Startup learnings from Zynga
Learnings from Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon’s talk at the Entrepreneurial thought leaders series at Stanford:
- Don’t give up control of the company early or else you are effectively an employee of the investor.
- Can the company run fine on days when you aren’t in office at all? It should be able to..
- Identify and get better at what you are weak. (My corollary is: Instead of only thinking about why people are coming are using your product, think about why other customers aren’t using your products).
- Hire people one level below where they should be. They should have some humility, and not be too attached to titles.
- Don’t give yourself permission to fail. Essentially, as soon as you say: “this is pretty decent, good enough even if we don’t grow or get better”, you’ll start plateauing out.
- Don’t settle. Go for the double big back corner shot(do the hard thing if you can, rather than the least effort one).
- Prepare for technology transitions earlier than anyone else.
- Innovate on features not on titles(esp in reference to video games but might be applicable elsewhere).
- Building franchises early helped EA a lot.
- Test every configuration. Do a lot more tests.
- Measure every parameter change. Be obsessive on configs and tests.
- Go out and recruit amazing people.
- Identify a user frustration. Now think of the solution to it. The solution could be a not worth it idea, a worth it feature, or a totally worth it product.
- Build an Internet treasure(digital skyscrapers like Amazon, Google, Netflix). An Internet treasure is something without which life is now unimaginable.
- Use ghetto testing(like put a link to s feature you’re considering on your main page for a few days and see if people actually click on it. The link could lead to a survey with a promise to alert the user when it comes out).
- You have only so many bullets you can fire. Prioritize.
- Give me 5 words that describe what you’d Market if we do this feature. Now do Ghetto testing using the words( you can also use Google adwords to draw traffic for ghetto testing).
- Become a product manager. A PM is like the CEO for the products/feature s/he owns.
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