- Stanley, the founder of DoorDash, shares his journey from being a Stanford student to starting a successful startup.
- The idea for DoorDash came from a meeting with a small business owner who expressed the need for delivery services.
- To test the demand for delivery, they created a simple landing page and received phone calls for orders.
- They started with minimal resources and hacked together solutions to meet the demand.
- Doing things that don't scale allowed them to become experts in their business and provide personalized customer support.
- They faced challenges such as having their Square account shut down but overcame them.
- They learned the importance of testing ideas and getting off the ground quickly.

- The speaker discusses their experience with DoorDash and shares three lessons learned: testing hypotheses, launching quickly, and doing things that don't scale.
- They mention that their first customers heard about them through word of mouth and that they initially launched with a simple landing page.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of mobile technology and the ability to tap into an on-demand pool of independent contractors for delivery services.
- They mention that they started DoorDash as a passion project and were surprised by its success.
- The speaker answers questions about their marketing strategy, their plans for expansion beyond food delivery, and the timeline for incorporating the company.
- The next speaker, the CEO of Teespring, discusses the advantage of doing things that don't scale as a startup.
- They talk about finding first users, turning users into champions, and finding product-market fit.
- The speaker shares the story of TeeSpring's early struggles and the importance of personal effort in bringing in the first users.
- They emphasize the need for founders to invest personal time and effort in acquiring initial customers.

- In the early stages of building a company, it is important to focus on acquiring and retaining users rather than expecting immediate ROI
- Giving away products for free is not recommended as it can lead to a false sense of security and may not result in long-term value for the user
- To turn users into champions, it is essential to provide them with exceptional experiences and constantly engage with them through customer service and social media
- It is crucial to reach out to current and churned customers to ensure their satisfaction and learn from any mistakes that may have caused them to leave
- Building a product that has market fit requires rapid iteration and progress, prioritizing speed over scalability and clean code
- It is important to only worry about the next order of magnitude and focus on solving immediate challenges rather than getting overwhelmed by long-term scalability concerns
- Doing things that don't scale, such as talking to users and moving fast in development, should be continued for as long as possible to maintain a competitive advantage
- The speaker encourages listeners to reach out to him via email for any questions or assistance.

- The speaker announces the creation of a t-shirt with proceeds going to a charity.
- They explain that they entered the t-shirt printing business because they personally experienced a need for it.
- The speaker discusses their target markets, which include entrepreneurs and influencers.
- They emphasize the importance of setting goals before seeking press coverage.
- Different types of stories that can attract press attention are mentioned, such as product launches and fundraising.
- The speaker advises considering whether a story is interesting to others before pitching it to the press.

- Getting press coverage is like a sales funnel, not everyone you approach will convert
- To get press coverage, you need to think of a story and then get introduced to reporters through connections
- It is best to go to entrepreneurs who have been covered in the press and ask them to introduce you to the reporter who covered them
- Once you have the introduction, set up a meeting with the reporter to pitch your story
- Prepare a pitch by writing out the key points of your story and memorizing them
- Have a face-to-face meeting or a phone call with the reporter to pitch your story
- Follow up with the reporter a few days before your news goes out, providing them with all the necessary information and collateral
- PR firms can help with contacts and logistics, but they can't determine what is interesting about your company
- PR firms are expensive and it is recommended to try doing PR yourself before hiring a firm
- Getting press coverage is a lot of work and should be evaluated to ensure it is worth the effort
- Building relationships with reporters is important for future coverage and for managing negative press
- Help other entrepreneurs get coverage and they will likely help you in return
- Recommended resources for learning more about press are a book by Jason Kincaid and a book called "Trust Me, I'm Lying" which explores how stories spread on the internet.

- The speaker discusses the importance of press coverage for startups and suggests that getting attention from one outlet is a good start.
- They mention Twitch Plays Pokemon as a major news story and explain their role in helping to give it more attention.
- The speaker clarifies that the idea for Twitch Plays Pokemon was not their own, but they assisted in promoting it and providing context to reporters.

