Neeraj Paliwal’s Post

The Rise of Reddit: Lessons for Tech Startups 🚀 Reddit's move to seek a $6.4 billion valuation in its US IPO is a testament to the power of community-driven platforms in today's market. As reported by Reuters, this valuation reflects the growing influence of such platforms in the tech industry. For small businesses and startups, this presents an invaluable lesson: the significance of community engagement and user-driven content. Here’s what startups can learn from Reddit’s journey: 1. User-Centric Approach: Prioritize user experience and feedback in your product development. 2. Community Engagement: Foster a community around your product or service. It can be a powerful tool for growth and innovation. 3. Adaptability: Be ready to pivot and adapt based on user insights and market trends. In the fast-evolving tech landscape, these principles could be crucial in determining the success of your venture. What strategies do you use to engage with your community? #RedditIPO #StartupStrategy #CommunityBuilding #UserExperience Read more about Reddit’s IPO: https://lnkd.in/et_eDX-t

Reddit, now one of the world’s largest online communities, had humble beginnings. In its first few weeks, founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman submitted 99% of posts themselves, using different usernames to create engagement. This strategy helped Reddit simulate activity and attract real users, showing how early-stage startups often require creative, hands-on tactics to grow. Today, Reddit boasts over 1.7 billion monthly visitors and countless communities. The takeaway? Early success often involves unconventional methods. Founders must focus on building momentum and creating value, even if it means faking it until they make it. #reddit #entrepreneur #marketing #tactics

The launch day of Instagram didn’t go as planned! 🚀 Just as the big moment arrived, the servers crashed, leaving the team scrambling to bring it back online. In a moment of chaos, they discovered they had created something bigger than expected. IG founder Kevin Systrom’s story serves as a reminder of the unpredictable challenges in startup life and the resilience needed to adapt on the fly. #StartupStory #TechEntrepreneurship #InstagramLaunch #InnovationJourney #LinkedInLearning

I love studying great founders before they were successful. Two of those that I wanted to share the origins of are Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the co-founders of Reddit, Inc. Before they were founders, they were great entrepreneurs. In his blog post (linked in comments), Paul Graham talks about the origins of Reddit, and how a chance encounter led to the creation of Y Combinator. Here are some of the lessons from their journey: 1. Go the extra mile (or 600): - The founders travelled over 600 miles to attend a small talk from Paul. - Since they’d come so far, he took a meeting with them. 2. Timing matters: - Their initial pitch wasn't Reddit. It was an idea to order fast food from your mobile phone. Sounds familiar! - But this was before smartphones. Great idea, wrong time. 3. It’s personal: - Paul didn’t like the idea but liked the founders. - He was inspired by the duo to start a fund for early-stage startups, and encouraged them to apply. 4. Failure happens: - Their application was rejected, and they got on the train home. 5. Trust your gut: - Paul felt bad about rejecting the people that led to the creation the fund. - He thought they invested in ideas, but what if they invested in founders? 6. Adapt or die: - On the train home, they got a call from Paul saying he liked them, just not their idea. - He’d fund them if they’d work on something else. - They got off at the next stop and got the first train back. 7. Move Fast: - By the end of the day, they were committed to working on what’s now called Reddit. - They launched the product 3 weeks later. 8. Keep Going: - Almost 20 years later, Reddit IPO’d at a valuation of $6.4 billion. Sometimes things don’t go as planned and that’s okay, the path may lead to Reddit. But how did they fake their way to success? → I'll tell you this and 2 bonus insights in the comments below ⤵️ PS: Liked the post? This is new for me, so let me know if you want to see more.

We get asked a lot about why we shut down Psychic, the previous iteration of our startup, after 8 months of work. From the outside it looked like things were going well. We were an open source company with 3000 Github stars just a couple months after launching. We had a small but rapidly growing community, and VCs were reaching out to us daily. We had even started charging our customers, and our MRR was doubling MoM. But we never had conviction in the idea. This expressed itself in two ways: - We couldn't agree on a north start metric. Was it revenue? Was it open source adoption? We didn't know, because we had no idea who our ICP was. - We were selling SaaS, but spending about 5 hours per week on custom development for each customer. We were afraid if we didn't do the heavy lifting, they wouldn't use it. This turned out to be true. Our biggest takeaway is that while engagement and hype are correlated with product market fit, it does not cause it. People thought Psychic was "cool", but it wasn't solving a real problem.

