Secrets Of Being Awesome by Adam Tratt

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Slide Notes

Some of you came here tonight for the networking. Some of you are here to learn about cool new startups. Others came just to bask in the warm glow of Red's vibrating personality.

But I would posit that most of you are actually here for one reason. You want to be more awesome. Raise your hand if you want to be more awesome.

In the spirit of knowing your audience, tonight I want to give you my secrets on how to be awesome.

Of course, it is Seattle Tech Meetup and I would be remiss if I didn't put this in the context of our startup. What I'm showing you today is Haiku Deck, a free iPad app for creating beautiful presentations. If you're not familiar with it, please download the app and use it to blow somebody's mind.

Secrets Of Being Awesome

Published on Nov 18, 2015

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

SECRETS OF BEING AWESOME

@ADAMTR -- @HAIKUDECK

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DON'T BE LIKE ME

First secret to being awesome, is don't be like me. Before we landed on Haiku Deck, we began as a studio making celebrity-based facebook games.

Though our efforts to build the next FarmVille in partnership with sir mixalot generated headlines around the world, nobody actually wanted to play the game.

I completely misread the marketplace. Within weeks, our whole business plan was in shambles.

PRODUCT

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE

The huge mistake we made back then is that we set out to make an awesome product.

But IT'S NOT ABOUT THE PRODUCT OR THE TECHNOLOGY.

It's about the way you make people FEEL!

In our quest to create an awesome product, we neglected this.

Now that you know this secret, it begs the question... If you want to make people feel good, where do you begin?

Photo by Jake Mates

PICK A REAL PROBLEM

PEOPLE WILL BE HAPPY WHEN YOU SOLVE IT

Start by picking a real problem. With our first product and the 3 pivots that followed, we failed to pick a problem that others desperately wanted us to solve.

Having excellent solutions to unimportant problems repeatedly landed us in the unenviable position of being #11 of everyone's list of 10 things to do.

Then one day something awesome happened.

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"LET'S TAKE A GAMBLE"

THEN ONE DAY KEVIN SAID,

That's Kevin, my co-founder. And though the first secret is don't be like me, the third secret is DO be like him.

One day Kevin came to me and said, you know what sucks? Making presentations sucks. Why does it suck so bad?

I said, hey, you know what? you're right! Let's fix that.

At that moment, we threw everything we had built and learned so far in the garbage. We took a gamble on a big new problem that we both really really wanted to solve.

SUPERPOWERS

DELIVER

This time, we started with a very simple principle. Instead of building an awesome product, we set out to help people to BE AWESOME.

We wanted to make our users better presenters. We wanted to turn the design challenged into design ass kickers.

We wanted to turn people who hate making presentations into presentation Superheroes.

It was from this focus, that the magic started to happen.

Photo by zilverbat.

AWESOME PRESENTERS

When we did the research, we found that all of the experts had the same things to say about being a presentation superhero... It was actually a pretty simple set of requirements.

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As Haiku Deck made it's way from the drawing board to reality, it became clear that our focus on making people awesome was fundamental to our success. It wasn't just about the customers. It was about our team, our partners, and our investors too.

The more we focused on the needs of our econsystem, the more momentum we gained.

It had a multiplying effect.