How to Talk to Users with Gustaf Alströmer | Startup School

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:09)
Good morning, everyone. My name is Gustaf, and I work here at Y Combinator as a group partner. I've been here since 2017 Before YC, I was a product lead at Airbnb, and actually a YC founder back in 2007 Today, I'm gonna talk about how to talk to users and your future customers. Here's what I plan to cover today. Why the best founders talk to the users throughout the lifetime of the company. Two, how to find your users and how to talk to them. Three, what questions to ask them and what not to ask them. And four, how to turn your conclusions into an MVP. Most people in the world have the idea on how new startups are formed completely wrong. They think ideas of new products is something the founders just come up with on a lazy Sunday or a late night coding session.
You probably know it doesn't work this way. This scene, as you can see here, is a scene from the social network movie. It's a great movie, but they got a lot of things wrong on how Facebook actually got started. This is Brian Chesky. Brian is the co-founder and CEO of AIBNB. On the left side of the photo is Amol. Amol was the very first guest on AIBNB. They actually spent a weekend together in San Francisco when they were being kind of launched. You notice the difference between this photo and the previous photo? Well, this photo actually is a real photo and includes a two-way conversation with a real customer. Great founders talk to future customers before they even have a product. In fact, the very best founders in the world learn directly from their users throughout the life of their company. Let that sink in. If you have correctly identified who your users are, you should learn from them throughout the lifetime of your company. Why, you might ask.
Users and customers will keep you honest. They are the only stakeholders actually paying you anything. If anyone will tell you the truth, it will be them. So my talk today is about how to do this well. So let's talk about another Airbnb story.
In 2010, and I remember this myself, Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, he decided to launch an experiment. He was going to give up his apartment and live in 50 different Airbnbs over the next couple of months. You might ask yourself, why would anyone do that? So much hassle. Most people who read the articles about this experiment, because he did announce it, they missed a point.
I personally remember this being kind of crazy. By doing this, Brian will literally get a chance to talk to every one of these 50 hosts each single day on his trip, and what an incredible source of honest feedback on your product. Without the Airbnb hosts, Airbnb would not exist today. What Brian, Joe, and Nate did so early is deeply understand the motivations and the feedback from their hosts. Still today, Brian and Joe gets calls from hosts on their personal cell phone numbers. I remember them telling me that on their first day at work at Airbnb.
Why do they do that? Well, it's the number that they put on the website and share with all of their hosts early on. They weren't hiding behind anonymous email. They wanted to hear from the customers. At the time, this seemed almost radical. Most founders would spend their time in front of the computers trying to find scalable growth channels like Google Ads. Unfortunately, most founders still don't build personal connections with their users today. They hide behind info at emails or do not reply emails.
You don't believe me? You can just do a search in your email for do not reply at and see how many people don't want to talk to their customers. So let's start by trying to figure out who I should talk to. It's always easier to interview people that you know or people who are on your network. They're simply the most likely to respond, but perhaps can be less honest in their answers to not offend you. Don't be afraid of reaching out to them and don't be afraid of rejection. The second group here is coworkers or former coworkers. They can be a really great source. They might know the topic really well. And if you're building software for startups, you can easily navigate yourself to someone who's a potential user. It's also very common that the early users you speak to are outside of your personal circles or your coworker circles.
When asking YC founders how they found their early users, some of the most common answers were LinkedIn, Reddit forums, Slack or Discord communities, and sometimes in-person events.