Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo which is an online form builder that helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and simple payment forms talked about the products that users loved. First of all, the growth depends on two concepts or variables: conversion rate and churn.

The best way to get to $1 billion is to focus on the values that help you get that first dollar to acquire that first user. If you get that right, everything else will take care of itself.

The most important thing is to build something that people just wanted to use. We wanted a product that people wanted to love, that people wanted to have a relationship with. To do this we can use two metaphors which are acquiring new users as if we are trying to date them and existing users as if they are in a successful marriage. Human beings are relationship-manufacturing creatures. r people who are very good at product is that they discover so many other moments and make them memorable: the first email you ever get, what happens when you got your first login, the links, the advertisements, the very first time you interacted with customer support.

There’s a big problem with how everyone starts up their company or builds up their engineering teams. There’s a broken feedback loop there. Before launch, it is a time of bliss, Nirvana, and opportunity. 

 A way of creating high-quality software, need to inject some values like responsibility, accountability, humility, and modesty. We call this SDD (Support Driven Development). A great example is Kayak. They installed a red customer support phone line in the middle of the engineering floor, and it would just ring with customer support calls. Well, after the second or third time that the phone rings, and the engineer get the same problem, they stop what they’re doing, they fix the bug, and they stop getting phone calls about it. It’s a way of having QA in a sort of nice, elegant solution.

John Gottman talks about the reasons for marriage break-ups (loss of existing customers) include criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling. He calls them the Four Horsemen. Criticism is when users start complaining and criticizing you for not listening to them. Defensiveness, you see this all the time especially in companies, as they get older. But stonewalling, this is something I see happening with startups all the time. You get a bunch of customer support calls coming in, and you just think, “I don’t need to answer, I don’t need to respond.” That act of not even getting back to them is one of the worst things you can do, and it’s probably some of the biggest causes of churn in the early stages of startups.

There’s an article that was put out by the Harvard Business Review several years ago by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema and in it they talk about the discipline of market leaders. They say there’s only three ways that you achieve market dominance,

• best price – focus on logistics, e.g. Wal-Mart and Amazon.
• best product – focus on R&D, e.g. Apple.
• best overall solution – being customer intimate e.g. all luxury brands follow.

The third one is the only one that everyone can do at any stage of their company. It requires almost no money to get started with it. It usually just requires a little bit of humility and some manners.

In conclusion, it is necessary to build a product that costumers really love and use. You should always follow customer feedback and always keep in touch with users.

Alex Schultz gives an overview of growth in the business.  Everyone nowadays talks about growth, growth hacking or growth marketing.

Retention is the most important thing for growth. You need to look for all of your users who have been on your product one day. What percentage of them are monthly active. Retention comes from having a great idea and a great product to back up that idea, and great product market fit. Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team and the CEO should be the head of growth. You need someone to set a North star for you about where the company wants to go. For example, Mark Zuckerberg put out monthly active users. WhatsApp published send numbers. In  Airbnb, they talk about ‘nights booked’ they always benchmark how many nights booked they have compared to the largest hotel chains in the world. They have at each of these companies, a different north star. The north star doesn’t have to be the number of active users for every different vertical. For eBay, it was gross merchandise volume. However, when you are operating for growth it is critical that you have that North star.

The magic moment that gets people hooked on your service. On Facebook The magic moment as simple as when you see the first picture of one of your friends on Facebook, you go ‘Oh my God, this is what this site is about!’ getting people to 10 friends in 14 days; that is why we focus on this metric.  The number one most important thing in a social media site is connecting to your friends, because without that, there was completely empty newsfeed, and clearly you’re not going to come back. When you think about Airbnb or eBay, it’s about finding that unique item, that you really really cared about and want to get it. Like when you see that collectible that you are missing, that is the real magic moment on eBay. When you look on Airbnb and you find that first listing, that cool house you can stay in, that’s a magic moment. The magic moment can increase the percentage of retention.

These are 3 tacticcs

• Virality,
•  SEO, 
• ESPN,
• SEM,
• Affiliates/referral programs.

The first, virality is payload – so how many people can you hit with any given viral blast. Second, is conversion rate, and third is frequency. This gives you a fundamental idea of how viral a product is. There’s a great book by Adam L. Penenberg called the Viral Loop that goes through a bunch of case studies of companies that have grown through viral marketing. Hotmail is the example of viral marketing. The interesting thing was that it meant that the payload was low: You email one person at a time, you’re not necessarily going to have a big payload. The frequency is high though, because you’re emailing the same people over and over. The conversion rate was also really high because people didn’t like being tied to their ISP email.

In SEO, there are three things you need to think about.

• keyword research – Research consists of, what do people search for that’s related to your site. There are many great tools but the best one is Google AdWords keyword planner tool.
• Links – The most important thing is to get valuable links from high authority websites for you to rank in Google.
• XML sitemaps -Making sure you have the right headers; it’s all covered really well online for you.

Emails today aren’t actual, WhatsApp, SMS, SnapChat, Facebook are popular nowadays. If you’re targeting an older audience, email is still pretty successful. You should be get your email, SMS, or Push Notification delivered. The most effective email you can do is notifications.

