Twitch founder Emmett Shear on the best users to talk to for finding product/market fit

Many startup founders will only talk to the most active users of their product.

But as Emmett explains, one of the most valuable things he learned early on at Twitch was that the people who were using competitor products had the best insights:

“The people who have chosen to not use your product—especially if they deliberately looked at, decided it sucked, and went somewhere else—are some of the best people to talk to because they know what’s wrong with it.”

Full video: Stanford Online “How to Build a Product I - Michael Seibel, Steve Huffman, Emmett Shear - Stanford CS183F“ (Apr 2017)

More popular advice from Emmett Shear

Twitch founder Emmett Shear on how to resolve product roadmap disagreements “If you find yourself thinking: ‘I’m going to go talk to my users to validate my product idea’, you’ve gone horribly off the rails…If you haven’t talked to users and you haven’t looked at data, you don’t get to have an opinion about the product. The person who has actually done the work gets to have the opinion. You can have ideas, but they get to make the call.” (full article).

Founders of Twitch and Reddit on data debt and how to avoid it “You will thank yourself later for having historical baselines for important user actions. Every time I’ve wondered how many people are using a feature and we don’t know, it was awful. You can’t make a decision for another three months as you build that baseline.” (full article).