Julie Zhuo: recommendation

Transcript context

…That is a really great question. One of the most common pieces of advice for founders, and I actually also had to remind myself constantly of this one is the more you know your customers, the more you can really close your eyes and just imagine everything about their life and what they're doing on almost like a minute to minute basis, probably the better you're going to do in terms of coming up with something that's going to meaningfully solve a problem for them. Right? And so, that comes from a couple of different places. The first is, look, if you're the person you're building for, you're the target audience, awesome. You probably do have a lot of stuff that is instinctively known to you, and maybe in those cases, your team doesn't have that experience and they maybe can't feel the same level of conviction you do, and they might be asking you, ""Hey, well, can we validate?" and all of that. Right? It's always good advice, but sometimes, you're so deep in it and you can... You're this person or you know this person, or you did this job that probably can trust your instincts and your gut quite a bit. I remember early days at Facebook, that was us. Everybody who worked at the company was either a college dropout or a recent college grad, and we were building a product for college students. I mean, we were the perfect... It was like for us by us. We understood exactly what this audience wanted. If we didn't, we would call up some friends. I mean, this was just pure target a demographic for what we were building. But eventually if that's not true, and it evolved at Facebook, and it evolves for companies. You might start out that way, but eventually, we started to open up to the world. We started to add people in different countries. The percentage of people that were college grads who were like us who were using the product started to shrink, became a smaller and smaller percentage of actually all core Facebook users, so therefore our intuitions started to become less and less reliable. I remember in spectacular fashion, I think this was in 2008 or '09, we had a string of failures, big kind of launches that were failures, and I think it was because we reached the end of our intuition for the user base at that particular moment. That's true for founders as well. Sometimes you're building a product in a domain where you weren't the target audience. Right? I feel this right now for myself. I'm building an analytics product. I was never a data analyst. as well. Sometimes you're building a product in a domain where you weren't the target audience. Right? I feel this right now for myself. I'm building an analytics product. I was never a data analyst. I understand the outside, the value of data, but I never did the job, and therefore, what I really needed to do was just spend a lot of time with data scientists immersing or actually just trying to do the job myself because the better that I understand what it is and what it's like and what the company context is, and I think with, for SaaS companies in particular, you might have done the job at one company, but you probably didn't do it at 20 or 50 companies, and you're probably selling to a lot of companies so it's just way more critical for you to spend a lot of time interviewing customers because your intuition is likely not going to carry you nearly as far as if you're building, again, a very consumer product for a very consumer audience of which you yourself are part of. So, I do think that, yeah, it doesn't matter that you need to really understand your customers. Do you have to go out and do the work, have the conversations, teach yourself the things that they do? It depends a bit on the context, depends on where you are, but it's never bad advice. The better you understand your customers, I think the better you're going to be able to build a product. I really like that advice of just this model of the more time the founder spends with their customers, the more you can trust that they're going to have the right sorts of instincts, and the less they start to spend time there, maybe start running more experiments and doing more research as a team around the founder. That's interesting.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.