Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

Thanks for having me. Today I am going to be talking about how to go from zero users to many users. I’m just assuming that you have many great ideas in your head at this moment and you are thinking about what the next step is.

A lot of my lecture is based off of mistakes I have made in the past. As Sam mentioned, I went to YC in 2010 and spent three years going back and forth, pivoting a bunch of times, starting over a bunch of times, and I learned a lot about what not to do if I were to start another startup after Homejoy. A lot of my advice comes from failure and understanding what you shouldn’t do and then using that to make generalizations about what you should do.

Just a reminder that you should take all advice as directionally good guidance, but every business is different. You’re different, and I’m not you, so take everything with that in mind.

When you start a startup you should have a lot of time on your hands to concentrate on the startup. I’m not saying that you should quit school or quit work; what I’m saying is that you should have a lot of compressed time that is dedicated to immersing yourself in the idea and developing solutions to the problem that you are trying to solve. For example, if you’re in school it is better to have one or two days straight per week to work on your idea versus spending two hours here and there every single day during the course of the week. It’s like coding. There is a lot of context switching so being able to really focus and immerse yourself is really important.

When I first wrote this lecture I was thinking, what are the things that most people do incorrectly when starting a startup? The novice approach is thinking, “I have this really great idea, I don’t want to tell anyone about it. I’m going to build, build, build and then going to maybe tell one or two people and then I’m going to launch it on TechCrunch or somewhere like that, and then I’m going to get lots of users.”

What really happens is because you did not get a lot of feedback, maybe you get a lot of people to your site, but no one sticks around because you didn’t get that initial user feedback. If you’re lucky enough to have some money in the bank you might go buy some users but it just whittles out over time and you just give up. It is sort of a vicious cycle. I actually did this once, and I did this while I was in YC. When I went through YC I didn’t even launch a product. I didn’t launch on TechCrunch which is the thing you should definitely do. You don’t ever want to get into that cycle because you’ll just end up with nothing good.

The next thing is that you have an idea and you should really think about what the idea is really solving. Like what is the actual problem. You should be able to describe your problem in one sentence. And then you should think, “How does that problem relate to me? Am I really passionate about that problem?” And then you should think, “Okay it’s a problem I have, but is it a problem that other people have?” And you verify that by going out and talking to people.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made involves my co-founder and I, who is also my brother. We started a company called Pathjoy in 2009 or 2010. We had two goals in mind. One was to create a company that made people really happy, and to create a company that was very, very impactful. A good proxy for that is to just create a big huge company. And so we thought, okay, the problem we are solving is to make people happier. We first went to the notion of who are the people who make people happy. We came up with life coaches and therapists. It seemed kind of obvious to create a platform for life coaches and therapist. What happened as a result was that when we started using the product ourselves, we aren’t cynical people by any means, but life coaches and therapists are just not people we would use ourselves. It was sort of useless to us. So it wasn’t even a problem that we had and it wasn’t something that we were super passionate about building out, yet we spent almost a year trying to do this. And so if you just start from T=0 and think about this before you build any product I think you can save yourself a lot of headache down the road from doing something you don’t want to do.

So say you have a problem and you are able to state it, where do you start and how do you think of solutions? The first thing you should do is think about the industry that you are getting yourself into. Whether it is big or whether it is huge, you should really immerse yourself in that industry. And there are a number of ways to do this.

One is to really become a cog in that industry for a little bit. And so it might seem a little counterintuitive to do this because most people say that if you really want to disrupt an industry you should really not be a player in it. Someone who spent 20 or 30 years in an industry is probably set in their ways and is just used to the way things work and really can’t think about what the inefficiencies are or the things that you can “disrupt”. However, as a newbie coming into the industry you really should take one or two months to just really understand what all of the little bits and pieces of the industry are and how it works. Because it’s when you get into the details, that’s when you start seeing things that you can be exploiting and things that are really inefficient and may provide a huge overhead cost that you may be able to cut down.

So an example of this is that when we started Homejoy, we started with the cleaning industry, and when we started we were the cleaners ourselves. We started to clean houses and we found out really quickly that we were very bad cleaners. As a result, we said okay, we have to learn more about this and we went to buy books. We bought books about how to clean, which helped maybe a little bit. We learned a little more about cleaning supplies but it is sort of like basketball, you can read and learn about basketball but you’re not going to get better at it if you don’t actually train and throw a basketball into the net.

And so we decided that one of us was going to have to learn how to clean. Or at least get trained by a professional. We actually went to get a job at a cleaning company itself. The cool thing was I learned how to clean from training the few weeks that I was there at the cleaning company, but the even better thing was that I learned a lot about how a local cleaning company works. In that sense I learned why a local cleaning company could not become huge like Homejoy is today. And that is because they are pretty old school and they have a lot of things that are done inefficiently. Such as booking the customer and optimizing the cleaners’ schedules was just done very inefficiently.

If you are in a situation like mine where there is a service element of it then you should go and do that service yourself. If your thing is related to restaurants you should become a waiter, if it is related to painting become a painter and kind of get in the shoes of your customers from all angles of what you are trying to build. The other thing is there is also a level of obsessiveness that you should have with it as well. You should be so obsessed that you want to know what everybody in that space is doing. And it is things like writing a list of all of the potential competitors, similar types of companies, and Google searching them and clicking on every single link and reading every single article from search result number 1 to 1000. I found all potential competitors big and small and if they were public, I would go and read their S-1s, I would go read all of their quarterly financials, I would sit on earnings calls. You know most of these, you don’t get much out of it but there are these golden nuggets that you will find every once in a while. And you won’t be able to find that unless you actually go through the work of getting all that information in your head. You should become an expert in your industry. There should be no doubt when you are building this that you are the expert so that people trust you when you are building this product.

The second thing is identifying customer segments. Ideally at the end of the day you have built a product or business that everybody in the world is using. In the beginning, you realistically want to corner off a certain part of the customer base so that you can really optimize for them. It is just about focus and whether you are catering to teenage girls or whether it is soccer moms, you will be able to focus a lot on their needs.

And lastly, before you even create a product or before you put code down, you should really storyboard out the user experience of how you are going to solve the problem. And that is not just meaning the website itself, it also means how does the customer find out about you. It can be through an ad or word-of-mouth, and then they come to your site and they learn more about you. What does that text say and what are you communicating to them when they sign up for the project and when they purchase the service? What are they actually getting from your service or product? After they finish using the product or service do they leave a review or do they leave comments? You need to be able to go through that whole flow and visualize in your head what the perfect user experience is. And then put it down on paper and put it into code, and then start from there.

