Your Ideas Are Worthless Without You
SXSWxPhil Part 3
So much of SXSW is about the startups.
Where do you get your ideas from?
How do you execute them?
Which approach is best for you?
Few of the idea talks have been as interesting as one hosted by Katie Roof of Tech Crunch, featuring Scott Cook — founder of Intuit, and Mike Maples an early investor in Twitter, Twitch.tv and Lyft.
With introductions over, Katie wastes no time jumping straight into one of the biggest questions of all — Where do ideas come from? Scott, with reference to his experience with Quicken, tells Katie that ideas come from being close with customers and it’s as simple as that. His answer is on par with an unavoidable theme at SXSW — that all successful work boils down to your user experience. All good ideas, Scott says, come from a pain that your customer is suffering from — and that’s something you should always be looking for.
Spending time with you customer is the quickest way to achieve this: Sit with them and watch what they do. Don’t go in with an idea of what you want their problem to be, because that’s dangerous — warns Cook. Find out what surprised you most about your time with them and that’s where you’ll find innovation.
So you think you’ve got a good idea but how can get investors on board? Well Mike and Scott say that in order to get ideas off the ground just show a little proof that they work. You’ve spent time with the customer, so do a little testing — which will work in some case but not all. On top of this — Mike and Scott share the thought that your idea really has little to do with it’s success — and what investors are really looking for is the person behind them. Investors need to be able to trust that the founder of a startup is passionate enough to see their idea through — and if it’s not working, have the flexibility and skill to pivot.
Mike invested in Twitter while it was known as “Voicemail 2.0”, despite the fact that it didn’t even have a revenue model because he believed in the person behind the idea. Mike tells us that passionate people demonstrate that they will dedicate their life to their idea with or without your money — and those are the ones you should hand it over to.
When Katie moved into the territory of competition, Mike diplomatically handled some questions about Lyft rival Uber and their recent controversies by talking about how Lyft isn’t focused on Uber, and that any business that focus on their competitors will lose — its the customers that matter in the end.
I hung around for the Keynote from Yasmin Green, where she interviewed two people behind both a fake news website and a fake senator’s twitter account. Green is a staunch advocate for the freedom and access of information and her views contrast directly with her guests as she probes them on their intentions and actions. As it was a keynote, its available to watch online next week (i’ll update with a link), and I highly recommend you watch. For anyone interested in the topic of fake news — the effects and sway these individuals have is impressive to see discussed in person.
Kesha also had a focus on her customers — or rather — her fans, during an interview with Refinery29 Chief of Content Amy Emmerich. The topic of the discussion was largely around bullying in an online space and Kesha spoke of her struggle with being online, her body issues, humanitarian work, and rehab. We reach the end of the time slot without discussing solutions for online bullying, as though that could be solved easily in an hour regardless. Instead we mainly just get across what the detrimental effects are aswell as a few other tidbits about Kesha. (She brought in her 30th birthday sleeping naked in the mud in Africa, and hopes to live naked on an island of cats when she gets older).
Despite all the negativity, Kesha maintains an online presence to remind her fans of what she can go through and still achieve. But her unfortunate truth is that she doesn’t believe that the internet is a safe place for her and plenty of others out there — and while online bullying remains a problem, the only way of combatting it at the moment is to just stay offline.
