yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Growth with Alex Schultz (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 6)


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

Thank you! So thank you! Cool! So you guys, this is awesome. I've been watching the lectures in this course. Isn't it absolutely amazing? Good content! And now you're stuck with me.

So, unlike Paul when he was talking in the Q&A and you guys asked him what he'd do if he was in college today and he said physics, I actually indulged myself! I went and I went and did physics. Did physics at Cambridge! I think physics is an amazing class to give you transferable skills that are really useful in other areas. But I guess that's not why you're listening to me today. Like, physics isn't the class.

So, I paid for college doing online marketing, direct response marketing. I started with SEO in the 1990s. I created a paper airplane site. I had a monopoly in the small niche market of paper airplanes globally! Which, you know, when you want to start a startup, also see how big the market could be in the long term. It wasn't great, but what that taught me was how to do SEO.

And back in those days, it was AltaVista! The way to do SEO was to have white text on a white background, five pages below the fold, and you would rank top of AltaVista if you just said "paper airplanes" 20 or 30 times in that text. And that was how you won at SEO in the 1990s. It was a really easy, easy skill to learn.

When I went to college being a physicist, I thought paper airplanes would make me cool, but I was actually the most nerdy person in the physics class. So I created a cocktail site, which was how I learned to program, and that grew to be the largest cocktail site in the UK! That really got me into SEO properly.

When GUI launched, so with Google, you had to worry about PageRank and you had to worry about getting links back to your site, which basically at that stage meant one link from the Yahoo directory got you to the top listing in Google if you had white text on a white background below the fold as well.

When Google launched AdWords, that's when I really started to learn how to do online marketing! That was buying paid clicks from Google and reselling them to eBay for a small margin of like 20% using their affiliate program. That was what really kicked me into doing what everyone nowadays talks about: growth or growth hacking or growth marketing.

In my mind, it's just internet marketing using whatever channel you can to get whatever output you want. That's how I paid for college and how I ended up going from being a physicist to marketer, transitioning to the dark side of the force.

So what do you think matters most for growth? You've had loads of lectures and people have said it over and over. So what do you guys think matters most for growth? Someone give me an answer!

Are you, brother? Great product! I agree, great product! What does great product lead to? Customers! And what do you need those customers to do? Spread the word!

Someone said "stay on your site." Someone said "packaged." That's it! Retention, retention is the single most important thing for growth.

Now, we have an awesome growth team at Facebook and I'm super proud to work on it! But the truth of the matter is we have a fantastic product. Getting to work on the growth of Facebook is a massive privilege because we're promoting something that everyone in the world really wants to use, which is absolutely incredible! If we can get people on and get them ramped up, they stick on Facebook so many times.

Like, I've advised multiple startups. My favorite was working with Airbnb, but with Coursera I've worked with other ones that haven't done as well as those guys. But the one thing that is true over and over and over again is if you look at this curve: the cent monthly active versus the number of days from acquisition, if you end up with a retention curve that asymptotes to a line parallel to the x-axis, you have a viable business and you have product-market fit for some subset of market.

But most of the companies that you see fly up who talk about growth hacking and virality and all of this other stuff, in a trice... so hard not to swear but it'll happen... their retention curve slopes down towards the x-axis. And in the end...

More Articles

View All
15 Things To Do If You Get Rich All of a Sudden
This is the Sunday motivational video. Every Sunday, we bring you a different type of video which should improve your life. Today we’re looking at 15 things to do if you get rich all of a sudden. Welcome to A Luxe, the place where future billionaires come…
The mindset that will (quickly) improve your life
So let me know if this has ever happened to you. You get really excited about starting a new diet. You’re starting to feel like crap about yourself, and you think a new diet will solve all your problems. So you start doing some research online. You read o…
Drew Houston : How to Build the Future
Hi, I’m Sam Alden. This is “How to Build the Future.” Our guest today is Drew Houston. Thank you for taking the time. Thanks for having me! So, you were in Y Combinator with Dropbox in the summer of 2007? That’s right. How did you come up with the ide…
Credentials don’t matter
Smart people, capable people, don’t let themselves be pigeonholed into one definition. That is a disease of credentialism. Because we created this university, now you’ve got to go to university, and you’ve got to get a degree in something. Then people say…
Introduction to hands-on science activities
Hi everyone! I’m Donna and I’m Via. We create the science courses on KH Academy. We’re excited to introduce new physics and chemistry activities sponsored by Adobe, and new biology activities sponsored by Amen. You can find all of these middle school and…
BEST IMAGES OF THE WEEK: IMG! episode 3
Pajamas for puppies and Weird Al approved accordion hero! I look like this because it’s episode 3 of [Music] IMG. Whoa, not so fast! Caution: wet floor! Batman, last week we saw the world’s smallest living frog. Well, this week Visualize Us showed us the…