Founders Peter Clark and Brendan Weitz of Journey share how they got their first 100 users
👋 Hey! Welcome to the Traction Newsletter.
Join hundreds of founders, investors, and operators learn how founding teams get their earliest startup traction.
Today we’re joined by Journey co-founders Peter Clark and Brendan Weitz who went through Y Combinator’s W21 batch and have raised a seed round which they’re announcing soon.
I remember seeing Journey at the beginning of 2021 and I connected with Peter. I thought they had an incredible product and I couldn’t wait to try it out for fundraising or have our sales teams give it a go.
TL;DR
Founders underestimate their own feedback
Recruit your friends to become early users
33% / 33% / 33% (read on for deets)
Rely on product-led growth
Consider using a waitlist
Let’s get into it.
👨🏼💻 Who are you and what have you been building?
Hey, we’re Peter and Brendan – we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the intersection of product design and growth.
We’re building Journey, a tool that helps people tell stories over the internet more effectively than presentations or videos.
You can collect all sorts of content (slides, memos, videos, embeds like a Typeform) in one delightful Journey.
The outcomes we're trying to drive with better storytelling are geared around B2B.
More sales, more investment, faster onboarding, and overall a better experience for both sides of the equation (buyers and sellers, investors and founders, customers and success managers, etc).
📈 How far along was Journey when you started seeing initial signs of traction?
We’re still a pre-product market fit company but we built our company around a simple hypothesis: when you receive a Journey you should be so impressed that you want to use the product yourself.
We had a few prototypes of Journey and by about month 4 we had enough glimmers of this hypothesis working.
Specifically: Users were getting Journeys and figuring out ways to get invites that we felt were directionally correct.
🥳 How did you get your first 100 users?
We seeded the first ~100 users with friends in our network like founders and sales/bd people who we'd worked with at previous companies.
And then we relied on product-led-growth of the aforementioned hypothesis to drive new signups.
We actually do almost zero customer acquisition, allowing us to live or die by our initial hypothesis.
🕺 When did you know you were onto something?
From Peter:
33% of my feeling about knowing if we are onto something is how I feel when I use Journey (both as a creator and as a recipient).
33% is from metrics (are we growing).
33% is from product feedback (in the form of net-promoter-score, amongst other avenues).
💡 Did you have an “aha!” moment? If so, what was it?
We started getting texts from friends about them randomly receiving a Journey – so that was probably when it clicked.
🙊 What do you think are common misunderstandings and misperceptions about getting early traction?
Founders should be comfortable having very low usage numbers for a long time.
You really really really want to feel good about your product and see a few users really using your product.
A lot of people advise the latter (“make sure people love your product! Blah blah.”) but that only works if you’re truly comfortable just sitting on a few users making them delighted.
🧪 Walk us through an early experiment.
Founders underestimate their own feedback.
Make a product that solves a problem for you and record yourself using the product.
Watch that video a bunch and see if it makes sense.
Send the video to others. It’s really powerful seeing yourself (or anyone) use your product and narrating what they’re trying to do.
We also mainly collect feedback through a set cadence of NPS surveys (stolen from Superhuman).
We also have a "request a feature" button and a "contact the CEO" button in the web app.
All of this is pinged to Slack for the company to see in real time.
In general, customer delight is one of our core values so we aim to be always available through every channel. Peter's cell phone is even on the site :)
Tactical tips
Video analyses
NPS surveys like Superhuman
User inputs get immediately sent to Slack
🎲 How much did luck play a role in that early traction?
We got lucky by raising a solid pre-seed round and being able to have cash in the bank to sit and iterate for 3-6 months without feeling weird about it.
🤷🏼♂️ What would you do differently?
We’d staff up on design faster and move slower.
We had about a dozen engaged and happy users and began really loosening the kite string in terms of letting people use the product.
It added a lot of noise and I think it’d have been better to have a conscious process about adding people to the product, like a weekly call where we review the waitlist and debate if someone is ready to use the product yet.
We should have frontloaded critical thought about if they’re going to succeed.
🎯 What advice would you give to founders looking to get their startups off the ground?
So many startups nowadays are just plain great products.
You need to be intellectually honest with yourself about if you’re building a truly great product.
The criteria is simple: have a proposition that is 10x superior to alternatives and then wrap that in a great product experience.
If you can’t tell this, work on developing that muscle yourself (or send us a login and we’ll tell you!).
The days of janky MVPs are over – the ones you hear about that get crazy traction are selection bias outliers.
✌🏼 Thanks for reading!
You can find Peter on Twitter @plc and Brendan on Linkedin - and make sure to sign up for Journey at journey.io.
If you’re new to Traction, check out the last two issues: Steve from Builder and Brandon at Violet.
If you enjoyed this, please share it with someone you know - thanks!
Thanks for reading :)