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Key take aways from dinner with Ahbinav and Ayush

  • Main bulk of the Chinese investors here in the Bay Area are just dumb money. Their primary motivation is to get a green card through the investment of half a million USD
  • Investors are typically focused on specific metrics in different verticals
    • Valuation of the company is tied closely to the multiple of the vertical it is “packaged” for.
    • Maximization of valuation is based on positioning in the right vertical
    • important to find investors that are interested and passionate about the space
    • check out pitch book
  • “Resources” is a commonly used and understood term
  • Clean data is something companies will be willing to pay for
  • Students need to establish a portfolio. They will be keen in participating in hackathons just to boost their portfolio. It might be a viable acquisition channel
  • A data market place is a viable end vision for GetData.IO
    • other companies can sell their data on the platform
    • focus on the supply side
    • focus on building a community around the supply side
  • At the inception of any startup, the founders would be heavily engrossed in building out the MVP with a few use cases
    • they might not  spend enough time thinking about the use cases that are exciting opportunities
  • Interesting verticals
    • High school leagues
    • medical research data
    • city data
  • Use cases identified
    • Useful for powering the SEO acquisition loop
    • Useful for powering the Viral acquisition loop
  • Focus on deepening the service offerings for existing customers
    • building out the product offerings to fulfill more pain points for the same customer year over year to monetize them more
    • 0% churn rate
    • acquiring new customers slowly so as to ensure the internal business process is rock solid
    • currently 30 paying customer
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Everyone Hates Marketers: price intelligently

Market research is important. Need to think about it constantly

Steps

Step 1: Retention

  • start with 10 users make them really really happy
    • measure based on retention and engagement metric
  • find more people like them as make them really happy

Step 2: Monetization

  • Build the buyer persona
  • quantify the use cases by assessing how much users are willing to pay for each use case
  • Focus on value perception standpoint versus usage standpoint
    • someone might use a feature a lot but that feature is not very important
    • invoicing feature in accounting software highly used but less valuable that analytics
  • Customer development need to happen on at least a quarterly cadence
  • send out surveys since it’s really cheap to send out surveys
    • Collect user data to validate hypothesis
  • experiment with price every 6 months

Acquisition

  • work to figure out the acquisition channels as a startup
  • larger companies really need to figure out how to monetize more existing companies

Further references

  • Coelevate, Reforge growth series by Brian Balfour
  • Book: Hacking Growth
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Book Summary – Predictably irrational

Brain understands value in terms of relativity

  • we tend to compare things with one another
  • we also only focus on comparing things that can be compared while unconsciously avoiding those that are hard to compare
  • need to use a decoy to ease the comparison process
  • think in terms of absolute numbers not percentages

Arbitrage coherence

  • the initial price maybe largely arbitrary
  • once the price is established the amount we are willing to pay is relative to the initial price

Market norms versus social norms

  • social norms takes longer to build
  • it is easier for market norms to displace social norms
  • once displaced it is hard to re-establish social norms
  • the notion of money/price displaces social norms
  • don’t mix the two norms
  • exchanges involving physical effort helps maintains social norms

Arousal

  • Its easier to fight temptation before it arises than suppressing it when it has occurred
  • people are wrong about their predicted behavior when aroused by a large margin

Procrastination

  • procrastination is the giving up of our long-term goals or immediate gratification
  • have person commit up front to a preferred path of action
  • bundling services helps reduce need to think

Schedules of reinforcement

  • variable schedules are not effective and reinforcing behavior
  • America’s top killer is our inability to make smart choices – 50% of folks will make lifestyle decision that kill us earlier

Ownership bias

  • if you own something you are more likely to value it more highly than if you had no prior emotional attachment
  • you tend to be more optimistic of the things you are doing
  • always be aware of base survival rate within a sample population
  • we tend to keep options we don’t need open even when it costs us more in the long run
  • too costly a strategy when there are too many available options in the environment
  • consciously close doors

Expectation

  • changes our actual experience of the item
  • adding a semi exotic ingredient while not necessarily changing the nature of the dish helps us enjoy it more
  • stereotypes – helps reduce caloric need for brain to understand the full picture
  • approaching a situation with no expectation helps seeing the true reality of things

Trust

  • Proactively address complains

Character is contextual

  • how we behave is largely a function of the signals we are getting from the environment
  • profession take a oath at the start of their career
  • cheating is easier one step removed from cash
  • individualistic culture versus socialistic culture

External References

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Everyone hates marketeers: how to use emotional targeting

  • focus on pain points
  • interviews
  • surveys
  • competitive analysis
    • focus on reviews and ratings
    • read the problems users describe the tool was solving
    • listen for the emotional words users were using to describe their pain
    • listen for their feeling towards the industry
    • listen for their feelings towards the company
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Signals from the network

  • Deliberately slow things down
  • Give as much as possible to details
  • Understanding Marketing/human needs is the most important thing to focus on.
    • jobs to be done
    • people are very bad at telling their own motivations
      • dont ask them why
    • they are very good at telling you the sequence of behavior they performed leading up to a buying decision
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Afternoon chat with Andrew

Agenda #1: Marketing to finance people on the research side of things versus prospecting side of things

  • the channels
  • the kinds of budget they have
  • their buying behavior

Agenda #2. Building up a data-set

  • the features you would use in trading
  • the kinds of systems they use
  • how to package it to make it easy to import to their systems

