Lane Shackleton: belief

Transcript context

…And one final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. I heard a story that at Coda there's this moment called Tim Ferriss Day that drove a lot of traffic. Can you share that story? Does that ring a bell? Yeah. There's lots of memorable days at Coda. One of them was Tim Ferris Day. So I guess maybe for context, we had built this very nascent publisher motion where we were going out and helping people publish their rituals. And this is what you see in the Coda Gallery and a lot of what we talked about today. But we had this one person on that team, this guy Al Chen, Tim Ferriss fan, and also I think had been really tenacious with the people around Tim Ferriss and basically finally got an in to him and figured out a really neat way to implement one of his rituals and wrote a doc. And so none of us really knew this, but this was all happening. And anyway, we wake up one morning and traffic is just spiking through the roof, signups are spiking, no one knows what's going on. I'm convinced this is all spam. I'm like, "Something's wrong with our data or something's going haywire." At the time, we were also in the China Basin office and the fire alarm went off. And so now we're outside on our laptops. We were in a war room trying to figure out what was happening and now we're outside trying to figure out what's going on. So anyway, make a long story short, data scientists investigate and we eventually figured out that we had been featured in Tim Ferriss' email newsletter and I think early on you hear this lesson or this adage of first time founder, build a great product, second time founder, build a great distribution. I think that was one of those early big cues to think about the importance of content distribution and the importance of these publishing flywheels. And it definitely made us double down. We're like, "Okay, if we can do this with Tim Ferriss, what's next?" And we definitely spent a few months trying to reach that high watermark that was set that day in traffic and sign-ups. So it was a fun memorable day and people for the subsequent one or two years would refer to it as Tim Ferriss Day. So funny. I bet Tim Ferriss had no idea what he did.…

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