Everyone should believe in opportunities, work really-really hard and execute fast. Growth is optional.

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund talked about strategy and competition. His business side is that if you’re starting a company, company you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition. 

To create a valuable company, you have to basically both create something of value and capture some fraction of the value of what you’ve created.

There are two kind of businesses: perfect competition (non-monopolies) and monopolies.

Perfect competition

             Advantages                                                    Disadvantages                   

Easy to model                                                                      Psychologically unhealthy

Efficient in a static world                                                   Irrelevant in a dynamic world

Politically sociable                                                               Preempts of value

             Advantages                                                    Disadvantages     

  Incentive to innovate                                                       Lower output, higher prices

Stable, long-term planning                                                Price discrimination

Deeper project financing                                                   Stifle innovation

Symptomatic of creation                                                   Tying

Google which is a dominant in the search market, so it’s like an incredible monopoly, it’s a bigger monopoly than Microsoft. When we observe the Google as an advertising or technological company, we saw that it occupies a small part of the market comparing with Apple, Amazon, Facebook etc… So, the nature of market is so important for understanding the type of business.

 If you’re a startup, you want to get to monopoly. You start with a really small market and you take over the whole market and then over time you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles.  If you take Amazon, you start with just a bookstore, It’s online, there’s things you can do that you could not do before, and then it includes all sorts of different forms of e-commerce.

Ebay is an American multinational e-commerce corporation that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American company operating a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers. All these companies are starting such a small market.

Characteristics of monopoly

• Proprietary technology -It about create a product unique or innovative. In the case of PayPal, Bill Turner was using checks to send money on Ebay PayPal could do it fast.
• Network effect – the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it. Facebook went dominant and getting more and more people talk about the product.
• Economics of scale – something with very high fixed costs and very low marginal costs give a chance to growth fast.
• Branding – it’s about creating real value and mark for separation.

Competition does make you better at whatever it is that you’re competing at because when you’re competing you’re comparing yourself with the people around you.

Competitions as validation

• Education
• Career path
• Investments
• Business decisions

Competition is important for business to increase sales and acquire more customers by regularly adjusting to market needs and demands. The more the consumers, the higher the market share; the more the sales the higher the chances of making more profit. It is, therefore, of great importance to stay ahead of your competitors. Competition makes people innovative. Innovation is crucial to the progress of any business. In the beginning it would be better to start in a small market and then planning a strategy for growing.

Adora Cheung is an American software developer. She is the co-founder and CEO of housecleaning business Homejoy. She  talked about how to go from zero users to many users.

When you start a startup you should have a lot of time on your hands to concentrate on the startup. You should have a lot of compressed time for idea and developing sollutions to the problem that you are trying to solve.

1.Most people don’t want to share their ideas with others in the early beginning, they only want to build their ideas and, in the end, launch it on TechCrunch or somewhere like it. The discussions with other people about your idea help to receive a useful feedback and develop the idea through it.

2.For understand the problem in detailed, must be involved in the related industry. It helps to start seeing things that can be exploiting and things that are really inefficient and may provide a huge overhead cost. The founder should become an expert in the industry. The entrepreneur should separate a list of competitors, similar types of companies, and Google searching them and read every single article from research result.

3. It is essential to identify customer segments. In the beginning, concentrate a certain part of the customer base (e.g. teenage girls, soccer moms, teachers etc.) and understand their needs.

4. Before creating a product, it is important to storyboard out the user experience of how it’s going to solve the problem. After this the founder should build a minimum viable product.   Minimal viable product (MVP)pretty much means what is the smallest feature set that you should build to solve the problem.

5. The second important thing is to know how to attract the potential costumer’s attention. The techniques for presenting are different, however the one point is significant, the description of product would be containing a few sentences mentioned which problem solved and would be underline the emotional benefits and most attractive parts of it.

6. Keep in touch with your customers via call, mail etc. make it a conversation and get to know them and get them to feel comfortable, implement their feedback, which is going to teach what features you need to completely change or what features you need to build.

7. Another important thing is the 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. Sometimes there is a shortage of collecting data. So a good leading indicator is actually collecting reviews and ratings, collecting some notion of nps, which is net promoter score.

Occasionally, it is difficult to figure out the reliable feedback, because the large number of your feedback written by your relatives, friends. So, if you want to get the best feedback, you just make someone pay for it.

Before launching a product, the entrepreneur should be building the product fast and should be optimizing the growth. There is no need to automate everything, try to building it manually at first.

It is necessary to listen to user feedback  but when someone tells you to build a feature you shouldn’t go build it right away. You should understand why the user give this suggestion and what is the principal key for it.

For  getting a lot of users need to:

1. Learn one channel at a time.
2. Iterate working channels
3. Revisit failed channels

So there are three types of growth.

• Sticky,
•  Viral,  
• 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 and tell ten other friends, and they like it. 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.

For measuring the growth use CLV (customer’s lifetime) and retention cohort analysis. It is basically the net revenue that a customer brings in the door over a period of time.

