Todd Olson

Customer, people, and the thing not listed is product.

I believe that the critical thing for any company, and certainly any startup, is you gotta obsess over customers, your people, that's your employees of course, and then your product.

And so that my extra story, my bonus story, is gonna be about product.

That is my background and specialty, so I obsess over that a good part of my time.

But I'm going to talk about unscalable customer things, because the things we do today are, of course, not the things we did in the very, very beginning.

The things we did in the beginning was assess about a human.

This is Amy from Invoke.

Actually, she's not at Invoke anymore.

This was many, many years ago.

But Lee, for a while, we had one user in our product.

One.

And we looked at everything this user did.

What she did, what she didn't do.

We would follow up with qualitative research to understand why she did certain things.

One day we show up at the office and it's like, holy crap, she used this part of our product like 20 times more than we had anticipated anyone would ever use this.

So we call up and we realize, ooh,

This is not good design.

She's probably misusing the product because we made it unnaturally difficult to do this certain action.

And the cool thing is we hadn't even conceived of someone using our product in this way.

So the value of doing unscalable things is by going direct to the user, direct to the customer, you