A weekly podcast about programming, development, and design.

• My name is John Jacob, I am a developer and designer.
• I am joined by my co-host JP

Conversation — When Tech Meets Business

Who is Jon? Tell us a bit about your educational background and how you eventually landed at Opendoor

Jon, Briefly tell us why you're interested in Real Estate

• potential to talk about the domains we are interested in as well
  • education
  • health

As a software engineer, why is it important to understand the domain that you're building for?

• Understand customer pain points
  • Example searching for a home: Zillow and more
• Understand the competition
• User value directly — Redfin and Zillow — are just lead gen tools. Let's focus on lower level.

1. Build in domains you are excited about
2. Understand customer pain points
3. Check out the competitive landscape
4. Books books books

Do you think you need to be interested in the domain you're working in to do well?

• Not necessarily, building tech can be an interesting exercise in itself
• You have to be open minded, and empathetic
• Obviously, when you are passionate about a product, there's magic in that.

What are some insights (perhaps specific to real estate) that came from someone who was non-technical?

How do you know when you should apply technology to solve a domain problem?

• Think about it in terms of Pain
• High transaction is the opportunity
• Repetitive tasks is an opportunity

Picks

• JP: Netlify
• John: Duck Duck Go
• Jon: Murphy bed

Links

• John Jacob 
• JP
• Guest: Jon

Episode source