Week #3 ODNC – Community First Products
Hi, I’m Kavir! Here's recapping Week #3 of ODNC1. ODNC continues to be the gift that keeps on giving.
If you're new here, I’ll be chronicling the 10 weeks of ODNC1 with key takeaways of events, noteworthy quotes, and my perspective while I build in public. Subscribe to get updates:
We had another heavy hitter lineup of speakers this week — Tyler Tringas from Earnest Capital, Jeff Morris Jr from Chapter One, and Greg Isenberg from Late Checkout.
The common theme from these chats was on the topic of shipping fast, building audience and community before product, and exploring niches.
Let’s dive into the takeaways from the fireside chats of Week #3. Let’s go!
Tyler Tringas - Earnest Capital
Tyler is the founder of Earnest Capital which invests in bootstrappers. He talked to us about the benefits of bootstrapping. Here are 3 key takeaways from his fireside chat:
Small exit before a large one
Most of the successful billionaire founders had an exit that let them not having to worry about paying rent ever again.
This is an interesting point. Earlier, I used to think that the need for money would be a good motivator to building startups. But that thought has evolved over the years. If you're financially secure in the short term, you can take more ambitious and risky decisions that benefit the startup in the long term. You also get a longer runway, helping you choose investors and partners wisely.
Control and Optionality
When you raise a lot of money, you essentially become an employee in the sense that you have a board of directors that can vote you out of your own company or overrule you on important decisions.
You have more freedom when you bootstrap than when you take VC investment. Tyler gives the example of a company that changed their work schedule to a 4-day work week because it increased employee-satisfaction and became quite convenient.
Unfair advantages when building No-code products
Differentiation and distribution. Differentiation is building a product that is more intuitive and better matches the jobs-to-be-done of the customer in the market you're going after. Distribution is being able to find them quickly and at low-cost.
This hits home for me. As a product person, uncovering customer needs and jobs-to-be-done is a core exercise.
Jeff Morris Jr. - Chapter One
Jeff is formerly VP Product of Revenue at Tinder. He runs Chapter One VC which is a fund that invests in cults like Roam Research and Lambda School. Here are 3 key takeaways from his fireside chat:
Speed of execution
No-code is fast fashion for product building.
Jeff talked about how using no-code can help build products that take advantage of the news story of that week. Whit Anderson is a good example of this mindset. He built Elonstocks.com to keep track of what stocks Elon Musk is tweeting about.
Experimentation at Tinder
At Tinder, I used push notifications as MVP for products.
Experimenting before writing code to understand your users better is the most efficient way to experiment. That can be through tweets, a sign up form, a landing page, push notifications,
Invest in cults
People want to build on top of your product at night for free because they love it so much.
He is talking about the Roam Research community also known as #roamcult. You know it’s 2021, when there are cults that form around productivity tools. Cults help you take stronger product decisions, because they are around to defend you in public.
Greg Isenberg - Late Checkout
Greg is the CEO of Late Checkout, and a Growth Advisor at TikTok. Here are 3 key takeaways from his fireside chat:
Tips for Founders
Marry your no-code solution with a trend. People who understand trends are the ones who will win the most.
Being on Twitter and following publications like Trends.vc is a good starting point to uncover those trends.
It's ok to be niche
Tiktok expanded from a lip syncing app for young girls to a YouTube competitor today.
Greg mentioned an interview with Alex (co-founder of Musically) who spoke about building communities. I wrote about the key insights of that interview here.
Build an audience and community first
A competitive advantage is having a community to iterate with while building the product. Start with the audience, then the community, and then the service.
Back in 2017, I made the mistake back of building a startup without building an audience at the same time. However, now, I am taking steps to build the audience first and then moving onto the product.
My Build in Public Journey
I did some public user research on Twitter on the topic of remote work culture
I started getting my hands dirty on Autocode to build a basic Slack bot, thanks to Kyleigh Smith
This upcoming week I’ll start the outreach to founders in my network to validate the problem
Featured fellows who are building in public:
Shiku
That’s it for this week! See you next time.
Follow me on Twitter @KavirKaycee!
Subscribe to get this delivered straight to your inbox