How a Unique Marketplace Strategy and Deep User Insights Power a Successful Product Launch

Great. Um, well, uh, hopefully I can use some of my startup experience to talk about this. I've got both large, uh, company experience and small company experience, but, uh, really enjoyed the product launch experience associated with Lafly. So what Lafly was, was a video streaming service where we basically had a marketplace problem. So we not only have to sort of acquire customers to be able to listen to, um, you know, to enjoy and listen to the comedy on, on-demand comedy that we're streaming. But then we also need to get the inventory and there's a little bit of a chicken and the egg between the two because, uh, if you're a famous comedian like Kevin Hart, you're reluctant to give away the, uh, the, the, the content until you know that there's a base that's going to make it worth your while. So it's almost a bit of a marketplace because you have to sort of solve for both. The third, uh, spoke of the wheel which is, which may even more complicated then is you also have to figure out how to generate revenue. So, um, you know, throughout the entire time that we're building this product, we're grappling on whether or not this would be a free service backed by advertisement or whether or not it'd be a subscriber service. So, we were dealing with a lot of moving parts, uh, a lot of players in every single field. Uh, and a tremendous amount of ambiguity. Um, the good news is, is that, you know, I'm no stranger to ambiguity. So, uh, we had an opportunity to sort of dig in. So we actually spent a lot of time actually talking and, and getting to know all the key constituencies. We interviewed, uh, a number of comedy, comedy lovers to understand how they want to consume the product. We actually sat outside Starbucks and offered free coffees for anyone who would listen to us. Uh, we went, we then spent a lot of time with agents to really understand sort of what motivates, uh, a lot of these, uh, comedians to be able to release their product. Uh, and then, uh, we tested, you know, we used a very, very scientific approach to be able to test a number of different pricing models, uh, which included advertising, which included subscription model, and it also included tipping, which is one of the more recent, um, more, more cutting-edge, uh, tools that are out there in order to generate revenue. So we played a lot with it. The way that we were able to grapple this complexity was by being able to test, test in very small quantities. We had a, a very long beta so the customers can sign on and try the product. We had a couple of early adopters on the commute comedy side that gave us content for free and then we are actually able to test and play with 3 or 4 different pricing models. And during that process we found product-market fit which allowed us to be able to launch worldwide.

So when you think of the content partners, there's really 4 categories of content partners in the space, right? So the first one is labels. So a lot of labels, there's a lot of labels that own a lot of content and what we found luckily was a lot of the content was sitting on the shelf not earning any money, right? So as you know with content distribution they rotate out in and out content. For example, at Netflix, Netflix has about 50 comedy specials uh available at any given time. Well, 4000 comedy specials are created every single year. So, um, so they rotate in and out and through that content and that's why there was a lot sitting on the shelf and that attracted the large labels. The second category are the small publishers, these little tiny mom and pop shops that are actually working with emerging up and coming comedians. Um, and those, in those cases, they're eager to make money, they're eager to put their content out there and they're a lot easier to work with and in for fact, one of the 1st 5, the 1st 5 content providers that we actually signed were one of those sort of independent contractors. The third category are the comedians themselves. So a lot of really smart comedians like, so, for example, Jim Gaffigan, uh, actually now, um, owns all of his own content. So he's actually produces it himself, uh, and then sells the whole package or leases the whole package to guys like Amazon Prime or, or Hulu or Netflix. And then the third of the up and coming comedians. So, we actually had to create a go to market strategy to really appeal to each of them, and they're all very, very, very different.

Yeah, you know, uh, we, we, we, we probably didn't as much as we, we, we should have, right? I mean, uh, the first thing we did was we really went, uh, we, we did sort of like, you know, I played football and with football, it's sort of the push and pass sort of scenario where, where, you know, uh, you, you, you, you, you put a little effort into each one of the four and you see which one gives the greatest responses. That's what we did. And when we did that, we heard from those small individual publishers first. Um, and by doing that, then we knew that they were probably more receptive as a, as a content category. So then we focused all of our resources on that one initially. But in doing so, we still didn't ignore the rest, right? Like we knew that the large publishers like Warner Music were gonna, uh, Warner was gonna be huge because they have, for example, all the Richard Pryor, uh, you know, all the, uh, all the, uh, um, Jerry Seinfeld stuff, all the big properties that people would want to listen to. And so as a result, we had to continue a sustained effort for the larger ones even though we're quicker at going to market with some of the smaller uh distributors.

Yeah, so interestingly enough, the small publishers in terms of total content probably owned about 70% of the total content in terms of the most listened to or most watched content, it was probably more like 25 to 30%. So, um, a lot, uh, a lot of times they'll, they'll actually capture people who are, are up and comers or, or not yet made it. Um, but every once in a while, they'll have a real gem in there. So, for example, one publisher we worked with actually, uh, owned the first recording of Dave Chappelle. So all of a sudden now you've got like his early work, um, which was very, very appealing, but you know, a Dave Chappelle special on Netflix will get 100 times the views of any average independent artist. Sure,

OK, yeah, and then that's why we had this kind of, uh, we, we had to prove ourselves with the small stuff but we really had to go after those large distributors no matter what.

Uh, well, you know, I, I, I think, uh, so we, we, we, we used the series, so it was all about customer acquisition and NDAU, right? So, could we in fact efficiently acquire a customer and over a thirty-day period, how many of them continue to, to listen to the product, watch the product. So we focused on key measurements like CAC, um, onboarding percentage, uh, listen time. Uh, retention, return, referrals, quick ratio and K factor, those types of things. And we measured, you know, so we focused on, you know, 10 primary measurements to determine sort of the overall health of the acquisition plan and the overall health of the of the, of the, and the overall viability of the product itself.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think, uh, so we were relatively small, we only had about 10 employees, so it's a little bit different than sort of my situation now where a team of 50, but, um, you know, we had two scenarios like that. So, uh, one scenario was that, and, and, and I'll also remind you that with startups you take what you get sometimes, right? I totally get it. Are you gonna work for free? Great, you're hired, um, and so we had two particular individuals which were interesting. The first individual, um, was, uh, one of my co-founders who was an engineer, and he actually was the very first engineer I recruited on. Um, and, and he ended up getting writer's block or programming block in the middle of, of it and then just couldn't write code anymore. Um, but, um, what was really amazing about it is his leadership was so fantastic. He actually found our next five developers. Um, he still provided great leadership, great encouragement, great product direction even though he had a writer's block. And what I found was, was that the, the development team was so supportive around him that they actually took up the slack without any complaint. Um, which, you know, which was really amazing to me that that happened. So everyone knew he had writer's block or programmer's block, uh, but, but everyone was able to rise to the occasion without complaint to really sort of do it because he was such a, a, a, uh, uh, an important part of the culture of the company, and I think that was fantastic.

Yeah, for this particular scenario, um, you know, we, we had, we had put together a, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, a a mile, a milestone, you know, we, we're using the agile method and we had sprints and we put together sort of a Gantt chart of what we're trying to deliver from a future basis on, uh, based on the calendar year, and he just kept missing his milestones. So, yeah, you know, features were getting dropped, uh, timing was getting delayed and so this was a point where, you know, after this happened a few times you really had to start, I had to start really digging in to figure out the why behind it. You know, was, was the product not specified correctly? Um, did they not have the right tools or environment to be able to be successful or was there something else? And then ultimately that's how we found that, that his code input was much lower than, than everyone else's code input.