Kat Mañalac - How to Launch (Again and Again)

I'm Timmy alikum and partner at Y Combinator and one of the things I helped founders do a lot is prepare to launch that is what I'm gonna talk to you about today so I want to change the way you think about launching so most people think about launching as something that you get one shot at but I so for example I just talked to a team that's been preparing to launch for six months they were lovingly trying to get every pixel perfect on their product before they shared it with everyone and now they are stressing over every line

on their landing page and you know they're trying to line up everything right with timing but if you're like most startups you will launch something no one will care and if it took you six months to get there your strap is probably gonna be dead before you get another chance to launch so in the same sort of spirit I'd always be shipping I want you to think about launching a thing you can continually do I want to destroy the idea that launching is just this one moment in time because assuming you do well and assuming you ship new

products and new features you are never going to not launching so let's talk about all the ways that you can launch here are different opportunities to launch that we're going to go through today I'll go through each of these except press launches we have done a previous startups lecture on press launches and I'll share a link to that and some resources you know after this but well over most of these and most of these things are things that you should be doing while you're in start-up school

so let's talk about first why you want to continuously launch so before you even have a fully functioning product you get a chance to practice your pitch and you can refine it you can a be test it and see how people actually respond to the idea and then once you have an MVP or you know a very early version of your product launching through different channels will give you an opportunity to see how people will respond to that early version of the product you know and then launching two different channels will help you determine whether

you're even talking to the right users because you know you might launch on one channel and get no response you'll another channel and you'll get a huge response and so that will help you identify whether you know you're identifying the right user for what you're building so let's talk about some of the types of launches that you can do while you're in start-up school and I'm excited to hear that you know a thousand of you have launched so far since the start of startup startup school that's

incredible so I clicked on ten random startup school companies from founders who posted on the forum and only about half had landing pages so this is what I call the silent launch and you do not need anything fancy for this you know all you need is a domain name your company name a short description a contact and a call to action so for example this is a random startup school company that I found from a founder who'd posted on the forum their company is zinc they have you know a domain name they have their

company name they have their you know short one-line pitch a short description and their call to Acton which is get in touch the call to action can be something like you know subscribe to our newsletter or subscribe to hear more when we launch product hunt for example has an actual product for pre-launch companies called ship and it's a way to collect potential like interest from potential users so for example this is something called designer school and it has a quick intro from the founders a short description of what the company

does and a call to action which is subscribe so you know you can go on product hunt and set up one of these pages but of course you can also build your own landing page incredibly quickly and easily and this should be something if you don't have one yet that you do this weekend so the next thing is the friends-and-family launch so if you're at ideas stage you can test out your short pitch on family and friends and see how they respond and once you have an MVP do a friends-and-family launch as quickly as possible so in its earliest

days reddit was shared just among the founders of their batch at YC you know there were only eight companies it was a really small community I use the Wayback Machine to actually see what reddit looked like in its earliest days it hasn't changed that much but if you look closely this is actually before they called up boats up boats they were calling it booth this is like 2005 and July so that's how they got their very first users just sharing it among their community of founders and so you know what I

recommend you do is share the product with your friends and family watch them use it you know sit down next to them and ask for feedback but don't stay in this phase for too long because your friends and family might not be the exact right you know ideal user for your product or what you're building and so sometimes their feedback isn't quite as helpful as a real users is so for example you know if Alexis and Steve had show this with their parents their parents might have been like what the hell is this so you get you know get out

of that you know family and friends circuit as fast as you can and so the next move would be to launch to strangers so one of my favorite examples of a YC company launching launching to strangers is the company lug so lug is an app that lets you call movers and delivery people on demand so even before lug had built a fully functioning app or product they would rent a truck and they would go drive to Ikea and they would sit outside of Ikea so they would watch shoppers and they'd look people who were having a particularly difficult time

tying stuff to the top of their cars and they'd run up to those customers and they'd say like hey instead of trying to tie this you know mattress on top of your car wouldn't it be cool if you could just push a button and someone with a truck would come and help do this for you and you know the customers would be like sweating and then be like yes that's exactly what I need at this moment and you know they'd hit they download the app they click the Lugg button and then the founder would run

