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Ryan Gum 🕶

12 Feb, 9 tweets, 4 min read

5 MVPs of now BILLION dollar companies:

Dropbox, Zappos, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter 🧵👇

The Dropbox MVP was a video that showed how the product WOULD work (they hadn't built it yet). Drew Houston posted it to Hacker News (yes, comments were skeptical) and captured 70k+ emails overnight.

Today's market cap: $9.80B
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The Zappos MVP was a fake e-commerce store. Nick Swinmurn took photos of shoes from his local mall and uploaded them to a website. When a customer purchased, he went back to the store, bought the shoes, and sent them to the customer.

Acquired by Amazon for $1.2B.

The Airbnb (AirBed&Breakfast) MVP was a site offering air mattresses in the founder's apartment for $80 / night. There was no option to select dates, locations, or prices. They targeted one single sold-out conference when hotel rooms were full.

Today's market cap: $130.35B

The Groupon MVP was built & launched in a month. It was a simple WordPress site with 1 daily deal post, and PDF vouchers manually emailed when a deal closed. This was after they spent a year working on a similar product that was struggling, The Point.

Today's market cap: $1.08B

The Twitter (Twttr) MVP built for internal users at Odeo as a way to send messages to other employees and view them on a group level.

Today's market cap: $54.53B

https://twitter.com/ryangum/status/1354078755732541440

3 takeaways:

1. Code is just a tool. You don't need as much tech as you think.
2. Validate. The market will tell you if something is worth pursuing.
3. Start small. Every huge business had humble beginnings.

How? Here are 3 small product ideas:

https://twitter.com/ryangum/status/1354078755732541440

BONUS MVP:

The DoorDash (Palo Alto Delivery) MVP was a static site with a few PDF menus from local restaurants. The founders took calls on their phones, placed takeout orders at the restaurants, and drove the food to customers for a $6 delivery fee.

Today's market cap: $67.74B

@ryangum

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Ryan Gum 🕶

@ryangum

2 Feb

In 2020 on Teachable:

2 creators made over $10,000,000

56 creators made over $1,000,000
823 creators made over $100,000

What do the top course creators have in common? 🧵👇

🗣 They share what they know for free.

They spend countless hours creating free content and demonstrating value to establish domain authority, credibility, and earn trust.

📚 They focus relentlessly on the student experience.

They create raving fans who won't shut up about their course. Satisfied students don't recommend courses, transformed ones do. Student referrals become one of their best marketing channels.

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Ryan Gum 🕶

@ryangum

1 Feb

Common sentiment is that "audience-first" is the correct approach:
Create content, gain attention, build something for your new audience, sell it, and celebrate your new found success.

But if you're starting from scratch today, is that your only path? 🧵👇

Audience-first: Build an audience before building a product.

Product-first: Build a product before building an audience.

But there's another option that can give you even better results:

Build both at the same time.

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Ryan Gum 🕶

@ryangum

31 Jan

@teachable

At @teachable, we help creators measure completion rates.

But completion rates are a proxy metric at best. Track them if you want, but don't let them trick you into thinking students are getting value 🧵👇

Hypothetical 1:

As a student, would you rather consume 100% of a course, or complete 30% of it but find an idea that helps you achieve your goal faster?

Hypothetical 2:

As a course creator, would you rather have 100% of your students complete your course, or have 100% of students actually apply the learnings they got from the course, regardless of their completion rate?

I'm confident you'd pick the latter in both cases.

Read 7 tweets

Ryan Gum 🕶

@ryangum

28 Jan

If you’re building products for creators, you’ll eventually need to generate revenue. VC money or not.

Get familiar with the most common monetization models 🧵👇

🤝 Share of earnings

∙ Aligns incentives between creator & platform.
∙ Harder to monetize creators with low sales.
∙ Creates a graduation problem (successful creators are incentivized to leave).
∙ Platforms negotiate special contracts for top earners to solve this.

@Patreon

Share of earnings examples:

@Patreon
@OnlyFans
@SubstackInc
@BookCameo

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Ryan Gum 🕶

@ryangum

27 Jan

@fortelabs

In 2020, Building a Second Brain and Write Of Passage had thousands of combined students & $1M+ in revenue.

Not many cohort-based courses are operating at this scale.

Luckily, @fortelabs @david_perell and @will_mannon shared their hard-earned learnings, summarized 🧵👇

On curriculums & live classes:

- "Running a live course is like organizing a music tour, but having to develop the music before every single new show."

- Curriculums aren't set in stone. The advantage of live classes is you can adjust the curriculum to cater to students needs.

- A day or two before every session, they typically spend between seven to nine hours preparing the next lecture.

- How? They have existing building blocks and assets, adjust based on where students are getting confused, and reassembling the blocks into the next lecture.

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Ryan Gum 🕶

@ryangum

26 Jan

"I really want to start a side hustle / become a creator / earn income online... But first I need to learn more about [topic]... Then I need to research the best tools... And I'm really busy right now, so I'll start later when things calm down."

Sound familiar? 🧵👇

There's a good chance this is you. And if so, you've probably been telling yourself this same story on repeat for years.

The only thing you're creating is excuses.

But don't worry, you're not actually that far from your dream. You already have the skills, knowledge, and tools you need to make your first dollar online. You just need to take action.

So if you want to stop dreaming, follow this plan:

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