Noah Kagan in the HQ

Noah Kagan recently came out to TechStars to hang out with our founders and talk about building community and awesome user experiences. Noah worked at Facebook as a project manager back in the day, and helped grow that somewhat successful community.

These days, Noah is working at a cool new startup called Mint. I’m one of the first 100 or so beta testers, and I have to say it’s going to be a pretty exciting service. It’s a new way to manage your personal finance, and it’s unlike anything else out there both in user experience and convenience (ping Noah if you’re really into it, he may let you in early if you promise to send lots of feedback). Noah is also running Community Next, a conference on building viral communities which is happening again in July. And of course, he’s blabbing away on his blog at OkDork.com as only Noah can.

Noah shared with the TechStars founders some of his tricks for obsessively understanding your users in order to make their experience better. He showed us how he uses tools like CrazyEgg to satisfy his compulsion for understanding exactly what his users are trying to do and what they care most about. If you want to mess with Noah, go click on stuff on his blog in a completely incomprehensible way. He loves trying to figure out what you’re trying to do and this will really melt him down.

Noah was great at helping some of our guys understand the opportunity presented by the F8 platform on Facebook, and how they might be able to leverage it. I think all of the founders approached me independently to tell me how many great ideas Noah gave them in his short time at TechStars.

After Noah got back home, he wrote me to tell me that he really enjoyed teaching, and feels like it’s in his blood to do it. I fed him back his favorite phrase. Solid, Noah, just solid.

Thanks, Noah, and we’ll see you at Community Next.