 As someone who is from, originally from Finland, but spent most of their professional career outside, I'm so, so excited to be speaking here at Slush. I'm Juha. I've spent most of my career, you know, building games, building consumer apps as a founder, operator, and also investor. I think they might have a bit of an issue with the clicker. All right, now we get started. But before this, actually I was this kid, I was this 10-year-old, you know, who loved playing games. And that's how I grew up. So now, you know, this kid at that stage could never believe that, you know, they could be in front of stage talking about something that they truly, truly love. And I think this is like really important for any product that you're building, that it really comes out of your passion. A bit of my own background, you know, I started it as an entrepreneur a little bit over 10 years ago, company called Nonstop Games, which was acquired by King, the makers of Candy Crush for 100 million. After that, I started a company called Donut, where we built a short form video platform for gamers for two years, ended up pivoting from that. And now we're building Soba. With Soba, our dream is to enable anyone to build games. Even if you don't know how to code, even if you don't have access to a computer, you know, you can build something. And that's really fulfilling the dream that, you know, that 10-year-old kid had, you know, 30 years ago. We're super happy to be backed by some of the best investors in the world, from Lightspeed to Cherry 0.9. The topic of this talk is winning by design. And maybe before I start, I'd love to get a show of hands. Who of you are building a product? Who are product builders? Who of you have, you know, had wins in building a product? Who of you had failures in building a product? So I think that sounds like a right ratio, because I feel the longer my startup journey has been, the more I've had actually, like, failures and learned from them. So, you know, this talk actually could be called failing by design. And I think it's very important that, you know, you have those failures, but you learn from them. You know, that makes you a better product builder. I'll go through some of those lessons that I've learned throughout my career as a product builder. I want to start from something that it's almost, you know, embarrassingly simple or common sense to say. But I want to start from that, which is building something that someone really cares about. I think Ray from Affinity was kind of touching on this as well, that a lot of us as product builders, we love our own products. We know how to pitch them. And I think as a founder, I think it's great to be a good marketer. I think being a good marketer is an awesome skill. But I think you need to separate your own marketing from whether you're building a product that somebody cares about. And to be honest, I think this is the one thing that, you know, most products miss or how most products fail. You know, they end up building something that's, you know, beautifully designed. You know, it has the right interaction patterns. You know, it gets a bunch of VC funding, has a great team. But it's a product that no one actually really cares enough about. And, you know, those products eventually end up dying. And that is probably the most difficult thing to do is to build something that is of enough value for someone. I think there are two ways of, you know, approaching this problem. The first one, which I think is actually a pretty good one, especially when you're building consumer products, especially when you're a young founder, is build a product for yourself. You know, if you are building something that you yourself love, it solves a problem for yourself. You know, it's quite likely that it's going to solve a problem for someone else. And nowadays, distribution is so global. You know, we have the app stores are global, the web is global. It's easy to get your product around. Marketing is a lot easier with all kind of, you know, ad networks and influencers and so on. So it's very likely there's going to be someone else who is like you, who is going to fall in love with the product that you love. So that's the first strategy. The first strategy is building for yourself. The second one, which I think like most people follow, is being really, really close to the user. And I'll go a bit deeper into that, you know, in this talk. But it's really about understanding who your user is, going deep into their needs, understanding what they want. And that's another strategy of trying to get to something that someone really cares about. And obviously, this is super tough. Before the talk, I checked some stats. I think there's like 90,000 apps on Google Play for every month. So that's over a million per year. And there's a lot of consumer choice over there. So I think only the products that, you know, really, the user cares about there, they're the only ones who are going to survive. My second learning is, and something that I've learned a few times over, and I kind of need to repeat it to myself as well, is that people don't want your product. And let me repeat it. People don't want your product. What they want is who they can become with your product. You know, they want to have this item, this flower, and get these superpowers, and that's what they want. So for me, like, I mean, I think a JetGBT is an awesome product, but I don't want JetGBT. I want an easier way to, like, write my LinkedIn posts, you know, without putting too much effort into it. That's what I want. Or I don't want this over a ring. I mean, it's a beautiful design product, but I