So, you have all these ideas in your head, now you kind of know what the core customer base is that you want to go after, and you know everything about the industry, what do you do next? You start building your product. The common phrase that most people use today is," You should build a minimum viable product." And I underlined viable because I think a lot of people skip that part and they go out with a feature and the whole user experience in the very beginning is flat. Minimal viable product pretty much means what is the smallest feature set that you should build to solve the problem that you are trying to solve. I think if you go through the whole storyboarding experience you can kind of figure that out very quickly. But again, you have to be talking to users, you have to be seeing what exists out there already, and what you should be building should solve their immediate needs.

And the second thing is that before you put things in front of the user you should really have your product positioning down. What I mean by that is that you should be able to go to a person and be able to say, “Hey, this does X,Y, and Z in one sentence.” So for example, at Homejoy we started off with something super complicated. We were an online platform for home services, you start with cleaning and you can choose blah blah blah. It just went on for paragraphs and paragraphs.

When we went to potential users to come on our platform they would kind of get bored after the first few sentences. What we found out was that we needed a one-liner. The one-liner was very important. It kind of describes the functional benefits of what you do. In the future when you are trying to build a brand or whatnot you should be able to describe the emotional benefits and stuff like that. But when you are starting with no users you really need to tell them what they are going to get out of it. After we changed our position to get your place cleaned for $20 an hour, then everyone got it and we were able to get users in the door that way.

So you have an MVP out there, now how do you get your first few users to start trying it? The first few users should be obviously people you are connected with. You and your cofounder should be using it, your mom and dad should be using it, and your friends and coworkers should be using it. Beyond that, you want to get more user feedback. I’ve listed here some of the obvious places to go to depending on what you are selling. You can take your pick of the draw here. So, online communities, on Hacker News now there is the show HN - that’s a great place. Especially if you are building tools for developers and things like that. Local communities - so if you’re building consumer products you know there are a lot of influential local community mailing lists. Especially those for parents. Those are places you might want to hit up too.

At Homejoy we actually tried all of these. We used it ourselves and that was fine. We were the only cleaners so that was pretty easy. Our parents live in Milwaukee and we were based in Mountain View so that didn’t work. Friends and coworkers were kind of like in San Francisco and elsewhere so we didn’t have too many of them use it. So we actually ended up in a dead end of not being able to convince many people to use it in the beginning. So what we did was, because we are in Mountain View, some of you guys might know on Castro Street they have street fairs there during the summertime. So we would go out and basically chase down people and get them to try to book a cleaning. Almost everyone would say no until one day we just took advantage of the weather. It was a very hot and humid day and what we noticed was that everyone gravitated towards the food and drink area, especially on a hot day.

We figured we needed to get in the middle of that so we took water bottles and froze them and we started handing out free bottles of water that were cold. And people just came to us. I think we basically guilt tripped people into booking cleanings. But the proof in the pudding was that I figured most of the people were guilt tripped into doing it, but then they went home and they didn’t cancel on us. Well, some of them did but the majority of them did not. I thought that’s good, I have to go clean their houses but at least there is something we are actually solving here.

I know another startup in the last batch, I forgot their name right now, but they were selling shipping type products or trying to replace shipping products. So they would show up to the US postal office and find people who were trying to ship products and just take them out of line and get them to try to use the product and have them ship it for them. So you just have to go to places where people are really going to show up. Your conversion rate is going to be really low but to go from 0 to 1 to 3 to 4 these are the kind of things you might have to do.

So now that you have users using you ,what do you do with all of these users? The first thing you should do is make sure that there is a way for people to contact you. Ideally there is a phone number and if you put up a phone number, one good idea is to make sure that you have a voicemail so that you won’t be picking it up all the time. But in any case a way for people to give inbound feedback is good, but really what you should be doing is going out to your users and talking to them. Get away from your desk and just get out and do the work. It seems like a slog and it is going to be a slog but this is where you are going to get the best feedback ever for your product. And this is where it is going to teach you what features you need to completely change, get rid of, or what features you need to build.

One way to do this is to send out surveys to get reviews after they have used the product. This is okay but generally people are only going to respond if they really love you or they really hate you. And you never get the in between. A way to get the in between and not all of the extremes is to actually meet the person that is using your product. I’ve seen people go out to meet the user and they sit there and it is like a laboratory and it is like an inquisition. You’re just kind of poking at them. That is not going to give you the best results. What you should really do is make it into a conversation and get to know them and get them to feel comfortable. You want to get them at a level where they feel like they should be honest with you to help you improve things. So I found that actually taking people out for drinks and stuff like that was actually a very good way to do that. I’m not sure if all of you are old enough to do that but you can take them for coffee.

So another thing that you should be tracking is how are you doing in general from a macro perspective. The best way to do that is by tracking customer retention. The number of people that came in the door today, the number of people who are coming back tomorrow, the next day and so forth. Usually over time you are kind of looking at monthly retention so people who came in the door today, are they still using it next month and so forth. The problem with that metric is that it takes forever to collect that data and sometimes you don’t have a month or two months or three months to figure that out. So a good leading indicator is actually collecting reviews and ratings. Such as five-star and four-star reviews or collecting some notion of nps, which is net promoter score. So you’re basically asking them for a rating from 0 to 10 about how likely are they to recommend you to a friend and calculating the nps. Over time what you’ll see is that as you are building new features, you will be able to see that the reviews and the retention are going up over time. That means that you are doing a good job. If it is going down then you are doing a bad job. If it is kind of staying the same that probably means that you need to go out and figure out what new things you should be building.

One thing you should be wary of is the honesty curve. Some people will just lie to you. These are degrees of separation from you, and this is the level of honesty. So here this is your mom, these are the friends of your friends and here are random people. Your mom will use your product and she will be proud of you anyway, so she’ll be honest this much. Your friends will be pretty honest with you and give you feedback because they care about you - this is assuming this is a free product - and then over time as you get more and more random, these people don’t know who you are. There are people over here who don’t care about giving you feedback. So take this into consideration when getting user feedback.

So say now this is a paid product. So when it is a paid product your mom is down here. She is just going to lie to you and tell you it’s great. But then it kind of goes like this (draws graph going upward). Your friends are going to support you and give you the right feedback but it is actually these random people out here that if they really don’t think that what they paid for was worth it, they are going to really tell you. That’s because it is money out the door.

This is another way of saying that you are going to get the best feedback if you just make someone pay for it. That’s not to say that you should make people pay for it the first time out, but it is to say that if you are going to build a product that you are going to eventually need to pay for the software or for the hardware or whatever then get to the point where you can do that very fast. Because that is when you can get to the more meaty stuff of how you can get more paying users in the door.

You’re getting a lot of feedback and what do you do before you officially launch the product? You always want to be building fast and you want to be optimizing for this stage of your growth. You might have 10 users at this point and there is no point in trying to build features for when you might have 10 million users. You want to optimize for the next stage of growth which will be 10 to 100 users. What are the features you really need for that and just go with that. One of the things I found when building a marketplace is that process is very important over time as you scale.