- Stanley, the founder of DoorDash, shares his journey from being a Stanford student to starting a successful startup.
- DoorDash started after a meeting with a small business owner who expressed the need for delivery services.
- They tested the demand for delivery by creating a simple landing page and received phone calls for orders.
- They faced challenges but learned the importance of testing ideas and launching quickly.
- DoorDash initially launched with a simple landing page and relied on word of mouth for customers.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of mobile technology and on-demand independent contractors for delivery services.
- DoorDash started as a passion project and grew unexpectedly successful.
- The CEO of Teespring discusses the advantage of doing things that don't scale as a startup.
- They talk about finding first users, turning them into champions, and finding product-market fit.
- It is important to focus on acquiring and retaining users in the early stages rather than immediate ROI.
- Providing exceptional experiences and engaging with customers is key to turning them into champions.
- Building a product with market fit requires rapid iteration and progress, prioritizing speed over scalability.
- Doing things that don't scale should be continued for a competitive advantage.
- The speaker announces the creation of a t-shirt with proceeds going to a charity.
- They discuss target markets, setting goals before seeking press coverage, and different types of stories that attract press attention.
- Getting press coverage requires thinking of a story and getting introduced to reporters through connections.
- Building relationships with reporters is important for future coverage and managing negative press.
- Recommended resources for learning more about press are mentioned.

How to Start a Startup is a series of video lectures, initially given at Stanford in Fall 2014.

Lecture Transcript: http://www.tech.genius.com/William-sydney-walker-lecture-8-doing-things-that-dont-scale-pr-and-how-to-get-started-annotated

Lecture 8 features 3 speakers:
Stanley Tang, Founder of Doordash, covers How to Get Started.
Walker Williams, Founder of Teespring, covers Doing things that Don't Scale.
Justin Kan, Founder of TwitchTV and Partner at Y Combinator, covers Press.

See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec09

Discuss this lecture: http://www.startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64037

And it's really amazing to be here because it wasn't actually that long ago where I sat in your seats.

I was class of 2014, graduated in CS, as well as my co-founder Andy.

And for those of you who don't know what DoorDash is, we're building an on-demand delivery network for local cities.

And I want to start off with this photo that I took just a few months ago.

And I think it, this was the, the night when we just raised our series A.

And I took this photo as I was walking back to where I lived.

I actually lived in Robley at the time on campus.

And I took this photo because I realized just how ridiculous the combinations of things I was holding in my hand at the time.

You know, I was holding my CS247 homework.

And then I had my tax forms since it was April and I had to fill out taxes.

And then also that yellow speeding ticket.

And then, right below that was the, was a $15 million piece of paper I just signed from Sequoia.

And that kind of summarizes just how ridiculous our, our journey has been, you know, starting at Stanford, doing this while I was at Stanford, and then transitioning this into an actual startup.

And I want to share that story with you today.

It all began 2 years ago, actually, in a macaroon store.

And at the time, I was really passionate about, you know, how do you build technology for small business owners?

And I sat down with Chloe, the owner of, you know, Chantel Guion, a macaroon store in Palo Alto at the time.

Just interviewing her, you know, trying to get feedback on this, on this product, prototype we've been working on.

And also just learning about, you know, what her problems were in general.

And it was during this meeting when Chloe first brought up this problem of delivery.

You know, she, I remember she took out this really, really thick booklet and she showed me pages and pages of delivery orders and a lot of these orders she had to turn down because there was no way she could have fulfilled them.

You know, She had no drivers and she was the 1 who ended up having to personally deliver all these orders.

And that was a very interesting moment for us.

And then we, Over the course of the next few weeks, we talked to, you know, around another 150, 200 small business owners.

And when we brought up this idea of delivery, they kept, you know, they kept, you know, agreeing with us, saying yeah, this is, this is a really big problem for us.

You know, we don't have, you know, delivery infrastructure.

There's, there's not any good solutions out there.

