Lecture
How to Run a User Interview with Emmett Shear (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 16)
- Personal Startup History: Emmett Shear co-founded Kiko Calendar (sold on eBay) and Justin TV, learning critical lessons about the necessity of user interviews.
- Kiko Calendar failed to reach optimal product-market fit because the founders built the product without speaking to calendar users.
- Justin TV initially succeeded only because the founders were their own users, a strategy that limits scalability for broader markets.
- The Twitch Pivot: Justin TV pivoted to gaming video broadcasting after identifying a market gap but initially lacking insight into user needs.
- Shear led the gaming initiative by conducting extensive user interviews, a discipline previously absent at Justin TV.
- The company established a dedicated division solely responsible for talking to users, recognizing broadcasters as the primary strategic users.
- Identifying Target Users: Determining who to interview is as critical as the questions asked; Shear emphasizes that broadcasters were more valuable to interview than viewers.
- Interviewing only viewers would have yielded different feedback that did not align with the strategic need to build a platform for broadcasters.
- Interactive Case Study (Note-Taking App): The session simulated a startup scenario for a lecture-focused note-taking app to demonstrate user identification.
- Target Audience: Primary users identified as college students across various majors, with secondary audiences including IT administrators (who control purchases) and parents (who fund education).
- Interview Findings: A sample interview with a student revealed a fragmented workflow using pen-and-paper, Google Docs, and Evernote without deep integration or effective review processes.
- Feature Validation: Proposed features must be validated by solving specific workflow blockers rather than asking users directly if they want new features.
- User Interview Methodology:
- Avoid Feature Focus: Interviews should uncover underlying problems and behaviors, not specific feature requests (e.g., "horseless carriage effect").
- Sample Diversity: Interviewers must speak to diverse extremes (e.g., different majors, non-users, competitor users) to avoid bias from a single demographic.
- Validation via Action: Ideas should be tested via low-fidelity prototypes (e.g., browser extensions) or by asking for pre-commitment (money) rather than verbal affirmation.
- Twitch Feedback Analysis: Shear compared feedback from three distinct groups to prioritize product development.
- Current Users (Justin TV): Requested minor feature tweaks (e.g., editing ban lists, title changes) which were deemed less critical as they were already tolerating significant pain points.
- Competitor Users: Identified high-value needs like revenue sharing, video stability, and the ability to switch users, which represented the biggest barriers to entry.
- Non-Users (Potential Market): Revealed fundamental barriers to adoption, such as lack of hardware, fear of revealing strategies, and the preference for uploading edited videos to YouTube.
- Strategic Outcome: Twitch prioritized building infrastructure for monetization, video stability, and accessibility (including console integration) over the specific feature requests of current users.
- Common Startup Mistakes: Shear identified three frequent errors in user research execution.
- Showing users the product during initial interviews, which biases their feedback toward the proposed solution rather than their actual problems.
- Asking leading questions about specific features (e.g., "Would you pay for subscriptions?") rather than exploring general pain points.
- Interviewing "who is available" (e.g., forum members) rather than "who is needed," resulting in unrepresentative data.
- Internal Buy-in Strategies: To convince teams to change direction based on user feedback, Shear recommends recording interviews and playing them for stakeholders.
- Recorded audio allows the entire team to hear the raw emotion and context of user struggles without the distortion of second-hand notes.
- This method is more effective than simply stating findings, as it prevents the team from cherry-picking data.
- Communication Channels:
- In-Person/Video: Preferred over email because interactive "detective mode" probing yields deeper insights and fills voids with user rambling.
- Recruitment: Reached out via site messaging, event networking, and direct email; compensation was generally not required as users were eager to help.
- International Challenges: Non-English speaking markets remain difficult due to the unrepresentative nature of bilingual interviewees and a lack of fluent English speakers in the target demographic.
- Evolving User Base: The target demographic for interviews shifts over a product's lifecycle.
- Early-stage growth often relies on competitor users, while mature products must engage new constituencies like game publishers.
- Continuous interviewing is necessary to prevent feature stagnation as the market and user base mature.