# How to Start a Startup: Talking to users

**Author:** Emmett Shear
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JQ-how-to-start-a-startup-talking-to-users
**YouTube ID:** qAws7eXItMk

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What can you learn by talking to users that you can’t learn by looking at data? What questions should you ask? How can
user interviews define or redefine your product goals? In this lecture, Emmett Shear, YC Partner and Co-founder/former
CEO of Twitch, answers all these and more.

## Transcript

All right, good afternoon. Today's guest speaker is
Emmett Shear, Emmett is the CEO of Twitch. >> Hello.
>> Which was acquired by Amazon, where he now works. And Emmett is going to do a
new formal of class today, and talk about how to do great
user interviews? So this is the talking to
users part of starting a startup, should
be really useful. Thank you very much for
coming. >> Thanks Tim. >> Contact server knows where
I'm coming from, from this.

We started our, I started my
first startup with Justin Kan right out of college we, started this company called
Kiko Calendar It didn't go so well, it, it went, all right. We, we, 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 It was 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're thinking you've got to talk to anyone who actually
did use a calendar.

So that was, that was not
optimal. we, 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 trick, that lets you get away with
not talking to users, which is that we were our own
consumer. We, we had this idea for a
television show, Justin TV, a reality show about Justin
Kan's life. And we built a whole set of
technology and website around the reality
show we wanted to run. And so we were the user for
that 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 is you want. And what you need. But that's if you're really
limiting, where to start a startup. Most startups are not just
built for the person who is 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. But very often also that just
turns into a side project that doesn't go
any where.

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. Which was broadcast ourselves
live on the Internet. But, 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 how to build towards
anything beyond that initial TV show. We knew how to, we built a
great product actually. If you wanted to run a live
24/7 reality TV 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 number of people, a broader spectrum of people,
a broader use cases. We didn't have we didn't have
the insight to figure that out because we weren't that user
and so at some point we decided to
pivot JustinTV. We decided we needed to go in
a new direction. We thought we'd built a lot of
valuable technology but hadn't identified the use case that
would let it get really big. And there were two directions
that seemed promising. One of them was mobile. And one of them is gaming.

And I led the gaming initiative inside of the
company. And 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 about broadcasting video games. And so I would amp up the
content, I thought there was a market there, that was sort
of the insight that I had which wasn't common at
the time, which was how much fun it was
to watch video games. Quick show of hands, people
know about watching video game

on the internet here? Okay, I'm just going to assume
that people listening to this also know about it. If you don't know about, if
you don't know about watching video games on the internet,
you should go read about that. Because it's sort of, an important context for the
stuff I'm going to talk about. But the main point is I
thought that was awesome but I didn't
know anything about the side of it that was really
important, which is actually acquiring the content
to start broadcasting. So we went out, and we ran a. Actually a very large number
of user interviews.

We talked to a lot of people
and brought that data back, and that formed the core of
all of the decision-making that was for the next three
years of product features on Twitch was sort of some of the
insights we got from that. And we continued to talk to
users, and in fact built an entire. Part of the company whose job
it is basically to talk to our users. Which is an, which is a whole division that we just
didn't even have at JustinTV. We had no one at the company
whose job it was to talk to our most
important users. So so that was Twitch. And I'm, I want to give you
guys a little bit of

a a little bit of an insight
into. With Twitch. What, what that, what that meant, going to go
talk to users. So, we determined that the broadcasters are the most
important people. And the reason we determined
that, was, when we went and looked into the market, we we looked into what, what
determined. Why people watched a certain
streamer or went to a certain website. They would just follow the
content, right? You had a, you had a piece of
content you loved and

the broadcaster would come
with you. And that's actually the one really important point about
user interviews, which is that who you talk to
is as important. As what questions you ask and
you pull away from it. Because if you go and talk to
a set of users, if we'd gone and talked to viewers only, we
have, a complete different set of feedback than talking to
the broadcasters. And talking to the
broadcasters gave us insight into how to build a
link for them. That you're not to be
strategically correct. I wish I could tell the recipe
for figuring out who the target
user is for your product and

who your target user should
be. But there isn't a recipe. It comes down to think really
hard and, and use your, use your judgement to figure
out, who you're really building
this for? So what I want to do is a
little bit, something a little bit
interactive now, which is. sometging We're going to, I've got a bunch of ideas
from, from you guys actually. So, sort of suggested ideas. And i'm going to pick one of
them. And I want every one to sort
of sit down and do, do step one of this
process for me, right now. Which is think about who would
you go ask about this.

Like which people., Where would you go to find the
people you needed to talk to about this. In order to in order to learn
about what you should build. And so the idea you're going
to use is, let me see here. Of these ideas, so here it's a lecture focused
note taking app. The idea is I don't think that
the state of the art for note taking is good enough
yet. And I want to make a note
taking app that improves. You know, improves that
experience. Makes taking notes in class
better. Or taking notes by listening
to a lecture online better. So you know, maybe it has
collaboration features.

