Idea Validation

"Someone says, 'Hey, you know what? This would be great to build.' And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify, justify, execute. First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on."

"Every time you solve a problem, there's inherent risk involved. There's the risk of will people buy this or will they choose it or will they choose to use it, which is all a value type of risk. There's the risk of can they use it, which is a usability type of risk. The risk that we can build it to have the skills to build it or the time to build this, that's a feasibility risk. And the risk of it working for our business, which is a viability risk."

"It's really this Wizard of Oz experience. We don't have to build anything. I coordinated with a bunch of interns and we were able to validate some of the value prop and conversion rates that we would expect in a subscription service."

"The way we actually achieved it is that we said, 'Okay. In two weeks, we're going to have a hackathon, in which, each one of our developers is going to take one column and implement it in one day.' And, if you think about it, from four months to one day, it's mind-blowing."

"We can cut down the product in terms of functionality to just most critical features, but we will never compromise on the quality and UX and the aesthetics."

"We would have an idea in the morning, come up with some sort of functional prototype, recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users, but have zero skin in the game, ship fast so people can start playing with it. In the afternoon, we're already running pretty full scale experiment."

"If I drill down what makes companies fail, it's quite simple. It's just like they don't talk to users, which means they don't find product market fit. And if they don't find product market fit, nothing else really matters."

"You fake it, you do a fake door test, you do a smoke test, Wizard of Oz tests. We used a lot of those in the tabbed inbox by the way, one of the first early versions was actually we showed the tabbed inbox working to people. But it wasn't really Gmail, it was just a facade of HTML and behind the scenes and according to the permissions that the users gave us some of us moved just the subject and the sender into the right place."

"We launched basically every type of app you can imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup apps. Basically, every consumer app on mobile that you could think of. That actually helped us build a muscle to understand what people want and how to actually make things grow and how to test them."

"So the zone of benefit works as a framework because people will not pay for things that don't either really shrink the workflow that they're doing or doesn't give them superpower. So the same amount of time, but twice as much output. But the most important thing is that it has to be noticeable."

"In a short five-day window, you can get a small set of people to quickly mock up a concept, convert it into some sort of a prototype and then go out there and get some sort of a validation. Oftentimes when we are working on some of these new things, we have our product teams that are focused on zero to one initiatives, run this five-day initiative, and at the end of it we say, 'Oh, this is great.'"