How to build a product (1/4) — Week 3

Y Combinator Startup School (Speakers: Michael Seibel (YCombinator), Steve Huffman (Reddit), Emmett Shear (Twitch))

• Interaction with users: It is essential to determine how you talk to your users. There are Unique paths of interaction depending on product. Challenge is to understand which users feedback you should act upon. Key is to understand how you can turn angry users to loyal ones. At times it is beneficial not just to talk to product users but also connect with the ones who chose the competitor product over yours.
• MVP: Even releasing something crappy is better than no product. Once launched, use real feedback to add features to the product. Amazon terms MVP as Minimum Remarkable product. You need something about the product to be remarkably useful. Understand what is minimum useful product which will help your customers use your product.
• What are they tracking? Intuition can fail you. As with MVP, go with collecting Minimum viable data. You can use scrappy approach of logging it somewhere. Useful to have historical baseline for important user’s actions. Baseline values are important to understand the dip or rise in trends. Pick 5–7 top user actions and just log those. Collect logs but use third party services (mixpanel, google analytics) rather than spending time in building a custom logging system.

Trivia: One of the KPI that matters the most:

Reddit 300 MAU for Reddit,

Twitch : Number of minutes watched every month, 30 billion +minutes .

• Product redesign: If after launch you believe there is miss in product market fit many companies undergo a redesign**.** First you need to determine if you need to redesign tech side or user interface. This leads to Second system effect. Fast iteration of one update at a time or fast built-up is a better approach then addressing all issues at one.
• Decision Making: How to come to a consensus? How to deal with contrarian?Talk to users to have your product ideas rather than validate ideas. Talking to users and looking at the data makes decision making easy. Appoint point person to make the call. Agree on mechanics but strategy can change.
• Development cycle: Cadence is of importance here. Do not get emotional about the output. Start with where you want to be in a year(future) and back track what needs to be validated. Based on the goal develop a cycle to check-in progress. Early stage startup (~13 days cycle), matured companies(~9 days). Look at when numbers move and understand why they move. Best product iteration ideas are looking at what user’s are doing anyway and just greasing on those habits.

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