Tactic
Reverse-engineer companies to fast-forward experience
Shaan's research stack for studying companies: Wayback Machine for old homepages, TechCrunch sorted to a company's earliest mention, and Twitter advanced search to surface a person's most-liked old posts. The goal is to download data points fast because earning experience the slow way takes decades.
“And it's not that you can copy it, but it's just data points. It's a way to fast forward experience because experience the hard way is slow. It takes like decades to get good at things and to learn and to like, figure out what's normal, what's not, what's fast, what's slow, what's good, what's bad. And a better way to do it is to like download a whole bunch of data points quickly.”
Steal thisUse Wayback Machine, earliest-TechCrunch-mention, and Twitter advanced search to study how winners evolved and compress decades of experience.
Story
Shaan let TechCrunch overstate his exit at $25M
Shaan's company was acquired (by Twitch/Amazon) and TechCrunch published a $25M price that was actually a bit higher than the real number. When asked to confirm, Shaan declined to correct the inflated, lazily-reported figure rather than risk trouble disclosing the real terms.
“And they said we got bought for $25 million. And it was actually a little less than that. And so they reached out to Twitch or Amazon. Sean for comment and they were like, they don't comment. So they didn't say anything. And they asked me and I was like, hey, if you were lazy enough where you just printed this wrong number that's higher than the real number, I'm also not going to correct you.”
Take
Boring beats sexy: TechCrunch hype invites competition
Kukoff makes the case for boring businesses: the more press and TechCrunch attention you get, the more competitors fight for your market. Staying under the radar, like Veeva, lets you dominate a huge market quietly.
“And by the way, boring is good. The more like sexy, big, like press and TechCrunch stuff you get, the more competition you have for that slice of your market. If you are boring, under the radar, like Veeva, great example, right? No one knows who they are. Multibillion-dollar company that only raised one round of funding in a huge, like, big whale hunting market.”
Steal thisPick a boring, under-the-radar market so you face less hype-driven competition.
Idea
Build a better paywall: publishers all build their own
Existing paywall software is so bad that NYT, WSJ, The Economist and Business of Fashion all built their own from scratch, and TechCrunch reportedly spends six figures in software fees on a vendor. Sam says he'd pay $5,000/month for a good web-based paywall product (Substack only does newsletters).
“Oh my God. It's so like, I will give someone right now $5,000 a month if they made this to try to, to try to start this.”
Steal thisBuild a web-based paywall product for publishers; demand is desperate enough that customers will pre-commit thousands per month.
Tactic
Use press as a tool by helping journalists do their job
Press rarely drives sustainable users, but it worked for Product Hunt because TechCrunch readers were exactly Product Hunt's audience. Hoover fed journalists like Josh Constine cool new products, which earned backlinks and goodwill—being helpful kept Product Hunt top of mind.
“every now and then I would email someone at, let's say, Josh Constine at TechCrunch and say, hey, Josh, I know you're like really interested in consumer social. Here's this new app that we found through Product Hunt. It's really cool. And for me, it was hopefully it was helpful. In some cases they're like, oh, cool, Ryan, you know, whatever. In other cases they're like, oh, that's really cool. Can you introduce me to the founder?”
Steal thisFeed journalists genuinely useful leads in their beat; the backlinks and goodwill follow naturally.