“There’s often a desire to keep adding features because ‘Oh wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this or that?’ The reality is if a customer is only spending five minutes with your product, they’re only going to interact with a very tiny subset of your feature set. And so, you’re better off usually improving something that 80% of [customers] interact with that is really core than things around the edges that are more functionality.” - Phil Kimmey
Why Listen?
We are very excited to be joined by Phil Kimmey, one of the co-founders of Rover (and a frequent member of various 30 under 30 lists), who designed Rover in its infant stages at a Startup Weekend! In this episode, we dive into Rover’s initial design, how the business model was proved, and wrap up with a lengthy discussion on Value-Add Features vs Data-Driven Features. Phil also provides his opinion on what makes new tech and development teams successful and explains why PayPal still sends Rover’s monthly summary statements to his parent’s house.
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Links from the Show:
Conjoined Triangles of Success
Show Bookmarks:
[01:20] – Rover’s Start
[05:28] – Proving the Idea
[08:42] – What was harder: Supply or Demand?
[12:12] – Rover’s original construct
[15:50] – What mistakes were made in Rover’s setup?
[19:20] – Market-place technology & White Labels
[23:21] – Deciding on Features and Builds
[25:49] – Rover’s Transition from Web to Mobile App
[29:29] – Rover’s KPIs
[33:00] – Rover’s Technology for Marketing
[35:35] – Value-Add vs Data Driven Features and Services
[45:15] – Advice for New Technology Teams
People Worth Knowing:
Greg Gottesman (Rover, Madrona, Pioneer Square Labs)
Aaron Easterly (Rover)
Jason Kreitzer (Rover)
Companies Mentioned in Episode:
AirBnB
AirBnB+
Bandwidth
Braintree
DogVacay
GetAround
Kayak.com
KissMetrics
PayPal
Periscope
Pubnub
Redshift
Rover
Stripe
Twilio
Uber
Episode Specific Terms:
Acquisition Model
Alternative Marketplace Platforms
Booking Engine
Continuous Integration-Continuous Deployment (Jenkins)
Flywheel
Front End
Metadata
Mobile App vs Web App
Modular vs Monolithic Code Base
Responsive Web Page
SMS Costs
Startup-Weekends
Uber for XYZ
Unit Economics
Value-Add Services
What is ACQ2: The Acquired Interviews?
ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with expert founders and investors. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.