I apologize because none of the people here today can speak to that topic.

>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] My name is Michael.

I'm the CEO of YC and help run the batch and

program as most of you understand YC to be.

This here is Steve who's the co-founder and CEO of Reddit.

And there's Emmet who's cofounder and CEO of Twitch.

Can you guys introduce yourselves in a couple of seconds?

>> You just did but I can do it again.

>> [LAUGH] >> And Steve, yeah co-founder and

CEO of Reddit.

I study computer science.

I graduated from UVA in 2005.

I was at Reddit for five years, I left for five years.

I've been back for about a year and a half.

>> My name is Emmet I graduated from Yale computer science in 2005.

I started my first company right out of college.

We made a bad copy of Google calendar before Google calendar existed.

And- >> Google calendar

>> Yeah, that's right, and

then we started Justin TV which is the company that one turn and

so I've been doing, basically continuously employed

working on that since 2006 >> And

then can you just, each of you guys say whatever the KPI you guys track for

the business and approximately what it is?

Just to give folks a sense of why you guys might be

experts at building great products.

>> [COUGH] One of our more shareable ones is monthly active users and

we hit 300 million last month.

>> Nice. >> [LAUGH]

>> That's a good number.

>> Our primary metric that we care about is a metric called minutes watched,

the number of minutes of video that are consumed every month on Twitch.

And we just crossed 30 billion minutes.

This year for the first timers.

This is very exciting.

>> Total? >> No, per month.

>> Jesus.

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> So

that's the main thing we look at rather than uniques.

>> So, what we're going to do for

you guys today is I have about 12 questions I'm going to ask these guys.

We're going to see how many of them we get through.

And then we're going to leave the last ten minutes for

questions about start up stuff, YC, or whatever else you'd like to talk about.

My goal is to kind of focus this advice on early, early stage.

So, these guys do a lot of stuff now that really

is completely irrelevant to you >> But hopefully they'll be talking to you

about the things they did, bad or good, when they were starting.

So, I want to start with one of the major tenants of

YC is how you talking to your users.

And we repeat that a bunch of times, and then we don't really go into any detail.

So, can you guys talk a little bit about how you talk to talk to your users?

Maybe the good and maybe some of the mistakes you've made as well.

>> Sure, so, I, most of the advice I give today will have two perspectives,

one at Reddit and one at Hipmunk.

because the companies are completely different and had different paths and

I think, kind of the ground rules for this discussion,

the first piece of advice I would give is every company is really different,

and there are lots of different paths you can take.

And what works in one place, very likely won't work in another.

So at Reddit, I mean the product is talking to users, right?

That was built in.

In the early days we didn't have comments and we didn't have communities.

So actually, we got a lot of emails, was our,

for the first probably six months was the way we communicated to our users.

But when we added the comment feature,

there was basically no option but to talk to our users.

And the challenge then becomes which users do you want to listen to?

And what are they actually saying?

And what do they actually mean?

Because they're often saying one thing and they mean something else.

At Hipmunk, because it was selling plane tickets and hotel reservations.

It was completely different.

We didn't really have a good forum for connecting with our users.

We used a product called Olark which was basically this imbedded Java Script

chat thing.

And that was indispensable, we still use it.

It was users, if they got stuck, they could ask us for help.

If they wanted to give us compliments or criticisms, they could do that.

And we can often, both over email at Reddit and over Olark at Hipmunk,

turn Like emotional users, angry users will often become your most loyal

users if you can flip them around, there's like this absolute value of emotion.

And so, if you can find those angry users that are having a bad time and

treat them well they will likely.

Quickly turn into some of your most loyal supporters.

So, we found that whole cycle to be very valuable.

>> The interesting thing for me, between Twitch and Justin TV,

which are two very similar product right there.

With live video products with chat.

So for Justin TV, we were our own users.

We were building a product for us to build a TV show.

And after that,

we really sort of declined to actually speak to users in any significant way.

And, unsurprisingly, all of the good ideas we had were things we came up with

when we were building it for ourselves.

Which sort of brings me to my first point, of talking to users, is it's possible,

especially very early, to build a product yourself.

And, if you truly are building something that is for

you to use, that can be super effective.

You don't necessarily need to talk to talk to anyone else.

Eventually, you'll need to, because you'll learn about people other than yourself but

for the first three months it's to develop something, just something that you want.

But you have to actually really want it.

It can't be, you can't be like lying to yourself about that,

it can't be something you think is cool.

It has to be something you, yourself actually desperately want to use everyday.

And then we had went through a long period in the desert where we were

wondering about.

