So now, on the basis of Raffa's example
and my stories of SensAble, hopefully
you're equipped with the knowledge and the confidence
to know what a persona is, why it's important,
how to build a persona yourself.
So let me now share some concluding thoughts with you.
First, no persona will represent all the characteristics
of the target customer end-user profile.
But what it doesn't represent will be far offset
by all the things that it does represent because that will
give you specific real guidance on what features you should put
in, who you should hire, what your message should be.
So get specific, get the best persona
you can, but don't worry that it's not perfect.
Second, as you progress through the process,
you'll find that you've made some errors.
And you're going to update your persona fact sheet,
and you're going to update your persona.
In fact, you may change your persona in its entirety.
All of this iteration is good.
It will make things better in the long run.
The point is that a persona is not a one-time event,
but an iterative process that involves your entire team.
Remember, keep your team involved.
Their buyin, their understanding,
is very, very important.
Thirdly, building a persona is extremely helpful process
to get to specificity, because it fosters cohesion
in your team, not just when the exercise is done,
but going forward thereafter.
Point 4, when you have a multi-sided market, where
you might have buyers and sellers,
or users and advertisers, it's important to make
a persona of both of them.
But the first one you're going to make a persona of
is the end-user, and then the economic buyer.
But you're going to make personas,
and you're going to use the persona skills that you're
developing here for both.
It might be a double-sided market like eBay,
where you have a persona of a buyer and a seller.
In that case, you have to think which is a more critical one
to get first.
And that's the first persona you make,
but then you're going to use the same discipline
to get the second one.
Point number five, the persona discipline
can be used to choose who your customer is,
but the same persona discipline will
choose who your customer is not.
We call this the anti-persona.
Because discipline entrepreneurship
is about not only knowing who your customer is,
but who your customer is not.
Steve Jobs once said, "I'm as proud of the things
that we've done as the things that we have not done,"
meaning he's real proud of the things that he didn't do.
You have to know what not to do, and the anti-persona
can help you in that regard.
So in conclusion, the persona is a very important part
of the process.
It's not just the result of the persona in the fact sheet
that you get, but it's catalyzing the team
to really start to think, who's our customer,
and everything we do has got be aligned with them.
The success in a new venture is making sure
a lot of planets line up at the same time.
And getting all those planets to line up at the same time,
how do you do that?
You get aligned with your target customer,
and that's the persona.
So that's a persona.
This should be a very fun exercise for you.
It's something that we've had a lot of fun
at MIT and throughout the world, and it's very, very productive.
For your next exercise, you're going to build a persona.
And Raffa has built a persona.
We want to wish him good luck.
We're going to wish you good luck.
And we started this all out with the Beach Boys.
I want to end with another musician we used to listen to,
Stephen Stills.
He once said, "Love the one you're with."
And the one you're with is your persona.
Stick with it, and you'll succeed.
Good luck.