Lessons from TechStars: Create with Passion. Listen. Repeat.

Recently at TechStars, Pascal Finette and Lloyd Hilaiel from the Mozilla Project came to visit the teams and give presentations. Pascal’s talk centered around creating great products and great communities, and that’s what I want devote this post to.

Pascal started with a simple point: Superior products matter. 

Throughout the talk I referenced Pascal’s points to the creation and distribution of iPhone apps. I thought about how the most useful apps or the most intuitive apps (or both) floated effortlessly to top of the App Store. Unknowingly, waiting communities resonated with great products and adopted them into their lives.

I can’t remember how many hundreds of thousands of apps have been released into the App Store. There are a very few apps that are clear standouts, because they do something very well. Simple put, they’re great products.

Pascal shifted his talk from products to the people who use them. He talked about the community that adopts the product and how it’s then their job to use it, break it and tell the original creators what they love, what they hate, what could be done better.

The community takes over. Now it’s your job to listen and not just blindly create. After listening, it is on you to build with the same care and passion, taking to heart what your users want to see from this product that they love. 

The community wants more than anything to see your product succeed. They’re on your side, one of your biggest assets. Pascal noted that you need to grow the circle of participation. Make it easy for your users to contribute and have their voices be heard.

It is the community that makes the product what it is. This can be plainly illustrated by looking at Twitter. Twitter’s users created @replies and #hashtags. Twitter did a great job of listening to its users and seeing how they were using the product. They, in turn, generated the user feedback into features that we now use everyday.

In conclusion: Create with passion. Listen. Repeat.

  1. zackshapiro posted this