- The speaker introduces the concept of office hours at YC and explains the three types: individual, group, and external office hours.
- They mention that the office hours on stage are slightly different and may be slightly awkward.
- The speaker emphasizes that the advice given in office hours is based on personal experience and may not apply to everyone.
- Three marketplace companies are selected for office hours and the speaker explains the unique challenges of marketplace startups.
- The first company, Traveling Spoon, is introduced and the founders discuss their supply and demand growth rates.
- They mention that word of mouth is a significant channel for growth and they are working on advertising.
- The founders express concern about reaching travelers at the point of decision-making and finding the right travel distribution partners.
- The speaker suggests that the direct model may not be effective due to infrequent use and lack of memorability.
- The speaker compares Traveling Spoon to apps that fulfill mental queries and expresses concern about the infrequency of these queries.

- The speaker discusses the struggle of finding the right customers and the importance of working with channel partners.
- They mention drawing inspiration from Airbnb and wanting to be a brand for authentic, meaningful, and friendly people.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of having a mission and making money, but not using money as a rationalization for an ineffective strategy.
- The speaker suggests focusing on power users and finding people addicted to the service to achieve consistent growth.
- They mention two paths to success: rapid growth or building a company that lasts for 20 years.
- The speaker advises against a broad strategy and suggests concentrating on specific markets.
- The conversation then shifts to discussing Human Search, a global emergency roster for humanitarian responders.
- The CEO explains that the company is a for-profit social enterprise connecting workers with organizations in need during disasters.
- The speaker questions the need for a marketplace model and suggests simplifying the company's description.
- They provide feedback on the website, including the need for clearer messaging and removing the "beta" label.

- The speaker points out that the website needs to make it clear what the call to action is and optimize for either professionals or organizations.
- The speaker suggests that the directory should be simplified and made more user-friendly.
- The speaker recommends collecting only essential information from professionals and volunteers during sign-up.
- The speaker suggests that the website should focus on impressing users with the listings and making it easy for them to contact the company.
- The speaker acknowledges that the website is better than many others, but emphasizes the importance of making a good first impression.
- The speaker advises the company to make necessary changes quickly and not let unnecessary features clutter the website.

- The co-founder of Power of You explains that their company helps people take control of their data and monetize it through market research.
- Users can earn $15 to $65 per data instance, depending on if their data is used by brands.
- Currently, only 8% of users have been paid, but the company has already distributed $3,000 in payments.
- The biggest challenge for the company is the sales cycle to brands, which can take 2 to 6 months.
- The co-founder is advised to email a larger number of potential customers and not be too confident in assumptions about ideal customers.
- The focus is on identifying bottlenecks to growth and tracking metrics related to effectiveness in outreach.

As a founder, it is important to focus on the problems that are hindering growth. By prioritizing these bottlenecks, you can have a clear direction and focus on what needs to be addressed.

- The speaker discusses the concept of office hours at YC, including individual, group, and external office hours.
- They mention that office hours on stage may be slightly awkward.
- The advice given in office hours is based on personal experience and may not apply to everyone.
- Three marketplace companies are selected for office hours and the unique challenges of marketplace startups are discussed.
- The first company, Traveling Spoon, talks about their growth rates and challenges in reaching travelers and finding distribution partners.
- The importance of having a mission and focusing on power users for consistent growth is emphasized.
- The conversation then shifts to Human Search, a global emergency roster for humanitarian responders.
- Feedback is given on the website, including the need for clearer messaging and simplifying the directory.
- Power of You, a company monetizing user data, is discussed, including challenges in the sales cycle to brands.
- The co-founder is advised to focus on identifying bottlenecks to growth and tracking metrics for effectiveness in outreach.

During YC startups have weekly office hours with their group partners. As a part of Startup School we invited attendees to volunteer for office hours on stage. Kevin and Qasar chose three marketplace companies for this round of office hours.

Traveling Spoon - https://www.travelingspoon.com/
Steph Lawrence and Aashi Vel  
Traveling Spoon is a food and travel marketplace.

HumanSurge - http://www.humansurge.org/en
Loek Peeters  
HumanSurge is a global emergency roster for humanitarian responders.

Powr of You - https://www.powrofyou.com
Keshav Malani  
Powr of You is a personal data marketplace.

We have a favor to ask of all you guys out there.

How many people follow Justin on Snapchat?

Oh, but there should be punishment for that.

So a few hundred messages to Justin right now would be appreciated.

1 of the things that we do at YC, or 1 of the kind of core things we do at YC, is office hours.

And There are 3 types of office hours we do in the program.

The first is individual office hours where a partner will sit down with you and talk about a specific problem that the company has and really dive in deeply.

And that's what we're going to emulate here on stage today.

Most of the partners are using their own experience as being founders and as being engineers or whatever the problem might be to help kind of solve that problem.

And 1 of the things that I say and a lot of the partners say is, when I'm giving advice, I don't tell you or the companies that'll be up here what they should do.

I can only tell what I would do if I was in your position.

The founders who are running companies are different from us, different contexts and different experiences.

