Marc is the CEO and creator of Frontend Masters, dedicated to teaching advanced web development skills. Before that he was heavily involved in open source and created one of the most popular UI elements on the web, the jQuery UI Datepicker. He also spoke at over sixty conferences around the world, created conferences and wrote on his blog to hundreds of thousands of readers monthly.

Find & Follow: @1Marc, http://marcgrabanski.com/

Extra links:

• Frontend Masters
• Intercom.io
• GumRoad
• LeadPages

Notes

• what experiment can i try next, and validate that they need the thing
• hater driven development: hate on you because they have a need but something is off (aka fighting apathy)
• intercom is a great feedback medium
• live feedback as much (1-1) as possible
• Being heavily harmonized with and in the industry and networked with the people allow simple priority decisions
• NPS (net promoter score) surveys are very helpful (1-10 scale surveys)
• determining what people what: huge difference between people who get it for free and those paying
• Careful because "free" can sometimes take your product away from it's core
• One of the big reason surveys fail is because they are blasted to everyone instead of contextual groups
• In software you can make a car a submarine, and then lets add freaking wings
• Biggest flaw is not validating the need
• Unless it's growing in ways that people care about, it's going to die. No matter how amazing, it will die, and no one will care.
• While still small enough, and agile enough, you can benefit from as close to a 1-1 conversation with a human on the other end
• Hard part or frustration is the pull/desire to jump on a new prototype product vs on the product at hand

Good Job:

• Aaron Skonnard
• Tim Ferriss
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Scott Harrison
• Justin Kaufenberg
• Matthew Dornquast