Andy McCune: How Products Go Viral

The most successful companies these days aren’t creating content, they’re curating it.

Founders & startups fail when they try to solve problems they’re not connected to or haven’t personally experienced.

For a product to be viral, the founder has to:

• Make it so great that it advertises itself.
• Embed growth within it.

If you work really hard at something, you can achieve great things. New York embodies that for sure. Everyone here is dreaming, everyone here is doing. You pull anyone over on the street and they’ll tell you what they’re excited about and what they’re moving towards.

At the end of the day, if someone really has a vision and they’re serious about it, I think you have to be in the middle of everything to make it work. In places like New York, San Francisco, and LA… you’re just surrounded by all of these like-minded people.

If you have an idea: Take action, make something, work hard, and watch what happens.

So many of the brilliant, creative minds of our generation came from Tumblr. Creative directors at massive companies, and people running their own agencies, all recognize themselves as Tumblr kids.

• Tumblr is all about curating other people’s content, as opposed to creating your own (and there aren’t many social platforms out there that encourage this)
• Putting out your own content can sometimes be intimidating, while simply sharing someone else’s is much easier
• In a way, content curation empowers those who aren’t creating to still be creative

If you decide to build a startup but can’t relate to the problem, you’ll constantly be spending time on market research. But, if you can relate to the problem, YOU ARE the market research (and the customer).

Often, your intuition can tell you things that would be impossible to measure with data

When looking for a co-founder, find someone who has the skills that you lack.

A framework for assessing ideas:

If you and your co-founder both agree on an idea, one of you should still play devil’s advocate (even if you’re a solo founder, try coming up with several reasons why the idea might, in fact, be a bad one).

Before I even present an idea, I have run it through the wash… and I try to kill it. And if that idea is still with me a few days after, it’s probably time to raise it.

You don’t have to be an engineer anymore to build a software company. You just have to know how to give explicit details and draw a sketch of what you want – then, you can hire someone to build it.

However, one of the best skills you can learn is coding. Coding and petroleum engineering jobs will be some of the last to be automated by AI.

You don’t have to be completely original to succeed in life:

• Google built off of other existing search engines.
• Wikipedia wasn’t the first online encyclopedia.
• Bitcoin was far from the first cryptocurrency.