Today's guest speaker is Emmett Shear,

Emmett is the CEO of Twitch.

>> Hello. >> Which was acquired by

Amazon, where he now works.

And Emmett is going to do a new formal of class today, and

talk about how to do great user interviews?

So this is the talking to users part

of starting a startup, should be really useful.

Thank you very much for coming.

>> Thanks Tim.

>> Contact server knows where I'm coming from, from this.

We started our, I started my first startup with Justin Kan

right out of college we,

started this company called Kiko Calendar It didn't go so

well, it, it went, all right.

We, we, we built it we sold it, but we sold it on Ebay so

that's not necessarily, the end you want for

your startup, >> And

It was it was a good time.

We learned a lot, we learned a lot about programming.

We didn't know anything about calendars,

neither of us were users of calendars nor did we.

During the period of time, we're thinking you've got to

talk to anyone who actually did use a calendar.

So that was, that was not optimal.

we, we got the build stuff part of the, startup down,

we did not get the talk to users part.

The second startup we started we used, a very common trick,

that lets you get away with not talking to users,

which is that we were our own consumer.

We, we had this idea for a television show, Justin TV,

a reality show about Justin Kan's life.

And we built a whole set of technology and

website around the reality show we wanted to run.

And so we were the user for that for that product.

And that's actually one way to cheat and

get away with not talking to many other users is if you're

just building something that literally is just for you.

You don't need to talk to

anyone else because you know what is you want.

And what you need.

But that's if you're really limiting,

where to start a startup.

Most startups are not just built for

the person who is who is using them.

And when you do that, every now and

then, you get really lucky.

And you are representative of some huge class of

people who all want the exact same thing you do.

But very often also that just turns into

a side project that doesn't go any where.

so, we kept working on Justin.TV for a while and

we actually achieved a good deal of success,

because it turned out that there were

people out there who wanted to do the same thing we did.

Which was broadcast ourselves live on the Internet.

But, the issue with Justin.TV, the thing that,

the thing that sort of, kept us

from achieving greatness is we hadn't figured out yet.

How to how to build towards anything beyond that

initial TV show.

We knew how to, we built a great product actually.

If you wanted to run a live 24/7 reality TV show about

your life, we had the website for you.

We had exactly, what you needed.

But if we wanted to go do more than that.

If we wanted to open it up to a broader number of people,

a broader spectrum of people, a broader use cases.

We didn't have we didn't have the insight to figure that out

because we weren't that user and so

at some point we decided to pivot JustinTV.

We decided we needed to go in a new direction.

We thought we'd built a lot of valuable technology but hadn't

identified the use case that would let it get really big.

And there were two directions that seemed promising.

One of them was mobile.

And one of them is gaming.

And I led the gaming

initiative inside of the company.

And what we did with gaming that was very very different,

from what we'd ever done before.

Was, we actually went and talked to users,

because while I loved watching gaming video, I was very aware

that neither I nor anyone else in the company knew about

broadcasting video games.

And so I would amp up the content, I thought there was

a market there, that was sort of the insight that

I had which wasn't common at the time,

which was how much fun it was to watch video games.

Quick show of hands, people know about watching video game

on the internet here?

Okay, I'm just going to assume that people listening to

this also know about it.

If you don't know about, if you don't know about watching

video games on the internet, you should go read about that.

Because it's sort of,

an important context for the stuff I'm going to talk about.

But the main point is I thought

that was awesome but I didn't know anything about

the side of it that was really important, which is

actually acquiring the content to start broadcasting.

So we went out, and we ran a.

Actually a very large number of user interviews.

We talked to a lot of people and brought that data back,

and that formed the core of all of the decision-making

that was for the next three years of product features on

Twitch was sort of some of the insights we got from that.

And we continued to talk to users, and

in fact built an entire.

Part of the company whose job it is basically to talk to

our users.

Which is an, which is

a whole division that we just didn't even have at JustinTV.

We had no one at the company whose job it

was to talk to our most important users.