And which, which led us to wonder, you know, delivery is such a common thing.

Why hasn't anyone solved this before, right?

Like, we, we must be missing something here.

So we thought, maybe, maybe because people have tried this in the past, right?

But they failed because there wasn't consumer demand for this, so we thought, okay, how can we test this hypothesis?

You know, we were just a bunch of college kids at the time.

You know, we didn't own trucks or delivery infrastructures or anything like that, right?

We can't, we can't just, we can't just spin up a delivery company overnight.

So how can we test this assumption we had?

So we decided to create a simple experiment with restaurant delivery.

We spent about an afternoon just putting together a really quick landing page and when I went on the internet, I found some PDF menus of, you know, restaurants in Palo Alto.

Stuck it up there and then had a phone number at the bottom.

And, and which was our personal cell phone number actually.

And this is actually what it looked like.

You know, super, super, you know, simple, ugly.

Like, honestly, we, we weren't really expecting anything.

And all we wanted to see was you know, would we get phone calls from this?

And if we got enough phone calls, then, then maybe this was, this delivery idea was something worth pursuing.

We weren't really expecting anything and we were, we were driving back home.

And all of a sudden we got a, got a phone call.

You know, someone called, they wanted to order Thai food.

And we're like, wow, this is a real order.

Like, you know, we have to do something about it, right?

So we're in our cars and we're like, okay, like we're not doing anything right now.

Miles, let's just swing by, you know, Siam Royale, pick up some pad thai, and let's deliver it to this person, and let's try to learn how this whole delivery thing works.

And we did, we delivered to this guy up in Alpine Road, I remember.

He told us he was a, I was asking him, oh, how did you hear about us?

And it said he was the author of a book called Weed the People.

And that was like our first ever delivery, right?

It was like the best first delivery slash worst delivery you could have asked for.

And yeah, and then the next day we got 2 more phone calls.

The day after that we got 5, and then it became 7, and then it became 10.

And then soon we started gaining traction on campus with powaltadelivery.com, which was, which was which was pretty crazy, because think about it, right?

You had to look up PDF menus to place your order, and they had to call in.

This isn't exactly the most professional looking site, yet people were still, we kept getting phone calls, we kept getting orders.

And, and that's kind of when we, we knew we were onto something.

When people are willing, like, we knew we found a need people wanted when people were willing to put up with all this.

So, I think Another key point to remember is that we launched this in about an hour, right?

Like we didn't spend, you know, we, we didn't have any drivers.

We didn't spend, you know, we didn't have a back end.

We didn't spend 6 months building like a fancy dispatch system.

Because at the beginning, none of that is necessary, right?

At the beginning, it's all about testing your idea, trying to get this thing off the ground, and figuring out whether this was something people even wanted.

And it's okay to, to hack things together at the beginning.

At YC there's a mantra we we like to talk about, is doing things that don't scale.

So at the beginning we were the delivery drivers.

You know, we would, you know, go to class and then after class we would go, you know, deliver food.

Like, I sometimes had to take phone calls during lecture.

We, we had to, we, we spent afternoons just going down University Avenue passing out flyers about trying to promote DoorDash.

I mean, we didn't have any dispatch systems, so what we had to do was, you know, we used Square to charge all of our customers.

We used Google Docs to keep track of our orders.

We, we use Apple's Find My Friends to keep track of where all of our drivers were.

Just figuring out like what's, just hacking together solutions, just trying to get this thing off the ground.

In fact, at 1 point we were growing so fast that Square actually shut our account down because we were under suspicion for money laundering.

We're getting small chunks of like 15, $20 orders coming in at a rapid pace.

And luckily my co-founder Tony worked at Square, so he just emailed some buddies there and everything was solved.

Yeah, and another thing about doing things that don't scale is that it also allows you to become an expert in your business, right?

Like driving helped us understand how the whole delivery process worked.

You know, we used that as an opportunity to talk to our customers, talk to our restaurants.

