If You Read Hacker News, You Should Watch the Techstars TV Show
A year ago, when this website was still in the planning stages, I was compiling a list of potential essay ideas. One of them was set to be “Why Y Combinator and Techstars Would Make Great Reality TV Shows”. I don’t always admit it readily, but I am a fan of certain reality tv shows, particularly Top Chef. Unlike most reality programming, shows like Top Chef and Project Runway take individuals with actual talent and showcase that talent. The contests are merit-based, so it’s fun to pick your favorite players and root for them all season long.
Years ago, while learning about YCombinator, it became clear to me that all the elements that made a successful reality show were present in the YC process including:
- the drama of interview day, the anguish of rejected teams and the utter joy of accepted teams
- the history of startups from previous batches, big exits and quiet closings
- the occasional interlude of YC alumni milestones (Imagine a startup from the current batch clicking on TechCrunch and seeing “AirBNB just raised $100 million on a $1 billion valuation”)
- the weekly dinners
- the dramatic pivots
- the preparation for, and excitement of, demo day
- the pressure and the potential
All of these factors would make a show worth watching (for me anyway), and on top of that, the exposure could be hugely beneficial to the startups themselves
In 2009 I started following the 5 minute videos posted weekly on Techstars.tv. These guys were doing it right: nice editing, great music, a high quality production all around. It kept me coming back every week, and it made me even more sure this idea would be a great tv show.
Clearly, I’m a little late. The Techstars reality show launched two weeks ago and the third episode airs tonight at 9PM ET on Bloomberg.
So why should you watch it? Well, many of the reasons are in the bulleted list above, especially the pressure and the potential. But you should also check it out for the following reasons…
Everything Seems Eerily Familiar… In a Good way
Watching Top Chef, it took me a while to get used to some of the jargon, and when a celebrity chef is introduced I never recognize the name or the face. Techstars is the exact opposite.
One of the first founders they introduce is Jason Baptiste of Onswipe. Hmmm, that name sounds familiar. Wait a minute, is that jasonlbaptiste, the prolific HN commenter? Ah, indeed it is.
And what’s his company? Onswipe? It’s goal is to “make your publication look great on tablet web browsers”. Huh, that’s the exact idea my friend, whose graduate thesis is about designing long form publishing for tablets, was just talking about.
While I never recognized a celebrity restraunteur from Top Chef, it seems like every mentor on Techstars is also a prolific tech blogger. Hey, isn’t that Fred Wilson? And isn’t that Gary Vaynerchuk? Why yes, yes it is.
Heck, even David Cohen was wearing my sweater. I’ve never seen anyone with that sweater!
Companies in the Midst of Customer Development
“So we’re trying to figure out what I call Product/Market Fit.”
- Melanie from To Vie For
As I was watching the show, I couldn’t help but constantly think back to Steve Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. In it, Blank argues that startups and new projects within existing companies should start with Customer Development instead of Product Development. When I first read it, I felt a little giddy with excitement. Maybe it was the self-published feel of the book, what with its terrible cover art (no offense, Mr. Blank), but it was like I had some kind of secret manual. Maybe everyone in the tech startup world had heard of it, but not too many in my part of Ohio had.
The Techstars show is exciting because these companies in the middle of the Customer Development process, and we get to watch how they navigate it. Based on the fact that Techstars has to turn away thousands of applicants, I’m a bit surprised more of the companies are not further along in the Customer Discovery phase.
Listening to the startups talking about their businesses and the language they use, you can sense that each team is thinking consciously about where they are in the Customer Development process. When I heard Melanie of To Vie For utter the phrase “So we’re trying to figure out what I call Product/Market Fit”, I couldn’t help but think, yeah, you know who else likes to call it that? People like Steve Blank and Marc Andreessen who use it constantly in their writings. But give her credit because she was literally “getting out of the building” and talking to potential customers, another element of the Steve Blank mantra.
In fact, the influence of Steve Blank is so thorough, the man himself appears on screen as part of a demo for another startup, SocratED.
This Show Was Made For You
Ultimately, we as readers of HN represent the ideal target market for BloombergTV. They have made this show for people with our specific set of interests, and I’m finding it very interesting indeed.
I can’t wait to hear what advice Fred Wilson and the other mentors dole out.
