StartUp Podcast Gets the Google Treatment

If you aren’t listening to the StartUp podcast, you should be.

It’s nominally the story of a startup podcast company as they go from founding to funding to audience research and product development. What makes StartUp special, however, is that the company founders, especially Alex Blumberg (a former This American Life producer), have allowed listeners unprecedented access into their deepest hopes and fears, frustrations and triumphs. Listening to StartUp is sometimes like being inside the heads (and living rooms) of the founders as they wrestle with imperfect knowledge and an evolving vision of what their company could be. My bet is that any business owner or manager will relate to these feelings and experiences — even if the specific events of this young company’s life aren’t that familiar.

The latest episode will bring particular joy to anyone in the technology or design fields who has considered ways to validate a product concept without investing too much time and money. Alex and his colleagues are struggling with deciding between sticking to their core expertise of content creation or branching out into app development. Specifically, they are thinking about making a proprietary podcast app that would offer subscribers extra content and functions for a fee (the shows themselves are free to download via other podcast apps).

Fortunately, the Google Ventures Design team is on hand to help them decide! The GV team members are fans of the show and saw this as a great opportunity to showcase their Design Sprint methodology…and play cameo roles on the podcast in the process. You know you’re onto something if Google offers to fly to your offices and provide free help with your product vision. Alex’s partner Matt Lieber likens the experience to having Derek Jeter offer to bat cleanup for your little league team. Of course, you accept.

The Google team’s proposition strikes Alex as totally revolutionary but it will be pretty familiar to many listeners: build a prototype! Then test it! With users! I suspect that a little of Alex’s amazement was designed to boost the “ah-ha!” value of the episode (in fairness, facilitated design workshops are not exactly the stuff of great audio entertainment, so it’s hard to blame him for laying it on a little thick).

What did bother me a little, though, was that the episode refers to the process of designing and testing a prototype as “faking” a product because what you build is nonfunctional and is only used to gather concept feedback. I’m being picky, but a prototype isn’t a fake product. It’s an early version of something that may very well evolve into the “real” product that customers actually buy and use. It’s also an opportunity to learn invaluable lessons about what may make the difference between product success and failure.

Anyway, what do Alex and the team learn from their fake product? I won’t ruin the surprise, but here are some tidbits:

• The Google Ventures Design team is “big on sketching” and they play Dave Brubeck to stimulate creativity.
• By contrast, brainstorming “feels productive” but it’s actually a waste of time because everyone has to wait their turn to talk.
• At least one research participant — a desirable user, apparently — is so uncomfortable with silence that he needs to listen to something while he’s flossing his teeth.
• Customers don’t want to pay money for extras. In the words of one participant: “If the turkey is free, dude…I don’t want to pay for the parsley.”

The end of the episode comes complete with the usual “small sample size” caveat (they only interviewed five people), but the good news is that the Google guys made a video about the whole process that shows the prototype. It’s cool to see what they came up with and the video is candid about the things that didn’t go over well with users. Sausage-making is fun!

You can listen to this episode out of sequence, but I highly recommend you start the podcast from the beginning. There are currently thirteen episodes that are each about a half hour long.

note: this post was originally published on the Catalyst Group blog.