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Description

Today’s guest built a keyboard app with 100,000 users and he shares how he built the app with user centric thinking and design. Also, he shares how he got early beta users, overcame investors saying this was just a keyboard company and how he built a product while still running a consulting agency.

Olivier Plante is the Co-founder & CEO at Thingthing Ltd.

Adam Davis is the Chief Marketing Officer at Thingthing Ltd.

Show Notes

The User-Centric Thinking

User-centric thinking is opposed to the legacy thinking of creating a technology for the sake of creating a technology. In the past, some systems were so complicated to use because they were designed using a business point of view and the user was not really important in the creation process. Today, the user is the one driving the company value. This approach was applied in Thingthing starting with when they tested by having people around them to do the trials to ensure that it is really a problem that people have.

Getting Early Beta Users

Their team looked around platforms that were promoting beta solutions and subscribed to them and started from there. They presented their products and ultimately, they had to pay for the beta list but they got thousands of sign ups in about a month. 

Getting Consumers and Investors Onboard

It’s a very interesting challenge to get people to care about their keyboards so Olivier tried versions and tweaks in the value preposition for consumers.  What they found worked well was the aspect of people having access to all their stuff within the keyboard with the least taps needed to get there.

For investors, good thing enough, the ones they talked to were those who already had knowledge in the keyboard space. They already know that the keyboard is a central piece of inputting information and will remain as the primary way to communicate with each other. So when they presented, they immediately saw the sense behind the app.

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