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It's nearing 7pm and we're in Mountain View for Startup Grind live. Tonight Derek will be talking to Jason Putorti, the Co-Founder of Votizen and early Mint.com Designer. We'll be liveblogging shortly, so get ready to start hitting refresh.
Aaaaaaand here we go...
It's Derek's third anniversary of leaving EA and doing the Grind.
Jason was one of the first 5 employees of Mint. Now he's a Co-Founder of Votizen.
Jason: Grew up in upstate New York. Went to school at Pitt. BS in Computer Science and Math. He took a design class and then ended up going to Parson's for about 3 months. His first gig was doing college books. Moved into a tech meets design agency (mid-'00s). Decided the services business didn't scale well, so he came out to California. Joined Mint.
Derek: What was your first entrepreneurial event?
Jason: A class project for doing a website. It was a civil war reinactment site that was sold to the city of Saratoga Springs for $500.
D: When did you first code?
J: When he was 8. Some QBasic. Took a class in Pascal at Union College.
D: What part of your formal education helped you with design or did you learn that on your own?
J: It was by necessity. As you start to do things, you have practice and get better at it. He read some books. Picked up a lot at Mint. All he had formally was a foundations of design class and 3 months at Parsons.
D: How did you get in with Mint?
J: He had a couple high school friends who went to Stanford. He was introduced to Noah at Mint. His first words were "do you want a job." Jason said no. Then Aaron pitched him and ran him through the investors' deck. Mint made sense to him. He contracted for a little bit and then got a FT offer.
D: What made Mint so special?
J: Great people. It's really hard to put together a team like that. The business plan was very clear. No pivots. No adjustment. User feedback would effect what they built, but it was set up to do what they did. The managers were left alone to do their things. The marketing messaging was consumer-targeted, so people signed up. With the economy the user base moved from college kids to households, which helped.
D: How functional was Mint?
J: It was 9 months from public launch when he started. His first job was to skein the app. He realized it needed some UIX changes. They ended up launching with less features because of a larger redesign.
D: Why was design such a big focus at Mint?
J: In personal finance, trust is incredibly important. The #1 way to make a site trustworthy is visual. First impressions. Google was taking off at the time with a minimalist design. Their user experience was aligned with the business intent. Mint had a similar philosophy.
D: What was the Mint sale (to Intuit) like?
J: He found out by reading about it in TechCrunch. He couldn't believe. Mint was started because Aaron didn't like Quicken. The mentality of the company was being the anti-Quicken. That even influenced his design. Intuit was the enemy. So it was "a kick in the gut." The key innovation of Mint was delivering data making things a little easier. He thinks there was a lot more work to do, influencing how people spend their money. He was looking at new ways to bring value to consumers (he just described an affinity program they never got around to). He feels there was a lot of work left to be done.
D: Is there an opportunity to pick up the torch and have a startup disrupt Mint?
J: Yes. Most of the original team is gone, too. He's keeping his eye on Stripe. Stripe is coupled closely with a bank, which means they have more data and you can just swipe the card. It has more to work with. The mini-investment space has opportunities.
D: Derek likened joining Intuit to David joining the Philistines. How does that work?
J: Well, pretty much everybody has left. In one sense it was winning. His mind wandered to politics with the election cycle. When you get put in a company that size, there are a lot people whose value is in saying no to you (as part of justifying their jobs). It wore on him.
D: How did Votizen get started?
J: He started paying attention to the Election during the Iowa Caucus. Then he saw Newt's tweeting getting reported after the fact by the mainstream media and he realized the dynamic was changing. He'd been consulting on the VC side, which had him thinking about different things from a different perspective. He realized David and Peter were into politics.
D: What's the core problem you're solving?
J: You have elections that are won and lost by spending on television and direct mail. It's been like that since '64 and Johnson vs. Goldwater. Now it's microtargeting and suppressing voter turnout. They want to be able to deliver votes through social media and skip the buying of votes.
D: This is a fundamental change to pre-TV ads in politics?
J: Yes, we want to make this work for both a school board election and running for president.
D: Are you looking to change campaign laws?
J: It would be great if all the money was gone, but that probably won't happen. They want to have an effect on public policy. They built a voter database, so you can prove you're a voter in your elect official's district. You can now find people in the district where the vote goes on and lobby to those people, not astroturfing (having everyone all over the country hitting one Congressman). The votes you can turn out would theoretically become a form of currency. Instead of buying a congressman, you can demonstrate you can deliver votes while lobbying.
D: What's the reach?
J: Approximately 1.3M voters have been unlocked.
D: Politics is very polarizing. Is it inherently social or anti-social. If you're creating your own war room, is this going to ruin friendships? How do people keep it separate or do they?
J: You can see who's a Democrat and who's in a swing state, so you can target easier conversations. It's about figuring out the right people to talk to in order to get done what you need to get done. Some issues will always be contentious, but they're trying to work on the tool set. Access to officials, for example.
D: Outside of the huge elections, it seems like there an opportunity to get the average person to care about the city councilmen. It seems like you could have a massive impact on a local election. Have you seen this happen?
J: A lot of people get their info from their political friend. They're working on a "political cabinet" so users can find more people to use as a political news source/filter. In the SF mayor's race, there was a good voter turnout through Votizen.
D: What's your design process?
J: Step one is empathy with the user. What the user look like?
D: Let's do another photo sharing app.
J: Let's build it for us and it will work if there are more people out there like us. What does the photosharing activity look like, step by step.
D: How do you do that?
J: Create an outline. That's what Apple did with iTunes. Apple built the ecosystem so it was easier to get the music on the device. More complicated is figuring out the context. Where do people share photos. Do you have to tail a user and observe? How does the environment effect how they share. Pick a design style. Pick a business goal. Pick a user need.
We could build something for the average voter right now. They might want a voter guide. The business goal is gaining critical mass, so they need to focus on political junkies and give them tools to run campaigns and promote their candidates to meet that goal.
D: When you talk about following people around, that's a deep dive. Do you actually shadow people?
J: Let's say you're building an app for doctors. You need to follow them around to know what their life is like. With Mint, mothers are dealing with distractions like kids and dinner, so you can't just log them out after 3 minutes. As much as you can do upfront is very valuable.
D: If we're self-funded, how long should we spend before make it public?
J: I believe in validating. There no set number, though. Pick a big enough market, take a representative market, start talking to people until you see patterns. Once you see repetitions, then go for validations and start showing people. Be careful when customers ask for very specific features. Ask why. The reason they want it will inform your decision.
It's Q&a TIME.
Q: How do you balance features you want to build vs. things that need to be done?
A: Be rational and keep emotion out of it. Put the winning first. Be passionate about the vision and the enemy.
Q:How is Votizen driving awareness?
A: The primary channel is campaigns. Talking to DC, talking to political consultants. Only small scale experiments with consumers. That will change after Labor Day.
Q: How did Elegently come about?
A: It was just solving his own problem. He was being recruited and he was also doing recruiting. He built it so the working designer could browse pitches.
Q: When do you bring the designer in-house vs. contracting?
A: As early as possible. You don't want to build the product and bring in the designer later. Contractor will not do work like gathering user experience data, unless it's a UIX contractor and that's expensive. You need to give a contract a lot of notes if you go that route. You don't want somebody being paid by the hour building your business for you.
Aaaaand that's a wrap.