ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS FROM

LAUNCH SCALE 15

Sebastian Fung (@sebfung)

WeFinance for Founders:The Simplest Way to Crowdfund a Personal Loan

Andy Artz, Social+Capital:Using Custom Audiences to Be 10x More Effective on Facebook

• Turn $10,000 into $12,500 through FbStart

• Pick a scalable platform; each have different strengths — content (explaining complex ideas), social (hyper-targeting), SEM (intent conversion), video (branding)

• As a startup, social usually makes the most sense because of targeting; create custom audiences on FB — 4 easy step:

• 1) Setup proper tracking (Facebook Pixel Helper / Chrome extension)

• 2) Study audience (pixels on blog posts and snip.ly for press articles)

• 3) Prime audience with content (1% lookalike; push press articles)

• 4) Convert primed audience (conversion ads; CPI is 4%)

Anneke Jong, Reserve:Creating a Ruthless Growth Culture: Scaling Without Breaking Your Team

• Have to be ruthless to scale your company — 3 ways:

• 1) Ruthless welcoming:

• No offer without executive interview

• Welcome email with docs for everything; playbook for every role

• 2) Ruthless sharing:

• Nationwide — role-specific — summits, email lists, Slack channels

• Weekly video hangouts; playbook for specific tactics

• 3) Ruthless camaraderie:

• Session on values and vision for new and old employees

• Monthly all-hands town halls; revisit origin story

• Standardized, easily accessible KPIs (use Looker)

Matt Epstein, Zenefits:How We Grew from $0 to $20mm ARR in ~2 Years

• Secret sauce: right message (problem, solution, benefits) to send to the right people (department, seniority) in the right industries (tech, education, etc.)

• Start with and focus on email because it’s fast, cheap, scalable, and touches every part of the funnel; 1:1 —> MailChimp —> Marketo

• Your levers: content, biz dev/VARs, referrals, SEO, SEM, growth hacking, events

• Prioritize levers by: potential impact, time, money, target audience

• B2B growth playbook: 1) find secret sauce, 2) start selling with email then SDRs, 3) prioritize growth levers and pull 1-3/month, 4) automate/optimize levers once you have 2 repeatable channels

• Top 5 tips: 1) find secret sauce first, 2) stack rank levers and commit to 1-3/month, 3) ready, fire, aim; if you’re happy, you spent too much time, 4) ignore shiny objects (social media), 5) make your “stretch” goal the real goal

Casey Winters, Pinterest:Two Years of Conversion Experience at Pinterest

• Once you find a winning idea, iterate on that idea until you can’t anymore

• Use data to improve the experience down the funnel; they landed on board about bikes?

• Some things to try:

• 1) Identify highest traffic opportunities

• 2) Eliminate steps that don’t add value (password)

• 3) Use users data to your advantage

• 4) Prioritize the right metrics in experiments (engaged users > signups)

• 5) Escape the local maxima

• 6) Audit your web to app experience

• Tools to use:

• Organic app install attribution: Branch Metrics, Yozio, Tapstream

• Paid app install attribution: Adjust, AppsFlyer

Julie Fredrickson, Stowaway Cosmetics: Scaling Communications (or, Marketing &

PR Is Just a DAEMON for Messaging)• Find the problem:

• "You have too much damn makeup”

• “Normal lipstick is too big; you won’t use it all”

• “Less than 1 in 5 woman discard their expired mascara"

• Stick with your messaging:

• “Right sized, half the size, half the price”

• “Right size at work, in your bag, or your car”

• Don’t fuck around with your messaging

• Don’t even touch “makeup is too expensive”

• Want press, blogging, or PR? Play the game, don’t try and change how it works

Dovey Wan, Danhua Capital: Far East Growth Engine: How China Can

Supercharge Your Business• Megatrends in China

• 1) Huge manufacturing scale

• 2) Rising Chinese middle class (millennials spend 40% more than parents)

• 3) Mobile internet (500mm internet users; grandparents don’t email, they FaceTime)

• 4) Aging population (in 5-10 years, there will be more senior citizens than newborns)

• Opportunities for U.S. founders

• 1) VR (entertainment industry is skyrocketing)

• 2) Robotics (software and algorithm matters more than hardware)

• 3) Infrastructure (SaaS focuses on business logic/workflow)

• Copycat concerns: find something with a high barrier to entry that’s difficult to replicate

• Recommended books: Age of Ambition, The $10 Trillion Prize

Rob May, Talla:Scaling Startup Funnels:

Moving Slow to Grow Fast• Misconceptions:

• Product-market fit means you are ready to scale

• Just pour money into your existing lead sources

• Success = Channel x Message x Cost Effectiveness

• Key takeaways:

• Understand how acquisition scales before investing a lot of money

• Be thoughtful; bad experiments waste time and money

• Pair experiments with funnel stages

• Make sure you learn about both scalability and cost

Alexander Mimran, Minbox: Guerilla Video for Startups

• How to spread videos: PR, email lists, word of mouth

• Send Files Freaking-Fast: Minbox vs. Dropbox:

• Tools: YouTube, Peggo, Adobe Premier

• Just tell a story

• Other tools: Product Hunt, SoundCloud, Dissolve (stock footage), VoiceBunny

• 5 tips:

• 1) Pick a style that fits your budget

• 2) Consider in-house production

• 3) A great soundtrack is essential

• 4) Tell a story

• 5) it’s about shock and awe

Adelyn Zhou, (Frm.) NextDoor: Inside the Invite Economy: How Nextdoor, Airbnb, & Uber Scaled Through Invitations• Members x Invite Rate x Invites per Inviter x Accept Rate = New Invited Members

• New Invited Members x Invite Rates… viral loop!

