Lecture 16 - How to Run a User Interview (Emmett Shear)

All right, uh good afternoon. Today's guest speaker is EMT Shear. EMT is the CEO of Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon, where he now works. Um, and EMT is going to do a new format of class today, uh, and talk about how to do great user interviews.

So this is the talking to users part of starting a startup. Uh, should be really useful. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks, Contex.

So everyone knows, uh, where I'm coming from. From this, uh, we started our, I started my first startup with Justin KH, uh, right out of college. Um, we started this company called Kiko Calendar. Uh, it didn't go so well. Uh, it went all right. We built it, we sold it, but we sold it on eBay.

So that's not necessarily the end you want for your startup. And, uh, it was, uh, it was a good time. We learned a lot. We learned a lot about programming. Um, we didn't know anything about calendars. Uh, 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.

Uh, so that was, uh, that was not optimal. Uh, we got the build stuff part of the, uh, startup down. We did not get the talk to users part.

Uh, the second startup we started, we used a very common trick that lets you get away with not talking to users, which was that we were our own