Disruption Podcast Ep 5
A new decade, the Coronavirus, and my favourite productivity tools!
In this episode, I give an update on my last year, the impact of the coronavirus and some of my favourite productivity tools including Superhuman, Woven, and Mercury Bank.
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Transcript
S2E1
Keegan Sard: Welcome back to Season Two of the Disruption podcast. It’s been a crazy year, and I wanted to delve into that 2019 was a little crazy and crazy than I expected, so I didn’t get the opportunity to post as much as I wanted to. There’s still a lot of content I’d like to get through over the coming months, and I thought 2020 new year. Let’s get into it.
[00:00:58]Last year, a lot of travel working with different teams and across the U S and, Dubai and France, which was a lot of fun and just a lot of different businesses, different problems, lot of playing with technical stacks and strategy, which is the fun work that I love to do. So , 300,000 kilometers down and I think I’m gold on Emirates, Qantas and Virgin now, which is just next level. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that again this year, but we’ll, we’ll see.
[00:01:28]When it comes to 2020, I thought, well, there’s no better time like now to get into it and have a play and get back into putting some thoughts out there and just seeing what everyone thinks.
[00:01:38] So love to get your thoughts on that and hasn’t it started like crazy in Australia, we’ve had the bushfires that were just hella crazy this year we’ve had then a flood in Sydney that was like polar opposite. And then we’ve had this Corona virus, which I’m pretty scared about this. A lot of people aren’t talking as much about this as I think they should be.
[00:02:03] A lot of people I see on Twitter, I keep saying it’s just the flu and I’m like this has a death rate of over 2% and I’m not entirely sure that we’re getting all the information here. Like if you look at the numbers and like there was a day this week that it went up like 10,000 had been confirmed cases in a day.
[00:02:22]Is it really, you know, 68,000 or is it 100,000 I, I don’t know. It’s, it’s pretty scary stuff. And the flow on effect that it’s going to have to the economy here in Australia needs to be spoken about more. And a lot of people aren’t talking about it. Like our university sector, nearly 50% is international students.
[00:02:43] And a lot of them are Asian students and they can’t come back at the moment. Like there’s been no reprieve on letting Chinese nationals back into the country. So that’s a real concern for a $6 billion industry. We’ve got oil that’s already down 20%. We’ve got manufacturing down, we’ve got travel down — hotels, airlines, et cetera.
[00:03:02] We’ve got exports. So wine, food, live exports, you name it, like it’s all down. Then you talk about the, the scary stuff around manufacturing. A lot gets made in asia and it’s not getting made. So there’s going to be a flow in effect for months around the supply chain. A lot of small businesses I talk to are saying, well, we can’t get goods, or we can’t get that part fixed because that parts in China.
[00:03:30] So is it one quarter of negative growth or is it two or more? I might think I’m leaning more to two or more, but that’s just me. But look, I digress to, today’s podcast is not around death and destruction as my wife likes to say. I think I get too excited about macro economic trends, but it’s more about productivity tools and, and what I’m seeing, what I’m enjoying and what, what’s coming that I’m just really loving right now. And I wanted to share that with you.
[00:03:57]It’s not going to be a long podcast. I’m thinking circa 10 minutes, and we’re just going to just deep dive into some of the things that have really had an impact on my life, productivity wise or what’s coming and what I’m really excited about.
[00:04:09]The first one I can’t speak more highly about is called superhuman. It’s an email app by a guy in the US called Rahul Vohra and his team of incredible rock stars. They have re-imagined what Gmail would look like today. If they built it from scratch. So it’s super fast. It’s got keyboard shortcuts.
[00:04:29] He’s an ex game designer and he focuses on flow. And I think that’s super important when you’re trying to play with something that most people don’t like. When you get to inbox zero, you get this huge weight lifted off your shoulders. It feels great. And it’s this thing where you can just take time and look at one email at a time and really triage it properly.
[00:04:52]They’ve really thought of everything and, and they do gamerfy it a little bit, but gamrefy with the intent of inbox hero. And I think they’ve done a marvelous job, and I can’t wait to see what they bring out later in the year.
[00:05:03] There’s now 220,000 people in this white list and they’ve waitlisted everyone, they’ve, they’ve got an onboarding process that’s just different and takes away pretty much everything you would ever do. So they started charging when the app wasn’t even built. It was an alpha release, and then they started charging 20 bucks a month for it. Then didn’t have an iPhone app, didn’t have an app at all. They still don’t have Android, they don’t have a windows app, they have very particular around there the marketing persona of who they’re trying to target. And boy, do their onboarding experiences next level for a software company. And I think that if anyone’s at the same price point, that $30 plus a month, they need to have some serious thoughts around how they onboard. So when you get invited to superhuman and you’re not on the wait list, you get a message from the Head of Growth Sahar and you fill out a survey and based on your third survey results, they will tell you if you’re in or out based on if they can serve you well and effectively reduce their churn and say it all goes well and you tick the right boxes, then you get a up to 30 minute video call with one of their team members who teach you how to use it.
[00:06:21] These things next level. And according to Rahul, it is scalable. I always joke with him that it’s not, and he always replies on Twitter, and he goes, yeah, of course it is. It’s scalable. We can do it. And I’m like, wow, this is just next level. So I think a lot of software companies are going to have to start rethinking the way they onboard users and being user centric and user first.
