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Marketing Reddit: Have an Awesome Product and Tie it to a Fantastic Brand

Published: Mar 17, 2011

Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, sat down with me to talk about how Reddit handled it’s marketing when it was still a startup. Alexis also give several marketing tips for entrepreneurs who are just getting started.

[Editors Note: This is part 2 of my interview with Alexis. To watch the first part, checkout The first 6 months of Reddit (YC 05): “Entrepreneurship is a bipolar existence”]

7 takeaways from the video

1. The Reddit alien came from a doodle in marketing class. Always be looking for inspiration.

2. If you have a great product and great service, tie it to an awesome brand. This will help you become memorable.

3. When people tattoo your logo on themselves, you’re doing something right

4. Great branding can’t save something that’s not good enough, so making sure you’re product rocks is the first priority.

5. Decent branding without a lot of cash: If you don’t have a network of designers, checkout a site like 99designs (but “shake the friend tree” for artists before you go this route).

6. You can’t succeed if you don’t actually start. Don’t be afraid to fail.

7. If something fails, no one will know about it because no one used it. Stopped letting fear paralyze you and built cool stuff.

For up to minute startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry.

31 days, 120,000 hits, and $462 in revenue. The Startup Foundry’s story.

Published: Mar 16, 2011


In our first month online The Startup Foundry had 120,000 page views, grew to over a thousand followers on twitter, and generated $462 in advertising revenue. I thought I would share the backstory and some lessons we learned along the way in hopes that it might be useful for other startups.

The Back Story.

The idea for TSF came to me while I was building my other startup, CodeSketch. I love talking and writing about startups but I live in West Michigan and the startup scene is rather small. I wanted to connect with other entrepreneurs that were building really cool things across the world and I saw The Startup Foundry as a vehicle to make that happen. TSF is a completely moonlit project.

Lessons learned:

1. Once you have identified a need, DO SOMETHING immediately.
•Don’t wait for other people to help you. Jump in and do it yourself. You can end up spending more time trying to convince other people to join you then just doing the work yourself.

•If you’re waiting to have everything completely polished, you’ve waited to long.

•Be borderline obsessed. I’m so incredibly hungry to make TSF the best place for entrepreneurs and founders on the web. Don’t lose focus.

2. Be the first to admit you suck at something, then work your ass off to fix it.
•When we first launched the site the comments were easier to read then the articles. Every startup is going to make stupid mistakes that seem blatantly obvious in retrospect. Don’t let this scare you.

•Our videos interviews were terribly produced (our guests had fantastic content though). If you watch my first interview that I published with Andrew Warner, you almost feel sorry for me I did such a poor job. I’m still not quite to the level I want to be at yet but I’m working at it and I’m getting better.

•Your goal is to not suck twice.

3. Be proud of your accomplishments, but not cocky.
•In the grand scheme of things we are a tiny site, but this is a tiny site I’m incredibly proud of. I love waking up each morning to an inbox stuffed with fantastic startup news that I have the privilege to dig through. It is truly humbling to have guys like Andrew Warner, Tim O’Reilly, and Alexis Ohanian give you a half hour of their time. I love that I have the privilege to do this and I don’t take it for granted.

•I’ve talked to some entrepreneurs that are almost afraid to take credit for their success. Luck is an admittedly huge role in success but take credit for showing up to work everyday. Many people fizzle out in the day to day grind. Take pride in your accomplishments (even if your accomplishment is that you’re still moving an inch at a time).

The Future.

After seeing the initial traction, I’m going to start shifting more of my time to The Startup Foundry and try to turn it into a powerhouse of startup news. I would love to see TSF grow into a full time job (complete with a full time salary), but we’re not there quite yet. I’m sure we are going to make more mistakes down the road but I promise that we will iterate quickly, and try to serve this community as best as we can. If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask them in the comments. I’ll try to answer them all. If you have an awesome startup, I want to hear about it, so send us a tip!

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry.

The first 6 months of Reddit (YC 05): “Entrepreneurship is a bipolar existence”

Published: Mar 15, 2011

A co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, sat down with me to talk about the first six months of Reddit. We talked about his experience in YCombinator, meetings with Google and Yahoo, and the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur. This is a great interview and you don’t want to miss it!

Highlights of this video:

1. Initially the Reddit team was rejected by YCombinator. Paul Graham then followed up with them via a phone call and said “as long as you ditch your original idea, you can come be a part of YCombinator”. This is a great reminder that investors often care more about the team then they do the product.

