- The speaker discusses the concept of launching and emphasizes the need to continuously launch rather than treating it as a one-time event.
- Launching allows for practicing and refining the pitch, testing responses, and identifying the right users.
- Different types of launches are mentioned, including silent launch (simple landing page), friends and family launch, launch to strangers, and launch in online communities.
- Examples of successful launches are provided, such as Reddit launching among YC founders and Magic gaining 40,000 users overnight through Reddit and Hacker News.
- Launching on platforms like Hacker News and Product Hunt is recommended, with a suggestion to understand the rules and engage with the communities effectively.

- The speaker advises a company to seek feedback from communities, even if they are not part of the community themselves.
- They emphasize the importance of writing in a conversational tone and avoiding marketing language or jargon when addressing the community.
- The speaker recommends introducing oneself, discussing the product, sharing interesting insights, and offering to answer questions in community posts.
- They mention the success of a "request for access" launch strategy, where users can skip the line by referring others or completing certain actions.
- The speaker shares an example of a company that reached out to bloggers and influencers to be featured on lists, resulting in significant early growth.
- They caution against paying for influencer opportunities and suggest finding alternative routes to gain exposure.
- The speaker mentions the success of hardware and physical product pre-order campaigns and highlights the launch strategies of companies like Stripe and Glossier.
- They encourage startups to start building their own communities and email lists early on to leverage for future launches.
- The speaker concludes by emphasizing that launching is a continuous process and encourages reaching out to them for any questions.

YC Partner Kat Mañalac presents on how startups should think about launching and why you should do it repeatedly.

Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-and-again

This lecture is part of YC's Startup School, a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/

Timestamps
00:00 Expect to launch more than once
1:14 Ways to launch
1:35 Why launch continuously?
2:32 Types of launch
3:50 Friends and family launch
5:05 Launching to strangers
6:28 Online communities
  10:20 No jargon
11:30 "Request access" launch
12:52 Social media
15:35 New feature launch
17:02 Build your own community

And 1 of the things I help founders do a lot is prepare to launch.

That is what I'm going to talk to you about today.

So I want to change the way you think about launching.

So most people think about launching as something that you get 1 shot at.

But I, so for example, I just talked to a team that's been preparing to launch for 6 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 1 will care.

And if it took you 6 months to get there, your startup is probably going to be dead before you get another chance to launch.

So in the same sort of spirit, always be shipping.

I want you to think about launching as something you can continually do.

I want to destroy the idea that launching is just this 1 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 1 channel and get no response.

You'll launch on another channel, and you'll get a huge response.

And so 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.

So I clicked on 10 random Startup School companies from founders who'd 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.

You know, 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'd posted on the forum.

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 1 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 1 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.

I used the way back machine to actually see what Reddit looked like in its earliest days.

But if you look closely, this is actually before they called Upvotes Upvotes.

So that's how they got their very first users, just sharing it among their community of founders.

And so 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 is.

So for example, you know, if Alexis and Steve had shared this with their parents, their parents might have been like, what the hell is this?

So you get, you know, get out of that, you know, family and friend circuit as fast as you can.

And so the next move would be to launch to strangers.

So 1 of my favorite examples of a YC company launching to strangers is the company Lug.

So Lug is an app that lets you call movers and delivery people on demand.

So even before Lug had built a fully functioning app or product, they would rent a truck, and they would go drive to Ikea, and they would sit outside of Ikea.

So they would watch shoppers, and they'd look for people who were having a particularly difficult time tying stuff to the top of their cars.

And they'd run up to those customers and they'd say, hey, instead of trying to tie this 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.

And they'd be like, yes, that's exactly what I need at this moment.

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.

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.

And so they decided it makes sense for us to really build this out and spend time 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.

This is actually 1 of my favorite ways to launch.

I think you should plan a launch for every single community that you are part of.

So when a company goes through Y Combinator, they have the option of launching on Bookface before they launch publicly.

So Bookface is our internal platform at YC.

It's like Facebook meets LinkedIn meets Quora.

And there are currently over 4,000 other founders on Bookbase.

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.

And you're launching in front of fairly friendly people who want to see you succeed.

And what I think, you guys are particularly lucky because you have Startup School.

And you have the startup school forum which about 40,000 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.

And so, you know, I also think that founders and other people making and building stuff, they give the best early product feedback.

So you have thousands of other founders at your disposal.

So I think that this kind of 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.

So 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.

So they sent a link around to their friends and family, and it just looked like this.

It basically said, like, text this phone number, and we'll make anything happen like magic.

And 1 of their friends thought it was so cool that they shared it on Reddit and Hacker News.