back to the parking lot drive up in his truck and then the customer be like oh my god it's you and they were like yeah you know so it was a real hustle at the beginning like none of this was working on the back end but it really confirmed for them that this was a hair on fire problem for their users and customers and so they decided it makes sense for us to really build this out and spend time you know on this product so launching to strangers will help do that for you it will help show you whether people are actually willing to download

and pay for what it is you're building we'll talk about online communities this is actually one of my favorite ways to launch um I think you should plan a launch for every single community that you are part so when a company goes through Y Combinator they have the option of launching on Bookface before they launch publicly so Bookface is our internal platform at YC it's like Facebook meets LinkedIn meets Cora and there are currently over 4,000 you know other founders on book base so it's a fairly

low risk way to launch because it's it's not totally public but there are you know is enough of an audience there to get some feedback and you're launching in front of you know fairly friendly people who you know want to see you succeed and so they launched there and what I think you guys are particularly lucky because you have startup school and you have the startup school forum which about forty thousand founders are on so if you have an early version of your product there is literally no reason

that you shouldn't be launching to the startup school community in the next few weeks and so you know I also think that founders and other people making and building stuff they give the best early product feedback so you have thousands of other founders at your disposal so I think that you know that this you know kind of gives you a leg up here here's a sort of extreme example of a company that successfully launched in online communities so magic is an on-demand personal assistant when they started in

Y Combinator in 2015 they were actually building a blood pressure monitoring app so they were trying to get this blood pressure monitoring app to grow and it wasn't growing as quickly as they were hoping so they decided you know let's test out another idea that we had so they sent a link around for their friends and family and it just looked like this it basically said like Texas phone number and we'll make anything happen like magic like it was very very basic and their friend one of their friends thought it was so cool that they

shared it on reddit and hacker news and basically overnight like over the course of a weekend 40,000 people signed up to use magic and so of course they were like oh my god this is crazy and and let's you know let's be honest this is an extreme case and almost no-one who launches on Reddit and hacker news is going to get 40,000 users overnight but my point is it's definitely worth putting yourself out there because you know you might be one of those like extreme cases but at the very least you'll get some early users and you'll

get some great feedback I'm so many of the strips that go through YC launched on Hacker News and producthunt and you know we over time have looked at the stats of how well these launches convert so you know a TechCrunch launch versus a product hunt launch versus a hacker news launch and in terms of converting to users and you know they're starting to even out in terms of their impact and conversion for you know whether it's you know your signups or you know converting to customers so um if you're launching in these communities

and aren't active members of these communities yet I my suggestion is that you spend a little bit of time looking at the communities you understand the rules especially if you're if you're posting to subreddits right they all sort of have their own moderators have their own rules understand the best way to talk to to these communities and if it's a community that's known for being helpful ask for advice ask for feedback and if you're not part of these communities I'd reach out to someone who

is and ask them for advice ask them for the best way to launch because they're going to be tips for every community and you know for example one company in this batch you know was building something that he wanted to get more you know women's perspectives on and and there - Mel founders and one of the users of alpha which is a community for women and tech said hey I'll post that too you know for it to alpha for you and I'll tell you what kind of feedback they got so I recommend like connecting with

someone in the community and asking them for help if you're not part of the community yourself the biggest piece of advice I have for launching on online communities is write like you talk do not talk like a marketing robot people hate that so don't use marketing language or deep jargon talk like a human one year when you're addressing the communities so all you need and these you know when you introduce yourself in these posts introduce yourself talk about what you're building talk briefly about why you're doing it

or how you came across the problem people on hacker news for example are super intellectually curious so are there any interesting insights that you've learned from talking to potential users or your users is there anything surprising or delightful that you could share with the community because people love that and they also want to ask you questions but sometimes don't know exactly how or which questions they should ask you so tee it up for them say hey I'm an expert in X Y & Z and I'm happy to

answer questions on these topics otherwise you risk people going down all sorts of weird rabbit holes but so and just make sure like that you're sort of are sharing this community asking and asking them for advice try to cut down as much of the jargon and marketing as possible out of these pitches the request for access launch the magic story that I share with you actually reminded me of this other type of launch you can do so when magic launched you know overnight they got 40,000 people signing up and of course they couldn't

serve 40,000 users immediately so they launched a wait list and they also gave people ways to skip the line so for example if you tweeted about magic you'd get you know to skip a few spots in line so you can build these viral elements into your launches that will help get people to spread the word for you one of my current favorite examples of this request for access launch is super human so super human is building a better email experience so you can go to their site here and request access and you can

