Into Building/Growing? Check out these Communities (Notes from March 2 - March 8, 2020)

I think we can see a bit where we're going as a society. Need some more community and less individual pieces. This has likely been exasperated by the current pandemic and the uncertainty of the approach taken to present a future. Thankfully, the internet does allow us connections from nearly any and all places, so for that, we can be grateful.

So, Trends would be if you want to learn from some excellent experts in the widest variety of industries. It's for the curious, bold and excited. Ecommerce, SaaS, storage facilities, other real estate, business, professional services, whomever. There's someone for every problem, ideas aplenty for solutions otherwise. Talk to a ton of people who just seek to do. This is all without even mentioning there's a newsletter with a wide swath of input on the most prevalent (or soon to be) trends based on a heavy dose of research.

If that's not enough, then whoever/wherever you are in your career, there are members that have volunteered to be mentors depending on what you're seeking. Bounce ideas? They have that. Grow to $1mln, sure. Exit plans? Check. It's the group to figure out what you think may be the next step. See it here: Trends link (yes, referral but I promise it's worth it)

Next two revolve around code/no-code and building/hacking your way to product. IndieHackers, fairly split I'd guess between those that can code / develop and those that choose not to - as well Makerpad - a community of no/low-code people trying to replicate big scale/functionality with little effort. If you're a student, especially, these are incredible - Makerpad's community/videos/walkthroughs are awesome value. Better if you're a student, too. It should inspire you to start something - or at least see what it may look like.

IndieHackers - similar. Plenty of hustlers and side businesses there that you can interact with, as well as a podcast that is top notch, both for inspiration as well as knowledge/insights. See basic problems with solutions turn into full-blown businesses (Rent a Card Sign to Wedding Card printing, as two examples). The knowledge and people, from a straight global environment, is intoxicating. With the good kind.

Hopefully you'll take these to heart and check them out. For now, these are the notes below. Some more experts, successes and adventures.

• Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures (20min VC 3/2/20)
• Dropbox, Revolut, Supercell, Plaid and Transferwise - all financial things
• BizOps at Dropbox, where company 10x'ed while he was there
• Went from 200-1500 people while he was managing there
• Was looking for a new thing, possible operator - talked to Index and some of other best ventures
• Importance of hiring / hypergrowth - 8 week interview process at time at DropBox
• 80% of time would be on hiring, not what he was looking forward to doing
• Highly commoditized as venture capital now - industry sees more money but offer is needed
• Evolution over last decade - Andreesen as services, others as sector expertise, data for a few
• Relationships as differentiator - connecting good investors, trust as foundation
• He was 30 years old in joining Index as an associate - flat hierarchy though, ton of autonomy and start investments
• Had been associate in a p/e firm 8+ years prior
• Find platform for the autonomy to increase your risk and search there
• Titles have become meaningless - true question: can you lead your round? Associates can at Index.
• To ask partner for looking for seed or traditional venture fund - are you going to dedicate the time to help get to next stage?
• If answer is no because it's a rounding error, not worth it, likely. Earlier stage investments = more time, often.
• More angels joining - extremely risky and making money is hard
• Upside has limitations
• If he were to leave Index, he'd ask who are the smartest people to add to cap table - rolodex for increase business
• Historically, meeting the demand - all these great founders/operators on deeper side
• As an early board member - listen - don't need a loud voice or overplay position as new member
• Being judicious about when to weigh in, praise, critique - impactful areas for you to dive in
• Favorite board member - getting to be in meetings with many at Index - Mike Volpi
• Offering hard conversations and messages to founders
• Lessons learned while passing or no - not focused, be direct
• Meet with an investor and then they get ghost you - try to close meetings
• Complement or help founders with an intro or interesting cases
• Thinks fintech is booming - not a bubble currently - trillion dollars in incumbents
• Just beginning to shift to the new crop - the 50th largest bank is $50bn in market cap
• Rise of Monzo and Revolut for UK / Europe - are they not going to just add student loans/mortgage/lending
• Best ones should, he thinks - Robinhood / Chime / New Bank (Brazil) - current account and then cross sell otherwise
• Favorite book - Barbarian Days by William Finnegan about surfing and surfing in SF
• Looks to see more climate tech investing
• Plaid selling to VISA - as a big win
• Enterprise software founders - "Have to get to $1mil ARR to get series A" - not true if it's a solid business
• Data privacy company investment - new category of software to go after data privacy
• Jeff Lawson, founder & CEO of Twilio (Invest Like the Best ep 158, 3/3/20)
• How to build a platform - cloud comms platform to customers like Twitch, Lyft and Yelp
• At his office - "Draw the Owl" - best values as needing to explain
• Call to action for builders - go figure it out - doing what you do as 2 step process of draw a few circles, then beautiful
• Early customers needed product (as API) opposed to the investor method which said it's not a product
• Content center app, marketing - developers can take APIs that provide infrastructure to build an app at scale, quickly
• Twilio has virtualized the communications center much like AWS does computing and storage
• Stripe / Google Maps for similar functionality
• New era for enterprise software - initially, CIO made the buying decisions and things cost millions of dollars, years to implement
• On prem and expensive
• SaaS around turn of millennium could buy online and their heads could provision the services they needed
• For the scale and software - it's a platform of things in their API
• Build or die compared to buy or build
• Incorporating software into business model - company would need new back-office financial
• Buy from vendor or build it - already built / reinvent but this would be solution after solution
• Banks with core competency for amazing software - digital banks
• In response, incumbents can do the same thing (one of Twilio's is ING - few years ago promoted a new CEO)
• Becoming Agile, outside of devs, set of Agile teams - each part of small team
• Agile at ING video on YouTube - one of largest banks' leadership in business saying they have to build to be successful
• At AWS - customer intimacy to align by customer needs
• A product company with a solution makes a lot of assumptions for what their customers' needs - may not intersect with differences
• A platform, however, can be utilized to build anything by customers - ING built a whole contact center on Twilio
• Lots of companies as on-prem for contact centers because the contact center market was broken - move to cloud
• Their billboard in SF that's been there for 6+ years - "Ask Your Developer"
• Merging business with tech and developers but many companies just give them the tasks instead of the big business decisions
• How can we do that?
• Developers often enjoy doing the work over the weekend - Hack-a-thons over weekends or doing stuff then
• Finding what it means to be a part of your tribe - heroes, symbols and rituals
• Skip Potter - CTO of Nike, building unbreakable relationships with customers, being Agile, serving Nike
• ING story
• Nations / religions have many rituals - companies have rituals (say, bagels on Thursdays for all-hands)
• Wednesday night dinner at the offices - defining who they are, with a theme each week
• Symbols - what matters to the tribe - powerful thing you have are the values
• Culture: what you feel when you walk into work every day, whether articulated or not
• Can be good, can be bad during the interactions within the company
• Values: handles on the culture - allow for you to describe and guide the culture
• No shenanigans, foolish/nonsense - can't just create/invent values
• Introspect the feeling when you walk in early - pooled 15 of people about 1/3 at the time to debate
• Be an owner
• Wear the customer shoes - customer-centricity
• Way you are customer-centric, looking at problem/company from perspective
• Go to a customer - I will trade you a Twilio-branded shoes for your shoes
• Kindest thing anyone's done - Kevin O'Connor as founder of DoubleClick was an angel investor in one of his first company's (dotcom era)
• Come to my Hampton's house in the winter, bring a cofounder and figure out what you're going to do, I'll put in some money
• No plowing of roads - would order Amazon/UPS would plow the road for them - took about 9 months
• Invested in first company, and then believed in him as entrepreneurs
• Tomer London, Gusto co-founder (20min VC 2/28/20)
• Raised $520mln for Gusto, people platform for small businesses providing one place to run payroll, manage benefits, support
• General Catalyst, CapitalG, KP, T Rowe, Fidelity, and more - also angels Shopify founder Tobias Luttke, Sam Altman, Max Levchin,
  Matt Mullenweg, Kevin Hartz and Elad Gil - did a PhD in EE at Stanford before founder/CEO at Vizmo (customer care for enterprise)
• Originally from Israel, parents have a small clothing store in Hypha - started by picking up a VisualBasic book for the store at 11 yrs old
• Count inventory, sizing, and could do it via a computer with inventory management software - helped his dad, grandpa, cousins and friends
• 10 years ago, moved to the Bay Area to start his PhD at Stanford - met his cofounders Josh and Eddie - family history and connection to SMB
• Fundraising = creating change as a tool
