How To Build A Product With
Your Community
Loic Le Meur – Seesmic
@loic (Twitter, Seesmic)
loiclemeur.com
loic@seesmic.com

Market research sucks

Advertising sucks

PR sucks

What your friends say matters.

“1000 real friends could tell 1000 other
friends that your product rocks here you
go you got 1 million people
talking about it”
Seth Godin
“1,000 True Fans”

Seesmic got 1.2 million users
download our products

It starts by sharing and listening to
your community
• Don’t ask anything to anyone if you did not share
first
• Never been as easy as today with microblogging and
blogging
• Your community (or your brand’s) is what should
matter the most, not marketing or PR
• It’s the same in any industry, word of mouth always
wins, it’s just faster in the Internet industry

Identify an exciting space, not too
crowded and make it really really
narrow
Seesmic: help people share, interact and know their
community in a new way, human and deep.
Started with video, now broader with the Twhirl success

Ship as soon as you can, even if it
is far from being perfect

Gather feedback it’s never been
that easy

Twitter search
one mention of Seesmic and Twhirl every 2 minutes or so

Get Satisfaction

Uservoice
feedback.twhirl.org

If nobody talks about your brand
it means it is dead

Answer especially if it’s negative

“Seesmic is a pile of ass”
- Niall Harbison

I replied…

“This is exactly what every company should do, you
really to talk to your customers” - @NiallHarbison

What the new Internet
customers look like
• They want it all for free
• They want no intrusive advertising
• If you suck they will tell everyone
• They will switch immediately to your
competitor the minute he beats you on
anything
• They will tell everyone they switched

The good news
• It’s the same for all your competitors
• You have a chance to turn people who feel like
enemies into real friends, just talk to them
• You will always have some real and
loyalfriends, it’s all about finding them and get
closer to them

Get closer to your real friends
• Launched Team Seesmic
as an experiment to get
help from our real friends
• We give them the
previews of our products
first
• We reply to every single
email
• Expected 500
members, we have 6,500
and growing

What I learnt
• Your community is your most important asset
after your family
• Get your product out as soon as possible
• Get your “public roadmap” out as soon as
possible
• Execute as fast as you can

Listen to your users

Don’t worry
often they love you too
and they tell all their friends

“A Porsche would be a Volvo if they
let their buyers decide on features”
– Robert Scoble

“When you listen to your users, you get Vanilla.
Feature creep. Boring. It takes a dictator to create
the iPhone and change the course of an entire
industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add
features to that device.”
“Making users happy is a suckers game”
– Michael Arrington

The truth is in between build your
product in the open, listen to the
users and keep some innovations
secret to surprise them

Thank you.
Loic Le Meur
@loic
Loiclemeur.com
loic@seesmic.com