also ask a current user to refer you and then that'll help you skip the line so in the signature of all emails that are sent by superhuman users is a little tag that says sent by superhuman and so I'm a superhuman user and I get a ton of emails like I'll send a ton out of of my emails out to people and I get a ton of emails asking me for referrals you know people I am email say hey how did you like superhuman would you mind referring to the product so if you have a product that you can build the sort of viral element into I

highly recommend it so we don't have a huge amount of time because like obviously social media and launching to bloggers is this huge long and well covered topic but I I wanted to skim them briefly and give you an example of a company that we worked with that did it very well as most of you know launching two popular blogs that cover your industry or trade can be incredibly powerful so joy is a free wedding website builder and they were one of the fastest-growing companies in their batch and a lot of their early

growth like an alarming amount of their really early growth was due to being placed on a number of lists like this they essentially googled they looked at you know SEO and they googled you know best wedding website builders and figured out who was coming up on you know the first couple pages of results on Google and they reached out to all those bloggers and you know they said hey we have this new product you know we think your community but love it would you be willing to add us to this list and they you know they said that they

reached out and basically did a drip campaign to over 50 you know 50 bloggers and only got responses from four but those four responses made a huge impact for their early growth and so one note that I want you to keep in mind is that some bloggers and influence or opportunities are pay-to-play and joy did not pay early on and I do not want you paying early on either if folks are asking you to pay please find other or creative routes to get around this because as startups as early-stage showed up you just don't have you don't

have the money to do it and so I'm say it is definitely possible to go this route without paying a ton of money so figure out you know wait routes around the expensive sort of sponsorship dollars if you're a hardware or physical product of course you can do a pre-order campaign and so you know honestly be a whole presentation of its own but take a look at some successful campaigns and get a sense for how they built out their launch strategy so for example sheer text was a company in YC that was making unbreakable sheer

pantyhose the founder Katherine made a great really compelling video that you pitched press she launched on Hacker News where you know hacker news is probably you know it's a very male audience so we were curious how how they would respond to something like sheer you know unbreakable pantyhose but they loved it they thought it was very clever they thought you know that the technical piece behind it was really interesting and you know so I would recommend like any company you know try to launch and see how different communities respond

she launched a product hunt she her friends and family and batchmates and investors to help spread the word and she did an incredibly successful campaign and so of course there's a new feature or new product line launches so two very different companies that do this incredibly well are stripe and glossier so both companies are incredibly smart about how they launch new products so stripe has always been great from the very beginning they've been really great at engaging the community so every time they launch a

product so for example when they launch stripe Atlas they launched it on Hacker News and the founders were in the thread talking to all you know potential users and and talking about the product and why they were launching it um the problems that they felt it was solving they blogged about it they spread the word on social media they pitched press and this is something that they do over and over again if you look at stripes blog if you look at hacker news you can kind of see the history since the beginning they've been very great at

said of activating the community glossier which is a you know a beauty brand is incredible at launching new product and the way they think about it is actually very scientific they release products at on a very specific cadence at specific intervals and for every product they essentially hit every single launch button again and again so communities social media press advertising so each time this they you know this new product launches which is basically like every six to eight weeks they have this cycle going so there's a

constant drumbeat about glossier out in you know out in the world one last note before we jump into questions is while you're in start-up school you should start to build your own communities and you this you can do this even really pre product so there was one YC founder Gaddy Avron who is founder Symetra and he had a really particularly successful TechCrunch launch a TechCrunch launch is you know a story about what they were doing launched in TechCrunch and I noticed that they had a ton of shares a ton of engagement so I asked him to

share you know how did you know how did you set this up what did you do to share and spread the word about your launch and he said that over the years you know even before launching the product he started to build his own email list so every person he met that discussed his startup with even you know even very loosely he would add them to an email list and they would get you know sort of email updates about what he was working on on a semi-regular like I said my regular intervals so when the TechCrunch article came out he said he

sent that email to the list full of all the people that he'd you know he'd ever talked to other startup founders investors friends family and asked for their help in spreading the news and he said the response was significant and he's even saw VCS who hadn't invested in them sharing the story from their own personal Twitter accounts and he said you know you would be really surprised by who comes out of the woodwork to help when you ask for it so I would recommend while you're in start-up school you have