So so that was Twitch.

And I'm, I want to give you guys a little bit of

a a little bit of an insight into.

With Twitch.

What, what that,

what that meant, going to go talk to users.

So, we determined that

the broadcasters are the most important people.

And the reason we determined that, was, when we went and

looked into the market,

we we looked into what, what determined.

Why people watched a certain streamer or

went to a certain website.

They would just follow the content, right?

You had a, you had a piece of content you loved and

the broadcaster would come with you.

And that's actually the one

really important point about user interviews,

which is that who you talk to is as important.

As what questions you ask and you pull away from it.

Because if you go and talk to a set of users, if we'd gone

and talked to viewers only, we have, a complete different set

of feedback than talking to the broadcasters.

And talking to the broadcasters gave us

insight into how to build a link for them.

That you're not to be strategically correct.

I wish I could tell the recipe for

figuring out who the target user is for your product and

who your target user should be.

But there isn't a recipe.

It comes down to think really hard and, and use your,

use your judgement to figure out,

who you're really building this for?

So what I want to do is a little bit,

something a little bit interactive now, which is.

sometging We're going to,

I've got a bunch of ideas from, from you guys actually.

So, sort of suggested ideas.

And i'm going to pick one of them.

And I want every one to sort of sit down and

do, do step one of this process for me, right now.

Which is think about who would you go ask about this.

Like which people.,

Where would you go to find the people you needed to talk

to about this.

In order to in order to learn about what you should build.

And so the idea you're going to use is, let me see here.

Of these ideas, so

here it's a lecture focused note taking app.

The idea is I don't think that the state of the art for

note taking is good enough yet.

And I want to make a note taking app that improves.

You know, improves that experience.

Makes taking notes in class better.

Or taking notes by listening to a lecture online better.

So you know, maybe it has collaboration features.

Maybe it, like, helps you focus better somehow.

It has multimedia enhancements.

I don't know, right?

All sorts of possible features.

But that's the, that's the idea.

So take, like,.

Take 120 seconds right now, and think about not what you

would ask, or what the right features for

this app is, but who would you talk to?

Who should the, who,

who's going to give you that feedback that's going to tell

you whether this is good or not?

I actually mean it, right now.

Take your laptop out, like type, write some stuff down.

Think, think about, like, the, you can,

it, it's good enough to.

Like think of that in your head.

But actually, like if you actually just write it down,

and like just come up with the five people you talk to,

the five types of people you talk to.

And who you think the most important one was.

LIke, actually do it.

Because there's nothing like actually running

through a practice of something and trying to do it

to actually get into your head, the right way to do it.

I"m gratified to see here clicking in,

of the keyboards now.

If you're following along at home, pause, actually do it.

Think about who you, who would you talk to?

Because that's a, that is the first question

for almost any startup that you need

to answer is like who is my user and,

and where am I going to find them?

Alright that's like way shorter than

you normally used to think about this problem.

It's actually a really tricky problem in, like, figuring out

where to source the people is pretty hard, but ,.

We're going to move along anyways in the,

in this highly abbreviated version of learning how to

build a product and run a user interview.

So can can I get one volunteer from the audience to

come up and tell, tell us what who you would talk to?

And we'll talk about it.

You guys are all pre-selected.

>> >> Here you go.

I don't know, how to turn this thing on, here we go.

So who do you talk to?

I would definitely talk to n college students first,

obviously because we sit in a lot of lectures, and

specifically I want to talk to college students studying

different subjects to see if maybe, you know,

if you're an English major,

if that makes a different, versus you're studying.

Of not, Computer Science in terms of how you want to

take notes in lectures.

>> And so you,

you're going to talk to a bunch of college students

Would you pick any particular subset of college students?

Like we're going to talk to all college students or

like a broad array.

>> I, I went out and talked to college students.

like, and break down the divisions by like people who

study different areas maybe.

And then also maybe it would make sense for

people who have like different study techniques.

Because some people take a lot of notes.

Some people don't take that many notes,