You need to not try and automate everything and create software to have robots run everything. What you should do to really understand what you should build is manually do it yourself. An example of this is when we started taking on cleaning professionals on to our platform, we would ask them a bunch of questions over the phone and then in person would ask a bunch of questions as well. And then they would go to a test clean and then they would get onboarded to our platform if they were good enough. Doing all these questions for that many candidates we had a 3-5% acceptance rate.

What happened over time was that we learned certain questions that we were asking were good indicators as to whether or not they would be a good or bad performer on the platform through data collection and just looking at everything we could ask on an online form. That is when we put up an online application, they could apply and then we would ask them maybe several other questions during the in person interview. If you try to automate things too fast then you run into this potential problem of not being able to move quickly and iterate things like questions on an application and things like that.

A third point here is temporary brokenness is much better than permanent paralysis. By that what I mean is perfection is irrelevant during this stage. When you get to the next stage of growth what you are trying to perfect in one stage is not going to matter anyway. So do not worry about all of the edge cases when you are building something, just worry about the generic case of who your core user is going to be. As you get bigger and bigger the volume of those edge cases increases over time and you will want to build for that.

Lastly beware of the Frankenstein approach which is - great you talked to all of these users and they gave you all of these ideas and the first thing you are going to want to do is go build every single one of them and then go show them the next day and make them happier. You should definitely listen to user feedback but when someone tells you to build a feature you shouldn’t go build it right away. What you should really do is get to the bottom of why they are asking you to build the feature. Usually what they are suggesting is not the best idea. What they are really suggesting is that I have this other problem that you either created for me while using the product or I really need this problem solved if I’m going to pay to use this product. So figure that out first before piling on a bunch of features which then hide the problem altogether.

So you have a product that you are ready to ship - some people at this point will continue building the product and not ship it at all. I think the whole idea of being stealth and perfecting the product to no end is the idea that imitation is cheaper than innovation in terms of time and money and capital. I think that everyone should always assume in general that if you have a really good idea no matter when you launch someone is going to fast follow you and someone is going to execute as hard as they possibly can to catch up with you. There is no point in holding out on all of that user feedback that you can get by getting a lot of users because he felt paranoid that someone is going to do this to you.

I hate to keep harping on it but these are things that I see today with founders and something that I went through as well. And I think that unless you are building something that requires tens of millions of dollars just to start up there is really no point in waiting around to launch the product.

So say you have something that you feel ready to get lots of users on. So what do you do at this point? I will go over various types of growth in the next slides, but the one thing to note here early on when it is just you, your cofounder, and a couple of other people building, you aren’t creating a team just for growth. It is going to be one person and one person only. You really need to focus and you are going to be tempted to try five different strategies at one time.

But really what you should do is take one channel and really execute on it for an entire week and just focus on that. And if that works continue executing on it until it caps out. If it doesn’t work then just move on. By doing this you will feel more certain that the channel you were working on is wrong and your initial hypothesis is wrong than if you only spent a third of your time on it over the course of a few weeks. So learn one channel at a time. Second, when you find one channel at a time and strategies that work, always be iterating on it. You can potentially create a playbook and give it to someone else to iterate on it but these channels always change. Anything from Facebook ads to Google ads, the distribution channels, the environments that you don’t control change all of the time and you should always be iterating and optimizing for that. And lastly, in the beginning when you see a channel that fails just to get rid of it and go on there are lots of other things to try. But over time go back to that channel and look at it again.

An example is that in the beginning at Homejoy we had no money so when we tried to buy Google ads to get users in the door quickly - what we found was that all of these national companies had more money than us, they were making a lot more money on the job than us. So they were able to acquire users at a much higher cost than us. So we couldn’t afford that and we had to go through another channel. But today we make more money on the job, and we are better at some things. So we should probably revisit the idea of buying Google ads. That’s what I mean by that.

And the key to all of this is creativity. Performance marketing, or marketing and growth in general can be very technical but, it is actually technical, and you have to be creative because if it was really easy and bland then everyone would be growing right now. So you always have to find that little thing that no one else is doing and do that to the extreme.

So there are three types of growth. Sticky, viral, and paid growth. Sticky growth is trying to get your existing users to come back and pay you more or use you more. Viral growth is when people talk about you. So you use a product, you really like it and you tell ten other friends, and they like it. That’s viral growth. And the third is paid growth. If you happen to have money in the bank you’re going to be able to use part of that money to buy growth.

The central theme that I’m going to go through is sustainability. By sustainable growth I mean you are basically not a leaky bucket. The money you put in has a good return investment on it. So sticky growth is, like I said, trying to get your existing users to come back and buy stuff. The only thing that really matters here is that you deliver a good experience. Right? If you deliver a good experience people are going to want to keep using you. If you deliver an addictive experience people are going to want to keep using you. And the way to measure this and to really look at this and how you are doing over time with whether you are providing good sticky growth is to look at the CLV and retention cohort analysis.

CLV, some people call it TLV, is a customer’s lifetime. It is basically the net revenue that a customer brings in the door over a period of time. So a 12 month CLV is how much net revenue does a customer give you over 12 months. And sometimes people will do the month and six months and so forth. So when I say cohort basically what you are looking at is, this is time, and this is percent of the users coming back to you. So at period zero you are at 100%.

So cohort is another name for customer segments. For example you might look at the female versus male cohorts or people in Atlanta, Georgia versus people in Sacramento, California cohorts. The most common one is by month. So cohort equals month and let’s just say for this exercise we are looking at March 2012. So in March 2012, 100% of the people are using your product. Now, one month later 50% of the people might come back. Now, in the second month how many people that came in March are coming back two months later? That might be down. So over time you will have a curve that looks like this. There is always some initial drop off. The reasons that people don’t stay after first use could be that it wasn’t worth it or they had a bad experience, or something like that. And then over time what you want is for your curve to flatten out. These over here become your core customers. These are the ones that will stay with you over time.

Say we are at one year later and you have built a bunch of stuff. You graph out the same thing and hopefully what you see is that you have a curve like this. That is, that even in the first period more than 50% of the people came back to you and more and more people are sticking with you. A really bad retention curve looks like this - which is after the first use they just hate you so much that no one even comes back. I don’t know what kind of business that is, it is obviously a shitty business. I can’t explain a good business that has a retention curve like that. Over time as you are thinking of strategies to increase this curve and to keep making it go up and up and up you want to keep looking at this analysis over time to see if that strategy is working for you.

The second kind of growth is viral growth. Like sticky growth you also need to deliver a good experience. But on top of that you need to deliver a really, really good experience. What is going to make these people shout out loud on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever and tell all their friends and email all of their family about you. You have to really deliver a good experience. Combined with that is you have to have really good mechanics for the referral program itself. You have 100 customers who really want to talk about you. Now how are they going to talk about you?

