Dave McClure: Design for Emotion

Great presso (again) from Dave McClure from 500 Startups.

I’m flat out finishing off the end of this year with a bang, so here is some brief thoughts;

• Absolutely!
• Take risks – you have no brand. The big guys can’t take small risks, so to beat them you have to risk something.
• You can never please everyone, even when you’re huge. Pick a group and make them crazy happy. This will make someone else crazy angry. That’s ok. This goes to things like email too. If a few people aren’t complaining about your spamming, then you’re probably too quiet.
• Have a crazy big vision to go for. You can’t pivot pivot pivot endlessly. It has to be in a direction and if you’re not painting that sucker big, colourful and zesty every week then why would anyone else get up every day to work their butt off for it.
• When I’ve done it well:

• Wooboard – aiming for 1 trillion Woos by 2020. Huge!
• Kazaa – make P2P the most amazing digital distribution channel the world has seen for fans and artists.
• Pollenizer – create a new way to incubate businesses and build a billion dollar company doing it.
• When I’ve done it badly;

• Tangler – trying to please everyone, especially Mike Arrington.
• Zapr – not trusting my gut when I felt our strategy was going to broad.
• Posse – not being more ‘assertive’ that we could have iterated faster.
• Pollenizer – initially trying to be everything. It sucked.
• 100 other times.

Anyway, here is what Dave says. As per normal it comes with a language warning.