On today's episode, I sat down with Liyana Sulaiman, serial entrepreneur and Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder at Pollen. Pollen helps amplify brands by helping them convert social followers into a seller community. I love Liyana's story of how micro-failures can lead you through the necessary iterations to validate the market opportunity, your business model, and product market-fit. Liyana is super smart, thoughtful, and intentional in her work, and I'm excited for you to hear what she had to say. 

Here's what we discussed:

How Pollen is all about democratizing opportunity for citizens of Southeast Asia to earn extra income 

The origin story of Pollen and why Liyana and her best-friend co-founder started it

Pollen went through several rounds of iterations, trying to validate various hypotheses for the business model

How Liyana and Pollen went about validating how Pollen could create and capture value from both sides of the market

Why solving one problem is often not enough and how quickly the scope of the problems you need to solve can grow

How Liyana and her co-founder navigated the complex situations they found themselves in to identify where and when they needed to pivot

Questions you need to ask yourself as a PM or a startup founder

Why defining the problem space well helps you identify the right opportunity

The process Liyana recommends when you're building something from scratch

How the cornerstone of product success is identifying your actual customer and the right problems to solve for them

Why you should even challenge your mission and vision early on to make sure you're pursuing the right thing, in the right context

Where Pollen is at today and how they're now well-positioned for rapid growth

Here are the books Liyana Recommended:

Lean Product Playbook - Dan Olsen

My Product Management Toolkit - Marc Abraham