Maybe it, like, helps you
focus better somehow. It has multimedia
enhancements. I don't know, right? All sorts of possible
features. But that's the, that's the
idea. So take, like,. Take 120 seconds right now,
and think about not what you would ask, or what the right
features for this app is, but who would you
talk to? Who should the, who, who's going to give you that
feedback that's going to tell you whether this is good or
not? I actually mean it, right now. Take your laptop out, like
type, write some stuff down. Think, think about, like, the,
you can, it, it's good enough to.

Like think of that in your
head. But actually, like if you
actually just write it down, and like just come up with the
five people you talk to, the five types of people you
talk to. And who you think the most
important one was. LIke, actually do it. Because there's nothing like
actually running through a practice of
something and trying to do it to actually get into your
head, the right way to do it. I"m gratified to see here
clicking in, of the keyboards now. If you're following along at
home, pause, actually do it. Think about who you, who would
you talk to? Because that's a, that is the
first question

for almost any startup that
you need to answer is like who is my
user and, and where am I going to find
them? Alright that's like way
shorter than you normally used to think
about this problem.

It's actually a really tricky
problem in, like, figuring out where to source the people is
pretty hard, but ,. We're going to move along
anyways in the, in this highly abbreviated
version of learning how to build a product and run a user
interview. So can can I get one volunteer
from the audience to come up and tell, tell us what
who you would talk to? And we'll talk about it. You guys are all pre-selected. >>
>> Here you go. I don't know, how to turn this
thing on, here we go. So who do you talk to?

I would definitely talk to n
college students first, obviously because we sit in a
lot of lectures, and specifically I want to talk to
college students studying different subjects to see if
maybe, you know, if you're an English major, if that makes a different,
versus you're studying. Of not, Computer Science in
terms of how you want to take notes in lectures. >> And so you, you're going to talk to a
bunch of college students Would you pick any particular
subset of college students? Like we're going to talk to
all college students or like a broad array. >> I, I went out and talked to
college students.

like, and break down the
divisions by like people who study different areas maybe. And then also maybe it would
make sense for people who have like different
study techniques. Because some people take a lot
of notes. Some people don't take that
many notes, but still jot stuff down. >> Right. So I mean that', that's a
really good start. like that's, that is actually
obviously a group of users you want to go talk to, especially
if you're targeting something at, you know, at college
students as the consumer. And if you're talking to
college students, as a consumer. the, you're going to get a lot
out of students, about, what their current note
taking habits are.

And, you know, what they would
be excited about. One of the problems with
selling things to college students, is that,
college students don't actually spend very much
money. it's, it's really hard to get
you guys to open your wallets. Especially, if you want. Them to pay for a
school-related thing. And if you don't even want to
buy text books, right, I think you probably,
probably all use or that you know, borrow it from
your friend or whatever. And so one of the like, one of the things that I think
you'd be missing if you go after just the students,
right, is you want to. Figure out who, who is the most important
person to this, to this app.

And if you're actually in a
note-taking app, my guess is for colleges, the
people most likely to actually buy a note-taking app
that you guys would used, would be College IT. Right, I mean, presumably for
most, for the most part, if you want to
sell software to students, like the people who have to
get bought into that is usually
the school administrator. So that would be one, that
would be one approach, if you like thought that they
will. You presumably go talk to the
College students and you find out they don't
actually, buy any note-taking software
right now at all. I mean, likely. It's possible they do in which
case I'm, I'm complete wrong and this is
where you actually have to go talk to the users but

you then have to try to maybe
try other, other groups right. So I would talk to college, I would talk to IT
administrators, as well. Think that's another. Area that's really promising. You might lo, talk to parents. Right?
Who, who, who spends money on their
kids' Education and is like willing to pull their
wallet out? Like, the, you know, parents
of kids. Parents of kids, who are
freshmen who are going off to college for the first time. You need this app to make your
kid productive so that they don't fail out of
College. and, and as I see a lot of
groups that are potential, that aren't necessarily, the obvious user, but who are
critical, critical to your app's
success, potentially.

And when you, when you're at
the very beginning of a startup like this, when
you're like, you have this idea that you
think is awesome. You want to have that broadest
group you possibly can. You don't just want to talk to
one type of person and, and, and learn that. You want to get familiar with
the space. You want to get familiar with
the various kinds of people who be contributing. All right. So lets lets have somebody
come up and we're going to, we're going to pretend we're
going to the senior interview. So we're going to talk to a
college student and try to find out what we should
build.