So it just ends up being a blueprint of how to solve from another person a problem.

So anyways, individual office hours is something we do.

We also do this thing called group office hours where multiple partners will sit together and then 6 or 7 startups will sit together.

And then the third type of office hours we do are external office hours.

So we'll bring in Apple or we'll bring in Android to help with the app stores, et cetera.

And so today we're emulating the first type.

Now a couple of key points here is this is kind of a bad example because we don't do them on stage in front of hundreds or thousands of people.

So naturally this kind of presentation is slightly awkward for that reason.

Number 2 is we tend to be pretty direct in office hours.

And obviously doing it in front of a group of people, we're going to temper that a little bit.

And I also want to just in advance thank the startups who are kind of brave enough out here to talk through the problems that they're having with us.

Yeah, so thanks and apologies in advance.

1 thing to note, 90% of you guys out there volunteer to do office hours on stage with us.

So I'm super delighted that you guys gave us the opportunity to look at all the ideas you're working on.

And then the 1 last point is, these are not pitches.

to try to avoid going into what do you do and why is it so great?

Much more in kind of diving into a problem.

We actually are doing a pitch section afterwards, so you'll see how that's different.

3 companies that we picked today, we kind of did on a theme.

This is a little bit different from other times that we've done this.

All 3 companies are marketplace companies.

And the reason we picked that is because they're very different kind of startup when you're working with them.

So most companies, when you work with it, what you'll notice that it tends not to be a zero-sum game.

So they're usually in any space, there can be multiple winners.

But in a marketplace kind of play, it tends to be 1 kind of company tends to end up dominating over everyone else.

And the thing is, when you can make that happen, that can make you very, very large and very, very lucrative.

And investors get very excited about marketplaces.

It's a category that we see actually lots of different investment firms and people are very interested in very specifically.

That being said, they work a little bit differently in terms of how you work with them.

And it tends to be always kind of a similar kind of approach.

You're trying to identify what's supply, what's demand, what side you're going to be working on.

And so what you're going to see is this kind of thematic thing where all 3 of them, even though they're very different companies, they'll have very similar approaches in terms of how we ask questions, how we think about their problems, and how we should go from there.

I think the camera guys are now having a hizzy.

I think they see all the markers on the floor.

They explicitly said, don't move the chairs, and the first thing I do is move the chairs.

So, tell us your names and tell us about what Traveling Spoon does.

Traveling Spoon is a food and travel marketplace.

So we connect travelers with local authentic food experiences from meals to cooking classes to market tours, all with local people in their homes around the world.

So I'm going to, let's say, Thailand, and then I would...

How would I find that you exist, just as me going to Thailand?

So a lot of our travelers hear about us through word of mouth right now, and finding the right channels is 1 of our challenges that we're excited to talk to you about.

But right now, most of our travelers find out about us either through word of mouth, through press, or also through some of our partners.

So we work with partners who are distributing supply like ours, so travel experiences.

So the first questions I usually ask about a marketplace, I'm asking about sort of like what is the conditions of the 2 sides that you're trying to grow?

And then how well are they being connected?

So like, what do you guys consider supply?

What do you guys sort of consider demand?

My instinct is the supply is the people who are offering meals inside of their homes, and then the demand is all the travelers.

What's the rate of growth for each 1 of those?

Our supply side consists of amazing hosts who give market tours, cooking classes, and meals.

We have over 225 hosts now in 40 destinations in 20 countries.

50% of that growth has happened through host referrals and we've been growing the supply side of the marketplace 50% in the last 6 months.

On the supplies, is there a reason you're in so many countries and so distributed?

Because I mean, I guess why wouldn't you have chosen like a country like let's say Cambodia and just say we're gonna get a bunch of hosts there so if we're going to Cambodia, we're definitely gonna get a match.

1 of the first questions we got from every single investor we talked to at the beginning was this question of breadth first depth.

For us where it came down to was that in the travel marketplace specifically, you really need to have some breadth to show relevance.

Like how did you came to that conclusion?

A bunch of travelers said like, I won't use this website because you don't have 200 countries covered.

So a lot of it came from our suppliers who would say, you know, we're sending travelers to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, like we want experiences in all of those destinations.

So sometimes suppliers, like some of our clients and partners that we're working with, so we have channel partners, we sell directly through our website, travelingspoon.com, and then we sell through some channel partners as well.

So some of it was coming through our partners, some of it was coming from directly from our travelers who said I traveled here and now I want to go to other places.

Tour operators, people who will plan 2 week trips from start to finish.

Yeah, so demand, as a two-sided marketplace, 1 of the challenges is you have to kind of pick.

30% month over month is sort of our traveler side that's been going through.

So just like, ideally for a startup, you guys have been operating for how long?

We launched our site a little less than a year ago.

Okay, so like at least 20%, but 30% that's sort of growing.

But then that's just people signing up or people actually like booking.

So travelers who have booked and then gone on completely experiences.

There's a pie chart of, you know, where they're hearing about the product.

How much is it these channels and how much is it word of mouth?

So word of mouth is certainly a big part of direct growth.

And we're also working on advertising right now.