Personal thoughts

  • Don’t see very clearly how a potential product market fit on the prospecting side will drive growth

General Feedbacks from Andrew on Blog

  • Generate traffic on my blog
    • put a subscription form
      • mailchimp
      • ConvertKit – more flexible bolt on look
    • intersperse on my muse by gradually shifting the focus towards what I am developing
    • talk about the journey working on my project
      • channels: IndieHackers.com
        • more development oriented
        • could monetize that later on

General Feedbacks from Andrew on Fundamental Trading

  • To look at TradeIdeas.com
    • trading data on the fundamental side
    • Collect data and run it through all the indicators
    • provide subscription to traders
  • Fundamental trades
    • market cap, in-depth structure
    • key data points
      • look at Yahoo finance to get the metrics they collect
      • all the information is known
      • everything is reflected in the chart price
    • BloomBerg and Reuters already have that data
    • leasing a BloomBerg terminals
    • 350K best institutional traders
      • USD25K a year
      • everything know about a market on the fundamental side

Thoughts on collecting disparate data points to support Technical Trading as they get published

  • turning into useful and actionable information
    • is this a highly custom solution that has a finite live?
  • everything that is known is also published
    • price and volume
    • what is something traded for and how much is traded
    • An indicator
      • based on Price and Volume
      • anything that paints a line on the chart
      • the ones he wrote and based on that

Is the trading market is really that appealing on the institutional side?

  • is everything custom

Feedback on GetData.IO

  • A really good market for an API to allow to get people to data in the form that they want filter

Be an expert in search optimization

  • Google has 200+ criteria
  • check out the following companies
    • Ahrefs
    • Moz
    • SEMrush
    • www.spyfu.com
      • shows you list of paid searches
      • Collect the name
      • Come up with a list of competitors
      • comes up with a list of keywords
      • gives you an idea on how to get ranked
      • Ranks click thru %: 30,20,10…
  • become an SEO expert
    • AHref study free course
      • https://ahrefs.com/blogging-course
      • learn the competitors markets
    • 4 steps
      • learn the list of keywords that describe what you want your market to be looking for
      • for everyone of the terms search for the names in the top ten competitors
      • weed out duplicates competitors
      • establish their rank for the different keywords
      • look at their website to see the message on their homepage
        • note their markets – get a list of those people
        • product market, data scientist
        • get a list of commonalities
    • do a deep dive on getting ranked using AHrefs after doing the necessary research
    • getting back links
      • takes a while to get ranked
      • getting backlinks needs credibility
      • using the blog
      • could always steer people to my blog without giving up and secrets
      • establish backline to GetData from my personal blog
      • go over to IndieHackers and post about web scraping service
      • that is a backlink
      • Do that on Reddit as well
    • Long tail keywords
      • ranking the uncompeted keywords
      • go for good traffic
    • the competitors products are similar
    • if hiring an SEO expert to do the grunt the cost will be USD10K-50K

 

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Dinner chat with Ahbinav

Quick assessment of key strengths and weaknesses of current team configuration

  • Main weakness: Solo person working on project
  • Strengths
    • 4.5 years working in EdTech, one of the most demanding verticals in the industry
    • experience scaling up platform from 25 Million to 90 Million registered users
    • A monetary exit in the EdTech space
    • Knowledge on how to build a social network
    • Knowledge of the entire stack
      • OPs
      • Backend
      • Frontend
      • User psychology

Proposed structuring of potential co-founder

  • 4 year vesting
  • 1 year cliff
  • Maximum 6%
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Book Summary – Barking up the wrong tree

  • Success is what you personally need to be happy at work and at home
  • Strategy that gets you there is obvious
    • consistency
    • knowing what you are best at and being perfectly aligned with your context
      • Intensifiers – character traits on the average that are negative but in proper context brings sweeping benefits
    • resilience and optimism – fixing your narrative of self
    • small wins
    • adjusting based on feedback
    • quit unproductive things to free up more time
    • maximize opportunities to be lucky – continuous small scale experiments
    • increase likelihood of follow through by listing out if-then statements
    • follow up
    • active listening
    • count your blessings
    • learn to have fun
    • knowing what enough is enough – satisficing versus maximizing
  • Students successful in class least likely to become outliers
    • encouraged to be generalist versus being hyper specialized on your strengths
  • Two kinds of leaders
    • rose through the ranks – filtered
    • came through the top window –
      • outliers
      • eccentrics due to genetic mutation
      • black sheep – a pain to deal with / psychopathic tendencies
  • Givers eventually win out takers
    • takers will deplete the environment of good faith reducing overall levels of collaboration
    • make sure not to give overboard by setting clear limits
  • Introverts get more time to nurse an idea and bring it to fruition than extroverts
  • Building friendship through likes/similarities
  • Self compassion/humility versus over-confidence
  • The big four
    • happiness = Enyoing
    • achievement = winning
    • significance = counting to others
    • legacy = extending

Further references

  • The invisible hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Peter Leeson
  • Creating Minds, Howard Gardner
  • The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile
  • Good to Great, Jim Collins
  • The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker
  • Little Bets, Peter Sims
  • The Talent Code, Dan Coyle
  • The As If Principle, Richard Wiseman