Yesterday it was announced that DailyBurn was acquired by IAC. No numbers were announced but it looks like a big deal. Congrats to the team, couldn’t happen to nicer guys.
That makes me proud. Another group of genuine, amazingly nice and driven founders with an exit. Inspiring.
I met Andy Smith, Stephen Blankenship during TechStars and quickly became a user of their fitness site. They came into TechStars with a solid product and a focused idea.
Here is a picture of them playing poker in 2008 during TechStars.
What did I learn from the team?
- Distributed teams can work
- Nice guys can come out on top
- It is ok to ignore some early adopters. I was an early user that stopped using it because it wasn’t built for me. Instead of building tools for the Ironman training freaks, they built tools for their core community (those trying to loose weight).
- Design matters.
- Landing page design matters (theirs is one of the best)
- Having quality investors matters. I can remember several points where their investors, perfectly matching the team, filled holes and helped out with connections and strategic tactics
- Be a core part of your community. Check out the founders profiles and you will see they were some of the most active users, and you can see this in the features and developments of the site.
- Track core metrics. They can tell you % of paid users of every single day of their startup. Think about how powerful this is.
- Test, test, test. You can bet a pretty penny that A/B testing drove the final product design. Test, listen, test, implement.
- Have many points of entry. Check out their iPhone apps as an example on how to innovate on products that are near your core product to drive people to what you really are.
- Sit in comfy chairs (as seen below).
I’m going to raise a glass to the team tonight, proud of what they have accomplished.
More coverage by Brad Feld and TechCrunch.
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