Kat Mañalac - How to Launch (Again and Again)

I'm Timmy Alikum and partner at Y Combinator, and one of the things I helped 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 you think about launching.

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. You know, they're trying to line up everything right with timing. But if you're like most startups, you will launch something no one will care about. 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, I'd always be shipping. I want you to think about launching as a thing you can continually do. I want to 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're never going to not be 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 startups lecture on press launches, and I'll share a link to that and some resources, you know, after this. But well 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. 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. Once you have an MVP, or you know, 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.

Launching to different channels will help you determine whether you're even talking to the right users. You know, you might launch on one channel and get no response, then launch on another channel and you'll get a huge response. That will help you identify whether you know 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 a thousand of you have launched so far since the start of startup school! That's incredible.

So I clicked on ten random startup school companies from founders who posted on the forum, and only about half had landing pages. This is what I call the silent launch. 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, their company name, you know, a 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. It's a way to collect potential interest from potential users. This is something called Designer School, and it has a quick intro from the founders, a short description of what the company does, and a call to action, which is "subscribe." You can go on Product Hunt and set up one of these pages, but you can also build your own landing page incredibly quickly and easily. This should be something, if you don't have one yet, that you do this weekend.

The next thing is the friends-and-family launch. If you're at the idea stage, you can test out your short pitch on family and friends and see how they respond. Once you have an MVP, do a friends-and-family launch as quickly as possible. In its earliest days, Reddit was shared just among the founders of their batch at YC. There were only eight companies; it was a really small community. I used the Wayback 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 "booths." This is like July 2005. So that's how they got their very first users: just sharing it among their community of founders. What I recommend you do is share the product with your friends and family, watch them use it, you know, 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, you know, ideal users for your product or what you're building. Sometimes their feedback isn't quite as helpful as real users' is.

For example, you know, if Alexis and Steve had shown this to their parents, their parents might have been like, "What the hell is this?" So you need to get out of that, you know, family and friends circuit as fast as you can.

The next move would be to launch to strangers. One of my favorite examples of a YC company launching to strangers is the company Lugg. Lugg is an app that lets you call movers and delivery people on demand. So even before Lugg had built a fully functioning app or product, they would rent a truck, drive to Ikea, and sit outside of Ikea. They would watch shoppers and look for people who were having a particularly difficult time tying stuff to the top of their cars. They'd run up to those customers and say, "Hey, instead of trying to tie this, you know, mattress on top of your car, wouldn't it be cool if you could just push a button and someone with a truck would come and help do this for you?"

The customers would be sweating and then be like, "Yes, that's exactly what I need at this moment." They'd hit, they'd download the app, they'd click the Lugg button, and then the founder would run back to the parking lot, drive up in his truck, and then the customer would be like, "Oh my god, it's you!" and they'd be like, "Yeah!" You know, so it was a real hustle at the beginning; none of this was working on the back end, but it really confirmed for them that this was a hair-on-fire problem for their users and customers. They decided it made sense for them to really build this out and spend time, you know, on this product.

So launching to strangers will help do that for you. It will help show you whether people are actually willing to download and pay for what it is you're building.

We'll talk about online communities. This is actually one of my favorite ways to launch. I think you should plan a launch for every single community that you are part of. When a company goes through Y Combinator, they have the option of launching on Bookface before they launch publicly. Bookface is our internal platform at YC; it's like Facebook meets LinkedIn meets Quora, and there are currently over 4,000, you know, other founders on Bookface. So it's a fairly low-risk way to launch because it's not totally public, but there is enough of an audience there to get some feedback.

You're launching in front of, you know, fairly friendly people who you know want to see you succeed. So they launched there, and what I think you guys are particularly lucky because you have startup school, and you have the startup school forum, which about forty thousand founders are on. So if you have an early version of your product, there is literally no reason that you shouldn't be launching to the startup school community in the next few weeks.

I also think that founders and other people making and building stuff give the best early product feedback. You have thousands of other founders at your disposal, so I think that, you know, this gives you a leg up here. Here's a sort of extreme example of a company that successfully launched in online communities.

