Framework
Billboarding: your customers wear your logo for free
Julian defines 'billboarding,' a subtype of product-led growth anyone can use even without software. The OG examples are the Hotmail email signature and 'Sent from my iPhone'; every customer action quietly broadcasts your brand to others and keeps you top of mind for free.
“And billboarding is a subtype of product-led growth that is my favorite because anyone can do it. You don't have to be a software company. And I'll give you the OG example of billboarding. If I sign up for Hotmail and I send an email, and you know where I'm going with this, which is there's that Hotmail signature in the email, right? Or if I send with my iPhone, there's that sent from iPhone in the email signature, right?”
Steal thisEmbed your logo or a referral line into the artifact customers naturally share, so every use becomes a free impression.
Number
SF vacant office space tripled to 10M sq ft; rents cut to $20
Shaan cites a CNBC article: sub-leasable San Francisco office space jumped from 3M sq ft in 2019 to 10M in 2021, with ~$200M of real estate impairments (nearly $1B with lease write-downs across Salesforce, Dropbox, Uber, PayPal, Zendesk). Space that cost $90/sq ft is going for $20.
$200M
SF office real estate impairments since COVID · USD
“So like, here's some of the numbers. Um, let me, so there's $200 million of real estate impairments in the past year since COVID It's almost a billion if you add in the lease-related write-downs from large companies like Salesforce, Dropbox, Uber, PayPal, Zendesk, just getting rid of their, their real estate. And so Dropbox itself has $400 million of impaired real estate right now.”
Framework
Feature, not a product: why Fast and Dropbox get absorbed
Andrew's recurring critique: single-purpose tools are features that platforms eventually absorb. Like OSes building in cloud storage to commoditize Dropbox, e-commerce platforms will just make their own checkouts faster, killing standalone one-click checkout startups like Fast.
“So many people miss— VCs, entrepreneurs— the idea of feature, not a product. I think this is something— it's kind of like what's happened to Dropbox. Dropbox has found a niche, but at the end of the day, it was a crazy, amazing product that everybody needed. And then over time, all the OSes just built this in.”
Fact
Dropbox's launch post on Hacker News was trashed as a bad idea
Jack points out Drew Houston announced Dropbox in the Hacker News Show section as a solo founder, and the still-visible comments are full of people calling it a terrible idea they don't need because they have a USB stick.
“Drew Houston, I think when he was a solo founder, announced his Dropbox idea in the Hacker News show section. You can actually still see the post online. This is another bit to bear in mind is if you look on that post now, all of the comments are about how his idea is so terrible and it's definitely going to fail. People are like, "Why do I need this? I've got a USB stick. This is a shit idea."”
Story
Dropbox was called a terrible idea in its Hacker News debut
Jack notes Drew Houston announced Dropbox in the Hacker News Show section as a solo founder, and the still-visible comments mocked the idea, with people insisting a USB stick made it pointless.
“Drew Houston, I think when he was a solo founder, announced his Dropbox idea in the Hacker News show section. You can actually still see the post online. This is another bit to bear in mind is, if you look on that post now, all of the comments are about how his idea is so terrible and it's definitely going to fail. People are like, "Why do I need this? I've got a USB stick. This is a shit idea."”