Maya Prohovnik: preference

Transcript context

…Before you move on, that's actually such an interesting story because it's so hard to have a product that's working that people love and decide to change it completely. Many founders are probably stuck in this where they're just like, hey, this is working and we're feeling some fit. Is there anything else you learned from that? Because that's a really interesting insight and it worked out in your case clearly. It absolutely worked out. I mean, I think it was a terrifying transition. Us at the time, it took us a few months to build a whole new app, it takes longer now, but the whole time we were building it, we were like, we weren't sure if it was a mistake and we would go back and forth and we would feel guilty when we were talking to our users about what they wanted us to be working on. But I think it was one of those things where as soon as we launched 2.0, our numbers started shooting up and we started seeing more kinds of people were using it and people were suddenly using it in the way that we had always imagined as a replacement for the old school, very difficult to make traditional podcasts. I don't know. I guess the lesson is you have to be able to tell the signal through the noise, and even if you've got lots of vocal users asking for something, we used to have this rule, the 80/20 rule, where it's like you can't just build for that 20, I don't think we made this up by the way. I think this is a common thing, but we'd always refer to it and say, we want to be building for the 80%, and even though the 20% are going to be more vocal, that's just going to get you deeper into that hole of that problem of you're not really building for everyone. And I think particularly when you're trying to build a creative platform, you're trying to democratize something and your target user is everyone on the planet. I think you really have to be willing to kill your darlings and let things go when they're not getting where you need them to be. That's probably the most common cases. Something is working, but it's not working incredibly well. What do we do? And so that's really interesting. I feel like the first thing you said there is really important of just we had a much bigger mission and vision, and even though this is working, this is never going to get there. There's no path to building a massive business.…

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