So in that sense the viral growth strategy is all about building a good experience, but if you have that, how do you build a good referral program. I have listed the three main parts of that. One is the customer touch points which is where are people learning that they can refer other people? That might be after they book or after they sign up. A better one is after they use the product for a while and you see that they are highly engaged, then you show them that link and get them to send it out to everyone. Another one is if you are doing more of a platform type play - for Homejoy we actually go inside their home. So another customer touch point is when the cleaning professional is inside the home they can have a leave behind and we can show them something there too as well. You want to basically put the customer touch points and the actual link to however they are going to refer their friends at a point in time where they are highly engaged and you know that they are loving you.

The second is program mechanics. The most common thing I have seen is $10 for $10. You get $10 if you invite your friends and they use it and they get $10. And so you should try different types of mechanics in that sense and try to optimize for whatever works for you. It could be 25 for 25 or it could be 10 for 10, it could be any of these things. And lastly, when your friend clicks on your referral link, when they come back to the site it is really important to optimize that conversion flow of how they are going to sign up. Sometimes you need to sell them in a different manner or up-sell that a friend suggested that you use this and so forth. So with all of these combined, you will really need to play around with them in different dimensions and come up with a good referral program.

And lastly is paid growth. Some examples of paid growth are this right here. And these are some of the most obvious ones and I’m sure that you guys can think of more. Paid growth is you happen to have money you can spend - you may have credit cards or whatever - but you can spend something to get users. So the correct way to think about paid growth is that you are going to risk putting money out there so that are you going to get a return. The simple way to think about it - is your CLV, your customer’s lifetime - is it more than your CAC. And your CAC is an abbreviation for customer acquisition costs. So an example is - say you run a bunch of ads over 12 months and the customer is worth $300 to you. Each one of these ads, when you click on it the CPC costs different types of money, and then when they click on your ad they have to come to the site and sign up or buy something.

And the conversion rates are different for all of these ads. The CAC is calculated by the CPC divided by the conversion. So you see that there are different acquisition costs for different types of ads. To determine whether or not that is a good or bad ad all you have to do is CLV minus the CAC. If it is more than zero you are earning a profit. So you see that despite the CLV remaining the same and the conversions being higher or lower sometimes some ads that might seem good actually don’t seem so good at the end of the day.

You can look at this for your whole entire customer base, aggregating all of your customers together, but the better way of looking at it is to break it down by customer segments. If you are building a marketplace for country music the CLVs of someone in Nashville, Tennessee is going to be much larger than the CLVs of someone in Czechoslovakia. I just assume that is the case anyway.

You will want to make sure that when you are buying ads for these different types of cohorts that you know what the differences are and you don’t want to mix everything together. The last point on payback and sustainability - I think a lot of businesses get in trouble and they turn into bad businesses when they start spending beyond their means. And it has a lot to do with risk tolerance or how much risk you are willing to take on.

So when you look at these CLVs, which is suppose you get a customer that is worth $300 after 12 months. In the first month they are worth $100. If you wait until the 12 month period then they give you the other $200. But if in the first period you are actually paying $200 for them then you are in the hole for $100 until the end of the 12 month period. That’s when you start to get into potentially unsustainable growth. Something could happen at the end of the 12 months where you don’t actually get the $200 from the customer and you end up in a very bad situation. Essentially, at the end of the day you could be running out of money. And if you are doing this with credit cards you will definitely find that you are going to have to declare bankruptcy very soon.

So again, payback time is very important. Safe time to go with is three months. If you are very risk loving then maybe 12 months is better. Beyond 12 months is very much unsafe territory.

The art of pivoting - Homejoy in its current concept was literally the 13th idea we fully built out and tried to execute on and tried to get customers for. And so a lot of the questions I get are," How do you even get to that 13th idea, and how did you decide when to move on?" The best guidance that I can give on that is the kind of look at these three criteria, which is once you realize that you can’t grow, and despite building out all of these great features and talking to all of these users none of them stick, or the economics of the business just don’t make sense - then once you make that realization you just need to move on.

I think the trickiest one is probably the growth one because there are so many stories out there where the founders stuck with the idea and then after three years all of a sudden it started growing. So the trick here is what you really should do is have a growth plan when you start out. What is an optimistic but realistic way to grow this business? it might look something like this. In week one you just want one user, in week two you want maybe two users and so forth. And you can keep doubling up and up.

In week one you should basically build as much as possible to get that one user. And then a week to build as much to get two users. If you have a product that people want you should be able to maintain this growth curve pretty easily by just walking around and manually finding people. It is when you get to 100 users a week when you need these growth strategies to start working. What I tell people is usually if you are fully executing on your product, and you are working really hard, then if you go three or four weeks in a row of no growth or backwards growth, then it is time to maybe consider a pivot.

Maybe not in the sense that you completely come up with a new idea but you are probably fundamentally doing something wrong because at that early stage a startup should always be growing. This is optimistically what it looks like and this is the kind of growth curve that I set forth and put out when I started Homejoy, but really what it looks like is like this. So you want to make sure that when you are in a lull you don’t stop. And that is what you should wait 2 to 3 weeks. As long as you don’t stop working hard you’ll eventually get back here and you’ll see a trend like this over time.

I can take questions at this time.

Q: So one question online was if your users already have a product that they are already comfortable with how do you get them to switch to yours?

A: There is always a switchover cost. I will tell you the example of Homejoy. We were actually creating a new market in the sense that a lot of our initial users had never had cleanings before so it was pretty simple to get them on board. And a lot of people who have cleaners already really trust their cleaner. To get them to come and use something else is probably the most difficult task in the world. When you are building things and trying to get people to switch over to you what you really need to do is find the moments where your product or what you are offering is much better or very much differentiated from the existing solution they have.

So an example is someone who had a regular cleaner and maybe had a party one day and they needed a cleaning almost the next day. Because Homejoy in most areas has next-day availability they would just come to Homejoy and use it because they knew they couldn’t get their regular cleaner. And once they start using the product, then that is when they start realizing the little advantages of using Homejoy, which adds up to a big advantage. Realizing that leaving cash out or using checks was really annoying so being able to do all of your payments online was more convenient. Being able to cancel or reschedule according to your own schedule was very convenient.

A lot of people when they build a product they are like - and these 50 things are better than the existing solution - and even if the benefits outweigh the switchover cost it is really hard to actually tell that to a user and try to get them to aggregate all of those benefits over many little things. It is better to have one or two things that clearly differentiate yourself from the other product.

