How to Run a User Interview with Emmett Shear (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 16)

Today’s guest speaker is Emmett Scheer. Emmett is the CEO of Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon, where he now works. Emmett is going to do a new format of class today and talk about how to do great user interviews. So this is the talking to users part of starting a startup. This should be really useful. Thank you very much for coming.

Contact server knows where I'm coming from. We started my first startup with Justin Khan right out of college. We started this company called Kiko Calendar. It didn't go so well. When I went, alright, we built it, we sold it, but we sold it on eBay. So that’s not necessarily the end you want for your startup. It was a good time; we learned a lot. We learned a lot about programming. We didn’t know anything about calendars. Neither of us were users of calendars, nor did we, during the period of time we worked on Kiko, talk to anyone who actually did use a calendar. So that was not optimal. We got the build stuff part of the startup down; we did not get the talk to users part.

The second startup we started, we used a very common