Office hours with Rob Walling, live!
Rob Walling, founder of Drip; author of Start Small, Stay Small; and co-creator of MicroConf, is holding office hours with several founders looking for help with their businesses:
@RyanHickman, @jbones33, @alexjv89, @sergey_shvets, @topshelf, and @HypeCrux
Tune in as we livestream the call!
Another great tip from @robwalling: If you're going to start something that requires network effects (e.g. a community), you really need to start with an audience. If you don't have that audience, either don't work on that idea, or take a stair step approach: find a way to build that initial audience before you work on the part that requires network effects.
This resonates with how I started IH. I didn't have an audience at all, so I had to get in front of the Hacker News audience. But even that wasn't enough, because they weren't my audience, so I couldn't continually each out to them on a weekly/daily basis. So I started out by simply publishing interviews and building a mailing list. I didn't build the forum until the mailing list had about 1500 people on it. After that, I could email the list repeatedly to get the ball rolling on the network effects.
Really great insight.
IMO it's really important to recognise that you were providing value, upfront, to your audience before asking for anything from them in return.
I see a lot of founders/IHers try and build an audience without focussing on creating value for that audience first, and it doesn't tend to end well...
Thanks, @csallen and @robwalling. Never done that before. Totally insightful and enlightening. Cowabunga!
-Steve
Crucial advice from @robwalling: Charging $5/month means you need 2000 customers to support yourself. By the time he had 2000 customers with Drip, they were doing 7-figures in revenue. Charge more!
That was a great conversation! Thanks, @robwalling for time and valuable insights and @csallen for putting this together!
Rob gives awesome advice!
You are too kind, sir.
Well done! Sorry for the last minute cancelation.