kind of don't want it. I want to sleep better. I want to have, like, an accountability partner. So, you know, if it happens that I end up, you know, drinking a few, too many drinks at a slush after-party, the next morning I know that, okay, maybe I shouldn't have done that, especially if I have a speech that day. So people really want these superpowers that can come with your products, and it's easy to get sort of these things mixed up. So what happened to us, for example, when we were building this, you know, Donut app, so we're building this in 2019, at the time when TikTok was growing but was still sort of focused on more of a kind of teenage female audience. So we thought it would be a great idea to build a short form video product aimed at gamers, aimed at, like, predominantly male audience. And, you know, we got a lot of people excited about this, and I think we actually built some, like, really nice tools for people. People, you know, people showed interest to it. But when we were pulling the motivation that people had for using our product, it was predominantly to become famous. And eventually, you know, that's a really tough thing to deliver with the social network that's still, like, pretty small. So for us, we sort of miss what people were really after, who they want to become. And that's, I think, essentially why we built a failed product. I mean, I think we did okay. We built something that's interesting, but it just didn't work because what the users wanted, we couldn't deliver. This is my second lesson. Think about what the user wants to become with their product, not your product itself. The third lesson, also something that I feel I need to kind of repeat to myself over my career building products, is that most likely your user persona, who you're building for, is too broad. So I think this happens in a lot of startups that as founders, we love a big market. We talk about a big time. But the user, that's a single person always. So who you have to win over is one person at a time. So if you're thinking in these big numbers, that's kind of like no one. So I think it's a lot better to be polarizing, have some people hate you and some people love you than being somewhere in the middle. Like if you're in the middle, you're going to die. And I think what happens, what I've seen happen in my own companies, my own teams, what I've seen happen as an investor, I think in a lot of sort of early founder product teams, people have different opinions, who should we build for? So there's a bunch of different people that you're talking to. You have like different sort of feedback from different sources. And then you try to have some sort of a compromise. You try to be somewhere in the middle. And I think that's natural in a team to try to think of that way, to try to find a consensus. I think it's a lot better to actually make a choice, exclude some people, and just build for a single persona. Then see if that works for you. If it works great, you can always expand. If it doesn't move to the next one. So make choices, that's super important. In my own industry of gaming, if I think of the biggest companies over there, Roblox, nowadays, over 60 million daily active users, Minecraft, nearly 200 million monthly active users, actually both of these products started with fairly niche audiences. They were not for everyone when they started. They were for like a very specific small group. And they had this engaged fan base, and then they expanded from there. So a lot better starting more niche, having some people that hate you, some people love you. Then you can always expand. What is helpful in getting to that first user persona that you want to build for is spending a lot of time and spending your time smartly with your users. There's this awesome book called The Mom Test that I would highly recommend for anyone who's building a product. Some great stuff around this topic. Something that I've noticed myself is that really try to focus on the user behaviors, not their opinions. I think a lot of times we're asking, what would people like to have? And I think people like to have a lot of stuff. It's really easy to say that you want something. But if you're asking someone that, have they done anything to solve the problem? Have they tried to look for a solution? How do they look for a solution? That's normally way more valuable information for you when you're building your product. So for example, for us now building Soba, our users are typically like 12 to 16 year olds. They all play games. When we ask, would you like to build a game? Almost everyone says yes. Obviously, who wouldn't want to have their own game? But that doesn't mean that you're likely to become a Soba user. So we normally ask, how have you tried to do it so far? Maybe they haven't tried any of the existing tools. And that's normally a little bit of a warning sign because someone who doesn't have the motivation to try something, it's unlikely that they become an early user of an early product. They still have, as we want to make it as good as possible, it has some glitches here and there. So I think it's really important to go deep into our users, understand their behaviors, not only ask for opinions. The fourth lesson, which I think is especially relevant for anyone building any type of a social product, is that your community, especially your early community, is really the product. So if you think of apps like Musically or Clubhouse, Instagram back in the day, YouTube, what most people experience is the other users who are there or the content produced by the other users. And if you're not being intentional, who are