You know, what we should get
into this note-taking app. So, so, some, another
volunteer please for, for running an interview. Yes. All right, so hello. >> Hi, I'm Stephanie. >> Hi, Stephanie.
>> Nice to meet you. >> Welcome, thank you for agreeing to do this user
interview with us. So I, I wanted to, hear from
you about you know, what are your note-taking
habits. How do you take notes today? >> Sure, so I take notes in a
variety of ways. I like to now because of speed
and efficiency and

just to come back to it later,
it's easier for me to just take notes on my
lap top. And so a lot of those notes
will be primarily, text based. But in certain classes. So, for example, if I'm taking a History class,
most of it will be in text. But if I'm taking it, taking a
Physics class for example they're going to be
more complex diagrams, different angles that I have
to draw and so that's little harder work,
harder for me to- >> What's-
>> Get. >> What software do you use
for this stuff today? >> I just do pen and paper for
that. >> You do pen and paper, so
you do a combination. You take notes with pen and
paper, you take notes- >> Exactly.
>> With your computer sometimes. >> Yeah.
>> And when you take notes

with when you take all these
notes, again it's like, do you actually review them? Like, do you, be honest, do
you actually go back and actually ever look at these
notes? >> The pen and paper not so
much. But yes to the software-based,
because it's more easy to access and it's easier for me
to, to share and collaborate and maybe even merge notes
with classmates and friends. >> So what do what do you use to take notes today on
your computer? Google Docs and Evernote. >> Google Docs and Evernote? >> Mm-hm.
>> And ,. >> And. >> Tell me more about like why two things at the
same time.

>> So Evernote is easy, if I'm
trying to just collect it for myself, I think. And yes you can share, but I
think Google Docs for me is easier to share and that
depends also if, you know, a friend has already created a
folder. For example on Google Docs and
I just have to add to that folder if it's a group project
for example versus if it's for my personal use I, I tend to
go more toward. >> So it sounds like you do a lot of note-taking
collaboration. >> Yeah.
>> What- >> I wish it was integrated >> What tell me more about that. Like, like, do you take as, do you want up taking most of
the notes, most of

the value of the notes out of
notes other people take? Or is it mostly your own notes
you review at the end of a semester? How does that work? >> It's mostly, mine because
I'm pretty picky about the way I like things
organized. like, design wise, or
formatting. Even color, I'm really
particular with. And, like, the font that we
use. And that really affects the
way I study. So, I tend to like, to like,
to like to personalize it, even after I merge. >> So, you, you pull in notes
from other people. But then you merge them into,
into the main. >> What works for me. >> Right.

awesome. And if you, if you have
Evernote notes and you have Google Docs notes and
you have pen and paper notes. >> Mm-hm,
>> Once the semester's over do you ever go back to any of
that stuff or is it like the quarter end, you guys
do have quarters here, right? >> Yeah.
>> One the quarter's over do you ever go back to any of
that stuff? Do you ever? >> For classes not so much but
if it's notes I've taken for like talks like these, for
example, or if it's like interview prep
that I'm doing. I tend to go back because of
things that I like to kind of keep fresh in my mind.

And to help me prep for, for
future things. >> So that's interesting. Tell more about that. Like you take notes not just
in class? >> Yeah, so I take notes to,
also to summarize main points. So if it's like inspirational
quotes. For example talks that I go to
like these. And then like, maybe I'm going
to an event where I'm actually going to meet someone
and it, it helps to actually to think
about and to remember and recall what we
shared at the time that, you know, I attended the talk
or something. >> Awesome. All right.
Well, normally I'd actually dig into a lot more
detail. There's a huge amount of like,
open questions that

are still in my mind after
hearing that stuff. Questions about, which people
do you collaborate with. Questions about whether or not you like, like what the
volume of notes are. And like how, how long of, of
note-taking stuff. Just sort of, digging in to like what the current behavior
is. But like in interest of time
and not like keeping everyone here hearing about the
intricacies of one person's note-taking habits forever
we're going to move on. But thank you very much
Stephanie that was, appreciate that. So so that, that's like, that
kind of stuff, you notice we're not talking
about the actual content of

the app at all. Like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not really interested in
features. I don't really want to know
about what they, the specific feature set in
Google Docs and Evernote. I might start digging in a
little bit more into, which features actually get
used. Like if she's actively
collaborating. You know is, how does that
work? I heard some interesting
things about oh, we, we use folders. That's interesting to me. But the main thing you're
trying to do when you're running these first set of
interviews is not necessarily get, like, questions about
like user flows and like optimizing that, or
questions about

like the specifics of of, of
any of that stuff. kind of can be distracting
because users think they know what they want. But like you, you get the you
get the horseless carriage effect,
where you're, you're you're, you're getting asked for a
faster horse instead of trying to design the actual
real solution to the problem. If you start asking people
about features, so you want to stay as far away
from features as possible because the the
things they tell you. Wind up feeling, almost
overwhelmingly real. When you have a real user
asking you for a feature, it's almost, it's
very hard to say no to them.

Because here's a real person
who really has this problem, and they, they're saying build
me this feature. But as you start to talk to
lots of people and really get a sense for what,
what their problems are, you figure out if this is actually
a promising area or not. And like, based on what I
heard there, it's like. Starting from that interview, I'm not necessarily positive
there is a problem or there's at least there's a,
there's a big enough problem that it's worth building a
whole new product for. Because I didn't hear a lot of
like things were were were.