We did dispatching, which helped us figure out, you know, how, we manually dispatched every driver, and that helped us figure out, you know, what our driver assignment algorithm should look like.

We did customer support ourselves, you know, getting real time feedback from, from our customers.

I remember, you know, for the first few months, when we got started, we would manually email every single 1 of our new customers.

And at the end of every night and just asking them, oh, how was your first delivery?

And we would personalize all these emails, right?

Like, if I see someone ordered chicken skewers from Orange Hummus, I would say, oh, like, I love Orange Hummus.

You know, how, how, how were chicken skewers?

How did, how did your first delivery went?

You know, just feedback like that was, was really valuable and our customers really, really appreciated that.

And, and I remember 1 time, this was during YC, we were at a, we just came out of a meeting with 1 of our restaurant partners.

And, you know, we, we wanted, we heard about this ice cream store that just opened up, you know, on University Avenue called Cream.

And then all of a sudden, our co-founder back at our, you know, office slash house texted us saying, oh, we need drivers on the road.

So we debated for maybe, you know, 10 seconds, like, should we go get ice cream or should we go, go deliver?

But that kind of became our motivation on, you know, scaling, right?

Like, if we can scale, then we could go get ice cream next time.

So, So yeah, I think that kind of and now of course, we, we scaled across different cities.

Now you have to worry about building automated solutions and, and dispatch systems and figuring out how do you match demand and supply and, and all, all that fancy technology stuff.

But none of that matters at the beginning, because at the beginning it's all about getting this thing off the ground and trying to find product market fit.

So, there's 3 things I would say that I learned from, from doing DoorDash.

You want to treat your startup ideas like experiments.

We launched in, you know, less than an hour with a, with a really simple landing page.

And finally, it's okay to do things that don't scale.

Doing things that don't scale is 1 of your biggest competitive advantages when you're starting out.

And you can figure out how to scale once you have the demand.

And maybe once you've scaled, then you go get that ice cream.

How did your first customers hear about you?

Yeah, so the question, question was how did our first customer hear about us?

So I assume he just must have typed in politildelivery into the web browser.

And then after that, we didn't do, we did barely any marketing.

I think I sent out like 1 email to my dorm and that was about it.

And that kind of just validates, you know, just how strong of a need you found, you know, when people just start talking about you and they're willing to put up with all this, you know, terrible user experience, terrible design and stuff like that.

When you started, it seems so obvious to me, you're wondering why has no 1 done this.

Yeah, I mean, looking back, I think, I think the biggest thing is mobile.

The fact that now everyone has 1 of those in their pocket, and we kind of saw that trend.

And thought, what if you can design a delivery system that was entirely based off mobile.

You know, where you don't have, you don't have to have any infrastructure or delivery fleets.

Instead, you could, you know, instead of hiring drivers full time, purchasing vehicles, what if you can tap into a more of an on demand pool of independent contractors.

And only send orders to them when, when they have time.

So, so that's kind of the, the insight we had.

Did you know we were going to be a startup or we were just making some money?

Yeah, I mean at the time we just wanted, we were all really passionate about building technology for small business owners.

And honestly this delivery thing came out of an experiment, right, with the landing page.

We didn't, we weren't expecting anything and it just took off and we went with it and logistics was always something we were really passionate about as well.

You know, like logistics, transportation, and it's kind of the perfect fusion of, you know, how do you help small business owners through delivery.

Do you launch the mobile app first or the website?

And how long did it take from idea to the first launch?

Yeah, it was, we started with this, this, this landing page right here.

How does Dorda set up a space built with Flux, Postmates and Seamless and other companies?

Yeah, the question was how does DoorDash stand out among a very competitive space.

I mean, I mean, in the beginning, I mean, for us, consumer demand has never been the problem, even up until now.

So for us, it's just about, you know, finding a need and, and just focusing on serving that, serving that demand.

So, I mean, at the beginning, competition doesn't really matter when you're getting started.

How long did you dedicate doing corporate into a company after you first delivered?

