Table of Contents

Top Learnings & Key Takeaways

<aside> 🚀 How to Kickstarts & Scale Consumer Business

1. Come up with Your Ideas (2 of 5)

   • Pay attention to your own problem (Scratch your own itch) (~30%)
   • Double down on what already works. (18%)
   • What to do once you have idea
     • Prototype it cheaply and quickly to validate the idea
     • Talk to potential customers to refine your idea
     • Figure out who you are building for

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2. Identify your super-specific who

   • Nearly every successful consumer company nailed their super-specific who (though not always right away).
   • Pick (3 of 6 attributes) to start by defining specific characteristics:
     • Age range, Job title, Interests, where they live,
     • where they spend most of their time online and offline,
     • what is most important to them in this product.
   • How to identify your super-specific who:
     • Who are three real people you know who will be exceptionally excited about what you’re building? What do they have in common?
     • Of your existing users, who are happiest and most committed? What do they have in common?
     • Who do you know whose life will become instantly better once they use your product?
     • Who do you know whose life will become instantly less painful?
     • Who’s asking to pay for this product?

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3. Craft your pitch: Hook

   • Ask yourself: what is your remarkable hook?
   • How to craft your hook:
     • Strategy #1: What’s unique about your product?
     • Strategy #2: How do your users describe your product?
     • Strategy #3: What job is your product doing for people?
     • Strategy #4: What about your product is likely to grab people’s attention?
   • Nail your hook and you’ll notice an immediate shift in interest, growth, and engagement. Miss the mark and you’ll continue to struggle.

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4. Reach: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale

   • Typical path to first 1,000 users for consumer startups:
     1. Reach out to friends and colleagues (e.g. email them, post on social media, call them) — 20% popular
     2. Reach to targeted strangers — 30% popular
     3. Go where your target audience hangs out, online or offline (e.g. forums, Product Hunt, college campuses, Craigslist, etc.) — 50% popular (#1)
        • Ideal for: Most products, if a community or meeting point exists
        • Key: Provide real value to people (vs. just spamming your pitch)
        • Takeaway question: What are 1-2 places where your super-specific who already gather?
   • Pick two or three items to try.
   • Almost every startup finds the vast majority of their early growth from just one or two channels

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5. Retain: Iterate until enough people stick around

   • How do I know I have product-market fit? ↓
   • Cohort retention curves flatten after 6 months:
     • Consumer social (e.g. Snap): ~25% is good, ~45% is great
     • Consumer transactional (e.g. Airbnb): ~30% is good, ~50% is great
     • Consumer subscription (e.g. Duolingo): ~40% is good, ~70% is great
   • Explosive growth through word of mouth
   • Sean ellis survey: 40% of users respond “very disappointed” if the product is gone
   • Visceral excitement — user urgently calling & demanding access to your product.
   • A few takeaways:
     • Over 80% found PMF within 2 years
     • Less than 20% felt clear PMF immediately
     • If it wasn’t immediate, most took 6-18 months
     • Most eventually got there by iterating on their product or finding effective distribution

6. Scale: become world-class at one growth engine

   • There are only three feasible growth engines (since relying on sales is rarely economical): Virality, Paid Growth, SEO
   • Your goal as a founder looking to grow your product is to: (1) creatively execute two to three kickstarting tactics and (2) become world-class at one primary growth engine.
   • You’ll likely grow primarily through virality if:
     • You have to share your product in order to use it. (eg. dropbox, paypal, etc).
     • Your product is only fun when your friends are using it too (e.g. Snap, FB)
     • The product is simply super-fun to share (e.g. Tinder, Airbnb, Tiktok).

✍️ Exercise Worksheet → Consumer GTM Worksheet

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<aside> 📈 Growth

1. Don’t limit free user experience that led to organic growth, because only payers that tell their friends.
   • What to keep free
   • What to charge for
2. Landing Page, remove all the links above the fold focus on one single CTA — download / Try
3. Encourage longer plans — for closa, 3 months subscription plan worked.
4. Add Multi-player features — to improve K-factor.
5. Choose north star metrics — for closa it’s engagement & revenue growth — optimize for engagement
6. Virality — invest in this channel if your product better with friends, fun to share, & remarkable.
7. Kickstarts by doing unscalable things to get your first 1000 users
8. Invest your time on nailing the onboarding — get user to your value as fast as possible but not faster.
9. You can do both Freemium & Trial. You got growth benefits by going free & users get benefits from Trial. </aside>

Consumer GTM Worksheet → Again, here’s the simple template

How to Kickstart and scale Consumer business

Step 1: INSIGHT: come up with your idea

Based on my research of over 50 of the most successful consumer companies, there are only five common strategies for coming up with a great startup idea—all rooted in paying attention:

1. Pay attention to your own problems, and solve them (~30%)
2. Pay attention to your curiosity, and tinker (~20%)
3. Pay attention to what’s already working, and double down (~18%)