Top advice for startups from Google, GrabTaxi and Zendesk at Product Hunt Singapore Meetup
Pie co-founder and CPO Pieter Walraven at the Product Hunt Singapore Meetup.
“Does my product work?”
“Do people understand how to use my product?”
“How can I make my product better than other people’s products?”
Startups struggle with questions like these every day when they develop a new idea. You can make the world’s coolest and most innovative product, but if people can’t figure out how to use it, there’s not much point to it. Ditto if you spend so much time developing it that others beat you to the punch with what might be an inferior but serviceable thing.
This was the central theme during last night’s Product Hunt Singapore Meetup, the fourth such gathering to take place in the city state. The meetup was organized by Singapore-based work chat software maker Pie and sponsored by Pie, B2B ecommerce software startup Tradegecko, and co-working space The Working Capitol, where it took place, drawing about 150 people.
Meetups like this are always a good opportunity for people in the ecosystem to catch up, network, and grow their business card collection. But it was the three guest speakers that offered some valuable insights on their approach to product building and management.
Buy coffee, test app
First up was Amit Chopra, from Google Developer Relations. He was there to hype up Google’s Usability Cafe scheme, which is meant to help developers evaluate their apps with feedback from real people on the street. Or, in this case, a cafe. The idea is based on the theory that five testers can usually find about 85 percent of your app’s usability problems.
So in practice, you go to a cafe with your app (usually alone or with one more person; more people can scare off potential testers), you find five random people to use your app and give you feedback, and then reward them with a small treat (such as a Starbucks gift card or something). Hey presto, you have yourself a tester team for the day! This can be a quick and relatively inexpensive way to get some fresh eyes on your product, and see it used in the wild.
Fail fast
GrabTaxi CTO Wei Zhu was up next, channeling his inner Socrates with the words he lives by: “I don’t know shit.” By which of course he meant that you can never know if a product will work at any given time, and why. It’s only through execution and iteration that you get an idea of what is best for your creation. Or, as he put it, how to move the needle from 49 percent to 51 percent.
See: GrabTaxi opens new R&D center in Singapore, nabs Facebook Connect creator as CTOZhu has an extensive record in the tech industry. His CV includes a stint at Microsoft, where he worked on Live Mesh, the company’s progenitor of OneDrive, and Facebook, where he notably developed the Facebook Connect function. According to Zhu, Microsoft’s cloud storage solution was beaten by competitors such as Dropbox because the team spent too much time adding features and took too long to bring it to users. And when it did, it made it hard to sign up by requiring users to get a Windows Live ID.
Another example he mentioned was the war of photo sharing apps. Facebook emerged as the dominant way of people sharing their photos with their friends (their social, everyday photos, which leaves out Instagram), but not before it introduced features like tagging people and commenting on the pictures. That was the nudge that took Facebook’s photo app to the 51 percent, in Zhu’s example.
Herding cats
Bjorn Lee, senior product manager at Zendesk and co-founder of customer support chat app Zopim, rounded off the speakers’ session by speaking not so much about product development, but managing that product after it’s out. Lee was part of Zopim from its inception to its acquisition by Zendesk, where he remains to this day. He spoke about the difference in managing a product from the perspective of the founder versus the perspective of the employee, since he has now seen both sides.
Zendesk and Zopim’s Bjorn Lee talks about the challenges of product management.
He also mentioned the importance of making sure you get at least two to three hours of work on your product that aren’t interrupted by meetings, phone calls, and emails – without letting stress destroy you in the process. He recalled experiencing chest pains during the Zopim days that he thought were heart problems, but were actually stress manifesting itself. He urged the audience to remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Other advice he left the audience with: equip your team with different skillsets that complement each other, spend less time massaging your message for the media (something the media would greatly appreciate, I might add!), and don’t fret over whether your product is number one on Product Hunt or lower. In the end, he said, “we’re all cat herders.”
This post Top advice for startups from Google, GrabTaxi and Zendesk at Product Hunt Singapore Meetup appeared first on Tech in Asia.