[00:06:40]I love it. I can’t speak more highly about it. I would probably go as far as to say that if I joined a company or took a gig and they asked me, they wanted to give me an email, I wouldn’t take the email unless it was backed on Gmail because I wouldn’t want to not use Superhuman. And that is a huge call.
[00:07:03] That’s a call that really excites me.
[00:07:05]The next app I wanted to talk about was calendar. No one’s really come close to this since sunrise was deprecated a few years back. Woven is the calendar app. That’s pretty much the closest I’ve seen so far to that. Tim Campos ex CIO of Facebook has gone out with a team and is recreating the calendar app and sheduling automated, a lot of AI improvements.
[00:07:31]He’s even had an API with Uber. So you can just go to your calendar, see what your next meeting is, oh shit, I needed an Uber. You can request a ride from the calendar app and it goes straight into Uber. And the best part about it is then the addresses in there, and it just takes you where you need to go.
[00:07:49] So you’re saving just like superhuman, you’re saving a few minutes here and there. And that adds up at the end of the day when you’re on the road. So somebody think about it. Highly recommend woven, wovens actually on office 365 and on G-Suite. Definitely worth checking out.
[00:08:05] The next one I wanted to talk about is around surveying your customers. I don’t think this has done enough and it blows my mind that we don’t ask for feedback. If you Google Superhuman and Rahul’s journey, he’s always been about product-market fit and the engine around that and him and a few others have created an incredible way to market and measure that around how disappointed someone is in your product, especially if it’s a software product.
[00:08:36]Getting feedback quarterly, monthly, yearly, just do it. It’s just crazy not to, I don’t know. You’re going to hit a few. Bits and pieces that you might not have been expecting, but then it changes your entire mindset and then you can go further and double down on that. If someone has a problem with me, I just don’t charge them.
[00:08:55]If they really don’t feel like that I’ve added value in their business, I just go don’t pay the bill, done, move on. And they’re shocked by that. And I’m like let’s unpack that further. Because that’s my brand promise to you. It’s very important to me that I surprise and delight you on every project that I work on because I want the next gig and the best referral for me is a word of mouth referral from a current or previous client.
[00:09:21] A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing recently has been around helping teams that are either going remote or have remote teams embedded in their organizations. Not, not fully remote, but they’re on the path.
[00:09:32] The one I wanted to talk about was one called fleet Smith, and this is for a company that is mac centric. With fleet Smith, you can pay a monthly fee and then set up your entire deployment architecture for your apps and your hardware, and you’ve got a new starter coming on, just go into fleet Smith and you can then buy the Apple Mac and it will get sent and deployed with your app set already on it. So the hire or the new staff member or the consultant can open up that computer and it just works. And that’s really, really cool. I think that’s going to be the next level for a lot of businesses starting to deploy remote teams.
[00:10:13] I’m going to do a whole podcast episode on this in the future, but I love it because. At the end of the day, you either have a 30-mile radius of guns to hire, or you have the world, and I would rather have a pool of people in the world that I can go and hire that are just rock stars in their own Niche, whatever they’re doing, and get that talent pool instead of being restricted to Adelaide, Sydney, New York, London, whatever. I prefer that. You look bigger and look broader than anywhere else.
[00:10:44]We’ve all been power pointing and keynoting for years, but there have been two companies that are doing a really interesting job in this space. The first one is pitch.com.
[00:10:54] pitch.com is trying to be the digital version for that, think Invision or frame.io for pitch decks, which is really, really cool. launching later in the year, I’ve had a play with it, it’s really exciting where they’re going, cause there’s an online collaboration and you can play around with it and sort of really, really cool.
[00:11:14]the second is called beautiful.ai and they’re taking a different approach to decks in regards that you feed it, the content, feed you back the design. so you can do a really stunning looking presentation in a matter of minutes, and it’s just done for you.
[00:11:30] The next one I wanted to talk about was one that saved me some time with electronic signatures.
[00:11:36] Everyone has contracts or NDAs that you have to sign, and. That’s just a nightmare. So we devised this little sort of automated thing between Typeform and a company called HelloSign, and they’ve got a really powerful API. it was great because what it could allow us to do is fill out a survey, get an NDA or a contract, and it’s just all filled out and signed and no interaction, no touchpoint from the staff.
[00:12:04] If you’re doing three or four of these a day. pretty time-consuming. You mean you’ve got an admin overhead that you have to play with? it’s saved us a lot of time.
[00:12:11] I wanted to leave on one company called mercury. I have a lot of American friends and small businesses that listen to this podcast and I wanted to touch on mercury bank.
[00:12:24] Banking for me, I touched on it in a previous episode, but for me, it’s just so shit. Bankers have just lost their way with how big their organizations are. They’re very slow to move. They don’t provide really fascinating feature sets. And Mercury’s changing the game for the small business startup landscape. So API banking, really innovative, intuitive, and being user-centric.
[00:12:49]If you are in the US and you need a new bank for your business, I highly recommend checking out mercury bank.
[00:12:56]That’s probably it for me. it has been a really interesting few months and I look forward to bringing you episode two in a couple of weeks. I’m going to try and do them a little bit more than monthly is the plan, but let’s just stick to monthly at the moment and see how we go.
[00:13:12] My Twitter DMS are open. So if you have any comments, anything you want to hear, if you want to have a chat further about anything that I’ve mentioned today reach out anytime.
[00:13:23] Till next time.
