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YOLO: You Only Launch Once

Danny BoiceSpeek Co-founder & CTO

@DannyBoice | @SpeekApp#YOLO

Drake

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What is Speek?

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Current State

Lots of Users

100% Monthly Growth

$1.5mm Seed Funding

11 Employees

Just hit “hockey stick” shaped growth curve last month

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Our Journey

Started with NYC, A Napkin, and Beer.

YOLO

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February 2012

Place: NYC

Problem: Conference calls suck and people hate them

Solution: Use a link instead of a phone number and PIN

Funding: $0

Users: 0

People: 2

Assumption:People will use a link for conference calls

Experiment: Lots of customer interviews & some AdWord buys

YOLO

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March 2012

Place: SXSW

Problem: We need an app for more experiments

Solution: Drink lots of beer (and bourbon) in our AIRBNB house and hack a butt ugly MVP together

Funding: $0

Users: 0

People: 2 + offshore dev

Assumption:We can overcome voice technology hurdles

Experiment: Get our friends and family to start doing calls

Result: FAIL - tech glitches (Voice related)

YOLO

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June 2012

Place: Arlington, VA

Problem: Voice quality sucks

Solution: Host conference calls on hardware rather than AWS

Funding: $50,000

Users: 50

People: 3 + offshore dev

Assumption:We can overcome voice technology hurdles

Experiment: Upgrade our technology and keep getting people to do calls.

Result: Validated

** This is when we finally formed Speek, Inc **

YOLO

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September 2012

Place: AOL Fishbowl Labs (our new and current home)

Problem: Not growing organically

Solution: Start giving survey.io survey to all active users

Funding: $150,000

Users: 1,000

People: 3 + offshore dev

Assumption:We can grow without huge user acquisition costs

Experiment: Customer Interviews & Survey.io survey and see if we can get to 40% “very disappointed if Speek didn’t exist” for a given cohort.

Result: 3+ months of iteration

YOLO

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December 2012

Place: Fishbowl Labs

Problem: Cheap user acquisition / feed the viral funnel

Solution: Try a bunch of different growth tactics - ITERATE

Funding: $500,000

Users: 20,000

People: 6

Assumption:We can grow our user base without huge marketing spend

Experiment: Customer development + analytics

Result: 3+ months of iteration

YOLO

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Today

Place: Fishbowl Labs

Problem: Scale growth, become ubiquitous

Solution: Keep iterating and get out early on new platforms and devices

Funding: $1,500,000

Monthly Growth: 100%

People: 11

Launching out of beta and charging $$

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Lessons Learned

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A great product trumps everything else

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Your MVP can - and should - be butt ugly

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Don’t be shy about growth and distro

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Survey.io is the bees knees

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People will not volunteer information – wrestle it out of them

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Pick one single metric and track weekly growth rate

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We should have done an accelerator

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Fundraising sucks

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Thank You!

Be Sure To Check Out Speek.com

@DannyBoice | @SpeekApp#YOLO