Andrew Chen

Have always enjoyed these guys http://andrewchen.co/ Andrew Chen of Uber http://jwegan.com/ John Wegan of Pinterest Probably more growth/product focused than PG and SA, but definitely give some excellent insight.

I am not sure what you consider an essay versus a blogger. I am a big fan of Andrew Chen's essays. I love how through he is. He does not gloss over critical points/how to's like many marketing writers do. Link to his site: http://andrewchen.co/

Looks great! I've had the same issue as you with many projects - so many people leave the marketing till the end so don't beat yourself up about it now. (Hopefully you will have learned a lesson haha!) Lets look at what you could do: - Start in one local area - ideally one near you or one that you know. Make it work there and then expand. - See if you can engage any local groups which might engage with the idea - I could see local city/town facebook groups liking this. Or maybe on nextdoor.com. - Check out the book "The cold start problem" by Andrew Chen. He goes into many examples of lots of companies that had this issue and how they over came the issue and got their first customers - http://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartProb_9780062…

https://andrewchen.co - I read a bunch of these when I was learning about growth / analytics at my last job.

Unfortunately blogs are missing a strong feedback loop. If RSS was the notification mechanism, then what was it that closed the loop so the blogger got great info on what was being read, liked, disliked? Chen gets this right here: https://andrewchen.co/the-death-of-rss-in-a-single-graph/ The internet is full of people with incredible ideas, many of which are writing them down, but the problem is discovery. How to connect them. If you can unify blogs with a feedback mechanism, with the immediacy of social media then that would be progress. Unfortunately most mechanisms for discovery are hopelessly low SnR or totally contaminated with advertising or articles gaming some search algorithm. Funnily enough I write a little about it here within the context of one platform which could have been good, but wasn’t. https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

My favorite blogs generally post super actionable marketing tactics that you can begin implementing as you read. Also enjoy reading industry insights, observations and trends from folks with high levels of experience. https://a16z.com/ (specifically Ben Horowitz's posts - he starts off each with a rap lyric) https://sparktoro.com/blog https://andrewchen.co/ https://doubleyourfreelancing.com https://rankz.io/blog https://contentdistribution.com/guides (mine)

Past articles[1] have gone into detail about how bad the churn and cost of customer acquisition is with dating sites. At best if you succeed at bringing a couple together, you've lost two customers at once. [1] http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/

> The most important thing in the world is love. If you hint at dating startups, here two texts why this is difficult: > http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html > http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/

there is a solid reason to ask: amazing engagement http://andrewchen.co/2014/09/16/new-data-on-push-notification-ctrs-sho… But you can do it wrong. Too many pushes for one. Or asking too abruptly.

Two excellent thinkers in this area: http://andrewchen.co/recent/ http://platformed.info/ Read their articles.

This is one of the reasons I am not in love with that word. For better or worse, for at least some people it is strongly associated with "naughtiness" in the sense talked about here: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html At least some growth hacking tactics are examples of taking someone else's system and convincing it to do things that its makers had not envisioned. The paradigmatic example was Airbnb building a deep Craigslist integration via a process which does not wholly fail to resemble security research. http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcra…

To me, one of the biggies is raising too early. To Sam's point, you want a competitive environment. To get that you want to obviously be a good investment to as many investors as possible. If you don't have some combination of an amazing v1 product, a traction graph that's moving in the right direction, credible investors already on board, a big/timely market, or a top 5% team, you're almost certainly fundraising too early... And you should do whatever you can to get one or more of the above. See: http://andrewchen.co/2011/06/21/video-the-anatomy-of-a-fundable-startu… (note: salesmanship can trump all of the above)

andrewchen wrote a blogpost about this http://andrewchen.co/2013/11/05/when-a-great-product-hits-the-funding-…

I would highly suggest following this quora board: https://www.quora.com/Growth-Hacking and then read this blog post by Andrew Chen on becoming a growth hacker: http://andrewchen.co/2012/05/11/how-do-i-learn-to-be-a-growth-hacker-w…

I think the term he's struggling toward is something like "user experience debt" [1] or "product design debt" [2], an area that has been discussed for years. I think "conceptual debt" is a poor choice of phrase here, as one important kind of technical debt is the sort of software design debt where your domain model ends up being a poor fit for your domain, often because the domain concepts themselves shift. (For those interested, "Domain-Driven Design" is a great book relating to this [3].) I also find the "worse than technical debt" headline irritating. It's the sort of, "the thing I specialize in is way more important than the thing you specialize in" thinking that is poisonous in a team environment. Which one is actually worse depends a lot on your product and your business conditions. [1] https://medium.com/@vijayssundaram/user-experience-debt-c9bd265d521b#.… [2] http://andrewchen.co/product-design-debt-versus-technical-debt/ [3] http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling-Complexity-Softwar…

