make it more scalable, more UX friendly, more extensible,...

ericmcer 4y ago
Maybe not clone… but I have suffered in the past by not using competitors products. One of the easiest UI/UX steps you can do is use a bunch of products solving similar problems and see what you like and don’t like. It’s insane how often I see people asking for UX tips and people tell them to hire a designer.
- revskill 4y ago
  We called those "clones" as competitions ?
rexreed 4y ago
That approach is called the "fast follow" strategy in business vs. the "first mover" strategy. There are some advantages in fast follow vs. first mover but also some key disadvantages, especially in markets of winner-take-most, or when you need a large amount of capital and the early leaders generally take the haul. That being said, for bootstrap projects, side hustles, and other projects, I've really come around to your way of thinking. For those projects where being another alternative does have good economics, "copy first, innovate later" is a solid strategy.

xpiyush 4y ago

Thanks I am working on saas product and useful to me

pqdbr 4y ago

Totally off-topic, but does anyone know what model of camera / lens I should buy to get this quality of image and bokeh effect at the background?

blcArmadillo 4y ago
Probably any lens and any modern camera can achieve this quality and look. The soft background is achieved by using a lower f-stop. In this example the background isn't really too blurry though so you shouldn't need anything special. You'll need to spend more time on lighting than anything else to reproduce the overall feel.
- fsloth 4y ago
  This! Good lighting (studio lamps) makes all material better. There are lots of guides online for various setups.
yawnr 4y ago
Really anything with a fast (low) aperture will give you the ability to do it in most environments. Something under 3 is usually a safe bet.
browningstreet 4y ago
It’s also about proper lighting and good color grading. But a basic setup can do this. And use Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve for existing/grading. Premier too, but less recommendable to start.
ttul 4y ago
If you’re thinking of producing content that looks and sounds this good, proper lighting and sound reflection deadening is key. When I have hired cinematographers to produce content like this, they show up with a whole lot of lights, reflectors, etc. along with high quality microphones.

bambax 4y ago

OT but she's obviously reading a prompter, and combined with that forced super-enthusiastic smile like she's telling us we finally defeated cancer (or announcing the second coming?), it's quite off-putting. Why can't people talk normally.

ttul 4y ago
She is not a seasoned media personality. Talking into a camera is a learned skill. It’s harder than it looks.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Thousands of YouTubers beg to differ

rexreed 4y ago

A 21 minute video and the term launch was never really defined. What exactly is a launch anyways? Is it a press release? Getting a website up? Email blasts? A big PR blitz? Or are each of those things separate launches in themselves? There seems to be an implicit expectation that the audience of this video understands what a launch is, and that might be part of the problem. Now there is a section that goes over the types of launches, but perhaps that should have been first in the presentation and go over what exactly is a launch and when do you do it? Launches originate from the idea of a boat that's ready for sailing, and the first launch comes out of the dry dock. But even in that case, ships need many more months before their first sea trials (a different kind of launch), and then something else before ready for whatever their purpose is. Like many other YCombinator videos, I think these assume much more understanding of terminology, lingo, and perception than the audience might actually have. Also, I have a major problem with launching to "friends and family". In my experience, friends and family provide very poor advice and they're much more prone to be encouraging or want to provide emotional or moral support, without actually telling you if your business idea sucks. I burned years doing something that sucked, and when I stopped doing it, my friends and family told me they never thought it was a good idea. I asked them why they didn't stop me. And they said it would have been not nice to be completely honest. Ever since then, I've ignored friends and family and focus where it matters: on the customers who I want to buy stuff. I don't get why the recommendation for the 2nd launch after an MVP landing page is Friends and Family launch.

tough 4y ago
For me a launch is having a system in place to take customers money. Once you start taking money, congrats you've launched.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Sure that might be the case, but what about Twitter, did it even launch until they went public?
  - tough 4y ago
    In that case, launching your website to capture the attention you will later sell. I did found an ad powered business when I was 16. You build a site. You create content. You spam the site wherever you can. You get organic traffic. If you're lucky you get SEO gods to pick you up and if you have a good product people will share it. You can put -ads- whenever you want, but that will have consequences. I wouldn't choose to build an ad-powered business in 2023 tbh, I hope ads die some die in the future as the lies they mainly are. Also if you're doing that, you're probably prepping up your initial users to be sold as cattle to your future enterprise customers. Not cool.