![Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]](http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/wp-content/themes/starkers/images/blank.gif)
05/05/08 Listen. Decode. Interpret.
SINGAPORE - Paul Buchheit ex Googler (who coined “don’t be evil” and Gmail developer) and now Friendfeed gives a great talk at Startup School.
The best message? Listen. Decode. Interpret. Listen. Decode. Interpret.
If I had of asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses –Henry Ford.
So when your problem group say “we need a faster horse” you should learn to decode this to “My transport is too slow”.
“that’s impossible” decodes to “according to my experiences and current field of view, I can’t do it”… so change your current field of view.
For the launch of Gmail, Eric Schmidt set them a challenge of getting 100 happy internal users first. They actually went to 100 employees individually and developed 100 features that made each of happy. As they neared the end of their happy 100 launch target, they found that by having followed happiness they had already made the others happy. Great idea.
Listen to Success: Tune-in to happy users, tweak for them. Find success in your product.
Listen to Yourself, Listen to Opportunity: Are you happy where you are now? Are you at your full potential?
You can watch the video here.
-Robin.
(Taipei 101 in the rain, Taiwan, earlier in the month. World’s tallest building and still has the world fastest elevators. By Author.)
Tags: decode, feedfriend, listening, Paul Buchheit, startup school
2 Comments
I spent almost an entire day last week watching the videos from Startup School 2008. Most of the talks were excellent and, like you point out, there were a lot of great sound bytes and advice given.
But I found they tended to contradict each other an awful lot. Many of the speakers gave advice based on how they found success, yet there didn’t seem to be many consistencies between how they actually achieved it.
For example:
Greg McAdoo (Sequoia Capital) says funding should be the first step, while Sam Altmen (Loopt) says it’s the last thing you should do (and even then, only if you absolutely have to).
David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals) says we should charge users for our services yet Paul Graham (YCombinator) says not to worry if you can’t figure out how to profit from your idea.
A little confusing but I guess it just proves that there’s more then one way to skin a cat.
Best highlight for me:
- David Heinemeier Hansson telling the audience to ‘Forget Viral’ and to stop trying to build applications that ‘infect and spread’ throughout their users whilst reminding them that the key to profit is (surprise surprise) having a price.
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(Great pic by the way - kind of looks like it’s on fire though!)
yeh great - I’ve seen them all now too.
I think the contradicting advice is the point that there is no secret formula… so much of this is who you know, who they know, and a good sprinkling of right place right time.
My view on funding is very simple. Build a great app with a revenue model that works and you will get funded to scale (if you need it).
