Zynga Founder: Separate Your Instinct From Your Idea

Most founders trust their gut. The problem, Zynga founder Mark Pincus argues, is they trust it too far – right through to the specific implementation, which is often the wrong one.

“Your instinct is right 95% of the time,” Pincus said on the HBR IdeaCast. “Your idea is wrong at least 75% of the time.” The gap between the two is where products die. The market wants what you sensed. The package you built fails before anyone sees the value.

Pincus’s first big failure was tribe.net, a social network built before Facebook. He had the instinct – people would connect online. He stuck with one losing idea and did not test alternatives. “I had such a higher probability of success if I started with this premise: there's some instincts I've got, and I'm curious about those, and I'm looking as much at what else people are doing as what I'm doing,” he said.

At Zynga, Pincus codified that lesson into a framework he calls “Proven, Better, New.” The idea: separate the parts of a product where you genuinely innovate from everything else. For everything else, copy what already works. Do not fail because your onboarding tutorial is worse than the industry standard when that is not where you planned to be original.

He points to a pair of competitors – Sid Meier's social Civilization and EA's SimCity Social – that launched against Zynga. Both had better graphics and more innovative ideas, he said. “Within an hour of their games launching, the Zynga PMs sent around their analysis and said, ‘These are dead on arrival.’” The reason: the first-time user experience, especially the first three clicks, was a fail state. They did not copy Zynga's proven onboarding flow. Users never made it past the tutorial.

“If someone has a great idea and they try to make everything different in their product, no one gets to it,” Pincus said. “It fails because you've made everything different but not better.”

Pincus made fun a strategic pillar. At Zynga, the mantra was “test more ideas in a week than your industry does in a year.” That means shipping lots of failures. The question becomes: how do you know when you have hit on something real?

He says you just know – the same way you know you are in love. “You don't need a metric. You don't need to ask somebody. When it's right, everything says this is right.” At Zynga, every game that became a worldwide hit – defined as more than $1 million a day in revenue – was already known to be a hit before it launched. “We didn't launch FarmVille to find out if it was a hit. We knew within two days of turning the game on,” he said.

That confidence comes from calibrating your own taste. Pincus recommends testing products against a simple audience: third-graders. “If they can understand how to play your game in three clicks, adults will. If they can't, nobody will.”

As companies grow, the instinct is to bring in outsiders who “know how to scale.” That is a trap, Pincus said. “Nobody can come in from the outside and teach you how to scale your company because they don't understand the magic formula that made your company successful. They will inevitably destroy it.”

His solution: treat scale as a series of reinventions, always in service of core values, never in service of scale itself. Use what he calls “stop time” moments – meetings, pitches, interviews that could be treated as routine but should be overfunded. When American Express CEO Ken Chenault visited Zynga, Pincus spent two weeks preparing a full presentation on what he would do as CEO of Amex for a day. The result: a partnership that created a prepaid card.

Pincus points to Steve Jobs as the archetype of a product maker who stole the best ideas as a starting point. “I've always believed that the master craftsmen of product making, when I see a great product maker, I see someone who brilliantly stole the best ideas in the world as their starting point and then they built on top of that.” Apple’s product history shows that pattern repeatedly.

When asked for the single most important lesson a CEO could apply tomorrow, Pincus returned to the start: separate your winning instincts from your losing ideas. Then surround yourself with truth seekers. “If you are the CEO of a successful company, chances are you're not getting the most pure form of intellectual honesty. People give you too much benefit of the doubt. That's circular and it's dangerous.”

The message for anyone building products: burn your resume. “Don't look for respect in the eyes of your industry peers. Look for respect in your end users. If they like your product better than what's out there, you're winning. That's the only innovation that matters.”