60% is direct and 40% is through our partners right now.

Finding the point at which travelers are making those experiences and planning their trips and booking with us.

So how do we get in front of travelers at the point of their decision-making process?

How do you get to travelers at the point of the decision-making process?

Yeah, so we want to find more of the right partners.

So we've started working with 1 partner who's serving almost 25% of our travelers right now, and we're trying to find more of them.

So who are the right travel distribution partners that are supplying these kinds of experiences.

How many travelers are we talking about here?

I guess to me, the direct model doesn't, correct me if I'm wrong, direct model doesn't make sense because, number 1, if I'm traveling to Cambodia this year and maybe next year I travel to India, I have to remember your company.

And the chance of that actually happening is really slim.

But 1 way to think about, or at least I think about applications is they fall into 2 categories.

Apps that you wake up, or products that you wake up every day and use, You open up Gmail, you open up Snapchat, without thinking about opening those up.

And then there's a second group of apps which fulfill some mental query that you have.

So I'm going to, I need a restaurant, I look up Yelp, I need to address navigation, so I use Google Maps.

So your product falls into this second category, but the problem is, you so infrequently have that mental query, no one's going to remember it.

That's the thing that makes me really nervous.

It's like, this is not an activity that I'm doing many, many times.

Like Uber has the advantage that's like, you might have people with you multiple times, even within a day.

not brushing your teeth, it's not riding an Uber, and that's definitely something that we struggle with in terms of finding the right customers.

So, with that context, why not focus on channel partners because that's all they're doing?

Yeah, So we've drawn a lot of inspiration from Airbnb, as an example.

Our vision for the company is to be a brand, and to be the brand for authentic, meaningful,

Your vision for the company is grow and make tons of money.

It's like, I created a really great brand.

We want to make a ton of money, but the mission is why we started the company and we want to

I'm not, what Kevin isn't saying is like, you just shouldn't be like money-hungry capitalists.

Yeah, but it's not, it's just a proxy for making sure that you're working on something that people actually want.

Just don't fool yourself and don't use that as rationalization for maybe an ineffective strategy.

1 thing that's promising is, see, there's this mix.

The thing is, like, you have all this word of mouth growth.

What's the percentage, like 60% coming from word of mouth?

And then what's the percentage that have re-like done a second booking?

We have 10% repeat travel in the last 9 months.

So if you take that context of people are not going to remember your product for a while, for like many years.

I think to me that just is like you have to work with channel partners because that's gonna be the way that you, that's what I would do.

I don't know what you would choose you should do, but for me I'm thinking I gotta get that consistent growth.

Word of mouth and Having a brand that people recall is very, it takes a long, long, long time.

I mean, the kind of benchmark in which that people automatically remember you, like even Airbnb, even today has that problem.

And Airbnb is like a lot bigger than your brand.

1 of the big things that you need to think about is where are there the most power hungry users on the system?

The people, 1, you're working with channel partners, who does active salesmen on your behalf because you can't afford that for the price acquisition.

But the other 1 is like where do you find people that are addicted to this service?

People who are going to use this over and over and over again because those are the people that we both talk about.

So are there power travelers or people who are going back and forth to the same countries over and over again, where it's like, every single time, this is just gonna be part of my experience that happens on there.

Because otherwise, it's just gonna be slow and steady.

And so, there's 2 types of companies that I get excited about, because there's 2 paths to getting very, very huge.

There's 1 that you have, everyone glorifies, is the startup that grows very, very quickly and shoots up and they become this great success overnight.

There's another kind where it's just like you do this solid sort of growth, but you figure out how do I make a company that's gonna last for 20 years, right?

And so the fact that you're focused on, it's like we care a lot about the mission that's set up on there.

But the thing is like, what is the mission?

It's like, the mission is like, I'm passionate about feeding other people's food.

It's like, I'm passionate about helping these other people have some kind of income.

I'm passionate about having people have an interesting travel experience.

There's like 3 different things that happens on there.

And the real thing is like, I think your core idea is just like, when you travel and you do it through us, you're gonna have something spectacular, something very different.

It's like, yeah, it's a lot cheaper, but it's far more interesting as a result.

And I think that's like a similar idea that you need to have on here.

Also going back early in the conversation about breadth versus depth, I'm still not convinced of breadth strategy here is the prudent 1, only because you can find channel partners, you can find local agencies that work just in Thailand, who can be booking hundreds, if not thousands of meals a week.

That's where the business becomes powerful.

And the reason I think that approach, that concentrated approach is better, is once you find those power users like Kevin was talking about, you can figure out, okay, this is what worked in Thailand, let's figure out what's gonna work in Myanmar, let's figure out what's gonna work in India, et cetera.

And that's actually exactly what we're doing now, is focusing on Thailand specifically for that reason.

So with all companies, we're going to talk afterwards because this is just like such a

So, we're going to talk to all of them afterwards and just dive into more stuff.

My first question is how did you come up with that name?

Okay, do you want to do a quick introduction of who you are and what the company does?

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Office Hours with Kevin Hale and Qasar Younis at Startup School SV 2016