EP25: Hiten Shah “Make your idea a reality” (part 2)
Hey Product People! What’s your process for finding an idea that people love? How do you take your initial hunch for an idea, and make it a reality? What is a funnel? Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics is back to answer these questions and more!
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Hey Product People! What’s your process for finding an idea that people love? How do you take your initial hunch for an idea, and make it a reality? What is a funnel? Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics is back to answer these questions and more!
Highlights
“Making human connections is the most important thing in any startup.”
“You need some sound reasoning behind why you’re building your product. It’s a balance of having a vision AND taking all the customer inputs you can find to make sure that your vision can be a reality.
“Study great product people.”
“You have to have an unbiased curiosity; like a method actor. You take off your shoes, and go find that other person’s shoes and start walking in them. You start walking, acting and observing like them.”
“Get unbiased facts about your customers. Know them better than they know themselves.”
“We discovered that building a funnel in Google Analytics is painful. And so we started thinking: how can we take the pain out of that?”
“One of the best things about going to industry conferences is learning about your potential customers. It’s full on anthropology!”
“The creation of the product is a big social experiment. As you understand people, you can ask: how can I save them time, make money or save money?”
“Any step by step process that exists in life, has drop-off. And to me, what a funnel allows you to do is figure out that drop-off. It helps you identify where your problems are.”
“One of the key things we’re learning is that you need to build an audience before you build your product. Build your audience not for marketing, but for learning.”
“Our listeners tell us that building and audience is way scarier than building a product.” – Justin Jackson
“Ask these questions: 1) Who is it I’m trying to reach? 2) Where do they hang out? 3) How can I reach them there?”
“In today’s world you should be able to get people paying right away. If you’ve spent a year, and you don’t have anyone willing to pay you, it’s likely they’ll never pay you.”
“An idea is a solution to a problem. What problem does that idea solve? My suggestion to people is asking: how do you know that a lot of other people have this problem?”
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Shout outs
Shout-out #1: Espree. SaveBusinessTime.com is a curated site featuring the Best Business Software to build and grow your start up.
Episode 25
