Justin Kan (Twitch; Justin.TV) at Startup Grind San Francisco

Key ideas

Kan traces Kiko, Justin.tv and Twitch to argue that years go to waste without user contact, and that short feedback loops and preset growth goals help.

From a machine transcript of the audio. Quotes link to the moment they are said.

1. 1

   Use what you build

   Kan says Kiko, his first company's web calendar, suffered because his only appointments were two weekly classes, so he never became a power user and didn't know which features mattered. He says they mostly cloned Outlook and never talked to customers, and that Google Calendar came out a month after the version they were proud of.

2. 2

   Shorten the loop with real customers

   Kan calls Kiko's feedback cycle infinitely long and says the fix is to be your own customer, or else show potential users a rough version and keep asking whether they would use it. His example is co-founder Emmett emailing people who made gaming video on other sites, asking why, building what recurred, then going back and repeating with those who still said no. Kan adds that a big enough pain should make sign-ups easy, citing a story of Optimizely's founders being offered payment for software they hadn't built.

3. 3

   Features nobody asked for go unused

   Kan says Justin.tv's platform came from a flood of viewer emails asking to stream, after which the team didn't talk to those users again for years. By his account, the only features used over the next three years were video, chat and the infrastructure behind them, while Challenges, an API and a Twitter video product went nowhere. His rule is to build only what more than one person has indicated they want without being prompted.

4. 4

   Set growth goals before you look

   Kan says that when Justin.tv flatlined, the team broke off groups to work on gaming and mobile and set growth milestones in advance, because they struggled to commit and could otherwise read results through hindsight. Gaming's goal was about 15% monthly growth, and he says it grew against that every month while Emmett built from feedback that a colleague gathered by being constantly present in the gaming community. Kan credits Emmett, not himself, with the discipline of focusing on the top one or two things.

5. 5

   Launch, and stop hiding the idea

   Kan argues that before launch you are living in a fantasy of success and should face the truth as soon as possible. He also rejects secrecy: he has heard of an idea being taken perhaps three times in about a thousand conversations, and says the help from talking outweighs that small risk. He concedes that one team that wouldn't tell him its idea became a multi-billion dollar company, and says there is no set way to start a startup.

In Justin’s words

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