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Masters of Scale

Frustration is your friend, w/Houzz founder Adi Tatarko

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Business, Jeff Berman, Startups, Reid Hoffman, Management, Diversity & Inclusion, Mindset, Bob Safian, Entrepreneurship

4.64.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Frustration is an important signal: it indicates an opportunity, a problem to be solved. And if your solution also builds a community, you've unlocked a path to scale. Adi Tatarko founded the online home-design site Houzz with her husband as a hacked-together tool to find and share home design ideas, after their own home renovation turned into a frustrating time-waster. But by flipping frustration on its head, Houzz has grown into a bustling platform and marketplace with more than 65 million homeowners and home design enthusiasts, an essential (and delightful!) resource for homeowners, designers, architects, craftspeople. Learn how to identify frustration – and flip it. Special guests: Puzzle master Karen Kavett, Eventbrite cofounder Julia Hartz.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,

0:07.8

with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.

0:17.0

We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.

0:24.8

So search for rapid response in your podcast player

0:28.0

and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.

0:31.2

I'll see you on the other side.

0:34.0

The puzzler.

0:37.0

A jigsaw puzzle of a jigsaw puzzle.

0:41.0

The cut in the image isn't how the pieces are actually cut out.

0:48.0

Very confusing to look at.

0:59.0

The first third of the puzzle took me literally all day, probably like eight hours.

1:09.3

The second third of the puzzle probably took me two hours and then the last third probably took about 15 minutes.

1:18.8

That's Karen Kavitt, known to her hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers as Karen Puzzles.

1:20.4

Her channel is dedicated to, that's right, watching Karen complete jigsaw puzzles.

1:25.0

Some of these puzzles are so fiendishly difficult that they can take Karen days to complete.

1:30.0

But Karen has no problem letting her viewers see when she hits a wall of

1:34.6

frustration. In fact, it's something that helps bind the community together.

1:38.6

My audience loves to see me frustrated. They love to see a puzzle that gives me a lot of trouble.

1:50.0

That I'm just like having a breakdown over.

1:55.0

And of course I've amp it up for the camera like everyone does on YouTube.

2:03.2

I think that's a way that I've taken the frustration of some of the harder puzzles

2:11.3

and turned it into a product that people want to consume.

...

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