#145 - Startup School Week 4 Recap - Kat Mañalac and Gustaf Alströmer

Y Combinator

We've cut down the fourth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First a lecture from Kat Manalac. Kat is a partner at YC. Her lecture focuses on how startups should think about launching and why you should do it repeatedly.
Then a lecture from Gustaf Alströmer. Gustaf is also a partner at YC and in his lecture he covers how to measure product market fit and growth channels.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
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Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Kat Mañalac - How to Launch (Again and Again)
1:51 - Ways to launch
2:14 - Why launch continuously?
3:15 - Silent launch
4:25 - Friends & Family
5:40 - Strangers
7:03 - Online communities
12:08 - Request access
13:29 - Social media
15:13 - Pre-order
16:13 - New Product or Feature
17:42 - Build your own community
19:20 - Launching isn't one moment in time
19:48 - Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups
21:06 - Most startups have nothing
22:13 - Do things that don't scale
27:13 - Startups take off because founders make them take off
28:23 - Measuring product market fit
31:20 - Retention
34:33 - Worse ways to measure product market fit
35:23 - Bad metrics to measure as product market fit
36:18 - Growth channels and tactics
38:17 - Conversion rate optimization
41:26 - Growth channels to explore
45:33 - Referrals and vitality
48:05 - Paid growth
50:09 - Search Engine Optimization
53:00 - Making decisions using A/B testing
55:02 - Summary