Recap: Building a Product and a Career on the Fly with Scott Marlette

Scott Marlette, a co-founder of GoodRx and the tenth employee of Facebook, sat at the front of the room, recounting his early, pre-Facebook days. He described the fateful interview, a shoe-less Mark Zuckerburg sitting cross-legged on the desk as he spewed off questions for Marlette to answer on the room’s whiteboard.

“I got an email on [Stanford’s] jobs list. They were looking for engineers to work at this company called Facebook. On a whim, I sent in my resume,” said Marlette in his public talk at Montana State University this past Monday. “On Thursday I interviewed with Mark, on Friday I had an offer, and on Monday I had accepted.”

Flash forward fifteen years, and Marlette is now the co-founder of GoodRx, a tech company dedicated to helping people save money on prescription drugs. During the talk, Marlette described his transition from a master’s student at Stanford to an early Facebook employee to the founder of a thriving tech company. Here are my five main takeaways:

1. Entrepreneurship is a choice

“For whatever reason, I just always wanted to start a company,” said Marlette during Monday night’s event. “I loved creating something from nothing. I loved figuring out: How are we going to solve this problem for people?”

In fact, Marlette enjoyed the entrepreneurial process so much, that he established his co-founders prior to discovering the idea for GoodRx. After leaving Facebook in 2010, Marlette met with co-founders Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek for coffee once a week, going through every idea they had until something finally stuck.

The idea? “Doug had gone to a pharmacy, had a prescription, and the pharmacy charged $200. He goes across the street, and [the same prescription] was $70,” explained Marlette. The three men looked into the problem further and realized its sheer prevalence. This birthed the idea for a prescription medication price-comparison tool — an idea that led to a company now valued at nearly $3 billion.

“Some of it was being naive,” said Marlette, “some of it was just thinking we could do better.”

2. Be user-centered

When discussing product development, Marlette urged listeners to second-guess themselves, to evaluate their solutions, and to assume they’re wrong.

“If you assume you have the most brilliant idea at the outset,” he noted, “I guarantee you don’t.”

Marlette explained that ideas should evolve through multiple iterations, all bent toward bettering the user experience. Ask yourself what people actually want. What are they already doing and how can you make that experience better? Ultimately, the user should fall to the center of focus, both in terms of the idea itself and its ease of use.

3. Keep moving forward

“Strategy is great,” explained Marlette, “but at times you just need to keep pushing, keep trying new things until something sticks.”

Entrepreneurship doesn’t mean having all the answers. Rather, it’s about adapting to user needs to best solve their problems. “Don’t be scared of breaking things,” he said. “Move fast, break things. If you’re not innovating, someone else will come along and you’ll be irrelevant.”

4. Don’t focus too hard on the end goal

Rather than setting your sights solely on the end goal, reorient your thinking around the process itself. “Don’t learn the thing to get out of the class,” said Marlette, “look at it more as exposure to another way of thinking.”

Throughout his talk, Marlette emphasized the importance of the process rather than the end. “The reason you’re doing this is not the end goal, it’s the things along the way.”

5. You can accomplish anything in 24 hours

While this may not be fully true, the idea is, if you’re passionate about something, you can figure out how to do it.

“Start something that solves a problem for you,” explained Marlette.

His reasoning? Well, for one, this means it’s a problem that actually exists because you’ve faced it yourself. Secondly, there’s likely some passion there. You’ve faced the problem before, and you’ve thought about it enough to prove it holds a place of interest. Ultimately, claimed Marlette, “The core of success is based on the problem-solving mindset.”