Sean Ellis: preference

Transcript context

…And you have to flip it. That is so interesting. That question is such a good reminder of how hard it is to build anything people really would be disappointed not to have. That's why this works so well. People are like, "I don't need this. Who cares?" That's the core of this, is just that is hard. Especially when I first moved to Silicon Valley. The first 15 years of my career were not in Silicon Valley, and so I was in Eastern Europe and then New York and then Boston. But you move to Silicon Valley and you have people who get really excited about technology for technology's sake. And so just something being cool is like, "Isn't it cool that we can actually do this?" drives a lot of people. And so to me, I'm very practical. If it's not something that is really bringing value to people, then the likelihood that that product's successful long-term is going to be pretty low. Even, interestingly, at Dropbox, through the six months I was there, I'd ask one question multiple times a month. I broke the early beta users into a bunch of different lists. And I'd ask, "Which best describes you? I like to be among the first to try cool new technology, or, I only try things that I think will be useful for me? " And over the six months, it flipped from 90% being people who try things that they want to try cool new technology to six months later, it was people who only are going to try something that they feel like is useful. But what's cool is just because what motivates you to try something is you're an early adopter and you want to try something cool, if you're going to keep using it, it's because it's giving you some utility. And so I can still use those early adopters to help me figure out where's the value inside the product. Awesome. So actually, two questions along those lines. How durable do you find this percentage being? Say you hit 40%, how often does that fade and go away versus stay there or go higher?…

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