产品开发、用户交流与增长

感谢大家的邀请。今天我想和大家分享如何从零用户发展到拥有大量用户。我假设此刻你们脑中已经有许多很棒的想法，现在正思考下一步该如何迈出。

我的演讲内容很大程度上基于我过去犯过的错误。正如 Sam 提到的，我在 2010 年参加了 YC，其后用了三年时间在不同方向之间反复尝试，不断调整和重新开始。从 Homejoy 的经历中，我学到了很多关于创业中不该做的事情。我的很多建议源于失败的教训，通过理解哪些事情不应该做，进而总结出一些值得借鉴的经验。

需要提醒的是，所有建议都只是大致的方向性指导。每个业务都是独特的，你也有你的特点，而我不是你。所以在听取建议时，请结合自身情况灵活应用。

当你开始创业时，你应该有充足的时间来专注于自己的事业。我并不是说你必须辞去工作或退学，而是说你需要集中安排出一段紧凑的时间，完全投入到你的想法中，并专注于解决你要面对的问题。例如，如果你还在上学，与其每天分散安排两小时，不如每周集中一两天全力工作。这就像编程一样，频繁地在不同任务间切换会打断思路，因此能集中注意力并沉浸其中是至关重要的。

当我第一次写这篇演讲稿时，我在思考，大多数人在创业初期通常会犯什么错误？新手通常会这样想：“我有一个非常棒的想法，我不想告诉任何人。我会埋头苦干，持续开发，可能只会告诉一两个人。然后我会在 TechCrunch 这样的平台上发布产品，用户自然会蜂拥而至。”

但现实情况是，由于没有获取足够的反馈，也许你会吸引很多人访问你的网站，但没有人会留下来，因为你的产品缺乏初始用户的反馈。如果你很幸运，手头有一些资金，可能会去购买用户，但随着时间推移，用户流失殆尽，你最终选择放弃。这是一种恶性循环。我实际上也曾经历过一次这样的失败，而且还是在 YC 时期。当时，我甚至没有发布过一款产品，也没有在 TechCrunch 上推广——这是你绝对应该做的事情。你永远不要陷入这种循环，否则你将一无所获。

接下来，当你有了一个想法时，应该认真思考这个想法究竟解决了什么问题。你需要能够用一句话描述你的问题。然后思考：“这个问题与我有什么关系？我是否真的对这个问题充满热情？”接着再想：“好吧，这确实是我的问题，但这是否也是其他人的问题？”你需要通过与人交谈来验证这个问题的普遍性。

我犯过的一个最大错误，涉及到我和我的联合创始人——他同时也是我的兄弟。我们在 2009 年或 2010 年创办了一家公司叫 Pathjoy。当时我们有两个目标：一是创建一个能让人们感到非常快乐的公司，二是建立一家非常有影响力的公司。为了衡量影响力，我们认为打造一家规模巨大的公司是一个不错的目标。于是我们想，我们要解决的问题是让人们更快乐。然后我们思考，谁能让人们快乐？答案是生活教练和心理治疗师。于是我们认为，创建一个面向生活教练和心理治疗师的平台是显而易见的解决方案。

然而，当我们开始亲自使用这个产品时，尽管我们不是那种愤世嫉俗的人，但生活教练和心理治疗师并不是我们自己会选择使用的人群。这个产品对我们来说完全没有意义。也就是说，这甚至不是我们面临的问题，也不是我们非常热衷于开发的领域，但我们却花了近一年时间去尝试。如果你能从一开始就认真考虑这些问题，在真正开发产品之前清楚自己的方向，可以避免未来在不喜欢的事情上浪费大量时间和精力。

假设你已经明确了一个问题，并能够清晰地表达它。那么下一步，你应该从哪里开始，又如何思考解决方案？第一步是了解你将要进入的行业。无论这个行业规模是大是小，你都应该彻底沉浸其中。有很多方法可以做到这一点。

其中一种方法是暂时成为这个行业的一部分。虽然听起来有些违背常理，因为许多人会说，如果你想真正颠覆一个行业，就不应该成为这个行业的一员。他们认为，那些在行业中工作了二三十年的人，已经习惯了现有的运作方式，很难发现其中的低效或可以“颠覆”的地方。然而，作为一个新进入行业的人，你应该花一两个月时间深入了解行业的每一个细节，搞清楚它是如何运作的。只有当你深入到这些细节中，你才会发现可以利用的机会，找到那些非常低效或有高额成本的问题，而这些问题可能正是你可以解决的切入点。

举个例子，当我们创办 Homejoy 时，我们选择了清洁行业作为切入点。一开始，我们亲自成为清洁工，去打扫房子。很快我们发现自己根本不是合格的清洁工。因此，我们决定进一步学习清洁技巧。我们买了许多关于清洁的书，这对我们有一定帮助，比如了解了更多的清洁用品。但这就像学习篮球一样，光读书不练习，是无法真正掌握技能的。

于是我们决定，至少其中一人需要接受专业的清洁培训。我们实际上去了一家清洁公司打工。在那里工作的几周里，我不仅学会了如何清洁，更重要的是，我了解到一家本地清洁公司是如何运作的。通过这种方式，我明白了为什么一家传统的本地清洁公司无法发展成像 Homejoy 那样的大型企业。原因是这些公司采用了非常老套、低效的方式来完成一些重要的任务，比如客户预订和清洁工时间表的优化。

如果你处在类似的行业，尤其是涉及服务的领域，那么你应该亲自去从事这些服务。如果你的项目与餐饮相关，那就去当服务员；如果与绘画相关，就去做画家。你需要从各个角度体验客户的角色，真正站在他们的立场上理解问题。

此外，你还需要对这个行业保持高度的专注和执着。你应该对行业中的每一个动向都了如指掌。比如列出所有潜在的竞争对手以及类似的公司，在 Google 上搜索他们，点击每一个链接，阅读从搜索结果第 1 页到第 1000 页的所有文章。我会找出所有潜在的竞争对手，无论规模大小。如果他们是上市公司，我会阅读他们的招股说明书 (S-1)，查看他们的季度财务报告，甚至参与他们的财报电话会议。尽管大多数情况下你可能收获不多，但偶尔会发现一些非常有价值的信息。而这些信息只有在你真正投入精力获取后才能得到。你需要成为你所在行业的专家，毫无疑问的专家，这样在你开发产品时，人们会对你产生信任。

其次，你需要明确客户群体。理想情况下，你的产品或业务最终会被全世界的人使用。但在初期，你需要现实地聚焦于某一部分客户群体，以便针对他们的需求进行优化。无论你的目标是青少年女孩还是足球妈妈，专注于他们的需求会让你的工作更加高效。

