External forces and inflection points.
Hey friends 👋🏾,
In many of the founding stories I wrote for this newsletter, I noticed that there is often an external force outside of a product or feature set that was instrumental in getting the company to an inflection point.
This week, I went through the 120+ issues archive with a fresh pair to see if there were any common threads to these external non-product-related forces.
I found four themes:
Strategic networking and partnerships:
Superhuman, Onlyfans, Cameo, and Whoop: leveraged influential communities and/or figures to unlock early adopters for product or marketplace.
Tinder, Gopuff, Snackpass, and Bumble are more specific examples of partnering with fraternities and sororities to infiltrate and dominate the college market.
Building free stuff for customers:
Shopify: offered free business tools like logo makers and slogan creators. They expected e-commerce store owners to search for these ahead of setting up their online store.
Hubspot: created free tools that potential customers would find valuable, such as website grader, email signature generator, and blog ideas generator
Zumper: created Zumper Pro to allow realtors to post on major listing platforms like Zillow and Trulia effortlessly from their phone
Getting lucky by showing up every day:
Waze: benefited from the Apple Maps rollout debacle. Apple issues an apology and recommended Waze as one of the viable alternative
Morning Brew: were amongst the first to run Instagram stories ads. For the first 48 hours, their CAC went down X10+ because there weren’t as much competing ad dollars.
Techcrunch: gained significant recognition and credibility by breaking the story of Google acquiring YouTube.
Telling a great story:
DoNotPay: 19-year-old Stanford student builds the world's First Robot Lawyer to fight parking tickets
Calm: with the www.donothingfor2minutes.com pre-Calm launch gimmick
That’s it for today,
Talk soon,
Ali Abouelatta