How to Run a User Interview with Emmett Shear (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 16)

today's guest speaker is Emmett Scheer Emmett is the CEO of twitch which was acquired by Amazon where he now works and Emmett is going to do a new format of class today and talk about how to do great user interviews so this is the talking to users part of starting to startup should be really useful thank you very much for coming contact server knows where I'm coming from from this we started her by stirred my first startup with justin khan right out of college we started this company called keiko calendar it didn't go so well when I went alright we built it we we sold it but we sold it on eBay so that's not necessarily at the end you want for your startup and it was a 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 worked on Kiko talk to anyone who actually did use a calendar so that was that was not optimal 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 was that we were our own consumer we we had this idea for a television show justin.tv a reality show about Justin Khan'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 it is you want and what you need but that's if you're really limiting way to start a startup most startups are not just built for the person who is uh 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 anywhere 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 build a great product actually if you wanted to run a live 24/7 reality television 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 who had to open it up to a broader spectrum of people a broader spectrum of 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 justin.tv we decided we needed to go in a new direction we thought we'd built a lot of valuable technology but we hadn't identified the use case that would let it get really big and there are two directions that seem promising one of them was mobile and one of them was 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 well I loved watching gaming video I was very aware that neither I nor anyone else in the company knew anything about broadcasting video games and so I was an throughout the content I thought there was a market there that was sort of the insight that did I had that I think wasn't common at the time which is how much fun it was to watch video games quick show of hands people know about watching video games in the internet here ok I'm going to assume the people listening to this also know about it if you don't know about watching video games the internet you should go read about that because it sort of 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 the decision making that was for the next three years of product features on Twitch was sort 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 a whole division that we just didn't even have it just TV 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 gonna 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 broadcaster's are the most important people and the reason we determined that was when we went and looked into the market Weiland we looked into what what determined why people watched a certain streamer NART 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 them what you pull away from it because if you go and talk to a set of users if we'd gone to talk to viewers only would have gotten a completely different set of feedback than talking to the broadcaster's and talking to the broadcaster's gave us insight into how to build something for them that turned out to be strategically correct I wish I could tell you 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 use your user judgment 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 we're gonna I got a bunch of ideas from from you guys actually so sort of suggested ideas and I'm gonna pick one of them and I want everyone 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 we're gonna use is let me see here of these ideas so here it's a lecture focus 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 in you know improves that experience makes taking notes in class better or taking notes while 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 on and out 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's gonna give you that feedback that's gonna 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's 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 or 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 it into your head the right way to do it I'm gratified to hear clicking and of keyboards now if you're following along at home pause actually do it think about 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 all right that's like way shorter than you'd normally used to think about this problem it's actually a really tricky problem and like figuring out where to source the people is pretty hard but uh we're going to move along anyways and the in this highly abbreviated version of learning how to build a product and run a user interview so can I can I can I get one volunteer from the audience to come up and we'll talk about it you guys are here we go and so you talk to a bunch of college students would you pick any particular subset of college students like sounds like you want to talk to all college students or like a broader I went on to talk to college students on like I'm break down the divisions by like people who study different areas maybe and then also maybe what makes 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 John stuff down great so I mean that that's really good start like that's that is actually obviously group of users you want to go talk to you 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 gonna 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 I mean people don't even want to buy textbooks right you probably probably all use Chegg or that you know borrow it from your friend or whatever and so one of the like one of the things with that 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 abbot if you actually add a note taking app my guess is for colleges the people most likely to actually buy and note-taking app that you guys would use would be college IT right I mean presumably for most for the most part is going to sell software to students like the people who have to get bought into that is usually the school administrator so that would mean up that we want approach you feel I thought okay well 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 really wrong this is why you have to go talk to the users but you then have to try to maybe try other other air groups right so I would talk to college I talk to IT administrators as well I think that's a that's another area it's really promising you might talk to parents right who spends money on their kids education it's like willing to pull their wallet out like the you know parents of kids parents get to a freshman or 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 there's actually a lot of groups that are potential but aren't necessarily the obvious user but who are critical critical to your app success potentially and you when you're when you're start at the very beginning of a start-up 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 learn that you want to get familiar with the space when you get familiar with the various kinds of people who'd be contributing all right so let's let's have someone come up and we're gonna pretend we're going to run this user interview so we're gonna 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 place for running an interview yes all right so hello hi I'm Stephanie hi Stephanie welcome thank you for agreeing to do this user interview with us so I wanted to hear from you about you know what are your note-taking habits like how do you take notes today sure so I take notes in a variety of ways I