最后，在你真正开始创建产品或写代码之前，你应该认真地规划用户体验的整个流程。这里不仅仅是指网站本身，还包括客户是如何了解到你的。这可能是通过广告，也可能是通过口碑宣传。然后他们访问你的网站，进一步了解你的产品。在这个过程中，你需要考虑网站的文案如何吸引用户，你是如何向他们传达信息的。当他们注册或购买服务时，他们实际得到了什么？在他们使用完你的产品或服务后，他们是否会留下评论或反馈？你需要能够完整地梳理出这一流程，在脑海中构建出完美的用户体验。然后将这些内容写到纸上，再将其转化为代码，从这里开始着手。

现在，你已经有了很多想法，也了解了自己的核心客户群和行业的方方面面，那么接下来该怎么做呢？你需要开始构建你的产品。大家经常提到的一个词是“最小可行产品”（Minimum Viable Product，MVP）。这里我强调“可行”这个词，因为许多人在一开始忽略了这一点，只是推出了一些功能，整个用户体验显得十分平淡。最小可行产品的核心在于：你需要构建的，是用最小的功能集解决你正在尝试解决的问题。如果你经历了完整的用户体验规划过程（storyboarding），这一点你应该可以很快理清。但与此同时，你还需要与用户不断交流，了解现有的解决方案，并确保你构建的产品能够满足他们的迫切需求。

其次，在把产品推向用户之前，你需要明确产品的定位。换句话说，你需要能够用一句话向别人清楚地描述：“这个产品可以做 X、Y 和 Z。”举个例子，在 Homejoy 的早期阶段，我们的描述非常复杂：“这是一个在线家庭服务平台，提供清洁服务，并且可以选择……”这样的介绍简直没完没了。

当我们向潜在用户介绍时，他们在听到第一句之后就感到厌倦了。我们发现，我们需要一个一针见血的简短表述，而这在初期尤为重要。这句话应该清晰地描述你的功能价值。尽管未来你可能会围绕品牌建设，探讨情感价值等内容，但在你还没有用户的时候，你需要直截了当地告诉他们：“这个产品对你有什么好处。”后来，我们将定位改为“每小时 20 美元让你的家焕然一新”，一下子用户都明白了，我们也因此吸引到了第一批用户。

当你推出了 MVP 后，如何让第一批用户开始尝试呢？最初的用户显然应该是与你有联系的人。你和你的联合创始人应该亲自使用，父母、朋友和同事也应该尝试。除此之外，你还需要更多的用户反馈。这里有一些可以尝试的渠道，比如在线社区。如果你是开发者工具或类似产品，可以尝试在 Hacker News 的“Show HN”版块推广。对于本地社区，如果你开发的是消费类产品，本地的社区邮件列表（尤其是父母相关的邮件列表）也是一个好地方。

在 Homejoy，我们几乎尝试了所有这些渠道。我们自己使用产品，这还算简单，因为当时我们就是唯一的清洁工。父母住在密尔沃基，而我们在山景城（Mountain View），所以这条路不通。朋友和同事大多在旧金山及其他地方，我们也没能让太多人使用。结果，我们在初期遇到了瓶颈，难以吸引用户。

于是，我们开始尝试更直接的方法。由于我们在山景城，那里夏季经常在 Castro 街举办街头集市。我们开始主动接近路人，试图让他们预订清洁服务。几乎所有人都拒绝了我们。直到有一天，我们利用了天气的优势。那天非常炎热潮湿，我们注意到每个人都聚集在食物和饮品区，尤其是在这种天气下。

于是，我们决定改变策略，用冷冻水瓶吸引注意力。我们免费分发冰水，人们一下子围过来了。我们甚至用“情感绑架”的方式让他们预订清洁服务。我原以为大部分人会回家后取消订单，但事实证明，绝大多数人并没有取消。尽管有些人确实取消了，但大部分人没有。我意识到我们确实解决了某些人的需求，虽然我需要亲自去打扫，但至少有了实际的结果。

另外，我还知道另一个初创团队，他们当时开发的是一种取代传统邮递服务的产品。他们的推广方式是直接到邮局门口找到排队寄包裹的人，把他们从队伍中拉出来，邀请他们尝试新产品，并帮他们完成邮寄。他们通过这种方式接触到了很多潜在用户。

你需要到用户真正会出现的地方，尽管转化率会很低，但从 0 到 1，再到 3 或 4，这是你可能不得不采取的方式。

现在你已经有用户在使用你的产品了，那么接下来你该怎么做呢？首先，你需要确保用户有办法联系到你。理想情况下，你应该提供一个电话号码。如果有电话号码，建议设置语音信箱，这样你就不需要一直接电话。无论如何，给用户提供反馈渠道很重要，但真正应该做的是主动接触你的用户，和他们面对面交流。离开你的办公桌，走出去，与用户互动。虽然这看起来像是一项枯燥的工作，但这正是你能够为产品获取最佳反馈的地方，也是你了解需要完全更改、删除或者新增功能的机会。

一种获取反馈的方式是，在用户使用产品后发送调查问卷。虽然这种方式可以获得一些评论，但通常只有特别喜欢或者特别不喜欢你的用户才会回复，你无法获得中间地带的反馈。而要获得更多中间地带的意见，最好的方法就是亲自与使用你产品的人见面。有些人在与用户交流时，像是在实验室做研究或审问，这并不会产生好的结果。相反，你应该将交流变成一场对话，让用户感到轻松自在。你需要让他们感到真诚和舒适，愿意坦诚地帮助你改进产品。我发现，带用户去喝一杯饮料或者咖啡是一个不错的方法。虽然不是所有人都能请用户喝酒，但咖啡总是一个好的选择。

另一个需要关注的方面是从宏观上跟踪产品的表现。最好的方法是监测客户留存率——今天有多少用户使用了你的产品，明天、后天他们是否还会回来。通常，留存率的分析以月为单位：今天注册的用户，下个月是否还在使用。但这个指标有个问题，那就是数据收集需要很长时间，有时你等不起一两个月。因此，一个很好的前置指标是用户评论和评分，比如五星或四星评价，或者净推荐值（NPS）。NPS 是通过询问用户从 0 到 10 分，推荐你的可能性有多大，然后计算得出的。

随着时间的推移，你会发现，当你添加新功能时，用户的评论和留存率可能会逐渐提高，这说明你做得很好。如果下降，那说明你需要改进。如果保持不变，可能表示你需要进一步了解用户需求，并开发新的功能。

需要注意的是“诚实曲线”。有些人会对你说谎，这通常取决于与他们的关系远近。你和用户的关系越近，反馈的真实性可能越低。例如，你的妈妈会因为为你感到骄傲而使用你的产品，即使产品不完美，她也会非常正面地评价；你的朋友会更诚实一些，特别是如果产品是免费的；而与产品没有任何关系的随机用户则可能最为直言不讳，因为他们对你没有私人感情。

