Kickstart 3.2 Rom
Suyay Escarsega
And then the magical moment happened when I started working with Jean Railla, who was the creator of Get Crafty.... She asked me to help her rebuild Get Crafty. That was my introduction to designing websites.... I was looking to sell my own furniture, and so that idea percolated and I talked with Jean about adding a marketplace to Get Crafty. She said, and I probably agreed with her, that it would probably be better to start the marketplace separate instead of doing it inside of Get Crafty, because Get Crafty was really a community of people talking, so one thing led to another and the idea of creating the marketplace as a marketplace took birth.
The way the company started was Steven and Martin [co-founders] were chatting at a funeral, and Martin was talking about how we recently became an NFL agent managing Cassius Marsh and the challenges with trying to find him brand deals, etc.
The way it all started was through conversation between Chris and I. Chris was writing a draft of a blog post that he never ended up publishing. In the draft, he laid out all the problems with the attention economy, how it incentivized bad online content and behaviors that led to bad outcomes in society. He asked me for feedback on that draft, and I said all the things he was saying were true but that people in the media already knew those were the problems and what they were lacking were any meaningful solutions (not for want of trying).
I suggested that he add a couple of paragraphs proposing a better way forward, but instead of doing that he started trying to convince me that we should make a thing based on direct payments between readers and writers because that would better align incentives between all parties.
Habitually restless and frustrated by inefficiencies, he came up with his first attempt at a solution: he would call all the yellow taxi companies when he needed a cab. Then he would take the first one that arrived.
Then he started gaming the system further: texting a favourite driver hours before he needed him and telling him to meet him at a restaurant or bar at an appointed time. On another night, he rented a town car and driver for himself and a group of friends for an entire evening. It was an indulgence that cost $1,000, and zooming around the city at the end of the night dropping everyone off was a pain.
Camp was certain that he wanted such a service. He also knew that the iPhone and its new app store, which Apple introduced over the summer of 2008, were going to finally make the futuristic vision in Casino Royale practical. Not only could you chart the location of an object on a map, but since the earliest models of the phone had an accelerometer, you could also tell if the car was moving or not. That meant that an iPhone could function like a taximeter and be used to charge passengers by the minute or the mile.
Finally I found a campground. We got down there and it was great. I walked out to the ocean and everyone was surfing. It turned out this place was a great surfing spot. I had read everything about the campground online, everything on their website, and nowhere had mentioned surfing. And I love to surf! I just sat there looking at this beautiful wave breaking and realized I had tried so hard and still missed what was the best part of this campground experience. I was driving back the next day when the idea came to me that getting outside was very broken, and that the internet could fix it.
It became apparent that the industry I loved was fragmented and unsafe. Many people buying sneakers were running into the same problems. There are entire subreddits, social accounts, and blogs built around how to spot fakes. People even post product SKUs in spreadsheets on forums like NikeTalk so others can find the shoes they are looking for. Essentially, everyone was piecemealing information together to find and purchase authentic sneakers.
Twenty percent of the biggest consumer businesses emerged out of the founders simply following their curiosity and intuition and then spending time tinkering with the idea. In most cases, soon after they had the idea, they quickly built a prototype to see if there was a there there.
Initially, the idea for OpenSea stemmed from our interest in CryptoKitties. While marketplaces for digital goods have existed for quite some time, they tend to be self-contained ecosystems: individual marketplaces for specific games, marketplaces for domain names, marketplaces for tickets, etc. Scaling something like eBay for digital assets would be difficult because there was little standardization around digital ownership. With the introduction of ERC721, it felt like such an idea was possible for the first time.
The third most common path to a successful consumer business, a path just over 15% of the companies I looked at followed, is to first launch something, pay close attention to which elements (unexpectedly) work best, and then double down (aka pivot) to that one element. For example:
PayPal: In one year, the founding team pivoted from encryption on mobile phones to cash on mobile phones to cash on PalmPilots to cash over email, based on their learnings about what was possible and useful.
When YouTube first launched in May 2005, it was still intended to be a dating service, rather than a generalized platform for all types of videos. So in the early, early days, it was trying to see if there was a need for a video platform for dating (rather than just photos/messages).
And then that extremely Silicon Valley thing happened: Citron and his team realized that the best thing about their game was the chat feature. This was circa 2014, when everyone was still using TeamSpeak or Skype and everyone still hated TeamSpeak or Skype. Citron and the Hammer & Chisel team knew they could do better and decided they wanted to try.
I was in New York City working for a quantitative hedge fund when I came across the startling statistic that web usage was growing at 2,300% a year. So I decided I would try and find a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth, and I picked books as the first best product.
I had several life experiences over the 10 years leading up to starting the company that eventually gave me the insight that this would become a huge consumer need. They included early adopting Web 1.0 delivery services, a business plan I wrote in college for a food marketplace, and then seeing the early days of ridesharing in 2011 after moving to San Francisco.
I moved on from Parthenon to become an associate at Leader Ventures, a VC firm, just as the iPhone appeared, in 2007. I was thinking about retail. I studied the economics of Blockbuster during the rise of Netflix. On one side was a company that dominated physical store sales; on the other was a company that dominated sales without stores. It was the perfect case study. And I could see exactly when the scale tipped. Whenever Netflix hit about 30% market share, the local Blockbuster closed. The remaining 70% of customers then faced a decision: try Netflix or travel farther to get movies. More of them tried Netflix, putting more pressure on Blockbuster. Another store would close, and more customers would face that try-or-travel decision, in a downward spiral.
A final strategy is to simply sit around with your friends and think up ideas. Eight out of the 50 companies I looked at found their idea through active brainstorming. Michael Seibel has some great advice on this path (30-second clip):
We tested just the consumer part first. We made a static HTML page at with a Google Voice number and a few PDF menus from local restaurants, offering delivery for $6. We launched a small AdWords campaign to see if anyone was searching for it.
Hours later, Tony [Xu] and I were driving home when we got the first order. I grabbed a notebook and wrote down what the guy wanted from a local Thai restaurant. We placed a takeout order, drove to the restaurant, bought the food, took it to the customer, and charged him with Square.
Although only about half of the startups I looked at were started by founders with specialized skills/experience, the majority of founders had a unique insight into the opportunity, based on some prior experience they had.
As a startup founder, you need to do the impossible. You build something that has never been built before, with a team that\u2019s never worked together before, while learning dozens of new skills, making countless no-going-back decisions, all before you run out of money (and energy). It\u2019s like being lost in the wilderness, in the dark, with only a vague sense of where you\u2019re heading.
From TikTok to Reddit to Uber to Airbnb, I\u2019ve had the opportunity to study the growth stories of hundreds of companies. I\u2019ve explored how these companies acquired their first users, found product-market fit, built growth engines, and nailed retention, conversion, virality, positioning, pricing, and most every other ingredient that goes into building a durable business. But I\u2019ve never tied all of these pieces together.
Starting today and for the next five weeks, I\u2019m going to share a six-part playbook that I\u2019ve been developing that guides you through the six fundamental steps of kickstarting and scaling your consumer business. Later this year, I\u2019ll share a similar playbook for B2B businesses.
This work is the result of hundreds of hours of research, interviews, and synthesis. It\u2019ll include brand-new frameworks, stories, and insights that I\u2019ve never before shared. It may be the best work I\u2019ve ever done. If nothing else, it\u2019s definitely been the most time-intensive.
Based on my research of over 50 of the most successful consumer companies, there are only five common strategies for coming up with a great startup idea\u2014all rooted in paying attention:
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