There was a, a big blocker, or
there was something really wrong with the way it, the way
it was working. Unless I had some big idea I
would take that as, you know, maybe a negative
sign. But it doesn't necessarily
mean that you can't, you can't move forward and
keep talking to more people. Because just because you talk
to the first person and you don't get anything out of
it, doesn't mean there's not going
to be. A ton more people, who
actually have a problem. And you, once you talk to
about six, seven, eight people you're usually
about done. It's unlikely you're going to
discover a bunch of new information there.

Which is why it's important to
talk to different extremes of people right. Go, go find people who are different different points
because this is just six or seven Stanford college
students, you're going to get a very different response when
we talk to six or seven high school students, or
six or seven parents. All right, one second, let me
look at the So based on that though, right, I
think the. I think it's possible you
could come up with,

a set of ideas, right? You have this information
about how someone takes notes, you've, you've come up with, potentially when you came up
with this idea you had, you had some ideas as to, you
heard this idea, you had some ideas as to like how you
could build something cool. And so, if you're going to
build just one feature on top of
Google Docs. What would that feature be,
right? And that's for, for, for a new
product like this, it might be a good way to like get started
thinking about where to go. Which is, okay, they're extensively
using this things, right now.

How can we make that experience just one quantum
better? Something that would be. Really exciting to this person
to be one one step ahead, and so let me take two minutes,
right now. And think about, what that
feature might be? Actually like try to, try to
come up with what, what you might do based on
what you heard from, from Stephanie, that could
convince her to switch away from her current
collaborative, multi-person, all-working-together workflow
on Google Docs?

To your new, your new thing
that is, has all the features of Google
Docs plus this one special thing that's, like,
going to make it,. It's going to make it more be,
more useful, and, and convincing the stop using that
they are using.

Awesome, all right. So, I'm going to invite our,
our third guest, if you, if you have something up. I, I don't want to put you on
the spot if you feel like you don't,
you're not sure, but. >> Yeah.
>> So what I, what I, is it on? >> Yes. >> What I thought about was
like the, the reason she uses Everknow is like, of like,
sticky note type notes like, like more thoughts and like
details. So, I feel like, Google Docs
has like documents and not like, smaller notes. So, I feel like a feature that
will be like, super like, a mobile version
of draw it

that doesn't like, isn't that
clunky and like, doesn't make you make real documents could
be like, really useful. Awesome. So right.
That's a, that's a good insight. Right, that's exactly, what's one of the thing that
you get out of that, that user interview? And then, you've got this
idea. Right, you've gotten this, I
guess, user-fed feedback. You've got this idea. What if we've had a Google
Docs that had the collaborative aspects and
the group aspects of that, but where you you could pull in
more little one off notes. And, it was, it was designed
more around note taking.

And so, the question is, now,
once you have this idea, which I think it's the, it's actually probably a
reasonable approach. Is this enough? Is this something people would
actually switch just to have? And, the way to validate, there's two ways to validate
that. One is if you're quick at
programming, you can literally just go
build it, and throw it out in the world and
see what happens. and, that's that's great. And, if that, when that works
that's that's an excellent way to
approach it. But, a lot of the time that
one little thing that's just a little bit better might take
you three months to

actually build something
worthy of actually using. And so, you actually want to
go out and validate that idea further
before you go ahead and start building it. And so, you might take that
idea, and you might go back go back out
and you know, you can sit down
with with diagrams. You can, you can draw what the
what it looks like. Draw the work flow, and go
bring that in front of people, but the one thing you really
don't want to do is ask them this, this is sort of
a trap, and I just want to warn you
against doing it.

Just don't go out and say, to
come up with a feature idea, and go out and ask people. Are, you know?
I've got this great idea for a feature. Are you excited about it? Because, the, the feedback you
get from users, if you tell them about a feature, and ask
them, is this feature good? It's often, oh yeah, that's
great. Like, that sounds like such a
good idea. but, when you actually take
that in front of people, and you actually build it. You then, find out that while
they thought it was such a clever idea, no one
actually, like, cares to switch to get it. And so, the one question you
can't ask is this feature

actually good or not? Yes, Sam?
>> What is the minimum that you could do in your experience to
actually if asking, you know, between asking and actually
building that whole thing. >> Yeah.
So, Sam's asking if what's the, what's the minimum
you can actually get away with to validate, given that you
can't actually just go and ask them is this good or not? and, it's, it's highly
dependent the answer to that is highly dependent on
the particular feature. But, usually the, the best
thing you can do is, is, is, really just hack something
together, right? It's, you find, if your, if
your idea is to build

something on top of Google
Docs, don't, for your V1, go rebuild, an awesome Google
Documents, but for note taking application. Find a way to write a browser
extension, that, that, that stuffs just that little
bit of incremental feature in, and, and see if it's actually
useful for people. go, like actually, go, go find a way to cheat is what
it comes down to, because if you can't actually
put it in front of people it's really, really hard to to
find that out.

