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He Was So Fed up with Traffic, He Redrew the Map (Literally!) | Uri Levine

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James Altucher   Jan 19th, 2023

Description

Uri Levine was frustrated by traffic jams on his commute and found validation that the problem was widespread. His solution was to co-found Waze, the crowd-sourced GPS navigation platform which became a major competitor to Google Maps before being acquired by Google for $1.4 billion. But Uri's new book, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs is not the story of Waze. It's not one story about entrepreneurship.

 It's completely an A-to-Z handbook for entrepreneurs with so many specific sections, like: How to do a demo, How to build a slide deckHow to make an effective presentation How do you evaluate a term sheet? What metrics do you use to measure the growth of your company? How do you manage investors, fire people, and hire people?What deal terms need to be negotiated for the exit? This is such a valuable guide, it really is, and today's conversation builds upon these principles. Listen on as Uri & James discuss all of these topics and more, including: Waze built its maps using user GPS data, why did the first 1000 users download Waze? (00:11:22) The 4 Stages of Users: Innovators -> Early Adopters -> Early Majority -> Late Majority (00:13:14) What percentage of successes are problem-based vs innovation-based? (00:15:46) How do you distinguish between your users and your customers? (00:16:50) Did Waze ever consider charging subscriptions to the users? (00:18:37) What metrics do you look at to see if a business is on the right path? (00:39:25) Did Waze ever consider licensing navigation data? (00:47:39) Why is it more valuable to talk to customers who don't like you? (00:48:27) What are some techniques to cement a good first impression? (00:53:30) ------------ Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own! My new book Skip the Line is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold! I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned. ------------ Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to “The James Altucher Show”