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How Mattermark Acquired Early Users – Danielle Morrill speaks at Hustle Con 2016

From My First Million · Published Jul 6, 2016 · Watch on YouTube

TL;DR

Danielle Morrill started Mattermark after shutting down Referrally, building an audience by writing daily blog posts that analyzed startup data, pissing off people and validating demand. A TechCrunch article about quantitative venture capital gave them a launch opportunity; they built a simple MySQL/JS prototype in a weekend, got early VC customers by selling to them directly, priced at $499/month

Key insights

  • Writing daily blog posts using public data (Crunchbase) and getting negative reactions from the industry validated that they had something worth building.
  • They had zero VC relationships or insider knowledge; they learned venture capital by sitting down with associates and asking what was hard about their jobs.
  • The first product was an ugly single-user database (MySQL + JavaScript, HTTP auth) – no user system, no marketing page.

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