Yeah, question was how long it took for us to incorporate into a company when we went through YC.

So we launched in January 2013, and then we did YC that very summer, and when we decided to take this idea through YC, we incorporated.

What do you plan to do next, or where do you plan to go with this besides food delivery?

Yeah, I mean, the question was where do we plan to go beyond food delivery?

I mean, for us, when we started DoorDash, it was always, you know, like I said, about, you know, helping small business owners and figuring out, you know, how do you serve this for any local merchant, whether you are a macaroon store or a restaurant or a furniture shop.

For now, we're just focused on restaurant delivery as a way to scale.

But ultimately, that's where we want to end up in.

Okay, next is Walker Williams from Teespring.

Teespring went through YC a year and a half ago.

I almost rejected them, because I thought it sounded like a dumb idea, But now they're getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year of revenue.

And Walter's going to talk also about doing things on scale.

For those of you guys who don't know what Teespring is, we're an e-commerce platform that allows entrepreneurs to launch products and apparel brands without risk, cost, or compromise.

Today, the company is about 180 folks and we ship tens of thousands of products each day.

And I want to talk to you about 1 of the most fundamental advantages you have as a startup.

And that's that you're able to do things that don't scale.

And I define things that don't scale as things that are sort of fundamentally unsustainable.

They will not bring in the millionth user.

And where they break, it's, it's usually time, but it could be a number of other things.

But it's really growth strategies that won't take you to a million users.

And there's 3 real places I want to focus on today.

The second 1 is turning those users into champions.

And the third 1 is finding your product and market fit.

The first thing you have to understand is that there is no silver bullet for user acquisition.

You know, everybody, and, and this includes me when we got started.

You look for that, that dream solution, that pay-per-click campaign that has tremendous ROI, some accelerating partnership that's gonna springboard you into the stratosphere, an affiliate agreement, something that solves it for you.

But the reality is for the vast majority of companies, and in fact for every company that I've had the chance to speak to the CEO of, that's just not possible.

Those are unicorns and most of the companies that from the outside look like they've had this dream growth curve.

The reality is that those first users were impossibly hard to get.

And let me tell you the story of a ridiculously unsustainable business.

When we first got, when we first launched, the, the business couldn't have looked worse.

It took days of meetings, we had to offer free design, days of revisions back and forth.

We'd have to launch the product ourselves, we'd have to do the social media, all to sell like 50 shirts for a local non-profit and generate $1,000 of revenue.

Anybody looking in would have said, you guys need to give up.

But as time went on, those users start to add up.

And, you know, I think something you have to understand is that when, when you first launch a company, just by virtue of the fact that it's a new product.

You're gonna be bad at selling it, right?

You've got no idea what the pain points of customers really are.

You don't have any success stories to point to or testimonials.

Those first users are always going to be the hardest.

And so it's your responsibility as a founder to do whatever it takes to bring in your first users.

And you know, it's going to be different for every company.

The common thread that I hear is founders need to spend personal time and effort, a lot of their personal time and effort, to bring those users in themselves.

It, you know, it can mean a number of things.

Everything from sending 100 emails a day, getting on the phone and just calling as many people as you can, going through a network, if you have a network like Stanford or Y Combinator.

Anything you can do to get that first user.

And, you know, I really equate it to pushing a boulder up a hill.

And if you think of like a very sort of smooth hill.

The, when you get started, the incline is the steepest, and those first inches are the hardest.

And over time, as you get farther and farther, the incline steadies out, it gets easier.

And hopefully, eventually you reach a point where you're at the top of the hill, And the boulder starts to roll on its own.

And so those first users, you just cannot focus on ROI in the sense of time.

Do not expect to spend an hour and return thousands of dollars.

But for, for most of us those first users are going to take a lot of hand holding, a lot of personal love.

And the 1 sort of caveat of that is that I don't recommend giving away your product for free.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

How to Get Started, Doing Things that Don't Scale, and Press (How to Start a Startup 2014: 8)