Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

1being able to really focus and immerse yourself is really important.

feedback is very important when you start a startup, maybe you get alot of people to your site but no one sticks around because you didn't get that initial user feedback.

2the next thing is that you have an idea and you should really think about what the idea is really solving.

Like what is the actual problem. You should be able to describe your problem in one sentence. And then you should think, "How does that problem relate to me? Am I really passionate about that problem?" And then you should think, "Okay it's a problem I have, but is it a problem that other people have?" And you verify that by going out and talking to people.

3if you really want to disrupt an industry you should really not be a player in it.

If you are in a situation like mine where there is a service element of it then you should go and do that service yourself. If your thing is related to restaurants you should become a waiter, if it is related to painting become a painter and kind of get in the shoes of your customers from all angles of what you are trying to build.

spending several months to learn and understand how it works, become the player, you will be know your thing better.

i decided to go to play guitar with 10 lessons, i was told i will play a song independently when finished, i want to experience this learning process to get some recognition.

each lesson half an hour, total 5 hours, 1st lesson i practice half an hour everyday for 5days. 2nd lesson i practice 2hours the first day. so if 5weeks 5 hours finished learning it needs at least 25hours finish practicing. if we don't caculate about this we don't have pressure sense of time, then we will do something emotionally and  randomly, low efficiency, also wasting time, this is an example of "recognition change behaviours". so keep in mind about this. so have you done like this?

i don't like this way because i don't want to communicate with others, but you should know what is the real key, and you should put your eyes on the positive perspective. so problem is the emotion and objective thing.

low EQ makes many people embarrassed but we all should learn something. i am not wrong i am not wrong i am not wrong is not the solution for problem. truth is good, but not all truth is good, the way is also important. low EQ i really learn about this.

anyway the lesson you should learn is to be careful, be cautious about something about how to be a person, you should respect procedure, your inner core, your person self,easy and not so nervous, relax.

what you want actually is truth is to be responsible, is truth but not everything needs cold truth it depends on many things, if morality and emotion mixed, you should be careful about it, too absolute extreme is not very good and useful, so you should be careful about that and not be so nervous, easy remember that, keep in mind about that.

see? this is an example of application, no matter how much reason you know, if you can not use it well, then it is useless and unmeaningful.

4be obsessived that you want to know what else everybody in that space is doing.

5identifying customers segments, build a product or business that everybody in the world is using, in the beginning you should realistically have the customer base so that you can optimize for them. it is just about focus and whether you are catering to teenage girls or whether it is soccer moms, you will be focus alot on their needs.

6lastly before you even create a product or before you put code down,

you should really storyboard out the user experience of how you are going to solve the problem.

And that is not just meaning the website itself, it also means how does the customer find out about you. It can be through an ad or word-of-mouth, and then they come to your site and they learn more about you.

What does that text say and what are you communicating to them when they sign up for the project and when they purchase the service?

What are they actually getting from your service or product? After they finish using the product or service do they leave a review or do they leave comments?

You need to be able to go through that whole flow and visualize in your head what the perfect user experience is. And then put it down on paper and put it into code, and then start from there.

一So, you have all these ideas in your head, now you kind of know what the core customer base is that you want to go after, and you know everything about the industry, what do you do next?

1 You start building your product.

The common phrase that most people use today is," You should build a minimum viable product." And I underlined viable because I think a lot of people skip that part and they go out with a feature and the whole user experience in the very beginning is flat.

2 Minimal viable product pretty much means what is the smallest feature set that you should build to solve the problem that you are trying to solve.

I think if you go through the whole storyboarding experience you can kind of figure that out very quickly.

3 But again, you have to be talking to users, you have to be seeing what exists out there already, and what you should be building should solve their immediate needs.

二 before you put things in front of user you should really have your products positioning down, that means you should be able to go to a person and be able to say Hey, this does X Y and Z in one sentence.

So for example, at Homejoy we started off with something super complicated. We were an online platform for home services, you start with cleaning and you can choose blah blah blah. It just went on for paragraphs and paragraphs.

for potential users we need one-liner. it kind of describes the functional benefits of what you do.

when you are trying to build a brand or whatnot you should be able to describe the emotional benefits and stuff like that. but when you are starting with no users you really need to tell them what they are going to get out of it. After we changed our position to get your place cleaned for $20 an hour, then everyone got it and we were able to get users in the door that way.

how to get first users to start trying your products. the first users should be obviously people you are connected with. you want to get more feedback you should go some places like online community, especially if you want to build tools for developers or things like that. local communities if you are building consumer products you know there are alot of influential local community mailing lists. especially for those for parents, those are places you might want to hit up too.

So you just have to go to places where people are really going to show up. Your conversion rate is going to be really low but to go from 0 to 1 to 3 to 4 these are the kind of things you might have to do.