The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 107 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Alströmer: Lyft's key PMF metric is active riders, not ride count
“And finally, Lyft. You might want to think it's rides here. The rides is the best metric here. It's actually riders. Like, the people that are taking the rides are the ones that matter. Because it's the individuals that we want to measure here, and we not nece…”
Alströmer: A flattening cohort retention curve proves product-market fit
“Every week, it eventually flattens out, and the people that stop using the product stop, stop using the product. And eventually here, week eight, nine, 10, we have a flat line of people that continue to use the product every single week. That means that they a…”
Alströmer: DoorDash maintains 20% monthly user retention after 20 months
“The first one here has 30% after two months and 21% after 20 months. This is pretty good. So you kept a fifth of your users 21 months later, or 20 months later. It's DoorDash. DoorDash have a monthly retention of 20% two years later, a year and a half later.”
Alströmer: GitHub retains 80% of users after month one and 30% after five years
“So 80% retention after one month, and then 30% after 60 months. This is really good. This is a really good product. Very sticky. People like this product and they don't stop using it. It's GitHub.”
Alströmer: Free usage does not indicate PMF for paid products
“Something that should be a paid product, you're giving away for free, is not a good sign of product market fit. Like, you want to figure out if people are willing to pay for it, because price, if someone says, I love this, if it's free, but if it costs money, …”
Alströmer: Startups should copy Pinterest and Airbnb's authentication flows
“Look at the best websites in the world. Look at Pinterest. Look at Airbnb. Look at some of those sites. They have teams optimizing these flows the authentication flow. Copy what they do. They probably figure it out. They spend a lot of time optimizing.”
Alströmer: Startups with definable target customer lists should use direct sales
“If you can make a list of all your customers, even if that list is a 100,000, or 500,000, if, as long as it's not mainstream enough, they'll be in the tens of millions, you're probably gonna do sales.”
Alströmer: Founders err by running online marketing before monetization
“The biggest mistakes founders make is to start working on online marketing when they don't have people paying for the product.”
Alströmer: Referral emails should name the inviter as sender to drive opens
“First, who's the sender of the email? If it's just Airbnb, I probably have never heard of Airbnb the first time I get this email. If it's Gustav that sent the email, and I sent it to my friends, they have heard of me, that's the reason to open the email.”
Alströmer: 'Accept invitation' CTA outperforms generic 'sign up' in referrals
“Well, I could sign up, which is a undefined thing that you can do sometime in the future, or I can do what we did here, was accept my invitation. This sounds more exclusive. It sounds like something that is just for me. It doesn't sound like something I can do…”
Alströmer: Startups should target a one to three-month CAC payback period
“The best thing startups can do is don't wait eight months. Just have a much lower Like a much lower target on what your CAC is going to be. Maybe one month, two months, three months, first, first transaction, something like that.”
Alströmer: SEO-driven startups must eventually match Pinterest and TripAdvisor
“If you are going to rely on search engine optimization to grow you're going to have to Be as good as a Pinterest or a TripAdvisor. Eventually. Not right away, but eventually. Because, ah, it's so competitive to win in this, like, large world of SEO.”
Alströmer: Early-stage startups should not focus on A/B testing
“Most of you guys don't have to focus on A-B testing at all. It won't matter for a long time. It is a great decision making tool later on.”
Alströmer: Mandatory signup wall increased Airbnb iOS bookings by 2.6%
“We got 2.6% more bookings from iOS by making people sign up through a sign-up wall in the app.”
Alströmer: Airbnb's market fit came from core experience, not funnel optimization
“So I would say that the story of Airbnb was basically we had probably one of the best market fits that I've seen but not necessarily thanks to, like, an amazing user flow, an amazing onboarding, or even an amazing acquisition channel. It's just, like, a really…”
Alströmer: Airbnb boosted total revenue by over 1% by extending session length
“In the early days of Airbnb, we used to automatically log you out after, like, I think two days. And we were like, why we do that? Well, security reasons. That makes sense. So then we would run an experiment. We set the kind of expiration date of that cookie t…”
Alströmer: Startups should control A/B experiments by user account, not visitor
“The thing you want to decide early on is who, sort of like, what is the thing that you're controlling the experiment on, and I would recommend that it's going to be user accounts. If you're doing it on visitors or something like that, it's going to be typicall…”
Alströmer: Early growth wins come from high-intent flows, not homepages
“The early wins are often in the high intent flows. So like where people actually thinking about booking or actually about to book. So search conversion is important one. Signup conversion is important one. Sort of like online marketing traffic was an important…”
Alströmer: Airbnb would not be as big today without early online marketing
“Like, had we not done online marketing early on we were certainly not being as big as we are today. So that was critical.”
Alströmer: Word of mouth drove over 50% of Airbnb guests and 70% of hosts
“But if you look at the composition of growth of Airbnb word of mouth is by far the biggest driver. So I think it was, like, way over 50% on the guest side, and way over, like, 70% on the host side of people that heard about me for the first time through a frie…”
Alströmer: Emerging markets offer ad arbitrage for startups before major brands arrive
“In the Middle East and many of the more emerging markets, the ads are actually quite, quite a good arbitrage for some of these countries companies, because there are not a lot of premium services to charge for things, and a lot of the brands have actually not …”
Alströmer: Growth disciplines become vital when new platforms emerge
“Growth kind of becomes important when they have new platforms. So you have Facebook platform, you have the mobile platform, you have Google, SEO, there's a bunch of larger platforms that makes people actually care about investing in them.”