like to now because speed and efficiency just to come back to it later it's easy for me to just take notes on my laptop 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 gonna be more complex diagrams different angles that I have to draw and so that's a little harder harder for me to get what software do you use for this stuff today I just do pen and paper for that you dependent paper so you do a combination you take notes with pen and paper you take that to the computer sometimes yeah and when you take notes with when you take all these notes at the end but do you actually review them like you be honest do you actually go back and ever actually 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 share and collaborate and maybe like even merge notes with classmates and friends so what do you what do you stick notes today on your computer Google Docs and Evernote Google Docs and Evernote and tell me more about like why two things at the same time um so Evernote is easy if I'm trying to just collect it for myself I think and yes you can sure but I think Google Docs for me is easier to share and it depends also if you know a friend is already created a folder for example a guru ox 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 tend to get more to it so it sounds like you a lot of like note-taking collaboration yeah what uh tell me more about that like like do you take us do you wind up taking most of the notes most the value of the notes out of notes other people take or is it mostly your owner it's your view at the end of the 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 and 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 it to like to like personalize it even after I merge so you you pulling know some other people but then you merge them into into the mailing works for me right awesome and if you if you have Evernote notes and you have Google Docs notes and you have a pen and paper notes once the semester is over you ever go back to any of that stuff where is it like recorder you guys aren't quarters here right once the quarter is over you ever go back to any of that stuff you ever for classes not so much but if it's notes that 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 it's things that I like to kind of keep fresh in my mind and to help me prep for future things that's interesting tell me more about that like you take notes not just in class yeah so I take notes to also just summarize main points so if it's like inspirational quotes for example from 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 helps to actually to think about and to remember and recall what was 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 note-taking stuff in just sort of digging into like what the current behavior is but like in the interest of time and not like keeping everyone here hearing about the intricacies of one person is note-taking habits forever we're gonna move on but thank you very much definitely appreciate that so so that that's like that kind of stuff you notice we're not talking about the actual contents of the app at all like 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 or 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 yet 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 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 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 Peters as possible because the things they tell you wind up almost feeling overwhelmingly real when you have a real user asking you for a feature 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 promising your air or not and like based on what I heard there it's like starting from that easier 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 where I'm where there was a big blocker where there's something really wrong with the way it the way it it was working and unless I had some big idea I would take that as a 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're the first person 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've talked to you about 6 7 8 people you're usually about done it's unlikely you're gonna discover a bunch of new information there which is why it's important to talk to different extremes of people right go find people who are at different different points because if you doctors just six or seven Stanford college students you're going to get a very different response that need we talk to six or seven high school students or 6 to 7 6 7 parents all right what's gonna 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 study you had you had some ID you heard this idea you had some ideas it's like how you could build something cool and so if you're gonna build just one feature on top of Google Docs what would that feature be right and that's for a new product this that might be a good way to like get started thinking about where to go which is okay so they're extensively using this thing 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 don't you 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 that's gonna make it more bit more useful and convince them to stop using the thing they're already using awesome alright so I'm gonna invite our third guest if you if you have something up I don't want to put you on the spot if you feel like you don't you're not sure but uh yeah what is it on yeah okay what I thought about was like the the reason she uses ever no is because 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 would be like super like I'm a mobile version of Drive that doesn't like isn't that clunky and like doesn't make you make real documents could be like really useful awesome all right that's a that's a good insight right that's exactly what's one of the things you'd get out of that user interview and now you have this idea right you've gotten this this user fit feedback you got this idea what if we had a Google Docs that had the collaborative aspects and the group aspects of that but where are 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 that it's a vacuum perfectly 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 a cricket programmer you can literally just go build it and throw it out in the world and see what happens and that's a that's great and if that mean that works that's a 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 that's 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 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 workflow and go bring that in front of people but the one thing you really don't want to do is ask them this is this is just a sort of a trap I want to warn you against doing is just don't go out and say to come for the future idea and go out and ask people are you I got this idea for a future are you excited about it because the the feedback you get from users if you tell them about a future and ask them is this feature good is 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 well they thought it was such a clever idea no one actually like cares the switch to get it and so the one question you can't ask is is this feature actually good or not yes yeah so Sam's asking you 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 that's highly dependent on the particular feature but usually the the best thing you can do is is really just hack something together right it's you find if you're if your idea is to build something on top of Google Docs don't for your v1 go rebuild awesome Google Documents but for notetaking application find a way to write a browser extension that that that stuff's just that little bit of incremental feature in and and see if it's actually useful for people go like actually go find a way to cheat is what it comes down to it 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 we'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 interested in the future it's one of the