So Magic is an on-demand personal assistant. When they started in Y Combinator in 2015, they were actually building a blood pressure monitoring app. They were trying to get this blood pressure monitoring app to grow, and it wasn't growing as quickly as they were hoping. So they decided, you know, let's test out another idea that we had. They sent a link around for their friends and family, and it just looked like this. It basically said, "Text us your phone number, and we'll make anything happen like magic." Like it was very, very basic.

One of their friends thought it was so cool that they shared it on Reddit and Hacker News. Basically overnight, like over the course of a weekend, 40,000 people signed up to use Magic. Of course, they were like, "Oh my god, this is crazy!" And let's be honest, this is an extreme case, and almost no one who launches on Reddit and Hacker News is going to get 40,000 users overnight.

But my point is, it's definitely worth putting yourself out there because you know you might be one of those extreme cases. At the very least, you'll get some early users, and you'll get some great feedback. So many of the startups that go through YC launched on Hacker News and Product Hunt, and over time, we have looked at the stats of how well these launches convert.

So, you know, a TechCrunch launch versus a Product Hunt launch versus a Hacker News launch in terms of converting to users, starting to even out in terms of their impact and conversion for, you know, whether it's your sign-ups or converting to customers. So if you're launching in these communities and aren't active members of these communities yet, my suggestion is that you spend a little bit of time looking at the communities.

Understand the rules, especially if you're posting to subreddits, right? They all sort of have their own moderators, have their own rules. Understand the best way to talk to these communities, and if it's a community that's known for being helpful, ask for advice, ask for feedback. If you're not part of these communities, I'd reach out to someone who is and ask them for advice. Ask them for the best way to launch because they're going to have tips for every community.

You know, for example, one company in this batch was building something that he wanted to get more women's perspectives on, and one of the users of Alpha, which is a community for women in tech, said, "Hey, I'll post that to Alpha for you and I'll tell you what kind of feedback they got." So I recommend connecting with someone in the community and asking them for help if you're not part of the community yourself.

The biggest piece of advice I have for launching on online communities is write like you talk. Do not talk like a marketing robot; people hate that! So don't use marketing language or deep jargon; talk like a human when you're addressing the communities.

All you need and these — when you introduce yourself in these posts, introduce yourself, talk about what you're building, talk briefly about why you're doing it or how you came across the problem. People on Hacker News, for example, are super intellectually curious, so are there any interesting insights that you've learned from talking to potential users or your users? Is there anything surprising or delightful that you could share with the community?

Because people love that, and they also want to ask you questions but sometimes don't know exactly how or which questions they should ask you. So tee it up for them. Say, "Hey, I'm an expert in X, Y, and Z, and I'm happy to answer questions on these topics." Otherwise, you risk people going down all sorts of weird rabbit holes.

Just make sure that you're sharing in this community and asking them for advice. Try to cut down as much of the jargon and marketing as possible out of these pitches.

The request for access launch: the Magic story that I shared with you actually reminded me of this other type of launch you can do. So when Magic launched, you know, overnight, they got 40,000 people signing up, and of course, they couldn't serve 40,000 users immediately. So they launched a waitlist, and they also gave people ways to skip the line.

For example, if you tweeted about Magic, you'd get to skip a few spots in line. You can build these viral elements into your launches that will help get people to spread the word for you. One of my current favorite examples of this request for access launch is Superhuman. So Superhuman is building a better email experience. You can go to their site here and request access, and you can also ask a current user to refer you, and then that'll help you skip the line.

In the signature of all emails sent by Superhuman users is a little tag that says "sent by Superhuman." I'm a Superhuman user, and I get a ton of emails asking me for referrals. You know, people I email say, "Hey, how did you like Superhuman? Would you mind referring me to the product?" If you have a product where you can build that sort of viral element into, I highly recommend it.

So we don't have a huge amount of time because, like, obviously social media and launching to bloggers is this huge long and well-covered topic, but I wanted to skim them briefly and give you an example of a company that we worked with that did it very well. As most of you know, launching to popular blogs that cover your industry or trade can be incredibly powerful.

