Max Levchin is someone I admire. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he is the co-founder of Paypal that was sold to eBay for $1.5Bil.
Here are some of my key takeaways:
- As an entrepreneur, you have to learn to define yourself as someone who runs a company. You know you’re really good at that if you dont think that much about what kind of company you are running (meaning, it’s second nature to you).
- After you launch something, watch the world respond to it. If they say it is no good, you must evolve.
- You don’t wait for the market to tell you that your product or idea sucks. You keep your ears close to the ground. Sometimes you must completely your strategy. Smell the opportunity.
- On reaching out to end-users: Being active in forums and the company blog is good, but that doesn’t scale. Satisfy your early adopter (your core base), then shift to metrics. Use metrics to drive all features. It’s important to measure, interpret the information, and feed that directly into product strategy. 10% of headcount at Slide is dedicated to measuring.
- Greatest fallacy: build products for yourself. Abstract yourself out of the equation. Startup founders are smarter and crazier than the average person, you can’t use yourself as the “normal” person this product is built for. Find out who you are building it for. It’s great if you are a part of your audience, but you may not necessarily be. If you are not, you must understand the audience really well.
- At Paypal, everyone on board understood the vision, and genuinely focused on customer needs. Build value, create something people want.
I found this cool interview of him, by iinnovate. Read more about Max on the New York Times.