Lecture 8: Getting Started, Things That Don't Scale, and Press

What this lecture covers

This lecture covers three separate talks from three founders. Stanley Tang (DoorDash) explains how he tested delivery demand with a one-hour landing page before building any infrastructure. Walker Williams (Teespring) argues that doing unsustainable, unscalable things is one of a startup's biggest early advantages, covering first users, turning them into champions, and finding product-market fit. Justin Kan (Twitch, Justin.tv) demystifies how startups actually get press coverage.

It follows the course's earlier lectures on product, growth, and culture, and gives a tactical, story-driven complement to those more conceptual talks. After watching, you should be able to design a scrappy test for a business idea, explain why early-stage founders should personally handle support, and outline the concrete steps of pitching a journalist.

Key ideas

• Test the hypothesis cheaply: DoorDash began as a one-hour landing page (PaloAltoDelivery.com) with a phone number, used only to check whether real demand existed before building anything else.
• Things that don't scale: activities that are unsustainable long-term, like founders personally delivering orders or manually emailing every new customer, are acceptable and valuable in a startup's earliest stage.
• No silver bullet for first users: most founders acquire their earliest users through slow, personal effort (calls, emails, personal networks), not a single high-leverage channel.
• Turning users into champions: delighting users, running your own customer support, and proactively reaching out to churned customers build the advocates who drive word-of-mouth growth.
• Optimize for the next order of magnitude: at 10 users worry about reaching 100, not a million; premature scalability work wastes time better spent on product-market fit.
• Press is a sales funnel, not a meritocracy: getting covered requires a real story, a warm introduction to a reporter, advance lead time, and a prepared pitch, not luck.
• Press is not a scalable growth channel: coverage can help get a startup's first hundred or thousand users, but a company cannot generate unlimited stories and should not treat press as a vanity metric.

Walkthrough

DoorDash: testing demand before building anything (0:00)

Stanley Tang describes interviewing small business owners about delivery problems, then testing the idea with a landing page built in an afternoon, listing restaurant menus with a personal phone number for orders. The first phone call validated real demand, and the team personally delivered food, used Square, Google Docs, and Find My Friends to run operations by hand before building any real infrastructure.

Doing things that don't scale, at DoorDash and Teespring (9:10)

Tang summarizes his lesson as testing hypotheses, launching fast, and accepting unscalable early operations. Walker Williams then picks up the theme for Teespring, describing its rough early days selling shirts for a local nonprofit and arguing that founders must personally spend disproportionate time getting a startup's first users, since there is no shortcut.

Turning users into champions (20:21)

Williams explains that a champion is a user who advocates for the product, and that the fastest way to build champions is direct, personal contact: running customer support yourself, proactively reaching out to current and churned customers, and closely monitoring social media, since one badly handled complaint can undo the goodwill of many champions.

Finding product-market fit by moving fast (25:24)

Williams describes prioritizing speed over clean, scalable code early on, illustrated by duplicating Teespring's codebase to quickly serve enterprise customers rather than spending a month building it properly, and argues founders should only worry about the next order of magnitude of users, not eventual massive scale.

Justin Kan: what press actually is (32:29)

Kan opens by dispelling the idea that press coverage happens through merit alone, and stresses that founders need a clear goal for why they want coverage (for example, positioning to investors, or reaching a specific industry) before pursuing it, illustrated with examples from Socialcam, Exec, and Twitch.

The mechanics of getting a story published (39:35)

Kan lays out the practical steps: identify a genuine story (launch, funding, milestone, stunt), get a warm introduction to a reporter through someone they already covered, give a week or more of lead time, secure a face-to-face or phone meeting, pitch with a memorized outline of bullet points, and follow up with a clear press kit before the news breaks.

Before you watch

• This lecture works well after the course's earlier lectures on product and growth, since it applies those ideas at the very earliest, pre-product-market-fit stage.
• No specific technical background is required.

Check your understanding

1. Why did Stanley Tang consider the one-hour PaloAltoDelivery.com landing page an "experiment" rather than a product launch?
2. What kinds of activities count as "things that don't scale," and why are they a competitive advantage early on rather than a weakness?
3. According to Walker Williams, what are the three ways to talk directly to your customers, and what does each accomplish?
4. Why does Justin Kan say getting press coverage is "like a sales funnel," and what determines whether a pitch converts into a published story?
5. Why does Kan argue that press coverage is not a scalable user-acquisition strategy?