How to Build Products Users Love, Part I

Lecture 7: How to Build Products Users Love, Part I

Link: How to Start a Startup

(You can find notes to the other lectures here.) 

Kevin Hale (@ilikevests)

Growth is the gap between conversion and churn.

The best way to get to a billion dollars is to focus on the value that gets you to the first dollar.

Human beings are relationship manufacturing creatures.

What is the emotion on somebody’s face when they interact with your product?

Sometimes places where you get errors are opportunities for first moments.

Design the links to your help documents to look like magazine covers.

Customer support is what happens between the steps of the funnel.

Software development: responsibility, accountability, and humility.

Support driven development.

Make everyone do customer support.

Support responsibility developers and designers give the best support.

The Four Horsemen:

  • Criticism
  • Contempt
  • Defensiveness
  • Stonewalling

Alert existing users to new features when they log in.

Focus on being best price, best product, or best overall solution.

Best overall solution is the only one that everybody can do at any stage of their company.

Focus on the people that are going to be the most passionate particularly at the early stages.

You have to get functionality right.

Word of mouth growth is the easiest kind of growth.

People love working on things where they make a difference.

Remote working is especially tricky.

Most problems in companies don’t need to be solved real time.

Everything outside of the site being down or payments not working.

An office allows you to be a little bit lazier in all the things around productivity.

kevin@ycombinator.com