Author: Shelby Stephens

Weedeating is art, and as any great artist should, I have a vision, a theory, an artist statement that guides my weedeating: controlled chaos. I like my yard to walk the fine line between expertly manicured perfection and uncontrollably overgrown wilderness. Regardless, there’s something magical about weedeating while listening to a good album or podcast – or, in this case, listening to a YouTube video.

Supply Side Prioritization

This past Sunday, instead of listening to Workingman’s Dead or Red Headed Stranger again while sculpting my front yard’s blades and weeds, I enjoyed a great presentation by Ann Miura-Ko (of Floodgate) and her subsequent conversation with John Lilly (Greylock Partners). You can find the video here (don’t worry, I just listened – I wasn’t watching a video while weedeating).

I particularly enjoyed their discussion about marketplaces that starts around 44m 50s.

Ann’s comments about marketplaces are awesome. She discusses how, when analyzing a marketplace in its earliest stages, the most important piece is not demand, it’s supply. From the trenches of building a marketplace, I will confirm this is counterintuitive but true. Ann wants to determine how effective a company is at convincing supply to come on board, how loyal the service providers are to the marketplace as a platform (rather than getting a customer and then trying to circumvent the marketplace), and how much longevity the company is seeing with the supply side (i.e., does it look like the service providers are going to keep using the marketplace).

She discusses the importance of focusing on supply, because having supply will lead to demand. It’s important to show the supply dynamic early on, because it’s the leading indicator to liquidity. In short, you must prove there are a lot of people who want to work in your marketplace.

Here’s a riddle: for an entrepreneur building a marketplace, what’s more satisfying than seeing a user request come into the marketplace, get claimed by a service provider, fulfilled, rated 5 stars, and billed. Answer: Nothing.

The WTF Experience

Since my Sunday was shaping up so nicely, I stayed on the Floodgate train and moved to the living room for some iced tea to watch Ann’s partner Mike Maples present to some Stanford students. Find that video here.

In particular, I liked Mike’s comments at ~32m about delighting your users/customers. He dubs moments of complete delighted astonishment the “WTF Experience.” At this point, he’s just finished discussing the analogy between tango dancing and the process of finding product/market fit, an “intimate back and forth.” So true. Using Lyft and Tesla as examples, Mike makes the excellent point that, “A lot of people think their product is good, and that rational customers ought to like it and buy it, but customers…need to say ‘WTF, I didn’t know that was even possible, are you kidding me?'” He calls this “actualizing your advantage in the product experience.” He adds,

“The best places to delight the customer are in the areas where you’re fundamental advantage just sings, and if you stick the landing on that, not only do you delight the customer, but it’s really hard for other people to do what you just did.”

Other gems from his presentation:

• Read the chapter about “mastering emergent strategies” from The Innovators Guide to Growth
• Be clear on price. It’s better to have clear high prices than unclear low prices
• Read up on “category design” using playbigger.com as a reference
• The purpose of a seed round is to marry Proprietary Power and Product Power
• If you can use a seed round to create something people love that’s defensible, that was a good seed round

Find any other relevant articles, videos, interviews or otherwise? Let us know in the comments!

I’ve been finding a lot of great information on feedback mechanisms lately, so I compiled it here. Seems to work out as four rough categories.

User Feedback

Talking to users (or customers) is incredibly helpful and informative. We’re finding value on the product side, proactively asking users for their opinions of our UI, features, notification and overall experience. At this stage, pretty much every piece of user feedback helps us improve our product.

But, we’re also finding value on the messaging side. For example, we found a thread of comments on Facebook about HubRunner, where WordPress experts communicated about our marketplace. They specifically pointed out their dislike of some of our marketing messaging, and we completely agreed with them. So, we improved it.

Another example involves working to engage a specific type of HubRunner user: the marketing consultant or firm. In this case, we are reaching out to individual marketing consultants and larger firms to discuss our marketplace, to give them access and see how they engage. These conversations are helping us shape the product use case for this class of user and, tangentially, the value proposition we can transform into marketing messaging.

