Take your product to the next level, build something that users love. Often in startups, 'shipping it' is more important than UX/UI, but that's not necessarily right.

1. Lecture 4: Building
Products that Users Love
Summary of Sam Altman's lecture:
http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec07/
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Website: www.ghacklabs.com Twitter: @GHackLabs Email: luke@ghacklabs.com
By Luke Fitzpatrick

2. "How do we make things that have
a passionate user base, that our
users are unconditionally wanting
it to be successful?"
This Goal Should be for Every Startup:
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3. The Best Way to get to 1 Billion
Dollars.
Focus on the values that
help you get your first dollar
to acquire your first user.
If you get this right, the rest
is history.
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4. The Wufoo Case Study
A small team, acquired by Survey Monkey.
Gave a 29,561% ROI to investors.
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5. Building Products That
Users Want to Love
• Wufoo was not interested in building software that
users wanted to use.
• They wanted a product that people wanted to love,
that people wanted to have a relationship with.
• They asked themselves the question, how do
relationships work in the real world?
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6. Two User Relationships Metaphors:
1) How do we acquire new users as if
we are trying to date them?
2) How do we treat existing users as if
they are a successful marriage?
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7. First Impressions: Human
Relationships
• If you're on a first date with
someone, and you catch them
picking their nose, you're
probably not going to have
another date with them.
• But, if you have been married
for 20-30 years, you're not
going to call the lawyer and
sign divorce papers.
• First time human interactions
do count, and it's the same
relationship with startups &
users.
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8. Make Your First User
Experience Memorable
Make every user moment memorable. Things like:
• The first email you ever get.
• What happens when you first login.
• The links, the advertisements.
• The very first time you interacted with customer
support.
These are all
opportunities to
seduce.
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9. Describing A Quality Product
This concept was taking from the
Japanese. They have two words to
describe things once you're
finished with them.
• The two words for quality are
atarimae hinshitsu and
miryokuteki hinshitsu.
• The first one means granted
quality, which basically means
functionality.
• The last one means enchanting
quality.
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10. Wufoo's Login Dinosaur
Wufoo's login link has a dinosaur. If you hover on it,
you will hear a "RARRR!" In the early stages, this
puts a smile on users faces, hands down. This is just
one of things that made their product memorable.
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11. When we assess products, we never think about:
"Hey, what is the emotion on the person's face when they
interact with this?"
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12. When you search the word
"fart" guess what happens?
You hear a fart noise when
you scroll up & down!
This is something that makes you
want to talk about it.
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13. The Cork'd Sign Up Page
It works like a rhyme, and most importantly, it's a
memorable first time user experience.
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14. Customer Service = A User
Experience, a lot of startups miss this.
AirBnB Wufoo
They went up to New York, and
offered professional photography.
The founders would go up there
and actually take pictures of the
people's apartments to help them
sell more. What a lot of people
don't know is, Joe was actually
doing customer support at the
same time.
The Wufoo team consisted of ten
people. They dealt with 500,000
users on the system. Resulting in
about 400 issues a week, that's
about 800 emails. Response time
was 7-12 minutes.
This is superhero customer
service!
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15. Support Driven Development
• For software based startups, SSD is a way to improve
your product by having software engineers & your
whole (small) team involved in customer support.
• Try to inject some values we don't usually talk about
enough, like responsibility, accountability, humility,
and modesty.
• Everyone should do customer support, means
problems are identified quickly & changed just as
fast.
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