YC: Product

Stewart Butterfield & Adam D'Angelo - How to Get Ideas and How to Measure In today's lecture, we're joined by Stewart Butterfield, founder and CEO of Slack, and Adam D'Angelo, founder and CEO of Quora. Sam and Stewart will explore the process of getting an idea, followed by Adam on tracking metrics for your company.
Michael Seibel, Steve Huffman & Emmett Shear - How to Build a Product I In the first of four lectures on How to Build a Product, Michael Seibel, CEO of Y Combinator, interviews Steve Huffman and Emmett Shear on how they built their products as founder-CEO's of Reddit and Twitch, respectively.
Aaron Levie - How to Build a Product II For our second talk on How to Build a Product, we are joined by Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.
Jason Lemkin, Solomon Hykes, Tracy Young & Harry Zhang - How to Build a Product III Jason Lemkin, of SaaStr, sits down with Solomon Hykes, CEO and co-founder of Docker, Tracy Young, CEO and co-founder of Plangrid, and Harry Zhang, co-founder of Lob, to discuss their experience building products in our third installment of How to Build a Product.
Jan Koum - How to Build a Product IV In the fourth and final episode of How to Build a Product, Jan Koum shares his journey as the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp.
Peter Reinhardt - How to Find Product Market Fit Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment, shares his experience on finding product market fit.
Joe Gebbia & Reid Hoffman - Scaling Product Co-founder of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia, sits down with Reid Hoffman to talk about scaling the product for Airbnb, and how they thought about designing the full chain of the travel experience (not just the accommodations element).

This conversation took place at The Scaleup Offsite, a private CEO gathering hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April 2017.
Des Traynor - Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem Des Traynor - https://twitter.com/destraynor - is the cofounder of Intercom - https://www.intercom.com/

Here's his talk Product Strategy Means Saying No - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AM6QQlgLSQ - and the blog post - https://blog.intercom.com/product-strategy-means-saying-no/
Emmett Shear - How to Run a User Interview Lecture Transcript: http://tech.genius.com/Emmett-shear-lecture-16-how-to-run-a-user-interview-annotated

Building product, and talking to users. In the early stages of your startup, those are the two things you should focus on.
In this lecture, Emmett Shear, Founder and CEO of Justin.tv and Twitch, covers the latter. What can you learn by talking to users that you can’t learn by looking at data? What questions should you ask? How can user interviews define or redefine your product goals?

See the slides and readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec16/

Discuss this lecture: https://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64045
Kevin Hale - How to Build Products Users Love Lecture Transcript: http://tech.genius.com/Kevin-hale-lecture-7-how-to-build-products-users-love-part-i-annotated

Kevin Hale, Founder of Wufoo and Partner at Y Combinator, explains how to build products that create a passionate user base invested in your startup's success.

See the slides and readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec07/

Discuss this lecture: https://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64036
Adora Cheung - Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing Lecture Transcript: http://tech.genius.com/Adora-cheung-lecture-4-building-product-talking-to-users-and-growing-annotated

So you have an idea. How do you go from zero users to many users?Adora Cheung, Founder of Homejoy, covers Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing, in Lecture 4 of How to Start a Startup.

See the slides and readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec04/

Discuss this lecture: https://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64033
Peter Reinhardt - Finding Product Market Fit Peter Reinhardt - https://twitter.com/reinpk - is cofounder and CEO of Segment - https://segment.com/

Segment helps companies capture data from every customer touchpoint and send it to the tools where it can be used most effectively.

They were part of the YC Summer 2011 batch.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

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Topics

00:00 - What is Segment?

1:30 - Segment’s first customers

3:05 - Their YC application

4:00 - Going through YC

5:30 - Realizing their first product didn’t work

10:30 - Launching Analytics.js

11:45 - Experiencing product market fit

16:55 - Debating whether to launch or build out the product

19:15 - Evan Farrell asks - You mentioned in the SS lecture that you had to totally pivot to Analytics.js to find PMF, is it possible to purely iterate on something people kinda like to find PMF, or should it be clear from the outset if a new idea is something people want?

20:30 - The importance of having a skeptic on your team

23:30 - Customer interviews

26:30 - Benjamin Liam asks - How did they know they have the right messaging to explain their product?

28:00 - Idea generation

32:45 - Danny Prol asks - What values and standards do you have in place for your team at Segment? And how do you actively build that culture into your company?

37:00 - Ashwin Doke asks - How has GDPR impacted Segment's business model?

39:15 - Andrew Pikul asks - Any advice he has on asking for more money than you're comfortable asking for.

41:45 - Juan Carlos Garza asks - How did YC help you to where Segment is right now?

43:15 - Juan Carlos Garza asks - In an early stage, what's the thin line between ignoring a customer suggested feature or moving a customer requested feature to the core of your application?

44:45 - Biggest learnings since YC

45:50 - Important hires at Segment
Michael Seibel - Building Product YC CEO Michael Seibel outlines how successful startups think about building something people want.

You can find the lecture transcript and slides here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/37

Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/
David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit David Rusenko from Weebly (YC W07) - https://www.weebly.com/ - details the story of how Weebly developed one of the most popular website creation and hosting sites on the web today.

You can find the lecture transcript and slides here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/38

Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/

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