The voices that interrupt the stillness are the ones
that are the daemons.
Redefine success as "learning something interesting".
External success is a mistake.
- Paul Buchheit
His goal for Gmail was to get to 100 happy users. "What would it take for your to be a happy user."
Yeah, that part of Paul's talk was amazing. He said most people thought Gmail was a mistake, so he explicitly set a goal to make 100 users really happy, and just went round asking them "What exactly can I make this product do to make you happy?" Then he'd just pick things off the list and do them.
Expanding on the idea of 'redefining success', I love how he explained that if the answer to the "What can I do to make you happy?" question was too complex to implement, he'd just keep asking different people until he found problems that were relatively easy to solve.
Comments
Yeah, that part of Paul's talk was amazing. He said most people thought Gmail was a mistake, so he explicitly set a goal to make 100 users really happy, and just went round asking them "What exactly can I make this product do to make you happy?" Then he'd just pick things off the list and do them.
Expanding on the idea of 'redefining success', I love how he explained that if the answer to the "What can I do to make you happy?" question was too complex to implement, he'd just keep asking different people until he found problems that were relatively easy to solve.