The Story of a Startup in Two Parts
This is Week 06 of 09 of Astra’s Y Combinator Startup School Journal.
We clicked submit for our YC Application on Tuesday morning (phew!), took a quick breath, and headed to this week's lecture with Patrick Collison (Stripe co-founder and CEO).
This talk was called "Running your Company" but actually covered a wide range of topics: Product Market Fit, the "Collison Installation," and leadership in a young organization. I highly recommend this talk as much or more than all the rest so far. Patrick shares some great mental models that you can deploy immediately to make progress with your startup.
Also, there are some choice tactical nuggets of knowledge throughout. Pre-Product Market Fit, he recommends being hyper-attentive to micro details (see story on early email notifications). This is something we've implemented since and have found to a highly illustrative means of extracting qualitative trends in our users' behavior in real-time.
The story of a startup is two stories. It's the story of getting to product market fit. And then the story of kind of what happens subsequently.
Program:
This week's Tuesday lecture (above) was great! And our smaller Office Hours setup is continuing to be a high-value burst of feedback and learning. Additionally, we:
- Shared our articles from last week on the SUS forum
- Conducted a feedback exchange with Dylan at Otechie
Product:
From our user interviews, we found some navigation dead ends in the app and some areas for improvement:
- Added back / cancel options throughout, especially when creating an Action
- Added more detail on Account and Goal detail screens, including the official name of the bank account and percentage complete for the goal balance
- Switched editing of Goals and Actions to the iOS tear sheet instead of buttons in the UI
Growth:
With last week's two articles published, we were hoping on a quick boost for signups. Even though that didn't happen immediately, we've decided to put some effort into other long term growth initiatives, mostly around our App Store listing. We found Meatti and are digging into optimizing our keywords and search results:
- Updated the format of our App Store listing title and description
- Used Meatti's keyword generator (recommend!)
Per our refined dashboard, this week’s user stats:
- 224 Total Users (+10)
- 210 Signed Up Users (+9)
- 90 Onboarded Users (+10)
- 53 Verified Users (+5 or 10%)