Bari Science Lab

Founded Jan 1964 by Phil Knight
10 Months: 3,250 Shoes Sold

My sales strategy was simple and I thought rather brilliant. I drove all over the Pacific Northwest, to various track meets. Between races, I’d chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn’t write orders fast enough.

Founded Jan 1964 by Phil Knight
10 Months: 3,250 Shoes Sold

Every time Johnson sold a pair of shoes he’d create an index card for that customer. He’d jot down all manner of minutiae details: shoe size, shoe preference, favourite distance.

Johnson used this handcrafted database to keep in touch with customers. He’d send birthday cards, training tips, notes of encouragement before big races.

Customers would write back telling him about their lives, their injuries, their troubles. Johnson had hundreds upon hundreds of customer pen pals. He had created the modern day mailing list but with a response rate of 95%.

Johnson wasn’t just renowned for his mail correspondence. He went the extra mile in everything he did.

Once a customer complained that the shoes didn’t have enough cushion for long distance running. Johnson hired a cobbler who grafted new rubber soles into the shoes and sent them back a few days later. Soon after Johnson got a letter in the post from the customer saying he’d just posted a personal best at the Boston marathon.

In 1967 Knight set Johnson another impossible task. He had to single-handedly establish Blue Ribbon (which later became Nike) on the East Coast. This meant rebuilding his whole running network from scratch.

What did Johnson do? Well, he worked through his index cards until he found a track star in the East who he’d shared letters with, drove to the kid's house and knocked on the door unannounced.

Fortunately for Johnson, he was invited in and treated to dinner with the whole family. The next day they went for a run together and the kid gave Johnson a list of names: respected coaches, potential customers, local running clubs.

Just like that Johnson’s network in the East was up and running.

When customers become fans they start selling your own product for you. Johnson’s great skill was turning customers into fans.

Imagine you’re scrolling through Instagram and you see an ad for a new running shoe. It’s unlikely you’re going to tell your friends.

Now imagine you see Jeff Johnson out on the track. He sucks you in with his passion, grafts rubber soles onto your shoes, wishes you luck before big meets, eats dinner with your family, sends you birthday cards, Christmas cards, get well soon cards, free t-shirts. You don’t just tell your friends about his shoes, you tell your whole running club.

And that’s exactly what happened. Nike sold its first 50,000 shoes on the power of word of mouth alone. A small sales team going out to track meets, talking to runners, turning them into customers, and then into fans. One by one.

It’s becoming easier and easier to come up with excuses to not recruit your first customers manually.

“Well, if we're optimising for CPA, CPL, CR, CRO, CTR, CLV and of course CoCa, the value really is all online now” the suits mumble, from the safety of their glass-paneled office.

All I’ll say is this: Jeff Johnson started from nothing and sold 3,250 pairs of shoes from the boot of his car in less than a year.

So, go ahead. Grow your Facebook page. Have fun with your follow/unfollow bots. Tweet until your heart's content. But you’ll be lucky to get 325 followers in a year, let alone sell 3,250 pairs of shoes.

Once you become a million dollar company it might all be online. But embrace the time you’re small enough to talk to every customer and turn them into fans. One by one.

“The wake up call was finding this startling statistic that web usage in the spring of 1994 was growing at 2,300 percent a year. You know, things just don’t grow that fast. It’s highly unusual, and that started me about thinking, “What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?”

After making a list of the ‘top 20’ products that he could potentially sell on the internet, he decided on books because of their low cost and universal demand. It turns out, it was just the beginning…..

Company Motto: Get Big Fast
In one month, they had customers from all 50 States and 45 Countries
In one year, they had 180,000 customers
1994: Amazon starts with 250k from parents and 10k from Jeff
1994: Sells at extremely low prices; Experiences only losses
2001: Amazon has first profit

Physically travel to your target user base [Tinder, Alibaba]
Populate your site with your own content to get other users on board [Quora, Reddit]
Design your campaign to encourage word-of-mouth [Dropbox, Threadless]
Facebook can be a great product feedback loop – and marketing tool [Lolly Wolly Doodle]
Delighting fandoms yields high returns [Black Milk]
Freemium isn’t for everyone, but it’s cheap and powerful [Evernote, Yammer]
Write legendary, jaw-dropping content [OKCupid]
Harvest interest from target communities before launching [Etsy]
Guest blog like crazy [Buffer]
Market across a variety of channels – print is not dead [ASOS]

Test continuously – listen and tweak, repeat [Nasty Gal]
Experiment with guerilla marketing [Twitter, Foursquare]
Get involved with your local community; meet their needs [Uber]
Focus on one community at a time [TaskRabbit]
Personally follow up with your early users [Airbnb]
Reward mechanisms incentivize participation [Yelp]
Consult customers you lost to competitors [Groove]

We did all kinds of pretty desperate things, honestly. I used to walk by the Apple store on the way home. I’d go in and change all the computers to say Pinterest. Then just kind of stand in the back and be like, “Wow, this Pinterest thing, it’s really blowing up.”

