Ryan Hoover: evaluation

Transcript context

…Or this is the content for people to save and use. Thanks for sharing all that. That was really helpful. One other question I wanted to ask you along these lines is around the target audience and an insight that we both share is that it's really important to get really narrow with who you focus on initially as a startup. For founders, it's often so counterintuitive. It's like, oh my god, why should I focus on 1000 people or 10,000 type people versus the millions that might want to use this thing? What's your sense and where have you kind of seen that become important? Just the idea of getting very narrow on how you're going after? Yeah, it's effectively the more narrow your idea generally, and this is where I throw in the big asterisks, not for everything. There's always contextual differences, but generally the easier it is to build a great solution for those people because now you can actually hone in the product experience, the messaging and everything to serve exactly those people. And it can help with the product side, it can help with the marketing and go to market as well where your messaging... When people land to your homepage, you don't need to create a broader value prop to everybody, but really you can focus on what is the problem this particular audience or community is facing. And so generally it's just easier. Now, there is always that challenge of like, well, is this too small? Is it too much of a niche if my goal is to build a massive company? My bias is not to worry too much about that because what you probably find is over time opportunities to expand beyond that, you'll see parallels maybe to other communities or other problems. And a lot of companies eventually expand well beyond that. I'll go back to Airbnb, you know the story way better than I do, but initially it was just basically couches and extra rooms and houses. And a lot of people, most people in the US would not do that. My parents, not in a million years. Even me, I don't want to stay in some strangers room. I want my own space, my own house. So that probably at the time seemed really niche and small, but obviously they extended well beyond that. Now Airbnb is housing in generally speaking. Their [inaudible 00:57:47] housing, in my mind, which they haven't yet expanded into real estate sales or long-term rentals per se, but that's a possibility. This is a good segue to the last topic I wanted to touch on, investing, which I believe you do full-time. Would you say that it's your full-time gig now?…

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