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1. ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS FROM
LAUNCH SCALE 15
Sebastian Fung (@sebfung)
WeFinance for Founders:
The Simplest Way to Crowdfund a Personal Loan

2. Andy Artz, Social+Capital:
Using Custom Audiences to Be
10x More Effective on Facebook
• Turn $10,000 into $12,500 through FbStart
• Pick a scalable platform; each have different strengths — content
(explaining complex ideas), social (hyper-targeting), SEM (intent
conversion), video (branding)
• As a startup, social usually makes the most sense because of
targeting; create custom audiences on FB — 4 easy step:
• 1) Setup proper tracking (Facebook Pixel Helper / Chrome extension)
• 2) Study audience (pixels on blog posts and snip.ly for press articles)
• 3) Prime audience with content (1% lookalike; push press articles)
• 4) Convert primed audience (conversion ads; CPI is 4%)

3. Anneke Jong, Reserve:
Creating a Ruthless Growth Culture:
Scaling Without Breaking Your Team
• Have to be ruthless to scale your company — 3 ways:
• 1) Ruthless welcoming:
• No offer without executive interview
• Welcome email with docs for everything; playbook for every role
• 2) Ruthless sharing:
• Nationwide — role-specific — summits, email lists, Slack channels
• Weekly video hangouts; playbook for specific tactics
• 3) Ruthless camaraderie:
• Session on values and vision for new and old employees
• Monthly all-hands town halls; revisit origin story
• Standardized, easily accessible KPIs (use Looker)

4. Matt Epstein, Zenefits:
How We Grew from $0 to
$20mm ARR in ~2 Years
• Secret sauce: right message (problem, solution, benefits) to send to the right
people (department, seniority) in the right industries (tech, education, etc.)
• Start with and focus on email because it’s fast, cheap, scalable, and touches
every part of the funnel; 1:1 —> MailChimp —> Marketo
• Your levers: content, biz dev/VARs, referrals, SEO, SEM, growth hacking,
events
• Prioritize levers by: potential impact, time, money, target audience
• B2B growth playbook: 1) find secret sauce, 2) start selling with email then
SDRs, 3) prioritize growth levers and pull 1-3/month, 4) automate/optimize
levers once you have 2 repeatable channels
• Top 5 tips: 1) find secret sauce first, 2) stack rank levers and commit to 1-3/
month, 3) ready, fire, aim; if you’re happy, you spent too much time, 4) ignore
shiny objects (social media), 5) make your “stretch” goal the real goal

5. Casey Winters, Pinterest:
Two Years of Conversion
Experience at Pinterest
• Once you find a winning idea, iterate on that idea until you can’t anymore
• Use data to improve the experience down the funnel; they landed on board about bikes?
• Some things to try:
• 1) Identify highest traffic opportunities
• 2) Eliminate steps that don’t add value (password)
• 3) Use users data to your advantage
• 4) Prioritize the right metrics in experiments (engaged users > signups)
• 5) Escape the local maxima
• 6) Audit your web to app experience
• Tools to use:
• Organic app install attribution: Branch Metrics, Yozio, Tapstream
• Paid app install attribution: Adjust, AppsFlyer

6. Julie Fredrickson, Stowaway Cosmetics:
Scaling Communications (or, Marketing &
PR Is Just a DAEMON for Messaging)
• Find the problem:
• "You have too much damn makeup”
• “Normal lipstick is too big; you won’t use it all”
• “Less than 1 in 5 woman discard their expired mascara"
• Stick with your messaging:
• “Right sized, half the size, half the price”
• “Right size at work, in your bag, or your car”
• Don’t fuck around with your messaging
• Don’t even touch “makeup is too expensive”
• Want press, blogging, or PR? Play the game, don’t try and change how it works

7. Dovey Wan, Danhua Capital:
Far East Growth Engine: How China Can
Supercharge Your Business
• Megatrends in China
• 1) Huge manufacturing scale
• 2) Rising Chinese middle class (millennials spend 40% more than parents)
• 3) Mobile internet (500mm internet users; grandparents don’t email, they FaceTime)
• 4) Aging population (in 5-10 years, there will be more senior citizens than newborns)
• Opportunities for U.S. founders
• 1) VR (entertainment industry is skyrocketing)
• 2) Robotics (software and algorithm matters more than hardware)
• 3) Infrastructure (SaaS focuses on business logic/workflow)
• Copycat concerns: find something with a high barrier to entry that’s difficult to replicate
• Recommended books: Age of Ambition, The $10 Trillion Prize

8. Rob May, Talla:
Scaling Startup Funnels:
Moving Slow to Grow Fast
• Misconceptions:
• Product-market fit means you are ready to scale
• Just pour money into your existing lead sources
• Success = Channel x Message x Cost Effectiveness
• Key takeaways:
• Understand how acquisition scales before investing a lot of money
• Be thoughtful; bad experiments waste time and money
• Pair experiments with funnel stages
• Make sure you learn about both scalability and cost

