This is the second post in a (bi)weekly series documenting our journey through
Product Club. The wins, losses, and bad jokes — on full display. Bullshit-free.
The image above is a picture of my actual notes, scrawled unintelligibly on any paper I could find in my vicinity. You might be wondering how I go from this chaos to a system in which I can commit these notes to memory, or at least reliably reference back to them when needed. Well, it’s a very simple system. I leave them scattered haphazardly across my desk. When the moment presents itself, I frantically throw them about, as if the recipe for the antidote were hidden on one of them. I know you’re thinking “Antidote for what?”, and boy, am I about to hit you with a doozy.
Jeff Morris Jr. poisoned us!
Gaby Goldberg is in on this too. What do you think she’s doing when she’s not writing incredible articles? Scheming, that’s what. You think I’d have broken my promise of writing this weekly for any reason other than mortal peril?
Okay, I lied. I don’t think anyone has been poisoned (can you ever be too sure?) but I have been pretty slammed… so yeah, this is bi-weekly now.
Week 3 — Product Experimentation
I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed. I’ve spent significantly more time fundraising than I had anticipated. I’ve heard “Fundraising is a full-time job” more times than I can count, but living it really makes you respect the colloquialism.
Fundraising or not, the show must go on. Your team needs to keep building while you’re away. When you’re also the lead designer, things start to bottleneck. The roadmap becomes more intimidating. It’s like a bank account you don’t want to look at. You know the balance is low. You just don’t know how low, and looking makes it real.
I told you we were going to talk about the good and the bad. This goes without saying but, startups are fucking hard. Having a startup is like having a baby. You’re not sleeping as much as you used to, and you’re not totally sure if you’re even doing anything right. You’re kind of just hoping you don’t kill it somehow. You love it though, more than you can put into words. Both the future and the present excite you. The magic is in the limitless potential.
Oh, and nobody else gives a shit, but you tell them all about it anyway.
The week ended on a high note! We got to talk to Peter Sellis (Snap) about the many benefits of experimenting! Not the kind of experimenting you did in college — we’re talking product experimentation. Jeff kicked things off the day prior with a crash course on how they approached experimentation at Tinder as well as helping us understand experiments being independent of our roadmap.
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Something that really shifted our thinking in this discussion was the idea that all early stage startups are experiments. It seems like a simple realization but it has far-reaching ramifications that impact the way I’ve thought about our business entirely. As an early-stage startup, our job is to prove out our thesis, our bet on why the world needs what we’re building. How we ultimately prove that out is open to interpretation, and that’s where experimentation comes in. Trying things others haven’t done, to get results others haven’t. Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks — scientifically, of course.
I think the above image illustrates how to approach experimentation better than I can put into words. The key takeaways here being the following:
- Keep your experiments simple, with a clear definition of what success looks like.
- Be creative. If you can take an approach that doesn’t require support from your development team, even better.
- You should be testing constantly. Have fun with it.
- T-Shirt sizes are a clever way of measuring cost (developer resources) and impact. Everyone you know wears shirts… and if they don’t, this is a reminder to weed those people out of your life.
“Josh, you’re handsome, witty and brilliant but I need an experiment I can take back to my team that will show results.”
True, on all points. Here’s something you can try that will make you the hero of the day. Your welcome email when users sign up is sent out instantly, right? The problem is, most of your users are likely discarding them or not opening them at all. If you’re not tracking your email metrics, shame on you. Set that up and then come back.
Try this:
- Delay your welcome email by 30 minutes or so.
- Change the sender to a real person. For us, that’d be josh@metafy.gg (please email me, I’m so lonely.)
- Make a subject line that isn’t generic as hell. “Welcome to Metafy” sucks. Change it to something more interesting, like “It’s time to stop losing.”
- This is a fun one, add “P.S. this is obviously an automated email, but feel free to reply, I read EVERYTHING.”
I pinky promise you’ll see a lift in open rates, and you might even make a connection with a few users that become evangelical about your brand!
Week 4 — Reality Distortion
We finally got some real product work done and it’s super smooth. Coming to a Metafy near you in the next couple days. All content is placeholder. I know that’s obvious, but some of you internet people are just the worst. Not you, of course, but the others.
Long before Trump‘s thinly-veiled gaslighting, there was another master of making us question reality until we couldn’t differentiate between fact and, uh… alternative fact.
The late, great Steve Jobs.
I’ll let Andy Hertzfield tell it.
“In [Jobs’s] presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”
- Bud Tribble (Star Trek fan, if that wasn’t obvious by the name)
This week, we were fortunate enough to get some time with Adam Grenier (Uber, Lambda School) to really break down why reality distortion is possible for mere mortals, and not just mutants like Jobs.
Listen, I’m with you here — or at least I was. This reality distortion shit sounds like ghost magic. If the religious intervention my mother concocted in 5th grade taught me anything, it’s that dragon posters and Yu-Gi-Oh are a path straight to hell. And so is mind control… sorry Steve.
Adam has convinced me otherwise, as people wielding Jedi Mind Powers are want to do. The truth about reality distortion is that it’s something everyone is genuinely capable of, and you’re doing it daily — for better or worse.
It’s a matter of your beliefs about yourself and others.
At its best, the distortion field is a refusal to accept the things standing in the way of your ideas. It’s a matter of convincing yourself that any difficulty can be overcome.
At it’s worst, it’s a self-inflicted bottle-neck.
- Don’t think you’re cut out to be a leader? You’ll miss every opportunity to lead, never getting the chance to practice and become an exceptional leader.
- Convinced you can’t lose weight? Your reality will become one in which you don’t push beyond what you thought your physical limits were.
- Don’t believe you can beat that well-funded competitor? You’ll never put the work in to discover the creative solutions to out-execute. Failure will become your reality.
For Steve Jobs, his communication enabled him to convince others that they, too, could achieve the impossible. “Think Different” was a mantra he internalized for not only himself, but his entire team.
In the face of obstacles, the impossible often requires more than simply working harder. When you don’t accept things standing in your way at face value, you and your team will begin thinking of more creative solutions to accomplishing your goals — and that makes a world of difference.
Closing thoughts
Also, I want to give a quick shout out to Daniel Heintzman, who’s summer role with Chapter One has come to a close. He probably wasn’t murdered, but you never know. Seriously, he’s an awesome guy and anyone lucky enough to hire him when he graduates is in for a treat.
He wrote a little something that’s worth your time, you should read that.
Thanks for reading this. I appreciate you giving me something you can never get back — your time. That said, there are a million better things you could have done with the time you spent reading this. I hope you at least enjoyed it.
See you nerds next week… or the week following. It’ll be a surprise for all of us.
P.S. We’re hiring a Ruby Developer and Lead Designer right now.