如果是一个付费产品，情况就会有所不同。在这种情况下，随机用户的反馈会更直接和有价值。因为他们付了钱，如果产品不值，他们会毫不犹豫地告诉你问题所在。这也表明，最有价值的反馈往往来自那些为你的产品付费的用户。

因此，如果你打算开发一个最终需要用户付费的产品，不论是软件还是硬件，都应该尽快进入到收费的阶段。这并不是说第一次推出产品就要收费，而是说尽早测试用户是否愿意为你的产品付费非常重要。这将帮助你快速进入核心问题，即如何吸引更多的付费用户，以及改进产品以满足他们的需求。

你收到了很多用户反馈，在正式发布产品之前应该做些什么？你需要快速构建并优化产品，专注于当前阶段的增长需求。如果此时你只有 10 个用户，就没有必要为可能拥有 1000 万用户的未来开发功能。相反，你应该优化下一阶段的增长目标——将用户数从 10 增加到 100。思考哪些功能对实现这个目标至关重要，然后专注于实现这些功能。在我开发市场平台的过程中，我发现随着规模的扩大，流程管理变得越来越重要。

不要试图让一切都自动化，也不要立刻开发出能够完全由系统自动运行的解决方案。为了真正理解你需要开发什么功能，你需要亲自手动完成这些任务。举个例子，当我们开始让清洁专业人士加入我们的平台时，我们会通过电话向他们提出一系列问题，然后在面试中也会问一些问题。接着，他们需要完成一次测试清洁，如果合格，才会正式加入平台。在这个过程中，我们的录取率仅为 3%-5%。

随着时间的推移，我们通过数据收集发现，一些问题是判断申请者表现优劣的重要指标。于是，我们将这些问题整合到在线申请表中，而其他问题则留到面试中提问。如果一开始就将所有流程自动化，那么在需要快速修改申请问题或调整流程时，将会变得困难重重。

另一个关键点是，临时的“不完美”比永久的“瘫痪”要好得多。在这一阶段，追求完美是没有意义的。当你进入下一个增长阶段时，你在这一阶段试图完美化的内容可能已经变得无关紧要。因此，不要过度关注各种边缘情况，而是专注于核心用户的主要需求。随着用户规模的扩大，边缘情况会逐渐显现，到那时再去解决这些问题更为合理。

最后，要警惕“拼凑式开发”。你可能与许多用户交谈，收到了很多建议，第一反应可能是立刻去实现所有这些功能，然后展示给用户，让他们感到更满意。虽然用户反馈非常重要，但当用户提出某个功能需求时，你不应该马上着手开发。你需要深入了解他们提出这个需求的原因。通常，他们的建议本身并不是最佳解决方案，而是因为他们在使用产品时遇到了某些问题，或者如果要付费使用你的产品，某个问题必须得到解决。因此，在添加新功能之前，先明确用户的真实需求，避免因为叠加太多功能而掩盖核心问题。

当你的产品已经准备好上线时，有些人可能会继续不断改进产品，而迟迟不发布。我认为，“隐秘模式”和无限完善产品的理念源于这样一种想法：在时间、金钱和资源上，模仿的成本比创新低。然而，无论你什么时候发布产品，只要你的想法足够好，总会有人快速跟进，尽全力追赶你。因此，与其因为担心被模仿而犹豫不前，不如尽早上线，从更多用户那里获取宝贵的反馈。

我知道自己一直在重复这一点，但这是我今天在创始人中看到的问题，也是我自己曾经经历过的。我认为，除非你正在开发一个需要数千万美元启动的项目，否则没有理由为了“完美”而延迟发布产品。

假设你已经准备好让大量用户使用你的产品，那么接下来该怎么做？我将在后续详细讲解各种增长方式，但首先需要注意的是，在早期阶段，仅仅是你、你的联合创始人，以及几个人在一起工作，这时候还没有专门的增长团队。增长的责任通常只会落在一个人身上。所以你需要专注，而不是同时尝试五种不同的策略。

正确的做法是，选择一个渠道，集中精力执行一整周，只专注于这个渠道。如果它奏效了，就继续深耕，直到达到饱和。如果不奏效，就果断放弃，转向下一个渠道。通过这种方式，你可以更清楚地知道某个渠道是否确实不可行，也能更快验证你的假设。如果你只是每周花一点时间在多个渠道上，很难得出明确的结论。所以，要一次专注于一个渠道。

其次，当你找到一个有效的渠道或策略时，要不断优化。你可以创建一个“操作手册”，交给其他人继续优化，但要记住，这些渠道会随时间变化。无论是 Facebook 广告、Google 广告，还是其他分发渠道，它们的规则和环境都会不断变化。你需要持续迭代和优化适应这种变化。最后，在早期阶段，如果某个渠道失败了，可以果断放弃并尝试其他方法。但随着时间推移，不妨回头重新审视这些被放弃的渠道。

比如，在 Homejoy 初期，我们没有资金。当我们尝试通过购买 Google 广告快速吸引用户时，发现那些全国性的公司比我们有更多预算，而且他们每单业务赚的钱也比我们多。因此，他们能以更高的成本获取用户，而我们无法承担这样的开支，只能转向其他渠道。但如今我们每单业务的利润提高了，也在某些方面做得更出色了，因此重新考虑购买 Google 广告可能是一个好主意。这就是我所说的“重新审视渠道”的含义。

这一切的关键在于创造力。绩效营销或整体增长策略可以非常技术化，但技术和创造力必须结合。如果增长真的很简单和无趣，那么现在所有人都能实现增长。所以，你需要找到那些别人没有尝试的“小突破”，然后将它做到极致。

有三种主要的增长方式：黏性增长、病毒增长和付费增长。黏性增长的重点是让现有用户持续回归，更多地使用你的产品或支付更多费用。病毒增长是当用户谈论你的产品时，比如他们使用了产品，觉得很棒，然后告诉十个朋友，朋友们也觉得不错，这就是病毒增长。付费增长则是，如果你手头有资金，可以利用部分资金购买增长。

我接下来的核心主题是可持续性。可持续增长的意思是你不是一个漏水的桶，你投入的钱能带来良好的投资回报率。黏性增长的关键在于提供良好的用户体验。如果你能提供优质体验，用户会愿意继续使用你的产品；如果你能提供让人上瘾的体验，他们甚至会离不开你的产品。衡量黏性增长是否有效的方法是观察客户生命周期价值（CLV）和留存率分析。

