Jan Koum Quotes

We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.

When you let travelers vote with their clicks, and you put that at the center of your decision-making, you build the product they want, and ultimately, their business will follow.

I love meeting our users and partners and talking to them about how ClassPass has made an impact.

You need to set near-term milestones. Put the assumptions down on paper, and make it to your vision or ultimate product. Your team has to understand where they're going. Your partners need to understand where they're going.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

Broadening and deepening the relationship with our users and advertisers have always been our strategic priority.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

Twitter needs to continue being a good listener and recognize that the service has been redefined by lots of people, tweet by tweet, but also come up with its own priorities.

Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It's still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you're making an impact.

You can't just tell your team, 'Think long term.' It doesn't work that way. When you are starting out, you have to always think about trying to build something of value for the customer: something they can use all the time, something of use.

There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong, and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them, too.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Companies that get confused, that think their goal is revenue or stock price or something. You have to focus on the things that lead to those.

Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas.

Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can't do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends.

We pay attention to every demographic in every country, so we're going to focus on building things that teens are going to like, and we're also going to focus on building things that other folks are going to like.

To ensure we are meeting the demands of existing customers while also attracting new users, we remain focused on building cutting-edge technology and introducing new and innovative product offerings.

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.

Developing a good, healthy culture is extremely important at a startup. Culture reflects the essence of a startup's operation because it directly affects the success of a company's hiring practices and overall strategy.

I think that building any product that has a lot of user loyalty is a bit like making a sequel to a great movie or video game - people generally want 'more of the same thing, except better and different.'

I have shifted my mindset in terms of how companies should... focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial.

We found we were able to create better, customer-centric product features more quickly with a more diverse product team.

In the early days, it was enough for Imgur to have a team that was focused on building product and engineering. But I realized early on if we were going to be successful, we needed someone who would be a bridge between the company and community.

Creating the future means having a global vision and an extreme focus on the approachability of what we're creating.

If a whole bunch of users want a specific feature, and we think that feature is pretty cool, too, that that's just what we'll do.