I can’t wait to see what startup “wins” the next 10:10 meeting. (Once a week, Techstars holds a meeting at 10:10 pm where all the founders gather and where at least some Jack Daniels and Heineken get involved. The founders present, a winner is decided, and a special prize is awarded. On episode 2, that special prize was a visit to one of the technical advisors on Spielberg’s Minority Report.)
And I can’t wait to see what some of these really smart companies, like Wiji, a company who is trying to customize outdoor advertising based on the viewer, are able to produce. I suppose I could find out just by Googling them now, but I’d hate to ruin the suspense.
I hope you tune in too.
A Remarkably Specific List: Companies Inspired by the Activities of Online Communities
This remarkably specific list contains several companies whose founders were smart enough to notice the activities of a certain online community and recognize the potential for a new business. Sometimes the most difficult part of entrepreneurship is recognizing a need when you see one, and all of these founders were able to recognize a very specific one.
This list is definitely not comprehensive. There are probably hundreds of successful businesses that have started this way, and this list is merely a start to the conversation.
In no particular order:
- Threadless. The first chapter of Jake Nickell’s book on the founding of Threadless is called “The Accidental Business”. In it, he explains how he was part of a small online design scene, experimenting with computers, code, and art. He posted often on the forums on dreamless.org. One day, the New Media Underground Festival held a competition on the boards to design a t-shirt for the fest. Jake won the contest, and had an idea. In an IM conversation, he told his friend Jacob DeHart about the idea: start an ongoing competition for t-shirt designers where the best designs would be printed and available for sale. The first competition was posted on the Dreamless forums, and it quickly evolved into an independent business. Threadless was founded in 2000. The term “crowdsourcing” wouldn’t even be coined until six years later.
- DailyBooth. Jon Wheatley, one of the founders of DailyBooth, tells the fascinating history behind the startup in one long, excellent blog post. In it, he details his specific inspiration for the site. Back in 2007, the internet became fascinated by a series of videos uploaded to YouTube in which a person will take a single photograph of themselves every day for several years. They edit the photos together into a video, add some cool music, and the end result is a visual evolution of a single identity. The most famous example of this is probably Noah. Jon thinks these videos are great, and he thinks more people would want to jump on this trend, if only they had a tool to ease the process. DailyBooth is born. The main idea behind DailyBooth remains the same, but with the parallel success of Twitter, it is now more popularly described as Twitter with images instead of 140 characters, rather than a tool to collect pictures and combine them into a video. As a sidenote, online communities were particularly important to the founding of DailyBooth, as that is where the founders first met.
- Flippa and 99Designs. Sitepoint launched in 1999, and its content has become an important resource for web designers and developers. The Sitepoint forums are humming with activity. It is especially interesting to see how closely the founders of Sitepoint have monitored their forums, and how quickly they can recognize a business opportunity when they see one. When they noticed that their users were downloading and printing their content, they began publishing books. When they noticed that people were using their forums to buy and sell websites and domains, they set up Sitepoint Marketplace, which was eventually spun off as Flippa.com. The story of 99designs begins much the same way as Threadless. The Sitepoint forum users were throwing impromptu competitions to see who was the best logo designer. Someone would create a fake project, 20 or 30 designers would enter, and a winner would be crowned. This went on for a while until someone who actually need a real logo offered to create a competition, and pay the winner $100. Sitepoint started charging users $20 to post a project in the forums, and in 2007, they spun that section off as 99Designs. Earlier this year, 99Designs announced the first outside investment in any of the Sitepoint properties, for $35 million.
- Imgur. Two and a half years ago MrGrim was a reddit user like any other. Reddit sends massive amounts of traffic across usually to simple, funny pictures. MrGrim and the rest of the community were tired of photobucket and imageshack. They were tired of bandwidth limits and being forced to compress their files. So MrGrim built a solution: an image host that required none of those restrictions while adding simple things like crop, resize, and rotate. He posted about his new hosting service, Imgur, and that post went on to win reddit’s Best Submission of the Year 2009. In 2011, reddit is even more popular and it seems like almost every single image post on links to Imgur. As of this writing, Imgur is getting 6,320,064,355 image views per month.
Deep Thoughts on the Print-on-Demand Industry
An Introduction
We can split the apparel print-on-demand industry into two groups: those companies that allow users to create and sell custom apparel from a storefront, and those who don’t. In the first group, we have Cafe Press, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Printfection, Skreened, and a few more. In the second group, we have CustomInk, Customized Girl, Blue Cotton, and many, many more.