For bigger things, where
you're actually trying to, get people to spend money, it
actually gets a lot easier. So, if you're selling it it's
great actually sales is this cure all for this
problem. Get people to put, give you
their credit card and I guarantee you they're
actually using the feature. It's it's one of the most
validating thing you can do for a product, is go
out there and actually get them to commit to
pay you up fron. And, the problem is when
you're working on a student note taking app,
that's going to be relatively hard because you
probably unless your idea is that you're actually going to
sell it. It's probably something where
you're thinking at least the, if the trial version's free,
and you're not necessarily

going to learn that much by
trying to charge people money. But, if you go out there and you can, if you can get people
to say hey I'm going to, I'm going to give you money? The money test is amazing, it
really does clarify whether or not, they're rereally excited, because if you're not
five-dollars-excited about it, you're probably not very
excited about it. so, the last thing I wanted to
do was actually work through with you guys, what
happened at Twitch. So I brought some slides of
feedback that I would like to get put up. It's my, my only slides for the for the thing and it's,
it's.

What it is it's, it's, it's representative
excerpts of Twitch feedback. I had a whole like, 26 page document full of all
the feedback. And then, I realized that reading that was going to be a
little bit tedious and there was no way I'd make it
through it in a lecture. So, pretend that like this is
stuff is all representative of like, lots of people sent this
kind of thing out to, to ask for me ask them
questions. And, I've already pre
condensed it for you in to the real feedback
you got. So, when we were working on
Twitch to go launch it, we we wouldn't talk too

much about existing Justin.tv
Broadcasters and asked them. About their experience
broadcasting, what they liked about
broadcasting, why they broadcasted, what
they broadcasted, what else was going on in
their life. And, the interesting thing is
when you talk to users of your product who are, who are detailed users of your
product, they come back to you with actually very detail
things about features. Because they actually get
mired in the feature and you have to sort of read
between the lines. But they asked for first
things like I want to be able to, way to clear the
banlist in my chat room. Like, this, that was actually
a very common request because there
was

a particular issue with how
our chat rooms worked. People had asked for the
ability to edit the titles of highlights after creating
them. And, and it's, it's, the, this was like, this
stuff was really consistent. As we talked to broadcasters, you probably talked to 12 fif,
fo, 14, something like that broadcasters from the
Justin.tv gaming platform. We got, we got all this
feedback and, you know, what else do we
have? We have your, your competitors
have all these cool features like polls and scrolling text,
you, I can personalize chat there and so, we have some
positive feedback.

They're like, oh, you guys
don't have ads, that's great. I need to be able to ban. So, a bunch of stuff around
chat. A bunch of stuff around
interactivity with, with interactivity with the
with their viewers. And, that was all really
interesting. So, this was what the, this is
what the Justin TV broadcasters wanted us to
build. And, this is what they, what, what, where they felt pain
using the, using the product. And so, if you thought that
what we did was going to address these
problems, you would be wrong.

Because, actually, people who
are using your service already and are willing to put up with
all these issues, kind of, kind of means that these are probably not
actually the biggest problems. Because if you're willing to
ignore the fact that you can't edit the band lesson, titles
are uneditable, and there's no way to get trolls
out of your channel. And, you're using the service
anyways, maybe those aren't huge
problems. And so, that sort of brings up another really
important point. Which is, you have to compare
you have to compare groups of people, and compare the level at which
they they argued with us. So, if you go to the next
slide yes. Nice.

We got competitor broadcaster
feedback, which is really interesting. So, this is stuff that you've,
we heard a lot from people who are using other broadcast
platforms. They wanted to be able to
switch multiple people onto their channel at the same
time. they, they complained about us
not having a rev share program or
they talked a lot about how they're trying to
make a living. They really wanted to make
money pursuing this pursuing this gaming
broadcasting thing. And, they talked a lot about
video stability. Our service wasn't good in
Europe specifically but, but

just globally, video stability
is this huge, huge issue for them. And if you compare and contrast actually, it was
really different. Like, the things that people
who didn't use our service said
about what they cared about, was completely different from
the things that people who were using the service cared
about. And we focused on this stuff
because this was the stuff where, it was so bad
that they weren't even willing to use
our service because of it. And most of them actually had thought
about this because we were, our user base happened to be a
very well educated user base in the area who knew about all
their options for, for this.

And, they would, they
actually, you know, reaching out to them meant
they could, they probably already tried
all four services and actually had an opinion. It's great when you can users
who are that, that informed and that, that, they have understand the
space that well. And and if you go to the. I'm just going to go to the
next slide. Yeah. Here we go. The other big thing we did
that I thought was really important was we talked
to non-broadcasters. so, we went up there and we talked to all the people
who weren't using us or competitors. And in many ways, those are the most important
people, right?

