How To Build A Product
With Your Community Loic Le Meur – Seesmic @loic (Twitter, Seesmic) loiclemeur.com loic@seesmic.com

Market research sucks

Advertising sucks

PR sucks

What your friends say matters.

“1000 real friends could tell
1000 other friends that your product rocks here you go you got 1 million people talking about it” Seth Godin “1,000 True Fans”

Seesmic got 1.2 million users
download our products

It starts by sharing and
listening to your community • Don’t ask anything to anyone if you did not share first • Never been as easy as today with microblogging and blogging • Your community (or your brand’s) is what should matter the most, not marketing or PR • It’s the same in any industry, word of mouth always wins, it’s just faster in the Internet industry

Identify an exciting space, not
too crowded and make it really really narrow Seesmic: help people share, interact and know their community in a new way, human and deep. Started with video, now broader with the Twhirl success

Ship as soon as you
can, even if it is far from being perfect

Gather feedback it’s never been
that easy

Twitter search one mention of
Seesmic and Twhirl every 2 minutes or so

Get Satisfaction

Uservoice
feedback.twhirl.org

If nobody talks about your
brand it means it is dead

Answer especially if it’s negative

“Seesmic is a pile of
ass” - Niall Harbison

I replied…

“This is exactly what every
company should do, you really to talk to your customers” - @NiallHarbison

What the new Internet customers
look like • They want it all for free • They want no intrusive advertising • If you suck they will tell everyone • They will switch immediately to your competitor the minute he beats you on anything • They will tell everyone they switched

The good news • It’s
the same for all your competitors • You have a chance to turn people who feel like enemies into real friends, just talk to them • You will always have some real and loyalfriends, it’s all about finding them and get closer to them

Get closer to your real
friends • Launched Team Seesmic as an experiment to get help from our real friends • We give them the previews of our products first • We reply to every single email • Expected 500 members, we have 6,500 and growing

What I learnt • Your
community is your most important asset after your family • Get your product out as soon as possible • Get your “public roadmap” out as soon as possible • Execute as fast as you can

Listen to your users

Don’t worry often they love
you too and they tell all their friends

“A Porsche would be a
Volvo if they let their buyers decide on features” – Robert Scoble

“When you listen to your
users, you get Vanilla. Feature creep. Boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device.” “Making users happy is a suckers game” – Michael Arrington

The truth is in between
build your product in the open, listen to the users and keep some innovations secret to surprise them

Thank you. Loic Le Meur
@loic Loiclemeur.com loic@seesmic.com