Startup Product Development: “Embrace Your Suckage”. Main Points: 1) Don’t get featuritis!, Your goal is love or hate, 2) Engage and iterate your product Presented by: Paul Marshall, CEO of Ivara

1. EMBRACE YOUR SUCKAGE Paul Marshall March 23rd, 2010

2. 5 THINGS TO REMEMBER! The calls you hate getting the most are the ones you need to take most often Strong emotion is a beautiful thing Build with your customers not for your customers Don’t complicate simple things Embrace your suckage to succeed

3. POINT 1 The calls you hate getting the most are the ones you need to take most often Track SM Call customers Track competitors Google search Examples

4. Paypal …Have I mentioned that I hate PayPal? That should be clear by now, I would think. I consider it a necessary evil. Evil being the operative word, because I’m convinced that even if he didn’t design the customer service, it must be Old Scratch himself at the helm (and secretly behind Ebay too… but that’s another story). It’s convenient. Clients like it. It does get me paid quickly. But Gawd does it suck!... Case in point: today, I switched banks. This is all to the good, except for PayPal. PayPal, in it’s inimitable style, managed to take something that should be simple and straightforward — and make it ugly and full of pain

5. Verizon I'm so mad at Verizon now I just need to vent. The rep(s) I've had to deal with on this problem are all nice folks and as helpful as they can be. The problem is that THEIR COMPANY SUCKS MOOSE BALLS!!! These reps are probably the kind of folks that buy rounds for everyone at their table at the pub and are most likely the kind of people you'd like to hang around with. I don't blame them one bit for my mood right now. To be clear - and it's worth repeating - it's not the reps at Verizon I'm pissed at, it's Verizon's FiOS division that's the problem. And to be perfectly honest, I know they're not alone in their general suckage. I left Cablevision because THEY sucked. It's a freakin' epidemic of "suck". Complicit in my foul demeanor is another bunch of suck-heads: UPS. Like H1N1, the suck is running rampant, completely unchecked, and not even FEMA would get involved in this one. Although I suspect FEMA would only magnify the suck factor if they were somehow to get involved. So I'm wallowing in a fetid cesspool of suck, and I'm not happy. Shocking, huh? 3 nights ago, at 2 AM, Verizon FiOS pushed out an update to all their cable boxes in the area. They gave us a new and improved on-screen cable guide that added a third info screen for each channel. Whoop-tee-freakin'-do. Yeah, two useless info screens clearly weren't enough. We desperately needed a third useless info screen. I suspect this is closely tied in to the previously mentioned rampant overall suckage factor. Anyhow, this critical update bricked my cable box.

6. POINT 2 Strong customer emotion (+ or -) is a BEAUTIFUL thing Explain?

8. POINT 3 Build with your customers not for your customers How?

9. Pretty Normal Product Dvmt Cycle

10. Here’s what to do different!!! Trial group of customers (10-20) Detail iterative process, get their buy-in SPEED!! Continuous deployment RELEASE EVERY WEEK/ 2 WEEKS / MONTH Build faster, measure faster, learn faster MinViableProd or prototype Low cost PIVOT WHY DO THIS?

12. POINT 4 MOST PROBLEMS ARE SIMPLE…. DON’T COMPLICATE THEM

13. FEATURITIS

15. Conclusion Embrace your suckage….SEEK it out Build for Love or Hate Pivot

16. REALLY SMART PEOPLE….. FOLLOW THEM @seanellis @brantcooper @davemcclure @ericries @danmartell @cindyalvarez @msuster

17. Paul Marshall @ceomarshall www.paulmarshall.ca Paul.marshall@ivara.com CEO, Ivara Corp