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.