Talking to your competitor's, that's your short term win,
right? Someones using a competing,
piece of competing software unless your piece of competing
software is something like Google, which is a search
engine, which everyone uses,. Okay.
Then, there are no non-users to
convert. But, in the case of gaming
broadcasting, almost everyone's a non-user,
right? The, the majority, this is
true for most new products. The majority of people you're
computing with are non-users. They are people who have never
used your service before. And, what they say is actually
the most important. What they say is, is the thing
that blocks you from expanding

from a, a, expanding the size
of the market with your features,
right? If you, all you do is look at
your competitors and yourself, and all you do is
talk to your, you know, your people who use
your competitors products. People who use your products. You can never expand. Well, not never. But, you're not learning the
things that help you expand the size of the market. You want to talk to people who
aren't even trying to use one of these things, yet. Who, who have thought about
it, maybe. But, who aren't who aren't
into it. So, what did they say? My computer isn't fast enough. I'm focused on training 12
hours a day for the next tournament. I like making the perfect
video, and like, editing it.

And so, I just upload things
to YouTube. I don't do live streaming. I don't, I, I, I have no
desire to, to go into that space. or, or this is actually, particularly in Korea, this is
a big problem. Once our strategy gets
broadcast in a major tournament, we have to
start over. We have to like, come up with
an entirely new strategy. And so, the last thing we
ever'd want to do would be broadcast our practice
sessions, are you crazy? That's going to hurt us in the
next big tournament. And so, this became, this became a big outreach
program for us, trying to figure out how
we can get people over this. We bought people computers. We ,.

We worked really closely with
gaming broadcast, software companies to help,
the who, who made the broadcasting
software to make that better. We started building
broadcasting into games and into platforms, like we built
broadcasting into the Xbox, we built broadcasting into the
Playstation 4. Because we wanted, needed to overcome this issue
that, like, it was too hard, broadcasting
wasn't, wasn't possible. And so you sort of combine
these, for us, these are three, three big groups we
looked at for broadcasting. And you combine that feedback
and

what it tells you is not the
features to build. Right?
Because the, the features they asked for things like polls
things like a you know, the ability to
have child account. Like, child accounts in your
account. We haven't built most of that
stuff. But what was important were
the, were the, the issues, like the goals they were
trying to accomplish there. People wanted money. People wanted stability and
quality. People wanted universal access
for viewers all around the world
to be able to watch them. And so that became our focus,
actually.

And we dumped almost all of
our resources into things that none, no one ever mentioned in
an interview. But, those are the things that
actually address the problem. And, and the way you could
tell that it worked is, was as we, we would build these
things, and then we would go back to this exact same people
we interviewed and say hey, you told us you really cared a
lot about making money. Well, we built you this
subscription program, that will let you make money. And, it, it, it's astonishing
because most people aren't, have never had that
experience, actually. They've never talked to
someone and said it would be really great
if your product had feature X.

And then, and then, like, two
months later or a month later, your product
actually has feature X. Or at the very least, a feature that addresses the
problem they brought up. And so, it was actually, the, the people we converted first
to our product are the people that we
talk to about user research. They are the ones who were
actually the most impressed, which is kind of fun. But it really worked, because
those, we picked people who are
representative. We picked big broadcasters,
small ones, medium ones. And we, we made sure we were
addressing their concerns. And that, that was completely
different from how we'd approach the problem on
JustinTV.

Because in JustinTV, when we'd
try to do this, we'd, we'd sat down. We trolled through huge
amounts of data. Like we, we spent tons of time
looking at Google Analytics. Looking at mixed panel. Looking at in-house analytics
tools. Figuring out how people use
the service. Looking at where our traffic
came from. Completion rates on flows. We spent all this time doing
that. And that's good, I mean, you
can learn things from that. I'm not telling you not to
look at your at your data. But it doesn't tell you where
you need to go. It doesn't tell you where, what the problems are you need
to address.

And so we would just sort of
invent these ideas in JustinTV. And then, nine times out of
ten, without talking to someone,
the idea turns out to be bad. And that's just one of those
disappointing things about doing user interviews and user
feedback. It's why, I think, so many
people don't do it, which is, you're going to get negative
news about your, your favorite pet feature most
of the time. Like, you're going to have
this great idea, and you're going to talk to
the user, and it's going to turn out that that nobody
actually wants that. Like no, no one's actually,
they're actually completely concerned about completely
different things and they don't care about what you
thought was important at all.

And and that's a little bit
sad but just, just think about how sad you'd be in four
months when you launched that feature and it turns out no
one actually wants to use it. So think that's about it for my the lecture section of what
we're we're talking about. I want to take some questions
from the audience. >> What you see startups get
most wrong about? I mean, most startups don't do
them at all, but the ones that do what are the
most common mistakes? >> I'd say, the most common
mistakes are, showing people your product.

don't, don't show them you're
product. It's, it's sort of like
telling them about a feature, you want to learn about what's
already in their heads, your, you want to avoid putting
things there. The other thing is, asking
about your, your pet feature direction, so
if you think you want to add, add subscriptions to your
product. Going and asking people would
you pay for a subscription. Going and asking them, would
you use this feature. And I'd say the the other big
mistake people make is talking to who's available
rather than talking to who they need to talk to.

