Episode 11 of The New Build: Scott Belsky on what building Behance taught him about listening to users

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Hi everyone,

Episode 11 of The New Build is live. I sat down with Scott Belsky — the founder of Behance, former Chief Product Officer at Adobe, and now a partner at A24, the independent film studio. Over the course of his career, Scott has backed and advised numerous companies including Pinterest, Uber, and Ramp, sits on the board at Atlassian, and has published two books on building and leading creative organizations. He’s also one of Bubble’s earliest investors, which made this conversation even more special.

About our guest

Scott founded Behance in 2006 after noticing that creative professionals had no reliable way to organize their work or get discovered by people who didn’t already know them. Adobe acquired the company in 2012, and Scott went on to shape the product direction of Creative Cloud across a period that brought Adobe’s tools to mobile and the cloud, including the launch of Adobe Firefly.

Away from his operating roles, he has backed over a hundred companies as an angel investor and is the author of The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen, which go deep on many of the themes he touches on in this conversation..

What to expect from this episode

The conversation opens on a question most product founders don’t ask themselves early enough. Are you building what people actually need, or just what you believe people should want? Scott’s argument is that passion gets you building, but without empathy for what users actually struggle with, you can spend years solving the wrong problem.

He illustrates this with a story from Behance’s early days. Their only focus group came back with pretty clear feedback that the world didn’t need another platform for creatives. People already had their own websites, DeviantArt, MySpace, and so on. Rather than push forward on conviction alone, Scott’s team asked a different question — what are you actually struggling with? The answers mapped almost exactly to the problems they’d set out to solve. The focus group had looked like a dead end, but turned out to be the brief for the next steps.

From there, we get into the volatile stretch between starting and knowing it’s going to work. Scott’s view is that the optimism that makes founders great at getting started can become a liability during this phase. It keeps teams motivated, but it also makes it harder to reckon with what might go wrong. He’s seen this pattern repeat itself across the hundred-plus companies he’s invested in, and his perspective on it is more nuanced than the usual “stay positive” advice you tend to hear.

The conversation also covers what he looked for when building out the team at Behance as it scaled, what the Ramp founders said that made him want to back them immediately, and what drew him from Adobe to the film world.

Where to listen

Episode 11 is live now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

You can hear stories like this every two weeks when we launch new episodes. And if you’re also building something on Bubble and want to share the story behind it, drop it in the comments or submit it here.

— Emmanuel