FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Great consumer products tap an unmet, often unexpressed human instinct — and the test is whether they earn a spot on your home screen.

  Mark Pincus says magic often lands where we're most cynical. His rough rule: if a product makes the front page of his iPhone, it has billion-dollar 'stick' value (now maybe two billion). That page is still half empty, which tells him how few digital products feel compelled-to-use daily.

• 02

  Look for 'heat' — true signal you don't need statistics to recognise.

  Heat is like finding your person: when it's real, everything says so. When you're hunting through click-through rates asking 'is this the signal?', it isn't. Seeing heat in your own product, he says, feels like Christmas morning.

• 03

  Your instincts are usually right; your ideas are usually wrong.

  With Tribe.net he had 'three winning instincts and one losing idea.' The instincts — a peer-to-peer 'cocktail party' seen in Napster, Web 2.0's 'anything that can be free will be free', social networking via Friendster — were right. The idea, Craigslist meets Friendster, got trust 'so wrong it's unbelievable' for mainstream users, even if Burning Man types loved it.

• 04

  Fix the hole in a 'sinking speedboat' instead of pouring in more users.

  Tribe had amazing virality and growth but terrible retention, like many viral apps. When Zuckerberg and Sean Parker visited a year in, Pincus saw they'd got trust right — but ego and a startup taboo against copying kept him from adopting the insight, so he doubled down on a losing strategy.

• 05

  Proven–Better–New: copy what's proven, improve one thing users unanimously want, and treat everything new as likely to fail.

  Most products lose for the wrong reasons — they try to reinvent every component. Slack took proven HipChat channels. Zynga Poker copied tables, dealer, cards and sounds; 'better' was no download, possible because no real money meant no security requirement. Better is usually mundane: free, half price, fewer clicks. 'New' — friends' photos around the table — gets many variants because 'all new fails until it finally doesn't.'

• 06

  Earn the right to change something by becoming a 'PhD' in what's already proven.

  When a new PM proudly showed a redesigned poker profile, Pincus asked for his PhD in profiles: the best mobile and game profiles ever made and why. He wanted a war room full of them and pixel-level care. Deconstruction is a lifelong craft: be a student of your own experience whenever a new product launches.

• 07

  Founders pass through 'the abyss' between successes, and structure helps you climb out.

  After a company ends, freedom feels great for weeks, then dread sets in that you'll never find work you care about; Pincus spent years there. His dad called it 'in between successes.' Side projects — one was a poker game — plus his yearly Book of Life gave enough structure for something to catch. He's either all-in 'maniac' or a dabbler with 'a terrible work ethic until I don't.'

• 08

  Know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises.

  Founders compromise for the next engineer, CTO or impressive board member until they wake up in a company they don't want to work at. If the place no longer fits the founder, the founder has failed. That's why he made raising Zynga's first round deliberately hard: everyone had to be aligned on the road trip.

• 09

  Build 'failure machines' at the top of the funnel instead of falling into the MVP trap.

  Teams waste months reaching a 'viable' product that is probably wrong. With AI you can vibe-code a minimum idea and test it. 'Meh' — a five to seven — is the worst answer; a clear no is better. His mantra: build it wrong and fast, see if it proves right, then build it right.

• 10

  Founder mode means betting on your instinct and keeping control, even at half the valuation.

  Founders were 'expert witnesses' — closest to the answer, furthest from the decision. He runs companies as a 'democratic dictatorship': hear everyone, then one vote. His biggest regret is not using his voting control to override his board in fall 2012.