I recently re-watched YouTube founders Chad Hurley & Steve Chen interviewed by Chris Anderson from Wired at the Commonwealth Club (5/23/07). Watch the Video. It’s fun to hear about the dinner party where the idea was born (once again, they had a personal need that wasn’t being met — to share home-made videos with friends). They also talk about the early days of the company and how the rapid growth of the site caught them completely off guard. My favorite is a story they tell about an early functionality planning meeting, when they rejected the idea of needing any search functionality on the site. They really could not imagine their little “YouTube” ever hosting more videos than could fit on the first page.

Now this may be just good story-telling. I’m sure if you ask the Sequoia Capital folks who funded YouTube, they certainly expected the site to need search! But I love this story because you can make guesses about how users will use new product, you can even ask them how they will use it, but you never really know until you get it in their hands. Scout Labs has been working with many companies since day one. They’ve told us what they need, they’ve reviewed wire-frames, they’ve prioritized functionality, and told us how they thought they would use it. But now that they have a real live application in their hands, they are using Scout Labs for all sorts of things that we (or they) never imagined. They are loving some things that they were mildly excited aboout before, and of course, now they have a million more feature requests. But this is the fun part of building new products and why it is so important to let your customers be your guide. We’ll be doing just that for the next several months, prior to launch.