It's all about talking to your users.

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

Most people in the world have the idea on how new startups are formed completely wrong. They think ideas of new products is something the founders come up with on a lazy Sunday or a late night coding session. You probably know it doesn't work this way. This scene, as you can see here, is a scene from The Social Network movie. It's a great movie, but they got a lot of things wrong on how Facebook actually got started.

This is Brian Chesky. Brian is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. On the left side of the photo is Amal. Amal was the very first guest on Airbnb. They actually spent a weekend together in San Francisco when they'd be kind of washed.

You notice the difference between this photo and the previous photo? Well, this photo actually is a real photo. It includes a two-way conversation with a real customer. Great founders talk to future customers before they even have a product. In fact, the very best founders in the world learn directly from their users throughout the life of their company.

Let that sink in. If you have correctly identified who your users are, you should learn from them throughout the lifetime of your company.

When Climate Change Became Personal, She Turned to Radio | Short Film Showcase

Saving Manatees: What It Takes - Meet the Expert | National Geographic

View All

See What It Takes to Hide a Secret Tracker in a Rhino Horn | Short Film Showcase

[Music] Africa’s got the greatest number and diversity of large mammals. It’s the continent that’s been blessed with the most wildlife. Many of these animals, like the black rhino, are down to a few thousand. This is it; in the next hundred years, years m…

Toothpaste | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 1)

What’s in here? What does it do? And can I make it from scratch? Ingredients toothpaste, as we know it, is relatively new—only 150 years old. Toothpaste, as we don’t know it, had things like rock salt, pumice, crushed eggshells, crushed bone, and even cr…

MTV News Rocks the Vote | Generation X

You have the right to vote music or lose it. Rock the Vote comes along at the same time MTV’s fledgling news department is finding its legs. Hi, I’m Kevin de Sauron and this is MTV News. The second of three presidential debates was held Thursday night; i…

Fourier coefficients for sine terms

Many videos ago we first looked at the idea of representing a periodic function as a set of weighted cosines and sines, as a sum, as the infinite sum of weighted cosines and sines. Then we did some work in order to get some basics in terms of some of the…

You Are Not Alone

Sleep is good, death is better; yet surely never to have been born is best. These lines close a 17th century poem by German writer Hinrich Hine. The piece is titled “Death and his Brother’s Sleep.” It compares these two states, suggesting that we experien…

100 Seconds to Midnight

Mutually assured destruction, MAD. These three terrifying words have somehow been the source of relative peace in the world for close to six decades. Yes, the only way we humans were able to achieve some sort of world peace is by keeping the most deadly w…

It's all about talking to your users.

More Articles