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This is a great talk, but I can't help but think this is tailored to bigger companies than YC-application stage start-ups. Alex spends lots of time talking abo

This is a great talk, but I can't help but think this is tailored to bigger companies than YC-application stage start-ups. Alex spends lots of time talking about the distinction between power users and marginal users, which is incredibly valuable advice for the AirBnBs, Dropboxes, Facebooks, etc but a different problem set than the 'normal' start-up. For emerging product-market fit companies, your power users are your lifeblood. Cultivation super-users early is the make or break for seed companies. These super users are testers, referrals, product-definers, everything. 50M+ user problems are just so limited. In any case, great talk, but definitely targets growth marketers more than start-up folks. Especially liked the idea of tying 'magic numbers' to logical reasoning, not done enough in the growth world. Edit: Much better in the tactical section going through marketing tactics.

dirtyaura 12y ago
Great talk, but I agree that like a lot of startup advice out there, it is for companies that have a product-market fit. I've been thinking why the startup community has so few talks about product design. We have a lot of advice about tech stacks, growth hacking, rising funding, building a team, even some about customer research, but surprisingly little about design. Yet, product design is one of the key activities to achieve product market fit: you can understand the problem, but if your product isn't easy enough to use, PM fit is hard to achieve. For example, you can find a deep analysis of a different SaaS models, but it is surprisingly rare that someone does a deep analysis of e.g. Facebook's UI and writes a blog post about it.
- alexorig 12y ago
  you are spot on. I was directly focused on the point in Sam's list (idea, product, team, execution) where you decide when to really focus on the execution phase of scaling and then what to do when you hit it. I think it's easy to over-focus on product design though, big companies are really bad at this, they produce polished products with great user flows and so on but miss the big win. Products like craigslist/eBay/Google weren't really great designed products to start with, they just solved a real need. As such I think Peter T's talk is really good on getting to product market fit.
cissou 12y ago
I think it's a very important distinction to make, especially early on, to make sure that founders focus on power users and completely ignore casuals. It's tempting to try to get interest from marginal users, because there is many more of them than potential power users, but it's going to do you no good if power users don't see value in what you build.

dirtyaura 12y ago

Great talk, but I agree that like a lot of startup advice out there, it is for companies that have a product-market fit. I've been thinking why the startup community has so few talks about product design. We have a lot of advice about tech stacks, growth hacking, rising funding, building a team, even some about customer research, but surprisingly little about design. Yet, product design is one of the key activities to achieve product market fit: you can understand the problem, but if your product isn't easy enough to use, PM fit is hard to achieve. For example, you can find a deep analysis of a different SaaS models, but it is surprisingly rare that someone does a deep analysis of e.g. Facebook's UI and writes a blog post about it.

alexorig 12y ago
you are spot on. I was directly focused on the point in Sam's list (idea, product, team, execution) where you decide when to really focus on the execution phase of scaling and then what to do when you hit it. I think it's easy to over-focus on product design though, big companies are really bad at this, they produce polished products with great user flows and so on but miss the big win. Products like craigslist/eBay/Google weren't really great designed products to start with, they just solved a real need. As such I think Peter T's talk is really good on getting to product market fit.

cissou 12y ago

I think it's a very important distinction to make, especially early on, to make sure that founders focus on power users and completely ignore casuals. It's tempting to try to get interest from marginal users, because there is many more of them than potential power users, but it's going to do you no good if power users don't see value in what you build.