Not talking to users, not really using our own product, and

not building anything of value.

And the thing we did with Twitch that I thought was really good for

production users is we talked to them in person.

I had done some amount of surveys and talking to users over email.

And I found that getting people on, at least on Skype, or if not,

literally in person changed my depth of understanding of who they were.

The other thing I would say about about it is that we focused down really hard on

which of our users we cared about.

And we decided it was the broadcasters and

not only was it the broadcasters, it was the successful broadcasters.

We didn't want to talk to people who had two viewers.

We wanted to talk to people who had 200 views.

And so, we went and talked to a bunch of broadcasters on the platform who

decided they were the important ones.

The other thing we did that was I think really valuable is we decided it wasn't

just people who were currently using our service it was people who we wanted to use

our service.

And so, we talked to a bunch of people who were streaming on other platforms rather

than just already on Twitch.

Because the people who have chosen to not use your product,

especially if they have deliberately looked at your product,

decided it sucked and went somewhere else, are like,

some of the best people to talk to, because they know what's wrong with it.

And so, I actually think the most valuable things I learned, especially early on,

were from users who had tried Justin TV, they had tried UStream.

They tried own 3D, they tried YouTube, and

they had a coherent opinion as to why ours was not the one they chose.

And that was super valuable,

because they really pointed at the details of where we were wrong.

>> And often those details are smaller than you think.

>> It's like memorably one of the biggest issues was we were

not listed on the Team Liquid Starcraft fan website.

We lost maybe 3,000 broadcasters over that.

We had to email them and ask them to re list us,

because they just didn't have us there.

Tiny issue, but like really mattered to our users.

>> It's easy to run a company for years and then be like,

I should have fixed this stupid one day fix if you don't talk to your users.

>> So a lot of people talk about MVPs, minimum viable products.

How many of you have heard that term, MVPs?

So one of the challenges I have is when folks like you apply to YC and

get into YC even though you know the idea that you should be releasing something

that is crappy, you don't do it.

And as a result, users slow down.

And oftentimes, that prevents you from getting into YC or

prevents you from building and talking to customers.

And so, I think that what's interesting is that just TV and

Reddit are pretty good examples of crappy MVP's.

So, can you guys describe how the products worked in the beginning or

maybe how they only kind of worked?

>> Yeah, we started, I think I wrote my first line of code on June 3rd or

4th, 2005 for Reddit and we launched on June 22nd.

I didn't even launch it.

Paul Graham linked to us from his blog without telling me.

>> [LAUGH] >> And from then,

it was on and the good thing about that for

us in particular is we didn't actually have a vision for Reddit for

better or for worse which would affect us in a lot of different ways going forward.

But as soon as we launched, that's when we started to find the path and we just would

kind of follow the users everyday as what do we think is best for the users?

What do we think is best for us?

And just build towards that and

we've built a lot of loyalty through those actions and

that would not have happened, if we were sitting in our apartment not launching.

Because if we launched and then for the next six months, we just added a ton of

new features, only about 25% of which lasted more than a day or two, but

there was stuff we though was a great idea.

Like we had these categories, I remember in July at some point.

I made Alexis my co-founder stay up all night one night categorizing every link

that'd ever been submitted to Reddit.

And the next morning, I was like we lost.

It's not working turn it off, but we could've probably, if we had launched,

we could have had that feature until November and then launched and

then wondered why it didn't work.

>> I think that Amazon actually has a really good saying about mineral and

viral products.

They like to call them, what they're aiming for

a minimum remarkable product which I think gets more at what you're trying to

accomplish which is a viral product bring into mind this whole ecosystem of support

like a viable organism that's got all the things it needs to live and

you don't actually want that.

Like if you're launching something that's actually self-sufficient, that's viable in

a this thing could live on its own sense, you definitely waited too long.

This thing is going to be on live support when you launch it and

you are the life support system.

What you actually want is you want something about

the product when you launch it to be actually good.

You want to get to the part where you've built something that maybe at least one

person in the world finds remarkably useful or remarkably good and you don't

know really if you've gotten there until you put it in front of someone,

which is why you need to launch it so quickly.

I think it's really important to remember Dropbox, for example,

one of the big YC successes did not launch an immediate product, because they were

building a backup system and backup systems aren't allowed to lose your data.

[LAUGH] And so, the last thing you want to do if you're building backup software is

go rush something out that's going to lose your customer's data,

because you will never get that trust back.

And so, the minimum remarkable product for Dropbox was a video.

Basically, saying, look at this awesome thing we were going to build and

getting all the senate for a newsletter and that worked, because the idea like