Sukhinder Singh Cassidy: Gut, Data, Gut

When you think about how to make decisions, I think one of the big challenges we all have is as data driven as we are, the data is imperfect. And more important for a founder, it's actually non existent, right. If we talk about being the product profit, you're thinking about the slight tweak or major shift in something you expect in consumer behavior. And de facto it doesn't exist. Right? There are analogies, but there is no data for what it is you have to do. So there is the paralysis by analysis. There are people who fly entirely by gut. And I think of the mode in between and the mode in between. I call gut data gut. So you have a gut sense that this idea for a consumer product or feature app or mobile app or whatever could be it. The most important thing is actually your rate of learning. So how do you lean right in, right. Follow your gut to get some data set, whatever that data set is. So when we were starting Joyous, my very first thought of it as we chatted about was, I don't want to be an entrepreneur again. God, I'm tired. Like, really? Am I really going to do this again when I could step into a company at a much larger stage and just lead it with everything figured out? So I wrote the business plan a month after I left Polyvore in October of2010. And I didn't start the company for three months, but the idea kept bugging me. But what I did do is somewhere around October or November, I sent out an email to my former Yodlee co founders, all the engineering folks I'd worked with, and I said, I need an engineer to just start coding something for me. I'm curious about this. And of course, just through my network, a bunch of engineers showed up. And I picked one that I worked with before at Yodeli, and he started coding for me. And then in sort of a little bit later, I think it was maybe December, I went to a woman I knew was a blogger, and I was like, what do you think of this idea? Is it idiotic? And she's like, been a blogger for 10 years. Like, I don't think so. I'm like, would you shoot a video for me? She was like, okay. Stuck her in front of a camera. January, I come back from vacation. I'm still sort of irritated and struggling with the idea of will I start another company? And. And am I really up for the task? The idea is bugging me, and I'm like, okay, let me put together a focus group. So then I get 12 women in a room who are friends. I shoot three videos on kind of January 5th or something. I put them up in front of 12 women, tape them, listen to their answers to these crappy four videos, and I'm like, I have no choice but to start this company. I have no choice. I'm listening to what these women are saying, and I'm like, there is something here, and if I don't pursue it, I will just be so frustrated. And we launched our first video on February 4, 2011, on Weebly. No checkout. No integrated sexy shopping experience through video. No premium content. Literally, a video a week buying clothes at retail on a Weebly site, just to Measure with a PayPal checkout. Launched two weeks later just to understand what the correlation was between a video and conversion. Like, leave everything else aside. And we ran it for five months. We just kept adding women. But it was simply the act of saying, look, I have a gut now. I need to just go get a data set. And the data set was very incomplete. But in month four, I was like, okay, I'm going to go raise some venture capital. You know, we raised $8 million. Closed around. And I was like, I guess we're launching a company. But it was sort of gut data. Gut is my point. So there is no perfect data. There is no perfect gut. What happens is, as you go through experience after experience, what you think of as gut is actually familiarity with a lot of diverse circumstances, and it starts to speak back to you as a gut. So when I was 25, I didn't have a gut. If you ask me what was a good idea from a bad idea, I had no experience. I had some intuitions, but I think of gut after this cycle as informed intuition.