31 Quotes from Emmett Shear on How to Run a User Interview
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 16
Published in
4 min readNov 14, 2014
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 16
The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.
- 1/”Most startups are not just built for the person who is using them. When you do that, every now and then you get really lucky and…”
- 2/”are representative of some huge class of people who all want the same thing you do…”
- 3/“…but very often that just turns into a side project that doesn’t go anywhere.”
- “Who you talk to is just as important as what questions you ask and what you pull away from it.”
- 1/“I wish I could tell you the recipe for figuring out who the target user is for your product and who your users should be, but…”
- 2/“…there isn’t a recipe. It comes down to think really hard and use your judgement to figure out who you’re really building this for.”
- 1/ “Who would you talk to? That is the first question for almost any startup that you need to answer.”
- 2/”Who is my user and where am I going to find them?”
- 1/“You have this idea that you think is awesome. You want to have that broadest group you possibly can.”
- 2/”You don’t want to just talk to 1 type of person and learn that, you want to get familiar with the space.”
- “Users think they know what they want, but you get the horseless carriage effect where you’re getting asked for a faster horse.”
- “The question is, once you have this idea, is this enough? Is it something people would actually switch just to have?”
- “The one question you can’t ask is, is this feature actually good or not?”
- “Sales is this cure all for this problem. Get people to give you their credit card and I guarantee you they’re actually interested.”
- “It’s one of the most validating things you can do for a product is go out there and get them to commit to pay you up front.”
- “People who are using your product and putting up with all these issues, means that they are not actually the biggest problems.”
- 1/“This is true for most new products. The majority of people you’re competing with are non-users.”
- 2/”They are people who have never used your service before. And what they say is actually the most important.”
- 3/“What they say is the thing that blocks you from expanding the size of your market with your features.”
- 1/“That’s actually one of the most disappointing things about doing user interviews and user feedback, which is why I think…”
- 2/“people don’t do it. You’re going to get negative news about your favorite pet feature most of the time.”
- “The most common mistakes are showing people your product- don’t show them your product, it’s sort of like telling them bout a feature.”
- “You want to learn about what’s already in their heads. You want to avoid putting things there.”
- “The other mistake I think people make is talking to who’s available rather than talking to who they need to talk to.”
- “If you just talk to who’s easy to talk to, you’re not really getting the best data.”
- “Recording interviews is like magic. a) It stops you from taking notes in the middle and b) you can play that recording for people.”
- “The most interesting things you learn in an interviews come from the: ‘interesting’, ‘tell me more’ ”
- “The instant they say something you don’t expect or already know, you should drop into detective mode.”
- “People don’t like silence, so they’ll keep talking to fill the void.”
- “The pool of people you care about is going to shift over time.”
- “The crucial people to get your product started for the first 6 months are not who will be using it 3 years later.”
You can watch the entire lecture for yourself here: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec16/
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Image Credit: Cropped from Emmit-Shear-Vertical.jpg via SpeakerPedia.com
