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Business strategy · October 2026

7 startup episodes to hear before you burn another year

How Does This Get Big? founders Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim on finding paying customers, growing an audience and avoiding costly startup mistakes.

Before you give your next app another year, ask a harder question: how will it get paying customers?

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim spent 2 years on failed products before growing Yorby to a reported $100,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Their show, How Does This Get Big?, gets into the decisions behind those attempts. They're founders and creators describing work they've done, including ideas they abandoned and marketing they paid too much for.

Put your next build through a harder test

If you're bootstrapping an app, your next decision might be whether to build, keep selling, change the offer or stop.

Their validation discussion gives you a way to test a purchase. Their failed-startup account asks what happens after the first customers arrive.

A first sale and a lasting business answer different questions. Keep both in view.

Get the right people to notice

You can learn from a successful video and still attract an audience that has little reason to buy your product.

Use the marketing-channel conversation to choose where to test your offer. If you want to put your own name behind the business, Meng and Kim's personal-brand discussion helps you decide what you can keep making.

Frank Niu's interview brings the engineering perspective: finding customers deserves a plan of its own.

Choose a move you can make this week

Test an offer. Review why customers leave. Find out what your company setup requires.

Pick the decision holding you up, then listen with that question in mind.

Have another long interview saved? Make a short audio summary from a podcast or YouTube video you choose, with the explanation written for listening. Your next useful idea can come from the people you already follow.

In this playlist

  1. Startup validation: find the customer who will pay

    Still researching an idea? Meng and Kim make the case for a small product someone can actually buy. Their interview tool found paying users, then exposed a different problem: keeping them.

    2 min read7 min listen

  2. 3 failed startups that reshaped Yorby's founders

    Before you abandon a slow-growing product, hear why the founders gave up on their marketing database too soon. Their failures separate a crowded market, customers leaving and losing interest in the work.

    2 min read6 min listen

  3. Yorby's first $100K: the pivot that finally paid off

    Yorby's founders say they reached $100,000 in annual recurring revenue after shifting toward work they knew. The interview app's customers left when they found jobs. Their next product served a continuing need.

    2 min read6 min listen

  4. Startup social media: choose a channel that brings buyers

    Getting views without sales? Compare posts, ads and creator partnerships through the buyer you're trying to reach. Consumer apps and software sold to businesses call for different experiments.

    2 min read7 min listen

  5. Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim on building a personal brand

    You don't have to become the same kind of creator as your co-founder. Meng and Kim explain how entertainment and technical teaching brought them different audiences, and why enjoying the work mattered.

    2 min read8 min listen

  6. Startup legal setup: what Yorby's founders learned

    Company paperwork comes with continuing costs and responsibilities. Hear how ownership and investment changed Yorby's setup, then take the questions to an adviser who knows your jurisdiction.

    2 min read6 min listen

  7. Frank Niu on finding customers before you build

    Frank Niu's engineering background couldn't solve every customer problem. His startup stories ask you to plan how people will discover and trust your product, alongside how you'll build it.

    2 min read5 min listen