 Just a reminder that you should take all advice as directionally good guidance, but every business is different. It is vital to focus on work and to believe your idea. Do not be afraid to make a mistake, this is help to be more attentive.Recall that the temporary brokenness is much better than permanent paralysis. 

Startups are very counterintuitive and this is an area where you cannot trust your intuition all the time. The first thing that I want to mention startups are so weird that if you follow your instincts, they will lead you astray. But sometimes instincts about people can help to manage the interactions with people in the business world. The second counterintuitive point is not to expertise in startups. Mark Zuckerberg did not succeed at Facebook because he was an expert in startups, he succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups because he understood his users very well.

In fact, it’s not merely unnecessary for people to learn in detail about the mechanics of starting a startup, but it’s much more important to get a valuation for startup.

 Young founders have an impulse on starting a startup for find out what the new tricks there are as in games. They want to find and discover the range of startup, weak and strong sides of them.

The third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. It’s needs to gamify activities that can change people’s behavior and motivate them.

There are tricks in startups, as there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem. Someone who knows zero about fundraising, but has made something users really love, will have an easier time raising money than someone who knows every trick in the book.

The fourth counterintuitive point, startups are all consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your life, so there is a real valuable opportunity.

What you need to know are the needs of your own users. You can’t learn those until you actually start the company, which means that starting a startup is something you can intrinsically only learn by doing it. You can’t do that in college or in university, because This is just a part of a much bigger problem that you are trying to solve and twenty is not the optimal time to do it. There are things that you can do in your early twenties that you cannot do as well before or after.

Starting a startup is a really hard work and it’s does not matter the age, it’s important to realize that you are the only one who can do it well and you are ready to suffering a long time until achieve a goal.

Otherwise if you are merely unsure of whether you are going to be able to do it, the only way to find out is to try, just not now.

How to find startup ideas

The way to get start up ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.

1. Learn about a lot of things that matter.
2. work on problems that interest you.
3. Work with people you like and respect
4. Do things that really interesting
5. Imagine you in the future (Paul Buchheit “Live in the future”)

For example, Robert – Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software. It wasn’t meant to be a startup, he just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without paying for long distance calls.

So, here is ultimate advice for young would be startup founders reduced to two words: just learn.

In the beginning stages of a startup, the recruiting process is a hard and sometimes continuous long time, cause of the difficulties to convince people that your mission is the most important of anything else. And also there are few employees who understand this fact and willing to wait and work hard to identify the main objective. So, you don’t have to spend much time for recruiting, only 25% is  still a huge amount of time for this.

Today there are a lot of channels for hiring such as Linkedin, Telegram, Facebook etc.. The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know. Another tip is to look outside the valley. It is brutally competitive to hire engineers there but you probably know people elsewhere in the world that would like to work with you. The required experience is changeable depending on the role of employee. That means that the junior positions are available where the experience does not matter.

Many companies pay attention to the skills of communication. If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it’s a real problem for the team work.  Also, for early employees you want someone that has a risk-taking attitude.There is a famous test from Paul Graham called the animal test. The idea here is that you should be able to describe any employee as an animal. This test helps founders to choose the right candidate for their startup. 

Mark Zuckerberg once said that he tries to hire people that 1. He would be comfortable hanging with socially and 2. He would be comfortable reporting to the roles were reversed.

Provide early employees with large amounts of equity. Be as generous with equity to employees, and be as stingy as possible with investors. Retaining employees is incredibly important and difficult. Three things that provide an employee with pleasure and meaning: autonomy, security, mastery and purpose. Fire fast, it’s best for everyone. Fire people who are bad at their job, create office politics, and are persistently negative. In the other corner if someone is getting every decision wrong, that’s when you need to act, and at that point it’ll be painfully aware to everyone.You don’t get to make their own decisions but you do get to choose the decision-makers.

Execution for most founders is not the most fun part of running the company, but it is the most critical. The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself. If you want a working culture where people work hard, pay attention to detail, manage the customers, are frugal, you have to do it yourself. There’s at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people who are willing to put in the effort to execute them well. Execution gets divided into two key questions:

1. can you figure out what to do and two- there are a hundred important things competing for your attention every day, and for deliver everything you need to seperate,  and figure out what the one or two most important things are, and then just do those.
2.  can you get it done- The founders really set the focus. Each day it’s really important to have goals Whatever the founders care about, whatever the founders focus on, that’s going to set goals for the whole company.  Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.So you want to have the right metrics and you want to be focused on growing those metrics and having momentum. 

The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm. 

Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality. You need to have a culture where the company has really high standards for everything everyone does, but you still move quickly.

Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. Startups have to always keep winning. Always keep momentum, always keep growing. Don’t get distracted by other things. Sales fix everything. If momentum sags, there is disagreement among employees, the focus should be to talk to users, ask them what they want, and do that. Work on small things to create growth. Don’t worry about a competitor until they are beating you with their real product. A competitor’s press doesn’t. ‘The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers you at all, but just makes better products’ — Henry Ford.