2. Alexis also talks about how Reddit was able to get new users by creating fake accounts to simulate an active community.

3. Alexis talks about a meeting they had with Yahoo, but he felt that the meeting sucked because Yahoo was more interested in the traffic they were generating then the actual mission of the site.

4. Met with Google, and things went really well. This was a huge boost of confidence for the Reddit team as “some very smart people at Google were interested in our product”.

5. Alexis also reminisces about doing “digital grunt work”. Alexis attributes a lot of Reddit’s success to doing things that aren’t glamorous. Great reminder that entrepreneurship is all about “the hustle”.

6. Entrepreneurship is a Bipolar existence. Sometimes you feel like you’re building an online empire, and other days you feel like a nobody. This is completely normal.

7. A tip that Alexis shared for other startups was to “celebrate quick and easy wins” (especially in the first 6 months). This helps to build momentum, and establishes comradery on your team.

Please follow us on Twitter for up to the minute startup news @startupfoundry.

O’Reilly: When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable

Published: Mar 14, 2011

Summary of the video:
1. In this video Tim talks about what “Web 2.0” means. (How he views the internet as an operating system).

2. Tim realized that software was becoming a commodity. He saw the same thing play out earlier with hardware in the IBM era. When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable. In the IBM era when hardware was commoditized, software became very valuable (and Microsoft won).

3. The web is a platform. The example Tim gave was Napster. Napster worked by indexing the songs you already had on your computer, not from a pre-determined master list. This was a huge shift in thinking about what the web could be about.

4. Tim encourages entrepreneurs to not “paint by numbers” when it comes to solving problems. Just because one company was successful doesn’t mean you should clone their product.

Be sure to checkout part 1 of this interview where Tim talks about how he Bootstrapped O’Reilly Media with “happy accidents”

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry.

We’re giving away $6,620 worth of goods and services to 2 Lean Startups

Published: Mar 13, 2011

When you’re building a lean startup, you walk a tightrope between pinching every penny that you can and making sure your team has the best tools available. We feel your pain and we want to help! We’ve decided that we are going to lend a hand and give away $6,620 worth of goods and services to 2 startups. How are we able to make this happen? The answer is our newest sponsor AppSumo, is really cool. AppSumo provides “Daily deals for web geeks” and we’ve partnered up to help a couple of startups get off the ground.

How to Enter:

1. Follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry,
2. Help spread the word by tweeting a link to this article.
3. Register for AppSumo (These guys take email seriously, and they will never spam you).

What we’re giving away:

When will the winner be announced?

We will contact the 2 winners on Friday the 18th.

Good Luck!

I would love to hear how your startup would benefit from these tools in the comments.

P.S. Make sure you say “Thanks” to @noahkagan (from AppSumo) for making this giveaway possible!

The Music Venture Capital Business Model (Or a New Perspective)

Published: Mar 12, 2011


This is a guest post written by Wesley Verhoeve. He is an entrepreneur and artist manager, and loves to write about where business and music intersect. For more articles by Wesley please visit his website at WesleyVerhoeve.com

As the music business evolves and moves beyond the antiquated copyright exploitation model, it makes increasing amounts of sense to further explore the thoughts I’ve shared on the parallels between the future of our business and the current ways of the venture capital/tech start-up world. Every artist (the creative)and their manager (the business person, and together with the artist the product developer) should consider themselves creative entrepreneurs, not much different from the small team of Dave (the graphic designer/artist), Jason (the product developer) and Spencer(the business guy) at online portfolio start-up Carbonmade.

How It Works In The Current Tech Start-Up Business

In a simplified version of the start-up world the scenario goes as follows: a small team of creatives and business people create a product (an app, a web service, site, etc.) and bring it to market in a Beta form, while continuously improving and providing updates. They might initially be self-funded and bootstrapping, or they could be funded with the help of one or more Angel Investors. If the product catches on with a small group of passionate early adopters, and there is potential for a much wider base of users, the team might seek out additional investors to be able to shoot for this larger market. These second level investors could be Venture Capitalists(VCs) , who differ from Angels mostly in the scale of finances they can provide (bigger), the additional knowledge they can share to help speed up growth, and the support network they can provide. The original start-up shares ownership in the company with both rounds of investors. The investors are either looking for an exit (a sale of the start-up to a large company like Google), or sustained profits over time.

