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The $15B Accidental Startup
Most people think Discord's $15B success started as a chat app. But that's the sanitized version. The real story is far more interesting. You'll learn where some of the biggest startup ideas come from.
Before Discord, founder Jason Citron built a mobile game company called Aurora Feint. Despite the funding and a talented team, the game was failing. But hidden in the usage data was something fascinating.
Jason Citron the man, the myth, the legend
Players weren't logging in to play. They were logging in to use this tiny social feature that let them chat while gaming. Some kept the app open for hours, barely touching the actual game.
Instead of ignoring this behavior, Citron went all in. He transformed that small feature into OpenFeint - a social network for mobile games. Within 18 months, OpenFeint was on 250M phones and sold to GREE for $104M.
Years later, history repeated itself. Citron started a new game studio company when they noticed their internal chat tool was getting more usage than their actual game. Once again, he spotted the pattern and pivoted. That became Discord.
The insight isn't to ignore customer research. Obviously not. For those of you who are long time readers, you know I'm a big fan of doing "voice of customer" surveys.
But sometimes the best market research often happens when you watch what customers actually do with your product, not just what they say in surveys. When you really understand what the community is doing with the tool better than they even know themselves, that's an insight you need to hold onto.
Citron's superpower wasn't building chat apps. It was spotting patterns in user behavior and having the courage to double down on them - even if it meant scrapping everything else.
Look for the features users are bending to their will.
Sometimes your biggest opportunity is hiding inside your current product, wearing a disguise.
By the way...
I did some filming last week in Miami for the pod. Trying to do more IRL stuff. I love it and think you might too.
Here was my episode with Cody Schneider about how to grow your startup on YouTube, Apple, Spotify.
More IRL pods coming within the next 3-4 weeks. One of the pods I recorded was life-changing. Can't wait for you to see it. Spoiler alert: it was with David Senra from Founders.
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Thank you for reading Greg's Letter. I hope you it got your creative juices flowing. You can forward this email to a friend that might benefit.
And feel free to click follow/subscribe on The Startup Ideas pod on Apple, Spotify and/or YouTube to get more startup ideas in your feed. It's free, so why not?
Greg's Letter by Greg Isenberg