Who are your early target users, and where they currently congregating online

I think the biggest thing overall was that as we were prototyping and testing [Instagram] we gave it to a few folks who had very large Twitter following. Not necessarily a large following overall, but very large followings within a specific community — specifically, the designer community, the online web design community. We felt that photography and the visual element of what we were doing really resonated with those people. And we gave it to those specific people who a large followings.

And because they shared to Twitter, it created this tension, of like “When is this thing launching, when’d do I get to play with it?” and that’s the day when we actually launched, it had that springboard affect.

Publish on Hacker News
Apply to Y Combinator for Acceleration
Apply to TechCrunch for Speaking Position
Write Guest Publications on FastCo
Write Guest Publications on Quartz
Target Lookalike audience on Facebook

Who are your early target users, and where they currently congregating, offline?
Who are your early target users, and where they currently congregating, online?
Do your friends fit into the target user group? If so, have you invited them yet?
Does your product rely on UGC? Consider curating the early community.
Is your value-prop incredibly strong? Consider throwing up a waitlist.
Is your product innately social? Consider relying on existing users to invite new users.
Who are influencers of your target users, and how could you get them to talk about your product?
What’s a unique, compelling, fresh story you could pitch press?
Could you build a community now, to leverage later?

The event that marked the turning point in the business was the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Denver, Colorado. The pair saw an opportunity to capitalize on the quadruple over-attended event that caused a massive shortage in rental housing. Finding hosts to offer up rooms in their houses was actually the easy part. Getting people to rent those rooms proved more difficult.

The first counterintuitive strategy was to pitch only the bloggers with the smallest audience possible. […] As ridiculous as it sounds, the coverage by these bottom-feeder press was the social proof that more prominent publications needed to piggyback on the story. Eventually, national news networks, including NBC and CBS, were interviewing the founders of the unknown startup that was housing the biggest political convention in history.

There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.

The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can't be how the big, famous startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth. We encourage every startup to measure their progress by weekly growth rate. If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week. And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big the numbers get. After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million.

Airbnb is a classic example of this technique. Marketplaces are so hard to get rolling that you should expect to take heroic measures at first. In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings. When I remember the Airbnbs during YC, I picture them with rolly bags, because when they showed up for tuesday dinners they'd always just flown back from somewhere

But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that they've never experienced such attention themselves. Their standards for customer service have been set by the companies they've been customers of, which are mostly big ones. Tim Cook doesn't send you a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. He can't. But you can. That's one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can.

It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially. Any strategy that omits the effort — whether it's expecting a big launch to get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto suspect.

Do things that don't scale

Lesson

#1

Get your customers directly

Lesson

#2

Find where there is no competition

Lesson

#3

There is a

NEED

How?

Goals

1 Million Subscribers

Goals

1 Million Subscribers
100 Students

Goals

1 Million Subscribers
100 Students
1 Store

Goals

1 Million Subscribers
100 Students
1 Store

Goals

1 Million Subscribers
100 Students
1 Store

100 Days

How?

By creating an experience

For every student ...

For every parent ...

For every student ...

For every parent ...

Personalized
Interactive
Engaging

For every student ...

For every parent ...

Personalized
Interactive
Review

Timeline & Next Steps
Growth Reports
Advice

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations
Put IIT JEE & CSE & SAT & SHSAT in titles and #JEE #CSE #SAT #SHSAT to capture Youtube Algorithm's attention. Put 6-10 tags per video! Customize each description with a one-line sentence!
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1M Subscribers

Remember, it only takes ONE

IIT JEE
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Remember, it only takes ONE

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Remember, it only takes ONE

65M

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1M Subscribers

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Put IIT JEE & CSE & SAT & SHSAT in titles and #JEE #CSE #SAT #SHSAT to capture Youtube Algorithm's attention. Put 6-10 tags per video! Customize each description with a one-line sentence!
Follow the trends (US + India)!

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations
Put IIT JEE & CSE & SAT & SHSAT in titles and #JEE #CSE #SAT #SHSAT to capture Youtube Algorithm's attention. Put 6-10 tags per video! Customize each description with a one-line sentence!
Follow the trends (US + India)!

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Tags, Titles, Descriptions, & Metadata

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Tags, Titles, Descriptions, & Metadata

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Tags, Titles, Descriptions, & Metadata

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

A Library of well-organized Math & Science Videos

Goal #1

1M Subscribers

Collaborations
Put IIT JEE & CSE & SAT & SHSAT in titles and #JEE #CSE #SAT #SHSAT to capture Youtube Algorithm's attention. Put 6-10 tags per video! Customize each description with a one-line sentence!
Follow the trends (US + India)!