There's certain users that are
really easy to get at, because they are say, members
of your forum already. Right?
You have some product forum, and you talk to the users on
that forum because they're, they're easier to get access
to. we, we spent like weeks
digging for identity information, and figuring who these people
were. So we could contact them, so
we could talk to them. Because a lot of these people
weren't, it wasn't obvious. They were just some user on a,
on a site. And if that site didn't
support messaging, there was, like, no obvious way to
interact with them.

And so we spent a bunch of
time trying to network, and find those users, and bring
them on. Because if you, if you just
talk to who's easy to talk to, you're not really getting,
getting the best data. The fortunate side there is
that almost everyone is flattered to be asked what
they think. And so most of them will
actually talk to you and tell you things. Yeah? >> How hard is it to get buy in from the rest of
your company? I mean, like, you can go and be like, whatever, I'm in
charge. So you're doing what I say. But it's probably not the best
way of doing it. >> Mm-hm.
>> So how did you get them to?

>> That's a good question. So the question is how hard is
it to get buy in from the rest of the company
and how do you do it? Getting buy in if you just go
to them and say, I figured out, I talked
to the user, I figured it out we have to
build this. Is really hard. Because people don't trust
you. There's something magic about
showing them in the interview though. So I really recommend you
record interviews. Recording interviews is like
magic. A, it stops you from taking
notes in the middle. And taking notes is a little
bit disruptive. It makes it harder for you to feel like you're actually
engaged in the conversation. And b, you can then play that
recording for people.

So when, when they don't have
to be there for the entirety of all of the
interviews. But when you want to make a
point about what, what we should be building and
why. You just playback for the rest
of the company that interview and it's it's like magic the
influence it has on people's thoughts and what's what the
right thing to build is. Yes. >> Since you mentioned
recording did you try to insist on doing Skype interviews rather
than over email or? >> What was your impression
of? >> Yeah.
So you definitely want to do

Skype or sorry the question
was, do we insist on Skype
interviews for recording. You don't want to do interviews over email if
you can avoid it because interviews over email
are non interactive. And the most interesting
things you learn in interviews come from the
interesting, tell me more. because the instant that you
hit, you hope this vein of they'll say something you
didn't expect, and the instant they say something
you didn't expect or didn't already know, you should drop
into detective mode, and detective mode is huh, that's
interesting. Can you tell me more about
that? And people don't like silence,
so

they'll keep talking to fill
the void. And the best part about doing
it over Skype or doing it in person is you have
that interactive feedback. And you can actually pull a
lot more out of people. E-mail interviews are, they're
okay. But they're basically useless. If you're in person or over Skype, they're actually
also easy to record. Make sure you ask them if it's
okay to record it. It's not polite to record
people without their consent. But if they're willing to like
give you like an in, a user interview, they're
probably willing for you to record it as well. >> Sorry, but what about the
international market? Like you mentioned if that you
had a lot of

interviews in Korea, and I don't know maybe feel
comfortable with English, or. >> Yeah, so the question is
like what about people in the international market where
you're trying to do youth interviews with people
who don't speak your language. That's just really hard. And actually to this day
Twitch works way better in English speaking countries
than it does in non English speaking
countries. And I think a big part of that
is, we are much better at talking to people in English
speaking countries, and learning what their needs are. And we're not as good at it,
in other countries. We've tried to address that by hiring people who speak
Korean. Having them translate. We've tried to address that
by, finding representative

people in those countries who
speak both English and Korean, and reaching out to
them. But the problem with that, is,
like the, you're not actually getting a
representative sample. No matter how hard you try. The very fact that they are a
fluent English speaker means they're not
representative of all the people who don't speak
fluent English. It's just a hard problem. It's why companies find it
easier to wi, build markets that went in
their home, in their home country. Much more easily than abroad. Because it's really hard to
talk to users abroad. Yes. >> What channels did you use
to reach out to them, and

do you ever compensate them? >> So the channels we used to, what channels did we use to
reach out to them and what did we ever compensate
them? The channels we used to reach
out to them, were, on site messaging
systems. So like, if you're, most site
websites have some way to contact the user, so if
they're a visible user of another website you use that
sites messaging system and say hey, I was watching your
stream, or whatever this person was doing
on the site. I'd love to ask you some
questions about your use would you mind hopping on a
Skype call? And as for, the other thing we
do is we find out who people

were and we send them emails. we'd, like, rented some at
events. because a lot of these people
go to the same events and we, like, would go to the events
and, like, get, we wouldn't run the
user interview at the event, but you get to know them, you
exchange business cards or, you know, whatever it is you
actually do now aren't, isn't business cards. And, and you, you get in touch
with them. We tended not to compensate
people. I think that if you, if no, if people don't care enough
about the problem to, like, talk to someone who's
trying to solve it. You're probably barking up the
wrong tree.

