DAVID KATZ: Hi, I'm David.
I'm a designer, and a developer, and a founder.
Over the last seven years I've founded three companies,
and lately I've been doing a lot of work
with Google, helping them with their startup education
programs.
So this year I've done talks about startups
in London, and Tel Aviv, and in Rio de Janeiro.
Because I have a lot of exposure to the community
I talk to a lot of startups-- every year,
at least 100 startups.
And that really gets my pattern recognition engines going.
What I want to talk to you about today
is something which might sound obvious.
And it's about building something people want.
You see, most startups fail.
It sort of depends on how you measure it,
but between 70% and 90% of startups do not succeed.
And the reason they don't succeed
is not because they fail to build something-- in fact,
most startups build products, especially
if they have engineers on their teams.
The reason that most startups don't succeed
is because they build something people don't want.
You see, startups, they face incredible friction.
People don't just walk around waiting for startups
to release new products.
They're not looking for change.
So if you want people to use your product,
you really have to solve a problem for them,
and you have to do it, I think, by doing something
that 10 times better than the alternative.
You know, doing something that's a little bit better
than the alternative isn't enough,
because people are resistant to change.
Another reason that it's really important
to make something that's 10 times better
is that almost always the first versions of your product
aren't going to be that great.
So they're usually going to have bugs that you didn't catch,
and you're usually not going to be great at communicating them
well, and what their value is.
And you're not going to figure out
where to get the right people in, the right users
and the right customers.
And building something that's so much
better than the alternative really
pushes through all of these things.
So how do you create something that's 10 times better?
One way to almost certainly not do it
is to take a competing product, and try to match every feature,
and just try to do it better.
If you want to build something that's significantly better,
you usually need to do something else.
You need a new take on things.
You need a new understanding of a problem, something
that your competitors didn't quite see.
I'll give you one example which is a product that I built
called MixTiles, which is essentially an app for getting
photos out of your phone, to your wall.
And this space of online printing is super competitive.
There's companies in that space that
are worth billions of dollars, like Shutterfly.
And they have an incredible array of features.
And MixTiles, when it launched, had almost no features.
I'll give you some examples of things it didn't have.
So you couldn't crop your photos.
You couldn't even preview your photos,
and see how they would look like.
And you couldn't even pay in the app.
So you had to get, an email, and then pay through the email.
But what it did let you do is get photos from your phone
to your wall.
And that was my theory of what people wanted,
and that's something that I think MixTiles made 10 times
better, even though it didn't have
all these features like cropping and payments.
So knowing what problem you're solving also really
focuses in the beginning.
Because when I built the first version of MixTiles,
I knew that the problem that I want to solve
is just to get photos from the phone to the wall.
And every time I thought of another feature
like, should I do cropping, I just asked myself,
does that help you get photos from your phone to your wall,
or can you get photos from your phone to your wall
without this feature?
And the answer is yes, even without a cropping feature,
you could still get photos from your phone to your wall.
And that's why I didn't build that feature, for example.
So how do you know?
How do you know if the product that you built
is something that people want?
There's two great techniques that I
want to talk to you about.
The first is a data driven technique,
an analytics based technique.
And that's measuring something called retention.
Retention is a metric that captures
how people return to use your product after they were already
exposed to it.
It's a great metric, because people only
return to use something if it's something they want.
Other metrics, like number of downloads,
or number of registrations, are easy to influence artificially.
So for example, if you get press coverage,
people will download your app.
Or if you advertise, people will download your app.
But none of that means that they actually want it.
It just means that you exposed them to it, and they tried it.
Retention is something that only works if people want your app.
One simple way to measure retention
is something called 30 day active.
It's basically out of the people that were first
exposed to your product, how many of them
still use it after 30 days?
And if that number is something significant, like 20%, or 30%,
or really anything that's not nothing,
then you may have a product in there, something
that people really want to use.
Another great mechanism is customer feedback,
just hearing what people think.
Something that I love doing is making
it really easy for my users and customers
to send me feedback through the product--
so, for example, a button that says Email Us.
When you do that, people start telling you things about
your product, and you can see if they love it or if they don't.
What you want to see, though, is that people love the product.
You don't want to see emails like, yeah this is pretty nice,
or something like that.
You want people to be excited about it.
You want them to tell you stories
about how you've solved their problems.
Or you want them to be angry that something's missing,
because anybody who takes the time to write you angrily
that they're missing something about your product
is somebody who is using your product
and is getting value out of it.
To summarize, what I wanted to talk to you about
is building something people want.
It may sound obvious, but it's not.
So many startups fail to build something people want.
And if the one thing you get out of this talk
is just focusing on that, and committing internally
to try to build something people want, that's already great.
We've also talked about one way to build something people want,
which is committing to building a solution that's
10 times better than existing solutions.
Not a little bit better, a lot better.
The last thing we talked about is
how to measure if you've succeeded.
We've talked about retention, which is people coming back
to use your product again and again.
We've talked about customer feedback, which
is people telling you that they love your product,
or being angry because it's missing something.
I hope that this set of tools helps
you build something people want.
It's something which has helped me greatly in the past.
That's it.
Good luck.