How It Could Work In The Future Music Business

When we translate this to the music industry we can draw some parallels. An artist and their manager start developing products together. They record demos/singles/EPs, produce a stage show and play small concerts, create artwork for branding and marketing, build a website (each of which are products!), and release them to friends/family/early adopters. This could be self-funded, or in part funded with smaller amounts of money from wonderfully nice family members, friends or through a service like Kickstarter or Pledge Music. In exchange the investors become small stake-holders in the career of the start-up team of artist and manager. (Note the difference from typical Kickstarter campaigns which are more like fancy pre-sales for the future product.)

With each product release, like a single, we build our customer base (or we could say fan base, but that’s so 2001), and as we learn from their feedback we adjust. Please note that I am not suggesting to change the art to fit an audience, but rather that we adapt the business elements(how do we offer the products, at which price point, through which channels, etc.).

As the start-up team bootstraps their way to an increased customer base, we add more members to the team to facilitate more growth and increased revenue. A booking agent can help us improve distribution of our live show product, visual artists can help us create more effective branding and marketing materials, an attorney can help us secure better deals, etc. These are contractors for the most part, and won’t take ownership.

An indie label or marketing firm might come on board in a second round of investments, and those could be considered bigger Angels, or even VCs depending on the level of investment/commitment. In exchange for a share of the profit they add value through additional manpower/skills, an increased network of supporters, additional funding, and services (royalty accounting, legal, distribution, synch pitching).

If the music is of a certain popular mass-appeal nature, an artist/music start-up can engage in a third round of investments. This time it would involve major investors (major labels). In exchange for a more substantial amount of money than a previous investor they acquire an additional chunk of equity (a co-release with the indie), or they can buy the angel’s piece of equity (upstream deal, master ownership). They can also offer additional services as part of the deal including radio support, mainstream media pr, etc.

The original start-up team won’t be looking for an exit, but a continuous stream of profits based on the different revenues streams that are developed. Angels could look for an exit in subsequent investment rounds (uncle Bob wants his money back and has no ambition to permanently operate in the music business!), and our version of VCs will look for partial ownership and continuous profit streams through catalog.

The Benefits

The benefits of this model over the current ways of the industry are obvious and plentiful.

  • Artists maintain creative control and (partial) ownership of their creations.
  • Investors gain ownership in all profit streams, but only in exchange for quantifiable contributions to the process.
  • Early investors (including managers who put in sweat equity) who have stood the most risk and exhibited the most vision, stand to benefit at greater rates than those who jump on the bandwagon later. This will stimulate a new wave of artist development, rather than the current wave of lazy “wait-and-see” A&R behavior.
  • The financial aspects of an artists career would gain incredible amounts of transparency, and accounting would be simplified.
  • The quality of music would arguably benefit from the increased artistic influence of artists and their trusted advisors (producers, indies), the decreased artistic influence of suits, and greater diversity.
  • Roles would be delineated much more clearly and people would focus on their strengths. Stay in your lane.
  • Major Labels get to remake themselves and focus on their strengths
  • Indie labels and new style management/label hybrids are better positioned to take back their rightful place as quality gatekeepers and this benefits our customers by freeing them from the clutter that has is so rampant in the world of music discovery.
  • The increased sphere of societal influence will belong to the creators, and not the financiers.
  • Job creation would take place in the music business as entire Major Label departments would spin off into a cottage industry of providers for start-ups and investors.
  • Opportunities for music industry people to act shady are reduced, and the opportunity for artists to waste a ton of money is as well. A fairness doctrine.

A Few Things We’ll Need To Make This Happen

  • An uncluttered way for Angels to find artist start-ups seeking investments (a curated myspace meets kickstarter?).
  • A template legal and financial structure that protects investors and artists alike. And subsequently, music attorneys that can practice “real law”, and not just weird mystery theater entertainment law.
  • A set of proper and relevant business analytics and post-Soundscan metrics that matter, both for artists and Angels, and a dashboard in which we can clearly track them.
  • A new perspective, vision and a willingness to let go of the broken system we operate under at the moment. This will be easy for new artists, but hard and scary for those artists still making money right now under the old system.

 

We’re giving away 10 copies of SyncPad for iOS ($9.99 value)

Published: Mar 11, 2011

You may have seen our earlier coverage of SyncPad in our post yesterday titled “Talk to your real customers, not your imaginary ones. The SyncPad story.“.

