YOLO: You Only Launch Once
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Speek is a startup that allows conference calls over a web link instead of a phone number. It has grown rapidly in the past year, now with 11 employees, $1.5 million in funding, and 100% monthly growth. The founder describes Speek's journey from initial idea to growth, including failures with early voice technology, validating their solution, and using customer surveys and analytics to fuel growth without large marketing spends. Key lessons included the importance of product quality, validating assumptions through experiments, and tracking one core metric like weekly growth rate.
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YOLO: You Only Launch Once
- 1. Drake YOLO: You Only Launch Once Danny Boice Speek Co-founder & CTO @DannyBoice | @SpeekApp #YOLO #EE2013
- 3. Current State Lots of Users 100% Monthly Growth $1.5mm Seed Funding 11 Employees Just hit “hockey stick” shaped growth curve last month
- 4. Our Journey Started with NYC, A Napkin, and Beer. YOLO
- 5. February 2012 Place: NYC Problem: Conference calls suck and people hate them Solution: Use a link instead of a phone number and PIN YOLO Funding: $0 Users: 0 People: 2 Assumption: People will use a link for conference calls Experiment: Lots of customer interviews & some AdWord buys
- 6. March 2012 Place: SXSW Problem: We need an app for more experiments Solution: Drink lots of beer (and bourbon) in our AIRBNB house and hack a butt ugly MVP together YOLO Funding: $0 Users: 0 People: 2 + offshore dev Assumption: We can overcome voice technology hurdles Experiment: Get our friends and family to start doing calls Result: FAIL - tech glitches (Voice related)
- 7. June 2012 Place: Arlington, VA Problem: Voice quality sucks Solution: Host conference calls on hardware rather than AWS Funding: $50,000 YOLO Users: 50 People: 3 + offshore dev Assumption: We can overcome voice technology hurdles Experiment: Upgrade our technology and keep getting people to do calls. Result: Validated ** This is when we finally formed Speek, Inc **
- 8. September 2012 Place: AOL Fishbowl Labs (our new and current home) Problem: Not growing organically Solution: Start giving survey.io survey to all active users Funding: $150,000 YOLO Users: 1,000 People: 3 + offshore dev Assumption: We can grow without huge user acquisition costs Experiment: Customer Interviews & Survey.io survey and see if we can get to 40% “very disappointed if Speek didn’t exist” for a given cohort. Result: 3+ months of iteration
- 9. December 2012 Place: Fishbowl Labs Problem: Cheap user acquisition / feed the viral funnel Solution: Try a bunch of different growth tactics - ITERATE YOLO Funding: $500,000 Users: 20,000 People: 6 Assumption: We can grow our user base without huge marketing spend Experiment: Customer development + analytics Result: 3+ months of iteration
- 10. Today Place: Fishbowl Labs Problem: Scale growth, become ubiquitous Solution: Keep iterating and get out early on new platforms and devices Funding: $1,500,000 Monthly Growth: 100% People: 11 Launching out of beta and charging $$
- 11. Lessons Learned
- 12. A great product trumps everything else
- 13. Your MVP can - and should - be butt ugly
- 14. Don’t be shy about growth and distro
- 15. Survey.io is the bees knees
- 16. People will not volunteer information – wrestle it out of them
- 17. Pick one single metric and track weekly growth rate
- 18. We should have done an accelerator
- 20. Thank You! Be Sure To Check Out Speek.com @DannyBoice | @SpeekApp #YOLO #EE2013
Editor's Notes
- Hello. I’m Danny Boice the co-founder and CTO of Speek and this is Drake. He’s the rapper who coined the acronym YOLO.Who’s familiar: Who here is familiar w/ “YOLO”? What is YOLO:If you’re not already aware YOLO is this cultural phenomena where people are doing crazy shit and just shrugging it off like “You Only Live Once”. There are a series of memes that have cropped up so you know it’s legit.Connection to my talk: My team dared me to try and work YOLO into one of my talks – so here it goes. Be sure to tweet at SpeekApp with these hashtags so my team knows I actually did thisMy startup Speek is launching out of beta this month so I just had to make my own YOLO talk but instead of “You only live once” I had to make it nerdy and call it “You Only Launch Once”Here it goes
- Speek is a new way of doing conference calls that doesn’t suck. You don’t need annoying dial-ins. Instead you get a simple link like speek.com/danny that you can share with anyone you want to do a conference call with. Once on you can see who’s on the call and when they talk, add / remove callers, share files, take notes. Speek was founded in June 2012 by myself and John Bracken who previously founded E-vite and did biz dev for AOL Instant Messenger and some other big communication products.Be sure to go register your free speek link now before someone else gets your name
- We’ve had a little bit of success so far but still have a ton of work to do:Raised a lot of cash early on good terms from good VC’sAmazing teamDecent pressI thought it may help to share what we did month by month to get here
- So we’ve navigated the infamous trough of sorrows. We just hit a good growth trajectory. Sounds cool but it started off in a very modest fashion.Back around February of last year John and I were in NYC and went out for beers after work. We were both serial entrepreneurs and in between startups at the time and did what any founder would do – we started brainstorming on startups to found together and drawing them out on cocktail napkins.The one we felt best about was this “bit.ly for conference calling” concept that John came up with.We were both big into Lean Startup so we immediately went about validating our riskiest assumption – that people would do something other than a phone number and PIN for audio conference calls
- Theme: product concept validation before we waste time and money even forming a company
- Theme: Even more product concept validation before we waste time and money even starting a company
- Theme: We validated our product concept. Now we had to make it not suck so much.Voice quality was core. One bad experience churned a user. We had to get this right. It took us several months to do that.We never stopped organically growing along the way though (no paid advertising)
- Theme: Our product doesn’t suck now but if we can’t scale it in a cost effective manner we’re fucked. Can we scale viral growth?Get out there and distribute, distribute, distribute
- Theme: We can generate new users out of active users so now we need to feed the funnel with new users that will active and not churn
- We’ve had a little bit of success so far but still have a ton of work to do:Growing exponentiallyRaised a lot of cash early on good terms from good VC’sAmazing teamDecent press
- Don’t spend money on marketing until your basic product works enough to retain users at a baseline levelOrganic growth is fine and a great sign if you can achieve it
- MVP = minimum viable product if you’re not aware.We literally sliced black and white balsamiq wireframes as our first UI in production. It got us a few hundred users which allowed to raise money on a note with a fairly high cap.
- Once you’re basic product is retaining users at even the most basic level go full steam with distribution and growth
- One way of understanding whether you are ready to grow or not is to use the survey.io survey to identify whether you have achieved product / market fit or not. 40% of a 30 user cohort must answer “very dissapointed” to the question about how they would feel if your product didn’t exist.
- Virginia Lee from my product team literally stalked our early users on facebook and linkedin to get their feedback. This must be done.
- Ours was active users. “active” means they did a conference call that was longer than 5 minutes with more than 2 people on it within the last 30 days. We tracked our % of growth on a weekly and monthly basis.
- I think we would have saved ourselves a few months if we had gone to one of these at the very beginning.It not only gets your product out there faster, connects you with really smart mentors but it will also jump start fundraising
- It will take you twice as long to raise half as much. We had me (previous exit, published, harvard, decade+ of tech) and my co-founder (e-vite founder w/ exit, berkleymba, several years of biz dev for AOL instant messenger) and it took us about 6 months to raise our seed round. Granted we did a convertible note with a high cap and only took money from pro’s.
- Thank you for having meNow please go put a dent in the damn universe by founding startups!