So what do you do to improve your metric?
>> Iterate, right?
Talk to your users and change.
If something's not working, there's a reason it's not working.
I think the worst thing that happens when metrics aren't going well.
The two worst things I would say that people do when their metrics aren't
moving in the right direction.
They stick their heads in the sand and say,
no, I understand better than anyone else.
So I'm just keep down the same path.
Which typically doesn't work because you're getting signals and
the other worst thing that people do is people switch metrics.
People say, oh well I know we were suppose to focus on revenue but
it's not growing so we're going to to focus on users.
Because they focus on, or press or money raised or something.
Because that's something they can point to as a sign of success,
because honestly, it's really, really hard to admit that you're not
doing something right and that you're failing, especially as an entrepreneur.
Because your ego is actually pretty important, again,
to push you through those walls.
But you can't let it get in the way of change.
You have to understand what you're getting wrong and fix it.
>> And when you iterate you do A/B testing or any other type of testing?
>> It depends.
I mean A/B testing is specifically really about
changing something on your website.
Doing two different versions to see what happens to click rates,
if you have a different picture, or something like that.
So that can be useful, but typically you need to go deeper than that, right?
You have to tinker with the guts of what you're doing.
If you're losing customers,
because your server load times are too slow A/B testing won't help you there.
You actually have to re-engineer what you've built.
If you have the completely wrong features, A/B testing.
You know, you could do the thing that we used to do,
which was put the dead link and see if people click on it.
That's a form of A/B testing.
>> Right. >> But then you have
to build a whole new thing.
And, I think about A/B testing as incredibly powerful,
but very much about incrementalism.
A lot of the the time when it comes to iterating your product you have to
take leaps.
So this is actually, I think,
something I didn't say before, which is listen to your customers feedback.
We don't build exactly what they say.
You have to make the intuitive leap from the feedback you get to what they're
going to need in the future and what they're going to want in the future.
A/B testing won't get you there.
Strong product vision will.
>> So when do you know that you can launch?
>> There's no way to know.
I think precisely, I think the main thing is just launch already, right.
If you've built that thing,
that is useful, even in the smallest way to your users, put it out there.
Because if you wait for
some sort of monolithic launch, you're going to be too late.
I think this is one of the key differences between how start-ups launch
and how software is made today versus ten or 15 years ago.
There's a great book about Intuit.
I'm totally blanking on the name of the book,
but it's sort of the story of Intuit and how they beat Microsoft Money.
Because they did, which was crazy.
That the small startup beat Microsoft.
And I remember very distinctly you know they had to launch a useful product, and
it's tough because it was you know accounting software and tax software.
Oh I think it wasn't tax software at that point,
it was Personal Money Management software.
And it needed a lot, and they did this Herculean effort.
To get the whole thing done and the CTO worked for
a week without sleep kind of thing.
And the reason they had to do that is because they actually had to
press floppy disks, right.
You had to get the software onto a floppy disk and
making the whole company came in to press floppy disks.
And one of the times they did this there was a bug they realized afterwards.
They all came back the next weekend, repressed them, sent them out.
And so that was this idea that you had to be ready to launch kind and
like really ready with everything done.
And what that lead to was a hell of a lot of up front investment
with no idea whether or not the product would work.
Now, because of the internet,
you can basically deploy something smaller and then add to it over time.
And so, we tell startups again and again and again, just launch something.
Because, a lot of the time,
the thing that you think will be the next step in your company's life isn't,
and you won't know it unless you're interacting with customers, so.
>> So, a lot of entrepreneurs want to wait until they're feature ready.
>> Oh, yeah. >> Until the last mile feature is done?
>> That they have the right number of pixel padding.
We're talking crazy things.
>> Right. >> Where people are delaying a launch
because they want a very specific graphic they hired someone to do.
Nobody cares if you have that graphic, right.
They care whether or not the product works and does something for us.
>> Right, and what are, for example,
the bad things that you forget to do in launch, or should wait to launch.
>> Well it has to work.
Sometimes people will focus too much say on visual design and
the thing won't work.
It just won't load, you hit a button and nothing happens.
That's the worst thing that you can possibly do because you get
one chance to make a first impression on someone and it better be good.
On the other hand, you can launch as many times as you want.
Right? No one will remember you
launched if they never saw it.
>> Right. >> So it's okay
just to put it out there.
It doesn't have to be a big splashy thing,
just put it out there, see what happens and keep launching until people notice.
>> And start to learn.
>> And start to learn about you, right?
So every time you got a new feature, you launched, right,
you're launching fresh until you hit that point where people know about you.