Lecture 4: Building Products that Users Love

Summary of Sam Altman's lecture: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec07/

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Website: www.ghacklabs.com Twitter: @GHackLabs Email: luke@ghacklabs.com

By Luke Fitzpatrick

"How do we make things that have a passionate user base, that our users are unconditionally wanting

it to be successful?"

This Goal Should be for Every Startup:

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The Best Way to get to 1 Billion Dollars.

Focus on the values that help you get your first dollar

to acquire your first user.

If you get this right, the rest is history.

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The Wufoo Case Study

A small team, acquired by Survey Monkey. Gave a 29,561% ROI to investors.

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Building Products That Users Want to Love

• Wufoo was not interested in building software that users wanted to use.

• They wanted a product that people wanted to love, that people wanted to have a relationship with.

• They asked themselves the question, how do relationships work in the real world?

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Two User Relationships Metaphors:

1) How do we acquire new users as if we are trying to date them?

2) How do we treat existing users as if they are a successful marriage?

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First Impressions: Human Relationships

• If you're on a first date with someone, and you catch them picking their nose, you're probably not going to have another date with them.

• But, if you have been married for 20-30 years, you're not going to call the lawyer and sign divorce papers.

• First time human interactions do count, and it's the same relationship with startups & users.

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Make Your First User Experience Memorable

Make every user moment memorable. Things like:

• The first email you ever get.

• What happens when you first login.

• The links, the advertisements.

• The very first time you interacted with customer support.

These are all opportunities to

seduce.

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Describing A Quality ProductThis concept was taking from the Japanese. They have two words to describe things once you're finished with them.

• The two words for quality are atarimae hinshitsu and miryokuteki hinshitsu.

• The first one means granted quality, which basically means functionality.

• The last one means enchanting quality.

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Wufoo's Login Dinosaur

Wufoo's login link has a dinosaur. If you hover on it, you will hear a "RARRR!" In the early stages, this puts a smile on users faces, hands down. This is just one of things that made their product memorable.

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When we assess products, we never think about:

"Hey, what is the emotion on the person's face when they interact with this?"

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When you search the word "fart" guess what happens?

You hear a fart noise when you scroll up & down!

This is something that makes you want to talk about it.

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The Cork'd Sign Up Page

It works like a rhyme, and most importantly, it's a memorable first time user experience.

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Customer Service = A User Experience, a lot of startups miss this.

AirBnB Wufoo

They went up to New York, and offered professional photography. The founders would go up there and actually take pictures of the

people's apartments to help them sell more. What a lot of people don't know is, Joe was actually doing customer support at the

same time.

The Wufoo team consisted of ten people. They dealt with 500,000 users on the system. Resulting in about 400 issues a week, that's

about 800 emails. Response time was 7-12 minutes.

This is superhero customer service!

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Support Driven Development • For software based startups, SSD is a way to improve

your product by having software engineers & your whole (small) team involved in customer support.

• Try to inject some values we don't usually talk about enough, like responsibility, accountability, humility, and modesty.

• Everyone should do customer support, means problems are identified quickly & changed just as fast.

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