Caroline Ghosn, CEO of Levo, explains how founders should learn enough technical skill to build a rough prototype and earn credibility with engineers. She uses Apple's approach to user targeting as a model: design obsessively for one specific person first, then expand. Ghosn built Levo around millennial women in career transition.
Chapters
How many of you guys are technical? Raise your hand. OK. How many of you guys— the people who didn't raise their hands and say they were technical, how much do you know how to do? Do you understand how a stack works? Do you understand how to do HTML, CSS? What level are you at? You can just shout. Dev level.
OK.
Dev. Dev. OK.
Cool.
So I think the synthesis of my answer to your question is basically that you have to be good enough to be smart about your product and build the first version if you want to recruit really high-caliber talent. Because if you think about it, right? So I'll give you context on myself. I went to Stanford. I graduated with honors in economics. I didn't build any technology when I was at Stanford. I barely built a model because Stanford does— you graduate and you still haven't touched Excel. So you get completely owned by Wharton kids when you go the workforce, by the way. I remember my first day at work, they're like, oh, can you build a macro? And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. How do you open this, right? And the Wharton kids are like, pshh. Anyway. That's my little plug for Stanford. Thanks, Stanford. Anyway. We're changing this as part of the alumni organization. But the point is that my goal in, in talking to you guys would be to encourage you to know enough to be dangerous. Like, you need to know how to build a first prototype. It's going to suck. That's OK. But at least it shows that you took the effort to be articulate about what the vision is. And you took the effort to build empathy as a leader for how hard it's going to be to build whatever it is that you want to do. Because if you're an engineer, your worst nightmare is someone who's like, and this, and this, and this, and this. Can we make it? Is it going to take a week? OK, goodbye. No, no, no. So this is your partner. It's someone that you need to have empathy for, that you need to understand what you're asking, and you need to be— You're gonna be a better leader and a better visionary if you understand what you're asking people to do. And by the way, that's, I would say that principle for anything on your team. Like, you need to learn how to do it first before you hire someone smarter than you to take that on as a full-time job. You're gonna get much higher quality people. Yeah.
So my question's more of a concept. So when I was researching Lifehack, a lot of the brand was still, oh, this is more, this is a career platform for women. And I would say it's like, as you're focusing your product So how do you find out, oh, you should grow on this? What do you decide?
Well, it's tricky, right? Because how many of you guys are thinking about a specific type of user when you build your company? OK, good. It should be all of you, by the way. So if you didn't raise your hand, we can have a whole conversation about phenotypes after this. But you have to be really specific about who you're serving, hands down. Yesterday I was sitting down with the head of marketing at Apple, and one of the things that they were talking about was the fact that, like, down to the kind of body spray that the user who they have in mind is using, who they're speaking to on Twitter versus on Snapchat versus on apple.com, they understand and have empathy for who it is they're talking to. Like, literally down to that person's favorite color and what they look like and whether they comb their hair in the morning and what kind of takeout they like. Like, they go all the way to the end with, this is the kind of person that we're trying to serve. So for us, what we did is we did that. And what we defined was that the person who needed this the most and who was going to be the most loyal user, of course, based on data on the internet, was the millennial who was a woman and who's experiencing this at 2 levels. But nothing around the career resources that we're providing was going to inhibit someone who didn't fit that stereotype or that phenotype. from using it. And so the positioning started with, OK, here is the specific type of person that we're attracting. But once that's clear, then you can relax the positioning so that people feel comfortable using it as well for their own needs. So the analogy I would use is that your brand is like a house. You're gonna build a house. If you're building an enduring brand that is something that's gonna resonate emotionally with people, you need to know who you're building the house for. If you're an architect, the first question you're gonna ask is, like, what are you trying to do? Who are you as the, as the person who's gonna live in this house? And you want to build the house according to that, right? So when you're building a company, you need to think about it that way. There's one person you're gonna build the house for. They look one way. They have one pain point or 2 pain points or 3 pain points. But you know exactly who they are, and you know who, how they're gonna interact with you. Build the house for them. Once the house is built and you have a critical mass of people who are coming to that house and who feel at home and welcome, You can open the windows, and you can open the door, and you can put some fresh cookies in the middle, and people who are walking by in the street will smell that and feel comfortable coming in as well. But you have to start with a very specific person, um, or else you get nowhere. Thank you.
