“All new fails. If all new worked, we’d be using new stuff all the time. But how often do you change what’s on the front of your iPhone? How often do the top 10 or 25 apps change? They haven’t changed in 8 years because all new fails. A million new apps a year — they all fail.”

This realization led Mark to develop a new approach to building products that he calls “Proven. Better. New.” And he explains how he used it to build Zynga Poker into the largest poker site in the world.

“De-risk it. Start with with what’s proven. You don’t have the right to change proven. You should copy every pixel of [an experience that already works — legally, of course]... What you think is ‘better’ is called ‘new.’ When you say it’s better, that’s because you’re naive. Grow up. I’m guilty of this too — we all are. We get emotional and fall in love with our own ideas, so we need something to hold us accountable.”

Zynga Poker copied every other online poker game as their starting point.

The next step is to add one thing that’s undeniably better for users. For Zynga poker this was not having to download the application. “You lose half your users every time they have to click download,” Mark explains. “I don’t even need to ask, I know that’s better.”

The last step is to add something new that might work. For Zynga Poker, this was adding pictures of real people — often your friends — to the game. The game was an instant hit.

Mark urges founders to look at the product through your user’s eyes — not your peers:

“This isn’t about getting respect in this little bubble [of Silicon Valley]... This is about normal, real-life humans. They don’t care if you copied. They don’t care how innovative it is. All they care about is, ‘Does it feel better?’ And they can’t even tell you why... Innovation often comes in smaller bits.”

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