#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/

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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