the opportunity to talk to so many people about what you're building and start and ask them hey can I add you to my update list and over time you know that you'll get that into the hundreds maybe maybe even thousands so I would definitely recommend that you start doing that now and so to sum up I want you to stop thinking about launching as this one moment in time I don't want you to spend all of start-up school getting ready for this one big day this one big launch day that you're trying to line up

all these things for this is something that is a continuous process that you can do over the course of the next couple months and into the lifecycle of your company if you didn't catch them the first time these are all the opportunities that we went over and I'm cat so if you ever have any questions it's demo day is coming up so it might be slightly slower than usual to respond but you can always reach out to cat at Y Combinator and I'm also on Twitter we have ten minutes for questions so does

anyone have any questions about launches yes the red shirt so the question is uh what do you think about launch parties oh gosh I mean as an early stage startup I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily recommend you spend a ton of money right like back in the day I don't know like back in the I worked at Wired magazine right out of school and people were spending like tens of thousands of dollars on these elaborate launch parties and it's bananas and I would not recommend anyone do that but at the same time if you if

you want to have something small and you know if you especially if you have a community and you want to celebrate you know I'm you know sure why not but I would not spend a ton of money on launch parties wouldn't do it but I'm not gonna stop you if you want to do something smart and and fun it's in the front so the the question is if you have different ideas and you're trying to test out different ideas or different approaches to solving a problem how do you recommend launching it and and so

you know I think you could definitely say you have two different ideas and you're trying to kind of can you what what industry just really quickly okay so so I would say this is a case of like where it's really important to talk to your users really quickly so so getting in front of you know potential customers and you're launching to not just friends and family but potential customers and asking them like what it is they want what what approach do they think would help them best and getting those like

talking to customers getting in front of those users as quickly as possible will help kind of got in which direction to go in but that is a case where I definitely think it's it's better to to launch sooner and even just you know pitching the idea to your customers yes that's a good question so the question is if you were launching on Hacker News what types of companies are better suited to launch on Hacker News b2b consumer dev tools so the hacker news community is you know a lot of very smart technical people but you would be

surprised so I would recommend you go to if you go to news dot y combinator comm slash launches you can see a list or even show HN you'll see a list of all the companies slash launches will show you a list of all the YC companies that have launched show HN is is all general companies that have sort of shared what they're building on HN and I think you'd be surprised by which companies get the most up votes so I'm one of the top YC companies of all time that launched on hacker news in terms of votes and

engagement was a company called 70 million jobs and it was a solo non-technical founder building a company that would help get people you know had criminal records and had previously been in jail connecting them with jobs and the community really loved what what the founder was building and asked a lot of questions and really um and we're really really engaged so the happen when I've asked this question to the hacker news moderators they're like you know I always thought you know sort of before I

talk to them that Deb tools right like something very technical would do best on Hacker News and they said that's absolutely not true if you actually look at the numbers all sorts of companies and do well and but what does really well on hacker news is really lean leaning into the intellectual curiosity like is there something really interesting that you've learned from your users that you can share with the community is there something surprising or um you know that they might not have heard elsewhere and so that's that's one

Commendation I'd have there is it doesn't matter what industry you are but really try to speak to the community in a way that will kind of connect with them and then I would look at previous launches that have done well and see how they've described themselves and how they've kind of teed up the communities to start asking questions oh really depends so on what I would recommend with reddit is you you target a subreddit that is very specific to so reddit has a lot like millions of different subreddits on every single

topic so you can find subreddits on you know TV shows all the way to like fitness and to men's fashion advice and history buffs and and so what I would do is I would figure out what is the subreddit that you want to target first and then that the demographics are going to be different depending on what a subreddit you go after but of course it's like on average it's probably like younger male audience but yeah there are even subreddit sent like only women are part of so it really depends okay one

more question in the green keep it short yeah I think I mean I think in for your landing page you want it to be really clear what it is you're building and who it is you're building for um but once you you know start getting you know into too much detail I think it can get really it can get muddied or confusing and you can you can certainly add a little bit more detail than just that but I would keep copy really tight like people people's attention spans are really short these days and and I think

it's if you can kind of and you have a huge community here to help you AV test that messaging and that and that you know kind of that front page copy so but I would recommend to keep it as short and succinct as possible okay you you