{"id":44661,"date":"2023-10-20T15:37:30","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/reddit-founder-alexis-ohanian-on-the-biggest-mistake-startup-founders-make-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:37:30","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:37:30","slug":"reddit-founder-alexis-ohanian-on-the-biggest-mistake-startup-founders-make-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/reddit-founder-alexis-ohanian-on-the-biggest-mistake-startup-founders-make-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian on the biggest mistake startup founders make – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Startup founders too often focus on superficial elements of running a business instead of what matters, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian says.<\/p>\n

Dubbing itself the \u201cfront page of the internet\u201d Reddit is the 25th most visited website in the world and was valued at $US500 million in 2014.<\/p>\n

During an AMA hosted by Product Hunt, the founder and tech investor revealed the most common mistake he says first-time founders make.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst-time founders often delude themselves with doing things that \u2018feel\u2019 like doing a startup but aren\u2019t actually what matters: writing code and getting users,\u201d Ohanian says.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause there\u2019s no syllabus to entrepreneurship, a lot of students who thrived in schools have problems adapting to a world where you don\u2019t get clear feedback from the market about how well you\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn school if you get a B on your paper you can figure out why, and adapt your behaviour to get an A for the class at the end. In business if you\u2019re not showing growth or repeat use it could be for an infinite number of reasons that aren\u2019t clear \u2013 you just have to keep testing your hypotheses.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question and answer sessions also included a number of insight takeaways on the growth of Reddit, building a dedicated community and why it pays to be a SaaS startup.<\/p>\n

Building reddit<\/h3>\n

Reddit was launched in 2005 long before promoting a new platform was a breeze on social media.<\/p>\n

Ohanian says the extent of the startup\u2019s marketing was email pitches to bloggers, and submitted a whole lot of links themselves to solve the chicken and the egg problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause we weren\u2019t going to attract anyone to stick around with an empty Reddit frontpage, Steve [Huffman, co-founder] and I submitted links for the first month or so under different usernames,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis helped new users understand that Reddit wasn\u2019t some kind of stripped down blog Steve and I ran, but a new kind of community platform.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur first surge of traffic that didn\u2019t come from brow-beaten friends was thanks to an essay Paul Graham wrote and gave us a great bump.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople actually were using the site and a couple of months in Steve and I no longer needed to fake submissions, which was a pretty awesome feeling. It seemed like it just might work after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building a community<\/h3>\n

For other founders looking to build a strong community around their startup, Ohanian says they have to follow a core mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the biggest tip is knowing what you\u2019re about and being true to it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cSteve and I were the first community managers at Reddit because we only had one community hten and we handled the spam. We set the tone for the community with the things we posted and upvoted and were active \u2018party hosts\u2019 there.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many ways that was a reflection of us \u2013 if we\u2019d behaved differently the community would have looked different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why it\u2019s an exciting time to be a SaaS startup<\/h3>\n

According to the Reddit found, it\u2019s a \u201cgood time\u201d to be building a SaaS startup.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone in the workforce now uses world-class software daily and thus has world-class consumer standards when they go to work on less than great software,\u201d Ohanian says.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike consumers, lots of your planning can be done with spreadsheets once you\u2019ve found product-market fit, so when you\u2019ve hit that next level, get your people together and plan a strategy for getting the sales machine going.<\/p>\n

\u201cObsess over hitting those numbers and making your sales cycle as short and efficient as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow StartupSmart on<\/em> Facebook,<\/em> Twitter, LinkedIn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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