All of these companies have one thing in common: they take advantage of the fundamental principles of the long tail. Because they don’t print anything until it is ordered, and because they allow customers to create whatever design they like, their inventory of designs is digital, which means it is essentially infinite. The only physical inventory they need to worry about is the blank apparel, but even that can be reduced to almost nothing by using just-in-time inventory, like we do at Customized Girl.
What Cafe Press and Zazzle Do Well
Cafe Press and Zazzle have done an extraordinary job of recruiting massive armies of storefront owners. Each of these storefront owners bring in tons of sales to their individual stores, but perhaps more importantly, they bring in links. If you were to build a storefront on Zazzle, you would be bombarded with reminders and tools to encourage you to constantly link back to your storefront. This results in excellent organic search rankings. If you’re on Google, and you search “any-word-you-can-think-of” followed by the word “shirt”, Zazzle will almost surely show up as the first or second organic link.
Zazzle, in particular, has also done a great job of cultivating partnerships with major brands such as Disney, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and more. These branded t-shirts represent the “head” of the long tail.
My absolute favorite aspect of Zazzle’s business model is their ability to provide their partners with incredibly specific and powerful data about their own customers. For example, let’s say it’s the year 2006 and Disney is about to release a new Pixar movie, Cars. They’ve been promoting the heck out of it with trailers and TV commercials, and because they’re really smart, they’ve had a Cars Zazzle Store open for weeks. No Cars t-shirts have been printed yet, because Zazzle prints everything on demand. Soon, Zazzle is able to report back to Disney: Lightning McQueen t-shirts are the best sellers in New York and Los Angeles. Mater t-shirts are the best sellers in Texas and Ohio. Disney can take this information and use it to direct inventory to their brick and mortar stores all around the country. (Just to be clear, I completely made up that data. I’m not even sure Zazzle get’s that specific, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t.)
Taking this one step further, imagine it’s your job at Zazzle to recruit new partnerships. How incredible would it be to walk in a room and say “Would you like to have everything you need to know regarding exactly how much inventory you need and where it needs to go?”. Seems like a pretty easy pitch.
What Cafe Press and Zazzle Don’t Do Well
Cafe Press and Zazzle claim they sell “custom apparel”, and while that is technically true (you can upload a design to blank items), they don’t sell “customizable apparel”. They have millions of designs in their shops, but almost all of them were uploaded by users creating designs in Photoshop or Illustrator. If you wanted to find a bachelorette t-shirt design that you could customize quickly and easily by adding your own name, you’d find it rather difficult at Cafe Press or Zazzle. If you did find a design you liked, but you wanted to change the colors, or the font, or the text, well… forget it.
That’s where companies like Customized Girl and Bridal Party Tees come in (and to a lesser extent, Custom Ink which offers a somewhat limited variety of designs you can customize) (also, if it is not obvious, I work for eRetailing, the company that owns Customized Girl and Bridal Party Tees, so this post is not without bias).
At Customized Girl, every design you see was created from scratch in our design center. There are no uploaded images. Every piece of art you see is from our massive library. This means you can customize the design’s colors, scale it up and down, edit all of the text, change fonts, swap out the item, and personalize it pretty much every conceivable way.
The Future
Cafe Press and Zazzle have fantastic business models because they’ve been able to harness the true power of the internet. If Zazzle had wanted, it could have bought a bunch of direct-to-garment digital printers and then built powerful art and marketing departments to fill up their shop with high quality designs. But they realized that if they created a platform, and opened it up to anyone, then they would be able to grow exponentially. Now their users are able to create a storefront and sell fully designed t-shirts from their bedroom. The user never has to buy inventory, or print anything, or even deal with customer service.
But the next step has yet to be taken. The next step is to take the Zazzle model, and instead of creating static t-shirt stores, the users can create another Zazzle, or at least another Bridal Party Tees. I don’t think this would be possible with the current Zazzle structure and design center, but if there was another platform, a platform with an incredibly easy-to-use design center, and a storefront that made it obvious each design was meant to be fully customized, then maybe… maybe users could build fully fledged custom apparel businesses. They could sell softball team uniforms, family reunion shirts, and any other item that might benefit from customization. There are a lot of different ways this platform could become a reality, and at eRetailing, we’re thinking hard about each of them…