Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff on if startups should buy ads

To your question of how did we get traffic? Very deliberately, and this is the advice I would give to any founder. Very deliberately we had. We did no advertising. So the philosophy for the first probably three years of the company was any money that we might spend on SEM on Facebook was just getting started, but today it would be Facebook, Google, Facebook, whatever. Let's invest that in product. Let's hire more engineers, designers, PMs, et cetera. Let's try to build something that's viral. Let's just focus on the product. And most of the great companies, the great services that we use today, from Uber to Snapchat to Instagram, Facebook, they follow the same philosophy, right? I mean, you've never seen an ad. Well, interestingly, after three or four years, you do start seeing ads for these companies, just like you see hundreds of millions of dollars of ads for us. But in the early days of those services, it's all about product, not about advertising. The reason you do that is to build innovation and product development bonafides. So when I do angel investing, for example, I just. I will never invest in anything that has. That's B2C with any paid marketing for the first two, three years. Like when they're like, oh, yeah, we're gonna try $100,000 a month Facebook budget, it's like, I'm out. Because that's just. That's a treadmill, you know, that's a hamster wheel that you're getting on, and you're just trying to arbitrage some other. Some other traffic acquisition channel. So anyway, we launched with just consumer PR and a product that people liked. We got about 3 million UUs in the first three days, which I think even to this day is still the biggest launch of any website. We had a million views in the first six hours, which I don't think anybody has. I'm not sure anything ever will get that much traffic. It was great. The first month was like 5 million views, and then month 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, through 12, we're not as great. And so then it's like many startups, it's the long, you know, the long climb back up to your initial peak. And, you know, that took more than a year to get back to that first.