Justin Kan

Justin Kan, the founder of Twitch, a Y Combinator alum, and a long-time partner, says you have to get these three things right:

(1) Know what you are doing. You have to convince the interviewers that you are a great founding team, primarily by projecting confidence, and showing your expertise in the industry.

(2) Understand the small and the big idea. You should be able to convey the reasons why you are going to attack and dominate a niche area with your product, and then use that as a platform to successfully enter a much bigger arena. Expansion can happen in many ways, often by expanding geography, product category, or target customer. The important part is that you make a bold claim abo

Either hard conversations equal an easy life. Easy conversations equal a hard life. It’s only a short-term benefit because it’s easier to avoid those hard conversations and save them for the future to come across them again.

On Build Your SaaS, Justin Jackson tells Jon Buda that leading a company comes down to two jobs: thinking, and making decisions. Execution is the work Jackson likes, but he says co-founders are not graded on it. The example in front of them is Spots, the product they were weighing alongside Transistor.fm. Chasing it would hurt in the short term, because he wanted to ship fast and Spots still had a lot to prove, including whether they even wanted to be in advertising. His instinct was to keep things easy and deal with it later. He says you almost always have to force yourself to do the opposite.

You should choose the path that is more painful in the short-term. Pain avoidance creates an illusion of quality. When making a decision and you can’t decide, the answer is no.

Justin Jackson says that when someone pitches him, especially a product he already has a version of, he asks what makes it better. A new Slack competitor gets that question. He uses the same test on Transistor.fm. One difference he wants on the homepage is unlimited shows for one monthly fee. A well-known person, forwarded to him because of a big audience, asked what made Transistor better than Libsyn. After about five rounds of answers, Jackson decided the sale was not worth the time and walked away. If you are hard-selling every lead, he says, that is a bad sign, often desperation. The useful skill is knowing when to stop and find someone else.

Just move on. This also applies in sales whenever someone is not convinced by what you have to offer. You shouldn't hang on and try to convince one person. It may be tempting for yourself, but not good for business.

On Build Your SaaS, Justin Jackson reads a Twitter thread from Stephanie Hurlburt, @sehurlburt, and tells Jon Buda why he follows her. She is an entrepreneur, and she is the founder of Binomial, which makes image and texture compression for VR, games, and similar work. Jackson says she is not really in the SaaS business. She sells annual licenses. What he values is her writing on marketing, on sales, and on being a software person, including a thread on how programmers can improve a wardrobe with a few simple changes, for men and for women. He points listeners to her thread on hard selling.

For one host, he remembers Netflix having a lack of quality shows to choose from. Also, there was a lack of quality in Netflix’s streaming at the time. What drew him in was actually Dora the Explorer, because it was cheaper on Netflix than purchasing individual episodes on iTunes.

A B2B sets a more attainable rate of success because the problems are known and are easily controlled. You have a clear execution path when attracting other businesses. You can charge money for things without needing a massive wave of growth.

When it comes to B2C it's more difficult because you need a massive user base. Getting to that point requires huge amounts of funding, debt, and the need to find a way to crawl out of the hole.

To reach success with a B2C you have to ride a massive way. This means that it requires more than building a company, but you also have to be lucky. B2B is in your control, and you can ask businesses what their problems are for you to target how to solve them.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube are all B2C. Possibly, you don’t hear much about B2B success because they are purchased behind the scenes. Shopify is a popular B2B app.

On Build Your SaaS, Justin Jackson tells Jon Buda that a bigger audience usually means tapping people who already have a bigger audience than you do. Their method that week was to pick three tweets and use them as the whole conversation, then see if the authors shared the episode. The first tweet was from Justin Kan, after he sold Twitch and started Atrium. Kan wrote that he had thought a lot about how B2B compares with B2C, and that he now preferred B2B. Jackson says Kan has done both, which is why the thread is worth using. Show notes were promised at saas.transistor.fm.

Get coaches, join leadership groups, and get a therapist. It can be very cathartic to have someone to talk to. It is effectively a mechanism that we've created in our society to make you feel like you are not alone. It could be very helpful when working through any sort of problems.

As a start-up you want to have a mission you are working towards and trying to accomplish, but you should also remember that achieving the goal is not 100% within your control. You are just one factor, one member of the team, one part of the strategy. You're only a contributor to achieving that goal. And even when you achieve the goal, it is not going to make you happy.

You need to find a way to work without actually wrapping up your entire ego and identity in accomplishing this one goal.

It is easy to burn out no matter how successful you are. You might accept unhappiness in the present, thinking the next milestone or the round of funding will make you happy, but the problem is that that's not a sustainable strategy for actually achieving happiness, and if you're not happy, you will not want to do what you're doing for an extended period of time.

As a CEO of a startup, you are a very important component and if you burn out, you are not doing yourself or your investors, employees or customers any favors, so you need to retain yourself. You need to create a situation inside your company where you are going to be available for a long time. Taking care of yourself is actually y

Justin's interest in self-improvement and self growth really came from a realization that he needed to make a lot of improvements in himself and in the company culture of Atrium in order to create an environment where he would not feel stressed every day.

Legal services is something that startups need in good time and bad times. Justin himself has been a client of legal services for over 15-year of his entrepreneurial and investor career, and no matter what was happening in the world, and no matter whether the business was thriving or dying, he'd always end up paying attorneys.

Atrium.co is a full stack corporate law firm for startups. They help startups with all the legal needs. Right now they work mostly with venture-backed technology companies in the US and specifically in Silicon Valley.

It has been a long road for Justin. He started in 2004 with Kiko , an online calendar, very similar to Google Calendar. The only really notable things about that startup were it was very early on in this online web application world and it got Justin and team into Y Combinator , which set him on the entrepreneurial career.

From there, the team started justin.tv, as an attempt to make their own reality show on the internet. Although that was a terrible idea that mostly failed, it eventually turned into a platform for anyone to live broadcast thei