The article in The Verge and Andrew's post[0] do a good job of explaining that With the amount of money they had raised, the expectation from investors was that their flywheel would already be setup and working and new funding would accelerate it (Series A being the new Series B). Media coverage of startups is all at the pointy end - companies that have raised money and are successful, most startups don't raise continuing rounds and the "Series A crunch" is real. The question should be inverted, why should Everpix get funded. Despite having a product that was loved, was free, had good word of mouth and coverage etc. they still didn't get funded. Not a unique or unusual situation, and only covered in this case (as opposed to the startups that die out quietly) since the founder was willing to speak to a journalist about it. Could it have worked with no funding, a leaner startup and as a paid product? Who knows, but I wouldn't use their freemium numbers to make that case. [0] http://andrewchen.co/2013/11/05/when-a-great-product-hits-the-funding-…

Without trying your app (not available to US users) or knowing if it's a freemium or ad model, I can't really provide too much insight. KISS and Mixpanel are nice, but there's little to no point in using them if you don't have your KPIs prioritized, and they may be overkill. I've found it just as effective to track growth via Google Analytics and a series of SQL queries, in conjunction with a dashboarding service like chart.io. I also used Flurry for a while, but it frustrated me quite a bit (Mixpanel offers a lot of the same features, btw). And if your app is HTML5, GA event-tracking is just as effective. Since mobile is the primary interface, month-over-month growth rate is your live-or-die 'macro' metric, calculated as simply ('users_at_end_of_last_month' - 'users_at_end_of_prior_month') / 'users_at_end_of_last_month'. As of Apr 10, users_at_end_of_last_month would be Mar 31 and prior_month would be Feb 28. Many contextualize this metric as 'churn,' for which there are numerous calculations. Shopify gives a good example. [1] Of course, it's way more complicated than this. And other KPIs include iTMS downloads/ratings/reviews, average time-to-subscribe, average time per session, number of events per session, DAU/WAU/MAU, e-mail conversion (assuming you manage lists/campaigns), etc. There was also a pretty good overview of how to set up cohort analysis via SQL queries on HN today [2]. Here's where you may want to start using Mixpanel, but only if you're running targeted…

Many developers love Apple and their products and they create apps that makes Apple smile to the bank. Apple does not return the love, hence they commoditize apps and make building a business off apps, a race to the bottom for $1.99 or free as a result, many indie developer are getting broke right now. Very sadly, the same commoditize apps, help make iphone and ipad appealing to consumers, which in turn gives Apple the leverage to sell them for $500 or more because it is a hardware or device company and software or your app is only a complement to the hardware. Where is the returned love from Apple. Be pragmatic, even while you choose to love an entity like Apple, that lacks capacity to return the love and will always act in self interest. Always search to see if your love is reciprocated by the person or organization you are in love with, because that is your self interest. Self love gives us the capacity to love others. Self love encompasses self interest among other things. If Apple acts only in self interest, why do developers choose to act out of love aka blind fan boy-ism that is detrimental to their business (indie app development)? http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-failing-like-i… http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/going-broke-with-succ…

apparently there's a PDF (maybe of some draft) on his website -- https://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartProb_978006…

Teams should identify their drivers of key metrics and do power user analysis based on this. A halfway decent analytics team should be thinking this way. Ultimately, analytics are just a view into the business. This thread is complaining about doctors not using microscopes when diagnosing system issues - sometimes a narrow slice is important, sometimes you need to zoom out. If you focus on your "early adopters" or power users exclusively, without understanding how they affect the business, then you are at risk of building things that most of your user base doesn't want. Power User Analysis: https://andrewchen.com/power-user-curve/

In Short: Product Market Fit In Brief: https://andrewchen.com/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-trough-of…

https://andrewchen.com/the-death-of-rss-in-a-single-graph/ I'm a big RSS user so I'm sorry to disagree with your optimism.

Relatedly, and more important for startup founders, is that more features may not actually drive increased adoption (e.g. David Bland's product death cycle https://andrewchen.com/this-is-the-product-death-cycle-why-it-happens-…

Here’s the PDF version of that book - nice of the author to publish it for free http://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartProb_9780062…

relevant link for dating startup economics for investors: https://andrewchen.com/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/ and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606572

>To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN). The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs by Andrew Chen illustrates and details this very well: https://andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/

I think what you're describing is the law of shitty clickthroughts [1] Every marketing channel goes through it, and TikTok is at the beginning of the whole process. [1] https://andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/

You can thank the capital side of the equation for this. Example: https://andrewchen.com/this-is-what-free-ad-supported-uber-rides-might… They used to hide it, but because so much money is being made there's no point anymore.

Facebook could have been Epic Games if they didn't blow up their platform. From 2013: https://andrewchen.com/why-developers-are-leaving-the-facebook-platfor…

Can this be tagged with 2012? Otherwise people might think Andrew Chen is advocating for mobile notifications and Open Graph in 2021... Here is the 2012 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804055 The dated URL is: http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/05/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/