Alströmer: Growth Teams Not Seeing Counterintuitive A/B Results Aren't Taking Big Risks
“Predicting product decisions are really, it's really tricky. So I would say this happens all the time, and if it doesn't happen, then you're not taking big enough risks. You should be seeing things that are counterintuitive.”
Alströmer: Airbnb Measures Data Team on Experimentation Tool Adoption
“At Airbnb, really the entire product team is now a growth team, and the goal of the data team that have built these tools is to get everybody to use them. Like, they're, Literally measured by how many people using experimentation frameworks.”
Airbnb maintained a minimum technical staff ratio to prevent stalled productivity
“At Airbnb we had this metric, which was percent of technical people that work at the company, and the reason we had the metric is, at some point you have too many non-technical people all they do is request things from the technical people, and then you can't …”
Claude Sonnet instantly fixed many previously failing startup internal tools
“When that model came out, a lot of companies that were building, say internal tools were like suddenly working, and they weren't really working before.”
Alströmer: 'Do Things That Don't Scale' Is the Most Important Startup Essay
“The most important essay ever written about the very early stage of startups is Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham.”
Alströmer: Brex recruited its first 10 customers from its YC batch
“When Brex was in Wicomner in winter of 2017, they recruited the first 10 customers directly from the YC batch.”
Alströmer: Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras onboarded every early customer personally
“Customers just had a virtual credit card and Enrique from Brex actively onboarded every one of the customers himself.”
Alströmer: Airbnb's referral program didn't bring in its first 2,000 customers
“They didn't start by running Google SEM or Google SEO. The referral program did not bring in the first 2000 customers. They did things that didn't scale, and they look different than what they do at scale.”
Airbnb co-founders still receive host calls on their personal cell phones
“Still today, Brian and Joe gets calls from hosts on their personal cell phone numbers. I remember them telling me that on the first day I worked at Airbnb, Why do they do that? Well, it's the number that they put on the website and share with all of their host…”
Most founders avoid personal connections by hiding behind no-reply email addresses
“Unfortunately, most founders still don't build personal connections with their users today. They hide behind info ad emails or do not reply emails.”
LinkedIn, Reddit, and Discord are top channels for finding early users
“When asking YC founders how they found their early users, some of the most common answers were LinkedIn, Reddit forums, Slack or Discord communities, and sometimes in-person events.”
Introducing product ideas early in interviews severely biases customer feedback
“The most, most, most important thing here is to not introduce your idea till maybe at the end of the call or maybe not at all. Doing this too early can bias them in their answers.”
Founders must observe actual user behavior because changing it is hard
“You want to deeply understand their behavior, not just what they're saying, but what they're doing because changing the behavior will be hard.”
Asking users if they will use a product yields meaningless positive answers
“Will you use our product? They're probably going to say yes, but they're not going to mean anything to you in that answer.”
Early Gmail users requested split-pane views because emails loaded too slowly
“Early days of Gmail, users were asking Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail, to view both the inbox and the actual email that they were reading on the same screen. Now, why would they ask for that? Well, the reason was simply that Gmail was too slow and people …”
Early Airbnb guests demanded host phone numbers because they lacked trust
“In early Airbnb, a lot of guests wanted to have the phone numbers of the host, so they can call them. And we were like, why do you need that? It just turned out that they didn't fully trust the platform. Like, we had not displayed enough trust in Airbnb, so th…”
Founders should build MVPs quickly rather than over-analyzing user feedback
“Don't over-intellectualize this process. Really, you just want to start designing the MVP as fast as you can, but you want to make sure you have accurate information when you decide the MVP.”
Replacing spreadsheets requires building a dramatically better product experience
“To move someone off Excel or Google Spreadsheet,
You need to make the experience of your solution dramatically better.
They're not going to pay you hundreds of dollars a month for something they can almost as easily do in Google Spreadsheet or Excel.”
Airbnb tested unbuilt features by handing phone prototypes to lobby visitors
“We used to do this at Airbnb all the time. We'd go downstairs in our office, and we'd find some people that were waiting for an interview or waiting for getting a coffee or something, and we'd just show them the latest version of the app. This would be an InVi…”
Never guide users when testing interactive product prototypes
“The key thing, if you're doing this tactic, is to not tell them what to do. Do not tell them what to do. Just watch them play around with it. You can tell them a specific goal, like try to make a booking at Airbnb, or try to do a search with dates on Airbnb, o…”
Many YC startups create Slack or WhatsApp groups for their customers
“One common idea that a lot of YC companies are using is to create a Slack instance or a WhatsApp group for, with their customers.”
Rapidly shipping product updates based on customer feedback builds trust
“Reacting to things that they're saying, you can ship a new screen with a new version of the product and that builds trust with them. They now know that you react to their feedback very fast.”
YC's climate tech Request for Startups generated unprecedented press interest
“This is one of the, I think the, probably the request for start, request for startup that generate the most amount of press interest of anything we ever done.”
Alströmer: Working on growth before product-market fit is a bad idea
“It's because working on growth before you have product market fit and good retention is not a good idea.”
Alströmer: Airbnb founders posed as hired photographers to hide small team size
“They claimed to be hired photographers for Airbnb, Airbnb and breakfast. So when they met with all the hosts, they said, we want to come by your home and take photos. They didn't say that they were the founders because that made the company sound much smaller.”