Outstanding talk and q/a from a startup grandmaster. Kevin reveals wise strategy and insight repeatedly. In particular I liked the simplicity of everyone storing their self authored todo lists on the company dropbox and using these lists to hold one another accountable. Another point that hit home was the idea of respecting one another's time and what that means if you think it through. From the q/a I wonder what the other two YC companies are that have the same sort of disciplined remote working style that Wufoo has. Since only 3 YC companies have made remote working work, if Kevin Chris and Ryan had it to do all over I wonder if they would choose the remote approach again. My impression is yes, because of the efficiencies gained when remote work is done well.
To be honest, there certainly might be more than 3 (it's hard to keep track of 700 companies!). The Zapier guys write a lot of great stuff on remote working on their blog.
i really enjoyed this one too, but just for clarity's sake, this talk could have been called "great customer service with a sprinkle of product on top". it was all about how to organize a company with the goal of making customers love you, which leads to benefits like having no sales & marketing spend (not sure if they literally had no s&m costs or not).
the anecdotes, research and techniques that kevin used and drew upon were impressive. had to try very hard not to feel dishearted about how clever you need to be to succeed.
Many gems in this talk. Loved the mindset of not only recognizing the value of first impressions, but recognizing that opportunities for first impressions are everywhere.
Kevin, Nice lecture: Lots of good ideas backed
with lots of good experience.
In my start-up, currently I'm just doing the
technical part of writing the code, etc. to
get the product to work well, but a little
before or after going live with a version 1.0
I will need to consider your ideas and likely
use several of them.
Your ideas, and experience, on managing a team,
including people working from home, was
terrific, by far some of the best team management
ideas and experience I've heard.
Some of what you are suggesting is close to
at least three ideas in E. Fromm, The Art of Loving,
e.g., that important qualities are caring, respect, and responsiveness.
A fourth Fromm idea is knowledge, that
is, for a couple to "give knowledge of themselves
to each other". Since the relationship between a
business and a user/customer is not really like
a romantic couple, Fromm's idea does not fully carry
over to a business relationship, but maybe some of
it does: The company should try to get the
customer/user to give the company, or at least the
company's customer support, knowledge of how they
think/feel about the product/service. Also, your
idea of giving a user a list of product enhancements
"since you were gone" (nice wording, suggestive of the
caring, longing, pathos in the old movie Since You Were
Away) can be viewed as the company giving knowledge
of themselves to the user/customer. Nice.
Some of your descriptions of your UX seem to
want to give the company a personality, and
I can't help but think of the guest post
I've not seen that post, but I'll read anything with dinosaurs in it. Fromm's ideas are very interesting to me. The one you think doesn't apply (about getting users' feelings), actually does. I talked about it a bit in the lecture, but you can read something more detailed here about our emotional dropdown field:
Yes, your "emotional dropdown field was terrific. Yes,
of course it was in your lecture, but I typed quickly
and don't have the transcript yet so missed that
connection.
To me your talk was very authentic. I felt like I was having a beer with you and you were just laying out in an hour how you see things. It was super impactful and totally changed the way I think about a number of things. A big part of that was from realizing how deeply you've internalized and proven these concepts and strategies, and that came across through the delivery. It felt like an interaction, and an interaction can't be reduced to quotes or soundbytes.
Your talk was a much better talk. I love pg's writing but his presentation felt like he was nervously reading an essay. Which he was, but it detracted from the value of giving a talk.
ya fair enough, definitely a difference in quality between PG's lecture and this one to be able to quote from. Still thought Kevin had some decent content though
Awesome lecture. A summary of the points that hit home for me
1. Really try create amazing first moments in your product
2. There are many first moments in your product, every feature of your product has a first moment
3. The little things that tell your users who is behind the company are VERY IMPORTANT, ROARRR tooltip, a little poem in sign up forms. It's the little things
4. Deeply implement Support Driven Development in your company culture
5. Let your users know what happened since they have been gone. --> set up a drip campaign, which reminds users who haven't logged in for a while
6. Send handwritten thank you cards to your BEST customers is very valuable
Never used them, so I don't really have an opinion on oDesk specifically. I like my process to be as simple as possible and rely on hiring remarkable people. Those people tend to just do their jobs and do them well.
If you could redo the hand-written Christmas cards to show appreciation to customers, would you still send every customer a card at first, or would you start with the weekly schedule you transitioned to later? Thank you for the great talk.
Hmmm...I don't know. It was great being able to send all the customers a card that first year. That said, if we had done it every week, we probably would have gotten through all of them too. I actually liked the weekly cards better than the Christmas cards because the former were unexpected by our users, which makes for the best gifts. More of the xmas cards were probably taken for granted.