9. Alexander Mimran, Minbox:
Guerilla Video for Startups
• How to spread videos: PR, email lists, word of mouth
• Send Files Freaking-Fast: Minbox vs. Dropbox:
• Tools: YouTube, Peggo, Adobe Premier
• Just tell a story
• Other tools: Product Hunt, SoundCloud, Dissolve (stock footage), VoiceBunny
• 5 tips:
• 1) Pick a style that fits your budget
• 2) Consider in-house production
• 3) A great soundtrack is essential
• 4) Tell a story
• 5) it’s about shock and awe

10. Adelyn Zhou, (Frm.) NextDoor:
Inside the Invite Economy: How Nextdoor,
Airbnb, & Uber Scaled Through Invitations
• Members x Invite Rate x Invites per Inviter x Accept Rate = New Invited Members
• New Invited Members x Invite Rates… viral loop!
• Why should users invite: share a killer feature (Snapchat), improve own experience
(Hinge), gain a reward (Gilt), altruistic (Nextdoor), by accident (Brewster)
• Move the invite to a prominent spot (top of email = increase conversion)
• Incentivize Invitations: free swag (Riot Games), free rides (Uber), extra services
(Wealthfront)
• Other tips: show invite status, allow bulk invites, streamline contact selections (top
friends), think beyond online (Lyft has posts to print), personalized landing pages
• Testing: experiment with subject lines, assets, reminders, value propositions
• Tools: Branch Metrics, Yozio, the MailChimp blog (data on things like email timing)

11. Josh Elman, Greylock Partners:
Launching Your Rocket Ship
off Someone Else's Platform
• Platforms are “free partnerships”; go where users already are: Google, Facebook, YouTube,
Whatsapp, Facebook Chat, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Slack
• Don’t expect platforms to be constant:
• 1) Users of the main product constantly want new experiences
• 2) Platform’s business model keep evolving (monetization can radically shift strategy)
• 3) Users risk stop trusting or using apps if the platform (bad behavior of apps)
• Build your product to be independent; Instagram grew from Facebook and Twitter
• The next platforms: FB Messenger, SnapChat, Pinterest, WeChat, Medium
• Platforms can still work for you…
• 1) Remember the value exchange (give the platform’s users better features, content)
• 2) They are accelerant; never get comfortable (take advantage of the moment at hand)
• 3) Only core users who come to your front door matter (don’t get confused with visitors)

12. Dan Arkind, JobScore:
5 Hiring Hacks for Founders
• Hack #1: Court don’t hunt (never give up on known, proven commodities)
• Say you are interested, make an offer, (if they say no) increase the offer, (if they say
no again) change the job, (and still saying no) offer again
• Hack #2: Pitch from end state and work backwards (mission status, pain, opps)
• Short timeline and explicit goals (product, usage, revenue)
• Hack #3: Tap into your founder super powers (be authentic)
• Bad (“looking for a great front end dev”); good (“rebuild our product as a one page
app, would love advice on Node, Angular, React, etc.)
• Hack #4: Build a referral machine; great people want to work with great people
• Ask employees to draw out the org chart from prior co and thumbs up/down people
• Hack #5: Hire like an investor and make bets
• Cliffs and vesting are your friends; 2% is fine since most people only stay for 2 years

13. Sahil Jain, AdStage:
Marketing Automation: Turning Strangers into
Customers and Customers into Evangelists
• Attract (Strangers —> Visitors): blog, keywords, social publishing on LinkedIn, Facebook
• Convert (Visitors —> Leads): forms, CTAs, landing pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter
• Close (Leads —> Customers): CRM, email, workflows via Facebook, Twitter
• Delight (Customers —> Evangelists): surveys, smart content, social monitoring

14. Jordan Stone, Huckle:
Building Super Fans Like Taylor Swift:
From a Guy Who Was on the Team in 2009
• Focus on the 1% of your customer base; super users (1%) not casuals (99%)
• Open a direct line of communication with your top customers: SMS, email, Twitter,
Facebook, push notifications
• Identify and empower top super users — your influencers — get them on payroll
• Entice the other super users: points system, leaderboards, “founding member”
• Offer rewards and experiences that one can’t buy (meet with Taylor Swift!)
• Announce and promote community rewards publicly; make the 99% feel FOMO
• i.e., GitHub has gold Octocat hoodie for top 100 contributors / month
• Have ownership over your entire community; own the data
• Example communities: Yelp, Product Hunt, Reddit, Magic: The Gathering
(forums), Starbucks (forums)

15. Regina Grogan, Bento:
How Bento Bootstrapped Its First 20k Customers
and How We Plan to Add a Zero to That
• Hack for contacting bloggers:
• 1) Research on what they write about
• 2) Customize your email (quality over quantity)
• What worked for Bento:
• Fliers and street teams were 3.5x more successful than Facebook Ads
• Employee referrals were 8.5x better than Facebook Ads
• What didn’t work for Bento: Reddit, direct mail, offline display
• Listen to the silent majorities: if 1 person reports a problem, likely 7 more who are pissed
• A customer service request is someone talking for the majority
• No script policy with customer service (no copy paste)
• Customers who interact with customer service were actually more likely to come back
• = Higher LTV!

16. Are you going “up and to the right”?
Can you pitch anything?
Do you have student loans?
We made this just for you:
WeFinance for Founders
Sebastian Fung (@sebfung)
sebastian@wefinance.co