\u201cWe were throwing things against the wall,\u201d says Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv, Twitch, Exec, Socialcam, and now a Y Combinator partner. (He\u2019s also a power-user on Snapchat, where he\u2019s putting out some great stuff for startup founders.)<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought that instead of talking to [customers] and finding out what they liked and didn’t like about our existing service, we would continue to invent new features that we thought would be used even more than our existing features,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Only often, they were wrong.<\/strong><\/p>\n For instance, they created a feature for Justin.tv called Justin.tv Challenges. The idea was that people could vote on what they wanted to see, like maybe a specific skateboarding trick.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd the biggest ideas would get performed by someone live,\u201d says Justin. \u201cSo we spent a couple months building this feature. It was the future of the company, Justin.tv Challenges. And we launched it. And it turns out that only one person ever completed a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n And that one person was Justin. Ouch.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I’ve lived the experience of building things that people didn’t want, and eventually finding out how to build something that people actually want,\u201d he says. \u201cThe way that you actually build something that people love is by building incrementally.\u201d<\/p>\n Justin says the process goes like this:<\/strong><\/p>\n Step one: Gather data on customer problems.<\/p>\n Step two: Form a hypothesis about how to fix that problem and build something that you think addresses it.<\/p>\n Step three: Test your hypothesis by giving what you\u2019ve built to your potential customers and getting feedback.<\/p>\n \u201cThen from there, you figure out the problems, and go back to step one,\u201d says Justin. \u201cIf you do that over and over and over again, if you complete that cycle over and over again, I don’t believe that you can be unsuccessful building a product.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what else you\u2019ll learn in his Mixergy course:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe were throwing things against the wall,\u201d says Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv, Twitch, Exec, Socialcam, and now a Y Combinator partner. (He\u2019s also a power-user on Snapchat, where he\u2019s putting out some great stuff for startup founders.) \u201cWe thought that instead of talking to [customers] and finding out what they liked and didn’t like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2370,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[293,295,245],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cheat-sheet","category-course-cheat-sheet","category-courses"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n