We ran the promotion on our story yesterday, but we felt it would be best to mention it in a separate post to give it the attention it deserves.

We are giving away 10 copies of the iPhone and iPad versions (5 copies each). If you would like a chance to win a copy, leave a comment and tweet out a link to this article. An easy way to do that is by a simple ReTweet.

We will pick the winners in the next couple of days. SyncPad for iPad is available for $9.99 on the App Store or $4.99 for the iPhone version.

For up to the minute startup news, follow us on twitter @startupfoundry.

Angry Bird’s “overnight success” only took 8 years.

Published: Mar 11, 2011

On March 10 the creators of Angry Birds (Rovio studios) announced that they had taken $42 Million in funding. They currently hold the record for the best selling iOS game ever. There is talks of a movie being produced featuring Angry Birds. You can already buy stuffed animal versions of the birds.

As Wired Magazine eloquently put it: “Every day, users spend 200 million minutes — 16 years every hour — playing the mobile game. Three trillion pigs have been popped. It has filled billions of those interstitial moments spent riding the bus, on a plane or in important work meetings, and it is or has been the number-one paid app on iTunes in 68 countries, as well as the best-selling paid app of all time.”

I overheard someone dismissively talk about how Rovio had everything handed to them and that’s why they had “overnight success”. I almost went medieval on them.

There is no denying that Angry Birds is a culture phenomenon, but one thing it’s not is an “overnight success”.

Did you know that the guys at Rovio spent 8 YEARS working on other games before they finally caught a huge break? That takes dedication. For almost a decade they didn’t have any big wins. Sure they had some small to moderate success early on, but nothing massive. Heck when Angry Birds came out on the iOS app store sales were pretty slow for the first 3 months. The Rovio guys believed in their product and kept their nose to the grindstone. Through an iterative process they were able to grow Angry Birds into the massive success that it is today.

“Over night success” is often idolized in the startup world, but sometimes the glamor is based in myth rather than reality. Show up and work hard each and every day and remember that you’re getting closer. You can’t have a breakout hit if you never show up.

For more startup news, please follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry.

Talk to your real customers, not your imaginary ones. The SyncPad story.

Published: Mar 10, 2011

SyncPad is an iOS app that helps people collaborate in real-time. You can think of it as a virtual whiteboard that helps people focus.

When Davide Di Cillo (the founder of SyncPad) was building SyncPad, he had envisioned the target market of his app to be creative studios. He foresaw advertising agencies, graphic design shops, and freelancers clamoring to use SyncPad so they could easily collaborate with clients remotely.

After Davide launched his app he hit the streets and began talking with his actual customers. What he discovered surprised him. Instead of taking the art world by storm, Davide discovered that his true customers for SyncPad were in the business market. He found that companies were using SyncPad to help manage meetings (both remote and locally), real time visual communication, and for presentations.

Davide jumped into action and immediately began to retool parts of SyncPad to better fit with how his actual customers were using his app (for example: They quickly integrated multi-page PDF support). Business started to flourish for Davide and SyncPad is now in talks with some major corporations that would like to buy several thousand seats for it.

All of this happened because Davide talked to his real customers, and didn’t get hung up on his imaginary ones.

We are giving away 5 copies of the iPhone and iPad versions. If you would like a chance to win a copy, leave a comment and tweet out a link to this article. An easy way to do this is by hitting the “Like” button in the comments and it will ask you if you want to share the article via Twitter.
SyncPad for iPad is available for $9.99 on the App Store or $4.99 for the iPhone version.

For up to the minute startup news, follow us on twitter @startupfoundry.

Bootstrapped Startup Fitocracy Helps You Level Up in Real Life (Beta Invites Included)

Published: Mar 9, 2011

Looking for a way to make your workouts more social and fun?  Fitocracy has you covered.  The two-man startup based out of Brooklyn is intent on ensuring that fitness is fun, motivational, and social.  The basics of the site include signing up for a profile and then logging your workouts, following users and seeing their fitness accomplishments, earning points and leveling up.  There is also a leader board that ranks all users of the site and allows for them to engage in competition amongst one another.  The unique relationship between exercise and many popular game mechanics is the ability to always be able to push harder, longer, or stronger.  Entwine that with a dedicated community of supporters and Fitocracy users can be well on the way to accomplishing their fitness goals.