CLV，也被一些人称为 TLV，指的是客户生命周期的净收入。例如，12 个月的 CLV 是指客户在 12 个月内为你带来的净收入。有时也可以用 1 个月或 6 个月的 CLV。留存率分析通常会分成不同的用户群（cohort）。比如你可以按性别、地域或月份划分群体。最常见的是按月划分，例如，2012 年 3 月，100% 的用户在使用你的产品。一个月后，50% 的用户可能会回归；两个月后，这个比例可能进一步下降。随着时间推移，你会得到一条曲线，初期通常会有一定的下降，原因可能是用户觉得产品不值，或者体验不好。然而，你希望曲线能逐渐趋于平稳，那些持续使用的用户就成为你的核心客户。

如果一年后你做了很多改进，再次绘制曲线，希望能看到更高的回归率，说明更多的用户对你的产品感到满意。一个糟糕的留存曲线则可能在第一次使用后急剧下降，这说明你的产品未能留住用户，这样的业务显然问题很大。通过持续分析留存曲线，你可以验证不同策略是否有效，进而提升用户黏性。

第二种增长方式是病毒增长。像黏性增长一样，病毒增长也需要提供良好的用户体验。但除此之外，你需要提供一种让用户忍不住在 Twitter 或 Facebook 上向所有朋友推荐的体验。为了实现这一点，你不仅需要优化产品，还需要设计出色的推荐机制。

病毒增长的关键在于三个方面。第一是用户接触点。你需要明确用户会在什么阶段知道可以推荐其他人。例如，这可能是在用户预订服务或注册之后；更好的时机是在用户使用产品一段时间、表现出高度参与后，向他们展示推荐链接，让他们发送给朋友。此外，如果你的产品是平台型的，比如 Homejoy，在清洁人员上门时，可以通过一些现场展示方式增加用户推荐的可能性。

第二是推荐机制。最常见的例子是“$10 for $10”：用户邀请朋友，朋友使用产品后，双方各得 $10。你可以尝试不同的奖励机制，比如 $25 for $25 或其他组合，看看哪种最适合你的业务。

最后，当用户点击推荐链接进入网站时，优化他们的注册流程也很重要。你可能需要调整销售话术，强调这是朋友推荐的，增加可信度和吸引力。通过尝试和调整这些维度，你可以构建一个高效的推荐计划。

最后是付费增长。付费增长的核心是利用资金获取用户，但关键在于判断投入是否能带来回报。简单来说，你需要比较客户生命周期价值（CLV）和用户获取成本（CAC）。CAC 是通过广告点击成本（CPC）除以转化率计算得出的。例如，如果某广告的 CLV 是 $300，而 CAC 为 $250，那么你赚了 $50，但如果 CAC 为 $350，那这笔投入显然不划算。

查看广告效果时，不能只看整体平均值，而是应该细分用户群体。例如，如果你为乡村音乐市场构建平台，那么田纳西州纳什维尔的用户 CLV 可能远高于捷克斯洛伐克的用户。投放广告时，你需要清楚不同用户群体的差异，而不是将所有用户混在一起。

最后一点是回本时间和可持续性。很多企业因为超出自身承受能力的支出而陷入困境。这与风险容忍度密切相关。假设某客户在 12 个月内价值 $300，但第一个月只带来了 $100，如果你在第一个月花了 $200 获取这个客户，那你将亏损 $100，直到第 12 个月才能回本。而如果到第 12 个月没有收回剩余的 $200，你可能会陷入严重的财务危机。

因此，合理的回本周期非常重要。安全的周期是 3 个月，如果你愿意承担更多风险，可以延长至 12 个月。但超过 12 个月的周期往往是极其危险的。

关于如何进行方向转变（pivot）——Homejoy 的当前模式实际上是我们完整开发并尝试推广的第 13 个想法。在这个过程中，我经常被问到：“你们是怎么找到这个第 13 个想法的？又是如何决定什么时候该放弃前面的想法？”对此，我能给出的最佳建议是参考以下三个标准：当你意识到增长无法实现，即便你开发了各种优秀的功能，与大量用户进行了交流，却依然留不住他们；或者业务的经济模型根本不成立。那么，一旦意识到这些问题，你就需要果断转向。

最难判断的往往是增长方面的问题，因为有很多故事表明，某些创始人坚持了三年，突然间他们的产品就开始增长了。因此，这里的关键在于，在一开始就要有一个清晰的增长计划。这个计划应该是既乐观又现实的，具体的增长路径可能是这样的：第一周，你只需要一个用户；第二周，也许需要两个用户；以此类推，用户数逐渐翻倍。

在第一周，你应该尽一切努力争取到那个用户。接下来的第二周，投入相应的时间和资源去获得两个用户。如果你的产品确实解决了用户的问题，你应该可以通过主动接触和手动寻找用户，轻松维持这样的增长曲线。当你达到每周需要新增 100 个用户时，就需要更成熟的增长策略来支持了。

通常我会告诉人们，如果你已经全力以赴执行你的产品计划，且非常努力，但连续三到四周没有增长，甚至增长倒退，那么可能是时候考虑转向了。这并不一定意味着完全放弃现有的想法，而是说明在某些根本性的问题上你可能走错了方向。因为在早期阶段，创业公司应该始终处于增长状态。

理想情况下，增长曲线应该是稳定上升的，这是我在创办 Homejoy 时设定的目标曲线。然而，现实的情况通常并不那么顺利。真实的增长曲线往往会有起伏。当你处于低谷时，不要停止努力。这种低谷可能持续两到三周，但只要你持续努力工作，最终会回到增长轨道，并在长期内看到向上的趋势。

下面是问答时间。

Q: 在线提问中有人问到，如果用户已经有他们习惯使用的产品，如何让他们切换到你的产品上？

A: 切换总是有成本的。我可以用 Homejoy 举个例子。我们实际上是在创造一个新市场，因为我们许多早期用户从未请过清洁服务，所以吸引他们使用相对简单。但对那些已经有固定清洁工的人来说，他们通常对自己的清洁工非常信任，让他们改用其他服务可能是世界上最困难的任务。当你试图吸引用户切换时，关键在于找到你的产品或服务在哪些时刻可以显著优于或明显区别于他们现有的解决方案。

例如，有些人平时有固定清洁工，但可能某天举办了聚会，需要第二天就进行清洁。而 Homejoy 在大多数地区提供次日服务，这些用户可能因此选择 Homejoy。使用后，他们开始意识到 Homejoy 的许多小优势，这些小优势加在一起就形成了一个大的优势。例如，他们发现，留现金或用支票支付是一件非常麻烦的事情，而通过 Homejoy 可以在线完成所有支付，这更加方便。同时，可以根据自己的日程随时取消或重新安排清洁服务，这也非常灵活。

很多人在开发产品时会列出许多优势，比如“这 50 个地方比现有解决方案好”。但即使这些优势超过了切换成本，也很难向用户传递这些信息，更别说让他们把这些零散的优势整合起来并做出切换决策。因此，更好的方法是聚焦于一两个关键点，这些点能够清晰地将你的产品与现有产品区分开来。