#145 - Startup School Week 4 Recap - Kat Mañalac and Gustaf Alströmer

We've cut down the fourth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast. First a lecture from Kat Manalac . Kat is a partner at YC. Her lecture focuses on how startups should think about launching and why you should do it repeatedly. Then a lecture from Gustaf Alströmer . Gustaf is also a partner at YC and in his lecture he covers how to measure product market fit and growth channels. Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Topics 00:00 - Intro 00:35 - Kat Mañalac - How to Launch (Again and Again) 1:51 - Ways to launch 2:14 - Why launch continuously? 3:15 - Silent launch 4:25 - Friends & Family 5:40 - Strangers 7:03 - Online communities 12:08 - Request access 13:29 - Social media 15:13 - Pre-order 16:13 - New Product or Feature 17:42 - Build your own community 19:20 - Launching isn't one moment in time 19:48 - Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups 21:06 - Most startups have nothing 22:13 - Do things that don't scale 27:13 - Startups take off because founders make them take off 28:23 - Measuring product market fit 31:20 - Retention 34:33 - Worse ways to measure product market fit 35:23 - Bad metrics to measure as product market fit 36:18 - Growth channels and tactics 38:17 - Conversion rate optimization 41:26 - Growth channels to explore 45:33 - Referrals and vitality 48:05 - Paid growth 50:09 - Search Engine Optimization 53:00 - Making decisions using A/B testing 55:02 - Summary