So Joy is a free wedding website builder, and they were one of the fastest-growing companies in their batch. A lot of their early growth, like an alarming amount of their really early growth, was due to being placed on a number of lists like this. They essentially Googled, they looked at SEO, and they Googled, you know, best wedding website builders and figured out who was coming up on, you know, the first couple pages of results on Google. They reached out to all those bloggers and said, "Hey, we have this new product, you know, we think your community would love it, would you be willing to add us to this list?"

They reached out and basically did a drip campaign to over 50 bloggers and only got responses from four. But those four responses made a huge impact for their early growth. One note that I want you to keep in mind is that some bloggers and influencer opportunities are pay-to-play, and Joy did not pay early on, and I do not want you paying early on either.

If folks are asking you to pay, please find other or creative routes to get around this because as startups, as early-stage startups, you just don't have the money to do it. It is definitely possible to go this route without paying a ton of money, so figure out, you know, wait routes around the expensive sort of sponsorship dollars.

If you're a hardware or physical product, of course you can do a pre-order campaign. Honestly, this could be a whole presentation of its own, but take a look at some successful campaigns and get a sense for how they built out their launch strategy. For example, Sheertex was a company in YC that was making unbreakable sheer pantyhose. The founder, Katherine, made a great, really compelling video that she pitched to press.

She launched on Hacker News, where, you know, Hacker News is probably, you know, it's a very male audience, so we were curious how they would respond to something like sheer, you know, unbreakable pantyhose. But they loved it! They thought it was very clever; they thought the technical piece behind it was really interesting. So I would recommend, like, any company, you know, try to launch and see how different communities respond.

She launched on Product Hunt, her friends and family and batchmates and investors to help spread the word, and she did an incredibly successful campaign. Of course, there are new features or new product line launches. Two very different companies that do this incredibly well are Stripe and Glossier. Both companies are incredibly smart about how they launch new products.

Stripe has always been great from the very beginning; they've been really great at engaging the community. So every time they launch a product, for example, when they launched Stripe Atlas, they launched it on Hacker News, and the founders were in the thread talking to all, you know, potential users and talking about the product and why they were launching it, the problems that they felt it was solving. They blogged about it, spread the word on social media, pitched the press, and this is something that they do over and over again.

If you look at Stripe's blog, if you look at Hacker News, you can kind of see the history since the beginning; they've been very great at activating the community. Glossier, which is a beauty brand, is incredible at launching new products, and the way they think about it is actually very scientific. They release products at very specific cadences at specific intervals, and for every product, they essentially hit every single launch button again and again.

So for each time this new product launches, which is basically like every six to eight weeks, they have this cycle going. So there's a constant drumbeat about Glossier out in, you know, out in the world.

One last note before we jump into questions is while you're in startup school, you should start to build your own communities. You can do this even really pre-product. There was one YC founder, Gaddy Avron, who is the founder of Symetra, and he had a really particularly successful TechCrunch launch. A TechCrunch launch is, you know, a story about what they were doing, launched in TechCrunch.

I noticed that they had a ton of shares, a ton of engagement. So I asked him to share, you know, how did he set this up? What did he do to share and spread the word about his launch? He said that over the years, you know, even before launching the product, he started to build his own email list. Every person he met that discussed his startup with him, even very loosely, he would add them to an email list.

They would get, you know, sort of email updates about what he was working on at semi-regular intervals. So when the TechCrunch article came out, he said he sent that email to the list full of all the people that he'd ever talked to — other startup founders, investors, friends, family — and asked for their help in spreading the news. He said the response was significant, and he even saw VCs who hadn't invested in them sharing the story from their own personal Twitter accounts.

He said, you know, you would be really surprised by who comes out of the woodwork to help when you ask for it. So I would recommend, while you're in startup school, you have the opportunity to talk to so many people about what you're building and start and ask them, "Hey, can I add you to my update list?"

Over time, you'll get that into the hundreds, maybe even thousands. So I would definitely recommend that you start doing that now.

To sum up, I want you to stop thinking about launching as this one moment in time. I don't want you to spend all of startup school getting ready for this one big day, this one big launch day that you're trying to line up all these things for. This is something that is a continuous process that you can do over the course of the next couple months and into the lifecycle of your company.

