YOLO: You Only Launch Once
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YOLO: You Only Launch Once Danny Boice Speek Co-founder & CTO @DannyBoice | @SpeekApp #YOLO #EE2013 Drake
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19-Oct-2014 -
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This is my presentation from the 2013 Everywhere Else Conference in Memphis. The premise was a retrospective on the last 6 months from founding Speek to launching out of Beta.
Transcript of YOLO: You Only Launch Once
YOLO: You Only Launch Once
Danny BoiceSpeek Co-founder & CTO
@DannyBoice | @SpeekApp#YOLO #EE2013
Drake
What is Speek?
Current State
Lots of Users
100% Monthly Growth
$1.5mm Seed Funding
11 Employees
Just hit “hockey stick” shaped growth curve last month
Our Journey
Started with NYC, A Napkin, and Beer.
YOLO
February 2012
Place: NYC
Problem: Conference calls suck and people hate them
Solution: Use a link instead of a phone number and PIN
Funding: $0
Users: 0
People: 2
Assumption:
People will use a link for conference calls
Experiment: Lots of customer interviews & some AdWord buys
YOLO
March 2012
Place: SXSW
Problem: We need an app for more experiments
Solution: Drink lots of beer (and bourbon) in our AIRBNB house and hack a butt ugly MVP together
Funding: $0
Users: 0
People: 2 + offshore dev
Assumption:
We can overcome voice technology hurdles
Experiment: Get our friends and family to start doing calls
Result: FAIL - tech glitches (Voice related)
YOLO
June 2012
Place: Arlington, VA
Problem: Voice quality sucks
Solution: Host conference calls on hardware rather than AWS
Funding: $50,000
Users: 50
People: 3 + offshore dev
Assumption:
We can overcome voice technology hurdles
Experiment: Upgrade our technology and keep getting people to do calls.
Result: Validated
** This is when we finally formed Speek, Inc **
YOLO
September 2012
Place: AOL Fishbowl Labs (our new and current home)
Problem: Not growing organically
Solution: Start giving survey.io survey to all active users
Funding: $150,000
Users: 1,000
People: 3 + offshore dev
Assumption:
We can grow without huge user acquisition costs
Experiment: Customer Interviews & Survey.io survey and see if we can get to 40% “very disappointed if Speek didn’t exist” for a given cohort.
Result: 3+ months of iteration
YOLO
December 2012
Place: Fishbowl Labs
Problem: Cheap user acquisition / feed the viral funnel
Solution: Try a bunch of different growth tactics - ITERATE
Funding: $500,000
Users: 20,000
People: 6
Assumption:
We can grow our user base without huge marketing spend
Experiment: Customer development + analytics
Result: 3+ months of iteration
YOLO
Today
Place: Fishbowl Labs
Problem: Scale growth, become ubiquitous
Solution: Keep iterating and get out early on new platforms and devices
Funding: $1,500,000
Monthly Growth: 100%
People: 11
Launching out of beta and charging $$
Lessons Learned
A great product trumps everything else
Your MVP can - and should - be butt ugly
Don’t be shy about growth and distro
Survey.io is the bees knees
People will not volunteer information – wrestle it out of them
Pick one single metric and track weekly growth rate
We should have done an accelerator
Fundraising sucks
Thank You!
Be Sure To Check Out Speek.com
@DannyBoice | @SpeekApp#YOLO #EE2013
