So it's very important to have a persona
because it's very important within a team
to have symbols to keep everybody aligned
and know what you are doing, why you're doing that.
And everybody needs to brief the company strategy, the mission,
and so on.
The persona, it's like something which inspires each of us
in the morning when we go to work.
And it's something we appeal to when we're not
sure the call to make for the product.
And that's something that's to be very clear to everybody.
So you say, OK, we're in the business of doing this.
And the business, it's really making our app.
Making her satisfied, making her fulfilled, making her
want to choose to open the app every day.
So that's what ultimately directs everybody's effort.
Now you presented Helen with one of the earliest
versions of Cannonball.
Was her feedback useful to you in your product development
process?
The first useful thing...the answer is yes.
The very first exciting thing was her excitement,
seeing that-- which was not only because she was, as you know,
showing so many of her friends and so on.
But really, our feeling that this
could bring a dead part of this back to life.
So that was very important for us
because we knew that there was something thriving in there.
And she gave us the light.
She told us, OK, this is the direction.
And so that is what keeps us up late at night.
It's really going for that light.
And sometimes, you struggle a little bit,
but then you fight back.
And you go for that light, which is
the excitement of your early users.
So, yes.
Now you have a pretty good end-user definition,
someone who is a woman in her early 30s, early 40s, someone
who goes couch shopping.
How did you go from that definition
to a very clear, detailed understanding of your persona?
How did you find the persona?
What's steps did you take?
End-user was my partner, was me.
It was our girlfriends.
So it was like a court of people which, in our mind,
was quite well-defined.
And then we started spending time with users.
We spent time with testers, and we
had a few kind of similar, which are
those who resonated the most with us,
those who resonated the most with the product, those who
took patience in providing feedback because they felt
that that was something which was meaningful to them.
So as we starting, receiving certain nice emails from her,
sometimes it was too much.
But it was great.
And so we realized those were the people.
She was the person for whom we could make the difference.
So we said, OK, now you really need
to focus and stick on something, on somebody, build
around there.
Gmail has-- just to mention, not just always to pick up
on Gmail, but just because it's been
the most successful large email provider in the last years--
has 120 million users in the United States only.
We want to make the difference for a niche
within that large number.
If we can do it for 10% of them, that would be amazing.
You know, 12 million users.
But the idea is that you really start
focusing on a specific use case.
And then you expand.
You iterate.
And you build around it.
Startups cannot be good for everybody.
Otherwise they're good for nobody,
and people do not switch.
What is very important is convincing a subset of users
that your innovation is meaningful to them,
and so they can adopt you.
Because otherwise, we won't make it out there.
Now, it would be interesting to hear from you
how your team participated in the process of defining
your persona.
Now your partner Jim, he leads product development.
You are more on the business side.
Did you participate in this process
of understanding and refining your persona together?
Did you participate?
How did the process work with Cannonball?
I think the persona was pretty much clear in Jim's mind from
the very beginning because he's a great program guy.
He's really been braving this from the very beginning.
And me, at first, I need to get up to speed.
And I remember, I was spending the first month or so--
and this was one year and a half ago--
interviewing a lot of people, asking what was in their inbox.
Of course, also for Jim, there was a learning curve.
But he really was more balanced, I mean,
was more grounded around a solid idea of the end-user profile.
And then we got to the persona together.