Episode #4: Consumer Tech Napkin | Building great products in consumer tech
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About this episode
When software can be built and copied faster than ever, what still makes a consumer product stand out?
Episode #4 of Consumer Tech Napkin, produced in partnership with True, explores how strong teams create an edge through user love, distribution, experimentation, learning loops and human judgement.
Host Andreas Munk Holm is joined by Neil Tanna, Co-Founder and CEO of Howbout, Graham Paterson, Co-Founder and CEO of Jitty and an angel investor in Howbout, and Mike Martin of True, a consumer and retail-focused investor and an investor in Jitty.
Howbout is the shared calendar app for keeping up with friends and has grown to more than seven million users across 125 countries. Jitty is the search engine for finding your next home.
They discuss why features rarely create lasting defensibility, what separates a genuine experiment from simply shipping and hoping, how teams balance data with product taste and how AI is changing the speed of product development.
Highlights
- Building great products when features are easy to copy
- Distribution, user love and learning loops
- Ideas versus execution
- What makes a genuine product experiment
- Incremental improvements versus bigger bets
- How Howbout tests higher-risk changes
- Where human judgement remains essential
Timestamps
- (01:00) Building great products when software is easy to copy
- (04:00) Does a unique founding insight still matter?
- (08:00) Ideas versus execution
- (11:00) The rising bar for consumer startups
- (13:00) Distribution as a moat
- (17:00) Why learning loops create an advantage
- (19:00) What makes an experiment?
- (20:00) Hypothesis-led product development
- (22:00) Product bets and building for remarkability
- (25:00) Where to test risky ideas
- (28:00) How Howbout runs experiments at scale
- (32:00) Lessons from Deliveroo’s logistics experiments
- (34:00) How AI accelerates shipping and analysis
- (37:00) Can AI run experiments autonomously?
- (39:00) Why human taste still matters
- (43:00) How audience size compounds learning
- (45:00) Closing thoughts
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