most valid anything's you can do for a product is go out there and actually get them to commit to pay you up front and the problem is when you're working on a student note-taking app that's gonna be relatively hard because you probably unless your ideas that you're actually going to sell it it's probably something where you're thinking at least the trial version is free and you're not necessary gonna learn that much by trying to charge people money but if you go out there and you if you can get people to say hey I'm gonna I'm gonna give you money the money test is amazing it really does clarify whether or not they're really excited about it or not because if you're not $5 excited about it you're probably not very excited about it so the last thing I wanted to do is actually work through with you guys what happened to twitch so I brought some slides of feedback um that I'd like to get put up that's my only slides for the UH 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 said this kind of thing out to to us when we ask them questions and I've already pre condensed it for you into the real feedback you got so when we were working on twitch to go launch it we wouldn't we talked too much of 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 or detail 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've sort of read between the lines but they asked to profess things like I want to be way to clear the banned list in my chat room like this that was actually very common requests because there was a particular issue with how our chat rooms worked people would ask 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 you talk to broadcasters you probably talked to 12 14 so they like that broadcaster so the justin.tv gaming platform we got we got all this feedback and you know what else we have we have your competitors have all these cool features like polls and scrolling tags you can personalize chat there and then we have some positive feedback they're like oh you guys don't have ads that's great I didn't hear the band trolls so much yourself about chat a bunch of stuff around interactivity with with interactivity with the with their viewers and that was all really interesting right so this is what this is what the Justin TV broadcasters wanted us to build and this is what they with where they felt pain using the using the product and so if you thought that what we did was go and 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 lists and titles are uneditable and there's no way to get rolls 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 think it to compare groups of people and compare the level which they they argue each other 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 could 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 were trying to make a living they really wanted to make money pursuing this pursuing this gaming broadcasting thing they talked about a lot about video stability our service wasn't good in Europe specifically but but just globally video stability was 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 than the things that people who are using the service cared about and we focused on this stuff because this was a software it was so bad they weren't even willing to use our service because of it and most of them actually had thought about it because we were our user base what happened to be a very well-educated user base in this in the area who knew about all their options for this and they would they actually you know reaching out to them meant that they they'd probably tried all four services it actually had an opinion it's great when you can get users who are that that informed then that that they understand the space that well and if you go out of the I'm just going to go to the next slide yeah here we go the other big thing we did that that was really important was we talked to non broadcasters so we went out there and we talked to all the people who weren't using or competitors and in many ways those are the most important people right talking your competitors that's a short-term win right someone's using a competing piece of computing software unless your your piece of competing software or something like Google which is a search engine which everyone uses okay maybe then then there are no non users to convert but in the case of gaming broadcasting almost everyone's a non user right the majority and this is true for most new products the majority of people you're competing with are non users they're 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 expending 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 computer you know people who use your competitors products people use your products you can never expand try not never but you're not learning the things that help you expand the size of the market you want to talk to the people who aren't even trying to use one of these things yet who've thought about it maybe but who aren't corn 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 have no desire to go into that space 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 do want to do would be broadcast our practice sessions are you crazy that's gonna 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 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 the PlayStation 4 because we wanted need to overcome this issue that like it was too hard broadcasting wasn't uh wasn't possible and so you sort of combine these Frosty's were the 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 they the features they asked for things like polls things like a you know the the ability to have a child account like child accounts on your account we haven't built most of that stuff but what was important where were the where the the issues like the goals they were trying to accomplish there people wanted money people wanted stability in 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 of that no one ever mentioned in an interview but those are the things that actually address the problem and the way you could tell that it worked is we we would build these things then we'd go back to this exact same people we interviewed and we'd say hey you told us you really cared a lot about making money well we've got you the subscription program that will let you make money and it it's it's astonishing because most people aren't have never had that experience actually they've never talked to someone and said it would 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 were the people that we'd talk to about user research they were the ones who were actually the most impressed which is kind of fun but it really works because we pick people who are representative and 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 justin.tv because in justin.tv when we try to do this we we sat down we trawl through huge amounts of data like we we spent tons of time looking at google analytics looking at Mixpanel 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 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 and justin.tv and then nine times out of ten without talking to someone that idea turns out to be bad and that's one of the most disappointing things about doing user interviews and user feedback which is why I think so many people don't do it we that you're gonna get negative in news about your your favorite pet feature most of the time like you have this great idea and you're gonna talk to a user and it's gonna turn out that uh 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 I think that's about it for my the lecture section of what we're talking about I want take some questions from from the audience that's the most common mistakes are showing people your product don't don't show them your 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 uh asking about your your pet feature direction so if