• Why should users invite: share a killer feature (Snapchat), improve own experience (Hinge), gain a reward (Gilt), altruistic (Nextdoor), by accident (Brewster)

• Move the invite to a prominent spot (top of email = increase conversion)

• Incentivize Invitations: free swag (Riot Games), free rides (Uber), extra services (Wealthfront)

• Other tips: show invite status, allow bulk invites, streamline contact selections (top friends), think beyond online (Lyft has posts to print), personalized landing pages

• Testing: experiment with subject lines, assets, reminders, value propositions

• Tools: Branch Metrics, Yozio, the MailChimp blog (data on things like email timing)

Josh Elman, Greylock Partners: Launching Your Rocket Ship off Someone Else's Platform

• Platforms are “free partnerships”; go where users already are: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, Facebook Chat, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Slack

• Don’t expect platforms to be constant:

• 1) Users of the main product constantly want new experiences

• 2) Platform’s business model keep evolving (monetization can radically shift strategy)

• 3) Users risk stop trusting or using apps if the platform (bad behavior of apps)

• Build your product to be independent; Instagram grew from Facebook and Twitter

• The next platforms: FB Messenger, SnapChat, Pinterest, WeChat, Medium

• Platforms can still work for you…

• 1) Remember the value exchange (give the platform’s users better features, content)

• 2) They are accelerant; never get comfortable (take advantage of the moment at hand)

• 3) Only core users who come to your front door matter (don’t get confused with visitors)

Dan Arkind, JobScore: 5 Hiring Hacks for Founders

• Hack #1: Court don’t hunt (never give up on known, proven commodities)

• Say you are interested, make an offer, (if they say no) increase the offer, (if they say no again) change the job, (and still saying no) offer again

• Hack #2: Pitch from end state and work backwards (mission status, pain, opps)

• Short timeline and explicit goals (product, usage, revenue)

• Hack #3: Tap into your founder super powers (be authentic)

• Bad (“looking for a great front end dev”); good (“rebuild our product as a one page app, would love advice on Node, Angular, React, etc.)

• Hack #4: Build a referral machine; great people want to work with great people

• Ask employees to draw out the org chart from prior co and thumbs up/down people

• Hack #5: Hire like an investor and make bets

• Cliffs and vesting are your friends; 2% is fine since most people only stay for 2 years

Sahil Jain, AdStage: Marketing Automation: Turning Strangers into Customers and Customers into Evangelists

• Attract (Strangers —> Visitors): blog, keywords, social publishing on LinkedIn, Facebook

• Convert (Visitors —> Leads): forms, CTAs, landing pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

• Close (Leads —> Customers): CRM, email, workflows via Facebook, Twitter

• Delight (Customers —> Evangelists): surveys, smart content, social monitoring

Jordan Stone, Huckle: Building Super Fans Like Taylor Swift:

From a Guy Who Was on the Team in 2009• Focus on the 1% of your customer base; super users (1%) not casuals (99%)

• Open a direct line of communication with your top customers: SMS, email, Twitter, Facebook, push notifications

• Identify and empower top super users — your influencers — get them on payroll

• Entice the other super users: points system, leaderboards, “founding member”

• Offer rewards and experiences that one can’t buy (meet with Taylor Swift!)

• Announce and promote community rewards publicly; make the 99% feel FOMO

• i.e., GitHub has gold Octocat hoodie for top 100 contributors / month

• Have ownership over your entire community; own the data

• Example communities: Yelp, Product Hunt, Reddit, Magic: The Gathering (forums), Starbucks (forums)

Regina Grogan, Bento: How Bento Bootstrapped Its First 20k Customers

and How We Plan to Add a Zero to That• Hack for contacting bloggers:

• 1) Research on what they write about

• 2) Customize your email (quality over quantity)

• What worked for Bento:

• Fliers and street teams were 3.5x more successful than Facebook Ads

• Employee referrals were 8.5x better than Facebook Ads

• What didn’t work for Bento: Reddit, direct mail, offline display

• Listen to the silent majorities: if 1 person reports a problem, likely 7 more who are pissed

• A customer service request is someone talking for the majority

• No script policy with customer service (no copy paste)

• Customers who interact with customer service were actually more likely to come back

• = Higher LTV!

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Sebastian Fung (@sebfung) sebastian@wefinance.co