And basically overnight, like over the course of a weekend, 40,000 people signed up to use magic.

And so of course, they were like, oh my god, this is crazy.

And almost no 1 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 1 of those extreme cases, but 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 launch on Hacker News and Product Hunt.

And we, over time, have looked at the stats of how well these launches convert.

So a TechCrunch launch versus a Product Hunt launch versus a Hacker News launch.

And in terms of converting to users, they're starting to even out in terms of their impact and conversion for 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.

You understand the rules, especially if you're posting to subreddits.

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.

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 there are going to be tips for every community.

And, you know, for example, 1 company in this batch, you know, was building something that he wanted to get more women's perspectives on.

And 1 of the users of Elpha, which is a community for women in tech, said, hey, I'll post that to Elpha 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.

So don't use marketing language or deep jargon.

Talk like a human when you're addressing the community.

So all you need in these, you know, 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.

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.

But so, and just make sure like that you sort of are sharing this community, 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, overnight they got 40,000 people signing up.

And of course, they couldn't serve 40,000 users immediately.

And they also gave people ways to skip the line.

So for example, if you tweeted about magic, you'd get to skip a few spots in the line.

So you can build these viral elements into your launches that will help get people to spread the word for you.

1 of my current favorite examples of this request for access launch is Superhuman.

So Superhuman is building a better e-mail experience.

So 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.

So in the signature of all emails that are sent by Superhuman users is a little tag that says sent by Superhuman.

And so I'm a Superhuman user, and I get a ton of emails.

out to people, and I get a ton of emails, like I'll send

a ton of my emails out to people and I get a ton of emails asking me for referrals.

People I email say, hey, how did you like superhuman?

Would you mind referring me to the product?

So if you have a product that you can build this sort of viral element into, I highly recommend it.

So we don't have a huge amount of time because obviously social media and launching to bloggers is this huge and 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 1 of the fastest growing companies in their batch.

And 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 best wedding website builders and figured out who was coming up on the first couple pages of results on Google.

And they reached out to all those bloggers.

And they said, hey, we have this new product.

Would you be willing to add us to this list?

And they said that they reached out and basically did a drip campaign to over 50 bloggers and only got responses from 4.

But those 4 responses made a huge impact for their early growth.

So 1 note that I want you to keep in mind is that some blogger 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.

And so it is definitely possible to go this route without paying a ton of money.

So figure out routes around the expensive sponsorship dollars.

If you're a hardware or physical product, of course, you can do a pre-order campaign So, you know at pairing for the order launch could honestly 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.

So for example, Sheertex was a company in YC that was making unbreakable sheer pantyhose.

The founder, Catherine, made a great, really compelling video, she pitched 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, you know, the technical piece behind it was really interesting.

And so I would recommend any company try to launch and see how different communities respond.

She asked her friends and family and batchmates and investors to help spread the word and she had an incredibly successful Campaign and so of course there's a new feature or new product line launches So 2 very different companies that do this incredibly well are Stripe and Glossier.

So both companies are incredibly smart about how they launch new products.

So 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, so for example when they launched Stripe Atlas, they launched it on Hacker News and the founders were in the thread talking to all potential users and talking about the product and why they were launching it, the problems that they felt it was solving.

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 sort of 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 on a very specific cadence, at specific intervals.

And for every product, they essentially hit every single launch button again and again.

So community, social media, press, advertising.

So each time this new product launches, which is basically like every 6 to 8 weeks, they have this cycle going.

So there's a constant drumbeat about Glossier out in the world.

1 last note before we jump into questions is while you're in startup school, you should start to build your own communities and you can do this even really pre-product.

So there was 1 YC founder, Gadi Evron, who was founder of Symmetria 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, and I noticed that they had a ton of shares, a ton of engagement.

So I asked him to share, you know, how did you set this up?

What did you do to share and spread the word about your launch?

And he said that over the years, even before launching the product, he started to build his own email list.

So every person he met that he discussed his startup with, even very loosely, he would add them to an email list and they would get 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.

And 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.

And 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?

And over time, you'll get that into the hundreds, maybe even thousands.

So I would definitely recommend that you start doing that now.

And so to sum up, I want you to stop thinking about launching as this 1 moment in time.

I don't want you to spend all of startup school getting ready for this 1 big day, this 1 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 life cycle of your company.

If you didn't catch them the first time, these are all the opportunities that we went over.

And I'm Kat, so if you ever have any questions, it's demo day is coming up, so I might be slightly slower than usual to respond, but you can always reach out, Kat at Y Combinator, and I'm also on Twitter.

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Kat Mañalac - How to Launch (Again and Again)