If you didn't catch them the first time, these are all the opportunities that we went over. I'm Cat, so if you ever have any questions, it's demo day coming up, so it might be slightly slower than usual to respond. But you can always reach out to Cat at Y Combinator, and I'm also on Twitter.

We have ten minutes for questions, so does anyone have any questions about launches?

Yes, the red shirt.

So the question is, "What do you think about launch parties?" Oh gosh, I mean, as an early-stage startup, I wouldn't necessarily recommend you spend a ton of money, right? Like back in the day, I don't know, like back in — I worked at Wired magazine right out of school, and people were spending like tens of thousands of dollars on these elaborate launch parties, and it's bananas! I would not recommend anyone do that.

But at the same time, if you want to have something small and, you know, especially if you have a community and you want to celebrate, you know, I'm, you know, sure, why not? But I would not spend a ton of money on launch parties. I wouldn't do it, but I'm not gonna stop you if you want to do something smart and fun.

It's in the front.

So the question is, "If you have different ideas and you're trying to test out different ideas or different approaches to solving a problem, how do you recommend launching it?" I think you could definitely say you have two different ideas, and you're trying to kind of — can you — what industry? Just really quickly.

Okay, so I would say this is a case of like where it's really important to talk to your users really quickly. So getting in front of, you know, potential customers, and you're launching to not just friends and family but potential customers and asking them what it is they want, what approach do they think would help them best? Getting those, like talking to customers, getting in front of those users as quickly as possible will help guide in which direction to go in. But that is a case where I definitely think it's better to launch sooner and even just, you know, pitching the idea to your customers.

Yes, that's a good question. So the question is, "If you were launching on Hacker News, what types of companies are better suited to launch on Hacker News?" B2B, consumer, dev tools?

So the Hacker News community is, you know, a lot of very smart technical people, but you would be surprised. I would recommend — if you go to news.ycombinator.com/launches, you can see a list, or even Show HN, you'll see a list of all the companies that have launched.

Show HN is all general companies that have sort of shared what they're building on HN, and I think you'd be surprised by which companies get the most upvotes. So one of the top YC companies of all time that launched on Hacker News in terms of votes and engagement was a company called 70 Million Jobs.

It was a solo, non-technical founder building a company that would help get people who had criminal records and had previously been in jail connecting them with jobs, and the community really loved what the founder was building and asked a lot of questions. They were really, really engaged.

So when I've asked this question to the Hacker News moderators, they're like, you know, I always thought before I talked to them that dev tools, right, like something very technical would do best on Hacker News, and they said that's absolutely not true. If you actually look at the numbers, all sorts of companies do well. What does really well on Hacker News is really leaning into the intellectual curiosity.

Like, is there something really interesting that you've learned from your users that you can share with the community? Is there something surprising that they might not have heard elsewhere? That's one recommendation I'd have there: it doesn't matter what industry you are, but really try to speak to the community in a way that will connect with them. Then I would look at previous launches that have done well and see how they've described themselves and how they've kind of teed up the communities to start asking questions.

Oh, really depends. So what I would recommend with Reddit is you target a subreddit that is very specific to. So Reddit has millions of different subreddits on every single topic. So you can find subreddits on, you know, TV shows all the way to fitness, men’s fashion advice, history buffs, and so on. What I would do is figure out what subreddit you want to target first.

The demographics are going to be different depending on what subreddit you go after. But of course, it's like on average, it's probably like a younger male audience. But yeah, there are even subreddits that only women are part of, so it really depends.

Okay, one more question in the green; keep it short.

Yeah, I think — I mean, I think for your landing page, you want it to be really clear what it is you're building and who it is you're building for. But once you start getting, you know, into too much detail, I think it can get really muddied or confusing. You can certainly add a little bit more detail than just that, but I would keep the copy really tight. People's attention spans are really short these days, and I think if you can kind of — and you have a huge community here to help you A/B test that messaging and that front page copy.

But I would recommend to keep it as short and succinct as possible.