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The 1 key thing star founders and CEOs say catapulted their startups into major success by Alyson Shontell and Daniel Richards on Dec 29, 2017, 12:53 PM Advertisement
 
For startups on the path to success, there's often one key moment or decision that catapults them from obscurity to the big leagues. This year on Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It," founders of companies such as PayPal, Lyft, and Dropbox shared how they built their companies into massive successes. And while a lot goes into building a company, the leaders we've interviewed all had surprising stories. Sometimes it's an inspired decision that leads to success; other times it's luck and timing. Listen and read below for the key moments that turned Zillow, Tinder, Warby Parker, and others into household names. If you're hunting for more career advice, inspiration, and stories of getting to the top, subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Radio Public, or wherever you listen. Here's the master class episode in which top founders talk about the moments that changed everything for their companies: The following interview excerpts have been edited for clarity. Zillow launched with an innovative feature, the Zestimate. It was the first time anyone could look up the current value of their home, and their friends' homes. This feature alone got the company a ton of launch press, and a million visitors within its first 24 hours.  Rascoff: We said: "Let's try to figure out what every house in the country is worth. How do we do that?" Most of this information — bed, bath, square footage, tax assessment, sale history — is available in county courthouses, but we had to go acquire it, digitize it, and then build the data layer, the Zestimate, that sits on top of that. And when we launched in, I think it was February 2006. We got about a million visitors within the first day. I still don't think any other service — Snapchat, Facebook, whatever — I don't think anyone else has had a million users in day one. Because it's so cool and so innovative to say, "Oh, my god, I can grab my kid's school roster and I can Zillow everybody at my kid's school and see what everyone's house is worth, see what everyone paid for the home." That was just, like, this, "Oh, my God" kind of thing that launched the company in 2006.
Tinder turned a college student's birthday with 500 attendees into a "Tinder party." The students were not allowed to board the party bus until a bouncer made sure they had downloaded Tinder's app.  Rad: Justin's younger brother was throwing a birthday party for his best friend at USC, and he had a bus going from USC to his parents' home. The bus was going back and forth, so a total of about 500 students. Justin called me one day and said, "Let's pay for the bus and call this a Tinder party." So we paid for the bus and put a bouncer at the door and told every student that they couldn't walk in unless they downloaded Tinder. You'd literally have to show Tinder on your phone. So about 400 people downloaded Tinder at USC. They went home and opened the app and started matching with each other. It really created a phenomenon within USC. Immediately after that, every afternoon the whole team would leave the office, get in a car, and we would drive by every fraternity and sorority in Los Angeles, then San Diego, then Orange County, and every school we could cover. In the beginning of January we had about 20,000 users, and at the end of January we had 500,000 users, all organic. The growth curve was unimaginable. It was pretty amazing.
TheSkimm was featured on 'Today' after the founders send a blind email to Hoda Kotb, and actually got a response.  Weisberg: We emailed every news anchor out there. We were like, "We're former NBC-ers, thought you would love this, thought you would appreciate the need that we're solving." Hoda Kotb responded, and she said, "I'll check it out!" We didn't know her. We followed up with her two more times, but got no response. Day four of us in business, she said we were one of her favorite things — on air — and it totally changed our life. We went from, at that point, let's say, under 1,000 users to thousands. All of a sudden, we had geographic diversity. And all of a sudden, we had huge pockets of the country paying attention to what we were doing. Shontell: Wow. What does a Hoda bump do to your newsletter subscribers? Zakin: It crashed our site. It crashed our email inbox. We got a few thousand people from it. It was life-changing.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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