#145 - Startup School Week 4 Recap - Kat Mañalac and Gustaf Alströmer

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is a recap of the fourth week of Startup School. I've cut down the fourth week of lectures to be even shorter and combine them into one podcast. First, we'll have a lecture from Kat Manalac. Kat's a partner at YC. Her lecture focuses on how startups should think about launching and why you should do it repeatedly.
Then we'll have a lecture from Gustaf Alströmer. Gustaf is also a partner at YC, and his lecture focuses on measuring product market fit and growth channels.
All right, here we go.

**Kat Manalac** (0:35)
I'm Kat Manalac, I'm a partner at Y Combinator. And one of the things I help 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 that 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 they're trying to line up everything right with timing. But if you're like most startups, you will launch something and no one will care. And if it took you six months to get there, your startup is probably gonna be dead before you get another chance to launch. So in the same sort of spirit at always be shipping, I want you to think about launching as something you can continually do. I wanna 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 be 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 startup school lecture on press launches, and I'll share a link to that and some resources after this. But we'll go over most of these, and most of these things are things that you should be doing while you're in startup 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-B test it and see how people actually respond to the idea.
And then once you have an MVP or 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.
And then launching to different channels will help you determine whether you're even talking to the right users, because you might launch on one channel and get no response. You'll launch on another channel and you'll get a huge response.
That will help you identify whether 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 startup school. And I'm excited to hear that 1,000 of you have launched so far since the start of startup school. That's incredible. So I clicked on 10 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. 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 posted on the forum. Their company is Zinc. They have a domain name, they have their company name, they have their short one line pitch, a short description and their call to action, which is get in touch. The call to action can be something like, 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 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 the call to action, which is subscribe. So 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 idea 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 used the way back 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 Upvotes Upvotes, they were calling it Boosts. This is like 2005, I think 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, 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 ideal user for your product or what you're building. And so sometimes their feedback isn't quite as helpful as a real user's is. So for example, if Alexis and Steve had shared this with their parents, their parents might have been like, what the hell is this? So you get out of that family and friend circuit as fast as you can.