Before we take a closer look at how Fitocracy works we asked the founders to share 3 pieces of advice for other bootstrapped startups.

1.) Know your topic.  Know your field.  Whatever topic or arena your startup is in, it should be your passion to know everything there is to know about it.  You should be credible and knowledgeable about all the details in your space.  That knowledge should become your identity.

2.) Jump in and do it.  Too often would be entrepreneurs find themselves idling around wasting time.  If you have an idea and you are passionate about it.  Go forth and make it happen.

3.) Communicate effectively.  If you followed the advice from #1 you should be able to live and breath the topic your startup is in.  If you can do that learn how to effectively speak to other about it in an engaging and meaningful way.  Sell your idea by stirring emotions, being a hustler, and imparting your knowledge to your audience.

Delving a little deeper into the startup the user is able to log fitness workouts in the form of repetitions for strength training or minutes for cardio.  These repetitions and minutes translate into points for the user.  There are also levels, which represent the overall fitness level of that user.  In addition to points and levels, users can also perform quests.  Quests are much like they sound, and involve going out and achieving some pre-established goal.  One such quest is being able to bench press twice your body weight or working your way up to lifting as much as this guy.   The quests are also a way to break up the regular routine that many gym rats fall into thus serve as a nudge to users to try a spinning class rather than just running all the time for a cardio session.  This repetitive routine can be broken by also participating in a multitude of workouts, which results in a more rounded fitness package, and thus a higher score in the Fitocracy world.  And of course, like any good game site, they have achievements and badges that can awarded and shown off to other users similar to Xbox Achievements.

Points, levels, and quests are all still a work in progress for Fitocracy.  They launched into beta a few weeks back and one of their continuing goals is to properly map the relationship between points and levels and the amount of work that a person is doing. This challenge has been tricky since the beginning due to the unique nature of exercise.  A standard across the board does not work well because fitness is not a one size fits all.  The mapping out of the points/user system is one of the main goals of the beta run.

So where did the idea come from?  Co-founders Brian and Dick were both your typical kids playing video games on the couch. When they decided to take control of their lives, they realized that fitness and working out tended to mirror the games they had once played.  Becoming obsessed with weightlifting and working out in general, they came to the conclusion that fitness and being healthy is about the journey.  And during the journey there are opportunities to level up and progress throughout the process.  Along the way there are also “mini adventures” (or quests, if you will) that add to the story.  Realizing there was an opportunity at hand they created Fitocracy, which is now helping real people level up and progress their way through the game of fitness.

Users also have the opportunity to share their workouts, stats, and achievements with the socialized aspect of Fitocracy.  They have utilized the Facebook and Twitter APIs making it easy to connect with friends.  As their user base increases the social aspect will obviously grow as well.  Members can follow other members or friends and “Give props” to those that deserve it.  “Give props” is analogous to the Facebook “Like” button in that it allows users to quickly notify others that they are deserving of credit for their workouts.  Or that they “Like” the status of another user.

Fitocracy has some really great things going for them.  For instance, time on site is averaging between 10-13 minutes, they have approximately 2,500 page views per day, and the gamification aspect of the site is actually meaningful.  This is important because normal game mechanics tend be cutesy and somewhat trivial.  Whereas, on Fitocracy they mean the user is able to translate them into real world effects that contribute to their overall health and wellness.  Which leads to another interesting point:  all the workout stats are self-reported.  Meaning I could say I accomplished 1000 crunches and ran 700 minutes if I wanted to accumulate a bunch of points and level up.  BUT, Brain and Dick tell me that their community is very self-regulating and the site offers a way to report abuses and flag unruly users.  This in turn has kept the community mostly honest and brings integrity into the game.

The Fitocracy concept would do well in the mobile world where users could log their workouts right in the gym.  While obesity rates are spiraling out of control in America there is a growing number of people that are taking control of their lives by starting down the road of fitness.  This means Fitocracy will continue to grow once they go mobile and users can get their fitness game on right in the gym.  They will have a mobile optimized site up soon followed by a dedicated app after that.

If you are interested in Fitocracy their main site can be found at: http://www.fitocracy.com.  Or follow them on Twitter @fitocracy.  If you are currently a beta user of Fitocracy make sure to leave them feedback and suggestions in the comments.  If your not part of the beta, use this link to get in and then leave them feedback and suggestions in the comments.  The first 100 readers will get a free beta account!

To keep up with startup news, follow us on twitter @startupfoundry.