Welcome to the greatest hack of our time. You're going to go crazy. (Plus, it's free.) We're launching Stik beta on June 15th. Reserve your username in stik.world If you dare, you’re welcome. You’re in. If you don’t dare, okay too. You can always go back to Facebook. P.S. Starting June 15th, you can only access STIK if you’ve reserved your username or if you’ve been invited. If none of the reserved username holders invite you, you’ll have to join a waiting list. You know what you have to do to avoid being left out. #changetheworld #hackeverything #producthacking #startup #new #wearehiring

Reddit. You know the name, you've used the site. It's a ~$10B company, with nearly $1B in revenue. Their 1B+ monthly active users are so powerful they can move markets. This is the story of how it all began. On this episode, we interview Chris Slowe, Reddit, Inc.'s current CTO and Founding Engineer. Chris was in YC's first-ever batch with Steve and Alexis. He was their roommate. When Chris's own startup failed, he moved over and joined them to build Reddit. This was almost 20 years ago, in 2005. It only took them a year to hit 1 million monthly active users. But it took them well over 5 years to hit $1M in revenue. Here's the story of how they hit product-market fit and built the world's most powerful online community. Listen to the full episode here:

My takeaway from Paul Graham's letter about the Reddit IPO: As Reddit has succesdfully made its way to an IPO, it's an opportune time to reflect on the platform's standout qualities from the outset. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, recently published a letter on the YC website that offers valuable insights into Reddit's early days. Here's my take on what made Reddit exceptional: 1) Strong Characteristics: The personal traits of the founders played a crucial role. Their genuine curiosity and proactive approach led them to engage with Paul Graham, studying his work and coding language. This personal connection paved the way for their initial meeting at Harvard and ultimately led to the opportunity to build Reddit, despite their initial idea being rejected. 2) Founders' Vision: Under Paul Graham's guidance, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian made a pivotal shift from their initial business model of food ordering via text messages. This bold move gave birth to a platform that would ultimately revolutionize the social media landscape. 3) Leveraging Existing Concepts: Reddit's original business model, inspired by a side feature of Delicious, demonstrates how focusing on a singular, often overlooked function can lead to monumental success. 4) Lean Startup: The first version of Reddit was launched just three weeks after Paul Graham's pivot request, with only a few hundred lines of code. This highlights that the value of a business is not measured by the time spent on development but by the execution of a robust, scalable idea. Reddit's journey from a startup to a publicly listed company is a testament to the enduring vision, adaptability, and unique characteristics of its founders who began with a simple yet powerful idea. Every startup has its own journey, but Reddit's tale stands out as exceptionally distinctive. It encapsulates everything an early-stage startup embodies and what its founders ought to do. Ultimately, it all circles back to a foundational principle: identify a problem and solve it. Set aside personal desires, disregard the costs, and ignore all other distractions. Focus solely on the notion, "Wouldn't it be cool if we had xyz?" and bring it to life with swift action. Read Paul Graham’s full post here. If you're a startup founder, it will be really worth reading. https://lnkd.in/gpW2kUDF

@ All cofounders: keep this in mind the next time you’re with your cofounder. If you haven’t seen my recent posts about Cherrytree, here's a look behind the scenes. My own cofounder journey taught me a ton about cofounder relationships - I even wrote a book about it. Y'all have been asking me for cofounder advice ever since. You know how important it is. A good cofoundership led to Instagram. A bad one nearly killed Facebook. I started with a content library, then created a course. But after talking with many of you, I realized that sending actionable advice to you directly is more useful than an info dump existing on the internet. Thus Cherrytree was born. It's a weekly newsletter with insights on everything cofounder-related. So far we’ve teamed up with Startup Grind and attracted global readers from Y Combinator, Techstars, buildspace, the University of Washington and more. Two-thirds of startups die because of cofounder conflicts. We want to help you beat the odds. Join the 10k new subscribers we're aiming to reach this year. Check out https://cherrytree.app

Yesterday I finished building an entire face-swap app by myself while running Hooked. Why? Because my team needed to see me code again. A few months back, I noticed something was off: • Team was clocking 10-14 hour days • I was mostly in strategy meetings • There was this unspoken "Yash just asks for changes" vibe Truth is, I'd fallen into the "delegate everything" trap. As founders, we're told to: • Focus on high-level decisions • Delegate day-to-day work • Spend time on strategy But here's what they don't tell you: Your team needs to see you in the trenches. So I made 3 changes: 1. Started joining daily standups 2. Got hands-on with development 3. Built a face-swap app from scratch Result? The energy shifted. That founder-team disconnect? Gone. Reminds me of that Silicon Valley scene where Richard codes for 4 days straight to prove a point to his team. Sometimes the best way to lead isn't from the top. It's from the keyboard. #startups #leadership #founderlife #buildinpublic P.S. Watch that Silicon Valley episode if you haven't. Sometimes TV gets startup life scary right