you think you want to 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 a you have some product forum and you go and you talk to the users on that forum because they're they're easy to get access to we spent like weeks digging for identity information and figuring out 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 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 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 was it to get buy-in from the rest of your company I mean like you can go and be like whatever on in charge so you're doing what I say but it's probably not the best wait a minute so how did you get it that's a good question so the the question is uh how hard is it to get buy-in from the rest of the company and how do you do it um getting buy-in if you just go to them and say I figured I talked to the users I figured it out we have to build this it's really hard um because people don't trust you there's something magic about showing them the interview though so I really recommend you record interviews recording interviews it's like magic eh it stops you from taking notes in the middle and taking notes is a little bit disruptive it makes it hard for you to feel like you're actually engaged in the conversation and be you can then play that recording for people so in they don't have to be there for the entirety of all the interviews but when you want to make a point about what what what we should be building and why you can just play back for the rest of the company that interview and it's like magic the influence it has on people's thoughts and what's what the right thing the build is yes so you definitely want to do Skype or sorry the question was to be 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 not interactive and the most interesting things you learn in interview is come from the interesting tell me more because the incident that you hit you hope this vein you know 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 the Detective Mode and Detective Mode is huh that's interesting can you tell me more about that how many 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 email interviews are they're okay but they're 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 an user interview they're probably willing for you to record it as well [Music] yeah so the question is like what about people in the international market we're trying to do user interviews with you 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 tried to address that by finding representative people in those countries who speak both English in 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 build markets that win in their home in their home country much more easily than abroad because it's really hard to talk to users abroad yes so the channels we use to what channels we used to reach out to and when do 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 somewhere to contact the user so 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 peoples were me to send them email we'd like run into them 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 that aren't isn't business cards and and you get in touch with them we tended not to compensate people I think that if you if know if people don't care enough about the problem to like talk to someone who's trying to solve it you probably barking up the wrong tree we never had any trouble getting people to talk to us about paying so so this is a whole second set of user feedback that's really important that actually talked about the question was what about like on-site user feedback tools and I think the stuff you're talking about is where you you have like a a new product and you want to see how if it's actually gonna 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 super important 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 helps you iron out the kinks and edges of the thing you did build but generally speaking we that wasn't the kind of user feedback we were getting I mean if that stuff's good it's good it's like it's much more similar though to the the data driven approach right you're finding out why are people dropping off in this flow you're not finding out what problem 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 says user interview which is 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 anyone on site actually I was almost all over phone or Skype yes yeah so with three different kinds of people did we focus 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 give it some of the switch which is a much easier thing to do than to try to create a 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 percent month-over-month growth every single month so we did and that meant focusing on short-term get the people in right now let's 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 which has been around from the beginning for a build-up for example the video game industry in the beginning this industry was very decentralized like there wasn't a lot of cohesion like different video game companies consolidating where tournaments aren't stuff but now it's very different so originally spoke to like broadcasters and you know strangers themselves how's that changed when like for example like riot as you know banned users yeah so the question is what about the game publisher it's basically right the game publisher is these huge important people in the space hey the game publishers and any big company for that matter isn't gonna 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 like talk that bad about them because I they they were nice about enough about it it's just that you know when you're when you're a tiny little startup there's lots of tiny little startups and they don't know 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 whoo-wee whoo-wee pulled information from now it would include game publishers definitely because they've become a proactive 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 people you care about is going to shift over time the people who get you started look the crucial people to get your product started for the first six months or not who will be using it three years later and it's very important you keep doing this stuff because one thing it's really easy to do is do a little bit of it in the beginning and and achieve some level of success and then you're sort of stopped talking to new people and that's a good way to make the next set of features you build be not as good as the first ones yeah yes user feedback if you're a user so how do you give good user feedbacks really good question so I I think what I want a user to do is I want to user to tell me about what they like what they're really thinking right and what what what their problems really are and to just sort of ramble like I want someone to like just tell me about stuff in their life because the the more you learn about them as a person and sort of that the there what's going on in the context of what they're doing the easier just 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 an A in someone when I'm doing a user interview if someone who's going to be willing to talk a lot and be willing to really give me a full give me a full picture so that's what I guess on the flip side is gonna be a good you're gonna help people out with good user interview feedback ramble like if you just just talk about stuff and everything alright great well thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 6,664

Rating: 4.8558559 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, Startup, Lecture, Stanford, Class, Sam Altman, How to start a startup, startup school, advice, how to do a user interview, how to run a user interview, emmett shear, twitch, justin.tv

Id: lHs9hQBSoJU

Length: 46min 38sec (2798 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2017