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. Uh, so that's not necessarily the end you want for your startup. And, 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, 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 consumer. We, uh, we had this idea for a television show, Justin TV, a reality show about Justin Khan's life. And, uh, uh, we built a whole set of technology and website around the reality show we wanted to run. Um, and so we were the user for that, uh, for that product.

And that's actually one way to cheat and get away with not talking to many other users, is if you're just building something that literally is just for you. You don't need to talk to anyone else because you know what it is you want, um, and what you need.

Uh, but that's actually a really limiting way to start a startup. Most startups are not just built for the person who is, uh, who is using them. And when you do that, every now and then, you get really lucky, and you are representative of some huge class of people who all want the exact same thing you do.

Uh, but very often also, that just turns into a side project that doesn't go anywhere. Uh, so we kept working on Justin TV for a while, and we actually achieved a good deal of success because it turned out that there were people out there who wanted to do the same thing we did, uh, which was broadcast ourselves live on the internet.

But, uh, the issue with Justin TV, the thing that, the thing that sort of kept us from achieving greatness is we hadn't figured out yet how to, uh, how to build towards anything beyond that initial TV show. We knew how to build. We built a great product. Actually, if you wanted to run a live 24/7 reality television show about your life, we had the website for you. We had exactly what you needed.

But if we wanted to go do more than that, if we wanted to open it up to a broader spectrum of people, a broader spectrum of use cases, we didn't have, uh, we didn't have the insight to figure that out because we weren't that user.

Uh, and so, at some point, we decided to pivot Justin TV. We decided we needed to go in a new direction. Uh, we thought we'd built a lot of valuable technology, but we hadn't identified the use case that would let it get really big.

Uh, and there were two directions that seemed promising. One of them was mobile, and one of them was gaming. Uh, and I led the gaming initiative inside of the company. What we did with gaming that was very, very different from what we'd ever done before was we actually went and talked to users.

Because while I loved watching gaming video, I was very aware that neither I nor anyone else in the company knew anything about broadcasting video games. And so, uh, I was amped about the content. I thought there was a market there. That was sort of the insight that, uh, that I had that I think wasn't common at the time, which is how much fun it was to watch video games.

Uh, quick show of hands: people know about watching video games on the internet here? Okay, I'm going just going to assume the people listening to this also know about it. If you don't know about watching v...