We never had any trouble
getting people to talk to us about paying them. >> What about on site user
feedback tools? Do you get a little feedback
from that? >> So, so there's this whole
second set of user feedback that's really important, that
I should talk about,. The question was, what about, like, on site user
feedback tools? And I think this stuff you're
talking about is where you have like a, a new
product and you want to see how, if it's
actually going to work or not. And so you put it in front of
people and you see how they use it or
not. That's really important. That kind of work is super
important and it can tell you lots of things
about where you went wrong

building something before you
launch it, which is great. It doesn't tell you what to
build. It it helps you iron out the
kinks and edges of the thing you did
build. But generally speaking we that
wasn't kind of the user feedback we were getting I
mean that's stuffs good it's good it's like it's much
more similar to the, to the data driven approach. Right?
You're finding out, why are people dropping off in
this flow, you're not finding out what problems
should I really be solving for them, and what, what do they
care about as a human. And, for this kind of like really early
stages interview which

the kind of user interview
that's crucial startups do,. >> That's the, that's where
you want to focus, so we didn't bring on site
actually it almost all over phone or
Skype. Yes. >> So for the three different
groups of people there are different kinds of feedback so
as a startup time and resources, is that a good area
to focus on first? >> Yeah.
So with the three different kinds
of people did we focused on one of them given that we had
very limited resources, yes. We focused on the competing
people using competing products. Because, we knew that they
already were interested in

the behavior that we needed
and they were willing to do it at
all. And therefore all we had to do
is convince them to switch, which is a much easier thing
to do than to try to create new behavior where none
existed before. And we had to do that because
we had to get some quick wins, because my gaming project
inside of Justin.tv would have been
killed if it wasn't showing 25% month over month
growth every single month. So we did, and that meant
focusing on short term get the people in
right now. And that turned out to be good
in general because it turns

out that building something
that some people want generally generalizes and so I
want to bring in people who weren't even users
of the service as well. Yes. >> Twitch has been around from
the beginning so it filled up, for example the
video game industry. In the beginning this industry
was very like, decentralized, like there wasn't a lot of
cohesion with like, you know, different video game companies consolidating where
tournaments are and stuff. But now it's very different. So you said originally you
spoke to like broadcasters and you know streamers themselves,
how does that change when

like, for example like Riot
has you know, banned users or professional players from
streaming their own stuff. Have you tried to you know,
gain leverage with that or? >> Yeah, so the question is what about the game publishers
basically, right? The game publishers is huge important people in this
space. a, the game publisher is and
any big company for that matter isn't going to
give you the time of day as a small start up. Which is both good and bad. It means you don't really
need, need to talk to them because, they're they're not interested
in you. But it means you actually just
can't talk to them, I mean we tried but no one
wanted to talk to us.

And they did once we started
getting some traction and, and becoming a little bit, slightly bit of a player in
the space. I don't want to like, talk
that bad about of them because they, they, they were
nice about it enough about it it's just that you know, when
you're, when you're a tiny little start up there's
lots of tiny start ups and they, they don't have the time
to talk to all of you. As we've gotten bigger
actually the point that, you know, game publishers have become an increasingly
important constituency for us. And if I was to talk about who
Twitch does user interviews with now, who we who we pulled
information from now it would

include game publishers
definitely because they'd be, they've become much more
active in the space. It was something that they
weren't particularly active three or four years ago as
much as they are now. And that's another really
important point about user interviews in general. Which is that the pool of
people you care about is going to shift over time. The people who get you
started, like the crucial people to get
your product started for the first six months, are not who will be using it
three years later. And it's very important you
keep, doing this stuff. Because one thing that's
really easy to do, is to do a little bit of it in
the beginning. And, and achieve some level of
success, and then you sort of,

stop talking to new people. And that's a good way to make
the, the next set of features you build be not as
good as the first ones. >> How about one more
question? >> Yeah. Yes? >> How do you give good user
feedback, if you're a user? >> so, how do you give good
user feedback, it's a really good question. So I think what I, what I want
a user to do is I want a user to tell me about
what they, like, what they're really thinking,
right?

And what, what, what they're
problems really are. And to just sort of ramble. Like I want someone to just
tell, tell me about stuff in their
life. Because the, the more you
learn about them as a person. And sort of the, the, their, what's going on in the context
of what they're doing the is easier to understand why they
want the things they want. And that's really the critical
question. So I'd say like, you know,
what I'm looking for in a, in someone, when I'm doing a
user interview, it's someone who is going to be willing to
talk a lot and be willing to,

to really give me a full, give
me a full picture. So that's what, I guess on the
flip side, if you want to be a good, if
you want to help people out with good user interview
feedback ramble, like, be, just, just talk about stuff
and everything. All right, great. Well, thank you very much. >> Thank you very much.
