Amit Doda’s Post

It took Uber 14 years to become profitable. You have 3-18 months to do it. The product itself works and delivers the value just fine. You need to capture some of this value and build a business. If you are a bootstrapped business, you should simultaneously test 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁-𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗙𝗶𝘁 and 𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗣𝗮𝘆. My grandfather, a wood maker, would tell you the same. A business that is not making money is a hobby. ❌ Some business models (social media, media, marketplaces, games, product-led companies) play the adoption game. In such models, you need numbers and network effects before monetizing. That is the cold start problem. ✅ In most cases, you can start pre-selling before the product even exists and optimize for profit from the get-go to secure your business model. This week, we will discuss pricing, willingness to pay, and business models. Let’s make it rain! 💰 📌 P.S. Have you ever 𝗽𝗿𝗲-𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗱 a product or a service before? Hit Y/N in the comments. 📖 My GTM Strategist book provides many practical examples and frameworks on how you can test WTP and presell your products https://gtmstrategist.com/  get your copy  ✌️

BIZ BUSTERS #2 The Unlikely Rise of Uber: Lessons in Lean Problem-Solving Travis and Garrett's journey with Uber began humbly in 2009, with a vision as simple as using phones to connect riders and drivers. What started as an idea paved the way for a transformative ride-hailing giant. 🔖Validating Problems: Early Uber employees immersed themselves in the taxi-hailing experience, understanding firsthand the pain points of traditional methods. This hands-on approach fueled a commitment to convenience and reliability. 🔖 Minimum Viable Product: Uber Cab's launch focused on essential features like ride requests and card payments. Continuous iterations were guided by real user feedback, steering away from assumptions. 🔖 Growth Hack Mastery: Innovative sign-up bonuses for new users catalyzed rapid driver and rider acquisition. Creative referral schemes amplified network effects, propelling Uber's growth. 🔖Flexible Pivots: Uber's willingness to experiment led to game-changing pivots like Uber Eats, born from observing unused backseats. Optimization for restaurant margins disrupted the food industry. 🔖Lessons for Budding Titans: - Address your own pain points directly - Start small, refine the core, then expand - Evolve continuously based on customer insights Reflect on Uber's blueprint for evidence-led disruption if your venture's leaders are eager to sprint before establishing a solid foundation. 🤔

It took Uber 15 years to become profitable. See how you can make it in 15 months or less. 1. Find a niche where demand > supply. Use Google Trends to spy on what is trending. 2. Build an audience or community in this niche. Listen to their specific needs and pains. Find out if they are looking for solutions. Become an expert on this topic. 3. Start promoting your product idea; collect emails for the waiting list. Build a beautiful landing page—design matters! 4. Build an MVP with No-Code in a maximum of one month. 1 week for discovery, 2 weeks for design, 3-4 weeks for development and launch. 5. Offer the price 50% lower than your closest competitor. Give a lifetime deal to your first customers. Treat them like kings. 6. Bet on automation and a global workforce to reduce operational costs. Use GPT agents for creative tasks and Zaps for repetitive tasks. Scale your system by hiring people overseas. 7. Minimize Customer Acquisition Costs by constantly improving your product. Collect customer feedback, keep learning. Do it step by step, not all at the same time. You don't need VC money to beat Uber in time-to-profit. -------- DM if you want to bring your product idea to the market in one month

Uber just became a $100B company. Dara Khosrowshahi took over the world's most hated start-up and turned it into a global behemoth. Here's how: 2017 - #DeleteUber goes viral and 200,000 people delete the Uber app. Dara decides to take over. 2018 - Uber loses 3 billion dollars. 2019 - The stock crashes 40% as Travis Kalanick sells all his shares. It's "the biggest IPO bust in history". 2020 - Just as monthly active customers reach an all-time high, COVID hits. “85% of our mobility volume, which was the profit driver of the company, falls off a cliff. We were already losing $2½ billion, and then it just got way worse." The stock drops 50%... in a week. 2021 - UberEATS drives monthly active customers back to pre-COVID levels. 2022 - UberEATS becomes EBITDA positive. 2023 - Uber finally becomes cash flow positive and GAAP profitable. It's hard to ignore the noise—but that's exactly what great CEOs do. Dara just put his head down and made it happen. I'm sure many will comment on this post to say how much they hate Uber. But does it really matter? - 6.5 million drivers use the platform to earn an income - 142 million users spend on Uber - 800 million trips are taken Each and every month.

Another key lesson from "A Brief History of Scaling Uber" is that sometimes you need to "do things that don't scale." Here's an insight from the early days of Uber Eats that illustrates this concept. Launched in 2015/16, we were the "newest" food delivery company on the market. So needed to move quick to catch up with the competition. As a result, our tech platform was a work in progress. We initially only enabled basic levers for our Operations team to manage their city's marketplace. Things like managing restaurants, adjusting the delivery radii, positioning drivers, optimizing pricing, etc. So, how did Uber Eats manage to grow into the largest food delivery platform across the globe in record time? The answer lies in the hustle and ingenuity of our early Operators. They turned to spreadsheets and scripts, creating makeshift solutions that filled the gaps left by the initial tech stack. This gritty approach allowed the marketplace to not only function but thrive. It not only bought valuable time for our engineering team to build auto-optimizations of these critical levers into the platform, but also informed us on what other levers we needed. This is a powerful reminder that sometimes, to build something scalable, we must first be willing to do the things that aren't. It's about embracing the manual, the tedious, and the seemingly inefficient processes that enable us to understand deeply what our platform and our users need. Only then can we truly innovate and create solutions that are not just effective but transformative. So remember - the road to scaling is often paved with actions that initially don't seem scalable. But it's in these actions that we find the keys to unlocking our full potential. Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with "doing things that don't scale." Have you ever faced a similar situation? How did it shape your project or company's trajectory? Read a "Brief History of Uber" here: https://lnkd.in/gAiZvKFg #Scaling #Innovation #Uber #UberEats

Everything starts small.

Coming from the startup world, I've learned that sometimes the key to scaling isn't just about doing things that are easily repeatable. In fact, my first-hand experience has shown me that in order to grow, you sometimes have to do the things that don't scale. These non-scalable actions can be the very thing that sets your company apart from the competition and propels you to the next level.

This is a great piece illustrate why ops teams need to move much faster. If you wait for your engineering teams to catch up, you're not going to make it. Ops runs the experiments, fail, iterate and figure out the right way to solve things -> Engineering picks up the right solution and implements it to scale. As a business and product leader, your objective should be to unlock the operations team to move fast. If you believe in this, you should check out ZORP