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Product People

99 EpisodesProduced by Justin JacksonWebsite

A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them

37:46

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!


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?”

Show notes

Premium Sponsors

  • Sprint.ly – Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter:  @sprintly
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Shout outs


🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
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