Partner Feedback

We’re testing our hypothesis that partnerships will be an important part of HubRunner’s growth. The trick? We don’t know how partners will want to use HubRunner – we don’t know where they’ll find value. Of course, we have assumptions about how they’ll use it, but to test those assumptions we’re engaging in conversations with potential partners. The trick? We don’t tell them how they should use HubRunner. Instead, we ask them what sort of problems they need to solve, and then we’re exploring whether or not HubRunner can solve one … or two 🙂

Advisor Feedback

It’s been really exciting to get positive feedback from our advisors – gratifying, and certainly emotionally helpful. But, we need some bad news, too. Michael Dearing has some great advice on this:

“Every big, good idea is going to be subjected to a devil’s advocate, who should be the smartest person you can find, whose job is to try to destroy the idea.”

(Note: I suggest checking out Michael Dearing’s presentation and discussion with Reid Hoffman from this past Fall – Also, you can find the notes from the session here)

(Another side note: in the video linked above, check out his comments on competition at 36m 31s)

Team Feedback

Regarding team feedback, the video linked above includes a discussion of the marketplace approach to sourcing ideas internally, which seems to work well when blended with a “benevolent dictator” in the early days. One suggestion that pops up now and again (including in the video) is to pretend your company has failed, to discuss the reasons why it failed, and then address those issues preemptively, i.e., now.

Founder Feedback

My co-founder and I have been working together for nearly a decade, meaning we’ve been together longer than I’ve been with my wife. While we’ve certainly had our disagreements, how have we managed to work together for so long? In the same video, at 47m 07s, he discusses the critical phases of iterating and building business, and also check out this video about the “cognitive distortions of founders.”

To use a specific phrase of Micheal’s, as founders, we seem to “shock absorb each other.” Where one of us is thinking more conservatively, one of us may be thinking less conservatively. The balance can be insanely frustrating at times (which is where a longstanding working relationship built on trust comes in the handiest), but the balance between founders translates into a balanced product and a balanced organization.

The bottom line?

Being open to feedback isn’t enough. We have to aggressively seek it out, ask for it, and in some cases, specify the type of feedback we want.

Did we miss any critical feedback mechanisms? Please drop a comment to give us your…feedback.

Build what you want to see in the world: make a bet that it will resonate with other people.

Only occasionally do I plow through one of the many business books piled on my shelf. They so often come highly recommended by a colleague or mentor. They are so temptingly presented on Amazon.

“Without motive, you will wobble about.” You need a common sense of purpose. Without motive, you will not do anything that is timeless.

I’m always a one-tap-order away from business strategy enlightment. A single send-to-kindle dropdown selection away from never-before-revealed secrets. Free two-day prime shipping away from the breakthrough idea that will propel our company through the profitability stratosphere.

“We are not here to do what has already been done.” Find your own path.

So, it’s refreshing to see someone like Jack Dorsey recommend a book that, on its surface, is completely unrelated to business: The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri. The first sentences of the first chapter read, “Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing. When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.

Art is doing anything intensely. Art is doing anything well.

Henri wasn’t a business guru. He was an artist and teacher, and the book – published in 1923 – compiles an assortment of his ideas, philosophies and “practical musings.”

You “must pioneer beyond the mere matters of fact” – use fewer words, copy fewer things, but be longer in meaning.

On its own merits, the book is extremely interesting. But as Dorsey makes clear, it’s a very relevant and inspiring read if you keep business in the foreground as you move through the pages.

Create only what is important.

This book has helped me focus on the things that really matter. On a day-to-day basis, that means properly prioritizing my work so the right things are getting done. At the highest level, that means pursuing goals and working on projects that not only have a high likelihood of success, but that I believe will really make a difference.

Have you read The Art Spirit? Let us know what you thought in the comments below!