those early users, you're missing something. So there's going to be some users, and if you're not choosing who they are, they might be something else that you wish them to be. And I think if you choose them rightly in the social products, that can really help you grow the product further. So when we started or when we first announced Sobop, so this is sort of 18 months ago, we had some investors who had some interest in crypto. We had some, sort of, us 18 months ago, we thought that maybe, hey, crypto would go with three, it could help us in some way. Then when we tweeted about our fundraise, actually within a couple of days, we had like 100,000 people join our wait list. And obviously for us, we were like, this is amazing, so many people are interested, this is so great. But then what we realized with that early community, and we were not being intentional, that all of those people were actually joining because they want to have an NFT, that was the time when NFTs still had some value, they want to have a token. So all of these people were joining with the primary motivation of getting a financial gain. When we released the product to them, a lot of people were actually not interested in trying the product at all. So what I realized that, you know, we were not choosing our audience, the audience that kind of like randomly chose us. And what we had to do at the end is that we sort of had to recycle our audience, move to a different direction. After that, we became a lot more intentional who we want our users. And now if you look at our current user base, we have about 10,000 creators who are using SOBA in early access. It's a lot more positive vibe. People who are authentically interested in creating games who are not there for the quick bug, but who are actually like super, super excited about creating something, sharing those with their friends. So here are some of the games that our creators are creating. And obviously this is like a totally different feel from the first community of users that we have. My sixth lesson of building products is maybe a little bit counter-intuitive, but don't just build what the users want. I think the users will always look at the, you know, the kind of the incumbent products out there and they will ask for stuff that they see in them. And I think it's very easy to get into this mode where you are trying to close the gap between your product and some other, you know, company or product that's been building for like 5 to 10 years. And normally this is just not enough. Like too many companies move into this mode where they want to close the gap too early. What's much, much more important for you is to focus on something, focus on the core experience of your product, making that better, building something different from the rest of the competition. I'm old enough, you know, I'm from Finland, so I actually started my career at Nokia as it used to be this big mobile phone manufacturer. And I remember when the iPhone came out, and you know, there was like, you know, there's 2007 and 2008, I believe. There's a lot of people who are listing all the possible things that the iPhone didn't have. And I think we kind of look back at that now and like how silly was that, right? People didn't care about the stuff that was missing. People cared about the stuff that's in there. So I think that's really important lesson for a lot of startups that, you know, try to find the core in your product that gets people excited, that gets someone to love your product. And if you don't have that, it's not gonna change by trying to, you know, close that feature gap to the other products out there. They may be pivot, build something different, but try to find the thing that people love, the thing that gives your user the superpowers. Think about that. So to give a bit of a summary of the lessons, I would leave you guys, you know, with three things, how to build your products better. You know, really start from this, like, you know, build something that people care about. Build something that, you know, makes someone, you know, makes someone happy, makes someone excited. And if you don't have that, you know, maybe change direction, try to look for that. And I think the way to find that is really like building for yourself or being close to the users. Then secondly, don't only focus on your product, really focus on what the users can become with their product. Focus on what is their motivation because they're trying to do something with their product. They're not interested in the product itself. And thirdly, you know, really go narrow, be close to your users, you know, don't be afraid of being polarizing, don't be afraid of being decisive. That's very important in a startup. And then what I want to leave you guys with as this topic is about design and designing products, designing products is super, super, super, super difficult. There's so much competition out there. There's so many things you need to try to get things right. So I think if you get too attached just to the outcomes, if you're judging yourself, if you're judging your teammates just by outcomes, you know, you're making your life too tough for yourself. So I'd also advise to think about, you know, think about the process, actually love the process, love the grind of building products because if you're just thinking about the successes, that's just normally too difficult. So what I want to leave you guys with is also like thinking about designing your life in the same way as you think about designing your product. Thank you so much. I really love to speak with you guys and love to see you in the QA after. Thank you.