• New channel to acquire customers that may be able to scale - $100mln ARR in 7 years, but maybe take 4 years with funding
• Might be making promises that can't be fulfilled
• If you have a product, but you see an R&D opportunity for a new product to similar customer-set that may have a good opportunity
• Investors have a lot of time to talk about start-ups so they set the tone for "requirements" for seed/A/B/C
• Fin/VC Twitter and social media - he tries to be away and off of it
• Echo chamber may not enable the creativity of different thoughts
• Hard to have the mental space to think different/contrarily
• Gusto started in YC 2012 Winter - had good traction, knew people and were oversubscribed
• Josh came up with thinking about investors similarly to culture fit - values/motivation alignment sharing with Gusto
• Raised a $200mln round, working with 100k small businesses including dentists, lawyers, tech, barbershops and working
• Look for opportunities and purpose - less about being big but around specific R&D initiatives, scaling growth channels
• Try to make sure to bring people on the cap table that can add value - specifically, VP of Product Adam Nash at DropBox has been sounding board
• Be really picky about the people you bring on
• Delightful experience really matters
• Product / design reviews: product quality with function, ease of use, and delight (can't add this later, has to be inherent)
• Delight is something of value and in a way that may be unexpected
• People come to them because someone has told the prospects that they love their payroll/benefits provider
• They don't use the MVP, they use MLP (lovable product) - don't waste time building things people won't use
• Scoping down to test and ship it
• How does it feel like to get paid? Maybe not anything at all - boring, just a check in the bank, missed opportunity
• Did a design sprint (a la Google Ventures) - short period of time/process for an email experience in payday - celebration
• When you meet someone for the first time - first 20-30 seconds really matter, personality shines
• If you understand personality of a product and brand, you can bring people in through copy/illustrations
• Justin Jackson, founder of Transistor.fm and Tyler Tringas, Earnest Capital founder (The Indie Hackers podcast #152, 3/6/20)
• Picking the right market to get started in that originated from Justin's blog post called "The Main Thing"
• Justin was following curiosity - somewhat interesting after talking with Nathan Bashez - main thing swallows most value
• Eating out in college with limited $, he'd order entrée and water - most folks just do that
• Is that applicable to how we think of products? Can we frame it the way we build products?
• Josh was doing subscription forms for embedding in Medium posts - Medium increasing audience
• It was a nice-to-have to store
• Insightful posts for nice, concise wrappers around important things to consider
• Justin has a series and Tyler's been the "reply guy"
• This is important to think about, and then what should we think about?
• Areas of disagreement are the implications for doing business outside of this - narrower (think: bootstrappers/indiehackers)
• Currently, Tyler believes indiehackers should be shying away from big things and verticals
• New twists on WP hosting, Todo app - not paying attention to 2nd order effects and incumbents
• Don't build on top of other platforms vs building on top of others (Jason Cohen on an app store where someone else pulls you with)
• To get traction, need big ideas and concepts and then niche down by product or audience
• Distribution or differentiation - typically this is often in main spaces
• CRM, PM tool, ToDo, basic ecommerce, CMS hosting - chock full of stuff
• Tons of successful ones, lately (last 5 years), are apps - automated collections on Stripe, error collections on Rails, bolt-ons
• Developer market is one of most unique markets - things that work there may not work outside of it
• Devs have a larger #, avg revenue and highly incentivized to get better at what they do - maybe parallels with doctors
• Reachable online, congregates online and tons of opportunity to reach them
• Ecommerce first may share this, content-based, ad/news/blogs similarly compared to pure offline markets
• ConvertKit - state of union surveys between bloggers and creators - cognitive ceilings of bubbles after meet-ups and conferences
• Differences of WP plug-in, Shopify extensions for ecommerce entrepreneurs, etc - big market differences
• Characteristics of markets matter - pointing yourself in some direction to pull yourself, it matters what you're first 1% is
• Size of market does matter - leaning too far - have to quantify the demand for a product in a specific category
• Number of potential customers, new customers, average spend, frequency of purchase, growth rate, % reachable
• His market for Transistor.fm as moderate sized podcast hosting - say, 70k customers, potentially
• Tyler considering "side dishes" in the main verticals because of differentiation for your product and jump into distributions
• $10k MRR per founder may be the "default alive" amount but completely depends on what you're doing
• Young Indie Hacker as total time without massive audience/trust can't launch a direct competitor to Google Analytics
• Privacy-focused analytics as a trend, simple analytics, too - big audiences launch failed products all the time
• Experience matters, everything you bring to bare matters - Justin started blogging in 2008 - built the audience over time
• Reuben Gamez doesn't care for audience - he knew SEO and had timing to help
• What trade-offs do you have to make for a market?
• Where are you in your life? Stage matters - spend some time on the slopes/get your experience
• Affiliates for Justin's foot off the ground to succeed
• Nathan Berry - pattern in his life earlier than Justin - early 20s blogging and publishing then, selling early
• The practice and experience matters
• Main thing for niche audience or side thing for huge audience - questionable unfair advantages, main thing in huge market
• Pretty core product for them - "Crossfit gyms, for instance - Mind/Body went after yoga studios and everything for it as SaaS product"
• If you have a particular product insight into P/M or payment txns - try to match the niche product where insight is overvalued
• IndieHackers as afraid of competition they make this product that nobody really wants to pay for as Unique
• Justin brought up going to meetups in other cities/states to be the outsider and find out what they want
• Gaming & Chrome OS / Steam, Going Cashless, Coronavirus Latest (a16z 16min on the News 3/8/20)
• Jonathan Lai and Andrew Chen from Consumer team, Alex Rampell from fintech team
• Steam - Valve corporation as the largest PC distributor of games after starting as Valve game
• Publishers controlled access to physical retail points - devs would take 20-30% of their games
• Developers actually made it 70% with Steam partnership - just took 30% otherwise, indie developers rise
• 30k games under Steam - not all would run on ChromeOS hardware, but can see smaller indies get access
• 90mn MAU, 1 bn registered accounts - social graph that may get ChromeOS more information
• K12 education - 60% of computers are Chromebooks now - Roblox, Stadia, Minecraft as possibilities for younger
• Google Stadia may unlock tiers of games for longer sit-down sessions because they wouldn't be able to target all platforms
• Entertainment over long-term, new gameplay experiences - click to play alongside as an ad or video, social onboarding
• Going cashless - no employee theft, checkout line, armed trucks vs cash only (cc fees and tracking)
• Both sides of consumer cutting and for small businesses - rich people monetized at interest margin but others on fees