What a Lot of Entrepreneurs Don’t Realize: Good Design Is a Really Selfless Activity
A few years ago, we had a series of conversations with several notable design leaders. We named this compilation Nostalgia because every time we read them; it allows us to take a tour of our past. We believe that good design can carry the context and memory of our past and bridge it to today. As a strategic design consultancy, we also want to remember and revisit it with the knowledge we have gained up until today. The first interview was with John Maeda: Design Beyond the “Happy Spray”. Among the interviews and articles that we are delighted to present to you, Here is the second interview with Kevin Hale | What a Lot of Entrepreneurs Don’t Realize: Good Design Is a Really Selfless Activity
We had a conversation with Kevin Hale, a partner at Y-Combinator and founder at Wufoo in 2014. Therefore, all his answers reflect his work at that time. Hale talked in extent about his experience working with startups and some common problems about them.
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For Hale, “good design is this really interesting selfless activity that’s hard for a lot of people who are drawn to entrepreneurship to realize.” That might often result in tech entrepreneurs being too product-centric:
“When you’re working with startups and looking at their pages, you can tell how proud they are about their product or service. Because all they talk about is ‘look at our feature, look at this, look at that.’ The language is always like ‘we built something cool, look at our thing.’ It’s not so much like: ‘This is something we built for you. Here is what you can do with it. You’re now in power. You can do something cool.’”
Hale argues that a product or feature-centric attitude often leads to “building things people don’t want and being very distant and divorced from having growth, as a result of it.” The solution, argues Hale, is maintaining regular contact with your customers:
“It’s crucial that I explain to them ‘a lot of your success is going to be dependent on you, being the founder, directly talking to users and doing whatever you can to have as much of that identity and DNA carry forth throughout as your company scales.’”
“Cause that’s going to be the difficult part” warns Hale. “Cause once you stop listening and think that you have all the answers, you start building things, then you launch them out and you think ‘why doesn’t anybody use them, why doesn’t anybody use those features?’ Then it’s really clear where that disconnect happened.”
Photo credit: YHP Online
Hale proposes a step-by-step approach to achieve that connection: “The best way to get someone to have a billion dollars is helping them focus really really well on that first dollar,” says Hale. “How do you have that connection with that first user? How do you scale it up to ten users? And then to a hundred users? And how do you maintain that same amount of intensity all the way through up?”
“The question is,” Hale adds, “how does this become a billion-dollar idea, how does this take over the world? But there is also this subtle thing that shows: In order for this to be really huge, how does it connect with so many people in a deep and meaningful way so that it gets people excited whether you’re an investor or a user.”
Hale goes on to expand on the connection between growth and meaningful connections with people:
“We get to that question through these two questions that don’t sound very design-related. But it helps you see that Airbnb is not just someone trying to cover their rent or take over the hotel industry. It’s actually connecting people having this new sense of how people live in other cultures and so on. But it has to start with this concrete way of thinking to get there.”
