Cameron Adams: belief

Transcript context

…I'm curious just what advice you share with founders when they're asking you how joyous does this first version have to be? How awesome does my MVP need to be? One thread I picked up as you were describing your experiences, you all had deep experience in this space, so you knew what you wanted to build. It wasn't like this dark forest of exploration is like we know what we want generally. Do you have advice you share with founders of how awesome their MVP should be and when it's worth spending a year or two or three building it? There's a couple of points in there. First is that even today we build for ourselves, and I think this is advice that probably a lot of product people wouldn't give you is that you shouldn't build for yourself, you should build for your customer. But I think we're fortunate that we are our customer and that the problems we experience are the problems that hundreds of millions, billions of people experience. I think that is maybe a fortunate part of just the problem area that we're interested in, but it has enabled us to move really quickly on the product because we can quickly know what's working in the product, whether this feature is useful, whether it's reached that bar of a great experience. So that's one aspect of it and I think that is also about being passionate, you entering an area that you are extremely passionate about. I often hear people are like, "I want to do a tech startup. What is the best area I should focus on to build a product in?" And to me, that is totally the wrong way to go about building a company that you're going to spend the next 10, 20 years in because if you're in an area that you are particularly passionate about but you see the opportunity to make a bit of money or have some external measure of success, that is a terrible way to go about being a founder because you're going to hit these rock bottom dark places and if the passion isn't driving you through that, you're going to have an incredibly hard time getting to the next step. So that's probably the first area I talk about in terms of knowing when a product is amazing. The second one is that it really needs to spark, joy, and delight in people and just pure excitement. It can't just be like, "Oh, yeah, this is a useful tool for me." It needs to light up their eyes. They need to be like, "How do I sign up for this thing tomorrow? How do I get it? How do I pay for it?" And they need to want to talk to other people about it because in the early days of your startup, you don't have marketing dollars, you don't have channels which you can go to immediately get access to a million people. You need to really foster the first people that are going to use your product and they're going to be the ones that are going to spread it and they're going to set the foundations for your growth. Interesting. So piece of advice number one is work on something you really want yourself that you're excited to work on. Two is get it to a place where it lights up people's eyes. They're just so excited with this thing. For that second bar, what was it for Canva? Was it just that it was impossible to do this design in a browser?…

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