Parabol Friday Ship 8-Apr-2016
Fire Starting, Meatier, & On-Boarding
Strategic choices are seldom between an obviously good opportunity and an obviously bad opportunity but rather between two or more potentially good opportunities which are at often at odds with one another. We were reminded of this when collecting feedback on our latest design sprint for Action. Some of our users broke the third wall and offered, “Action seems great for my team because we already work this way, but what will your story be for drawing in new users?” Or, “I get this, but what’s the single-player mode and simple value proposition for others who don’t?” In other words, do we initially build for a niche market or do we design for scale?
We share a Slack channel with our community of advisors and posed the question to them. CPJ at August offered a clear resolution to this tension, “win the small market first.” And offered this diagram:
It’s easy to get duped into chasing scale too early. Many investors demand the big story to maximize returns. Excellent talent often wants to work on building products with broad impact. But focusing a product effort to a narrow market in service of the broader mission has a better chance of winning both in the end. Paul Graham wrote about this eloquently in Do Things That Don’t Scale:
Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It’s like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.
If we can sell Action to Medium, former users of Holacracy’s weekly Tactical Meeting rhythm—we’ll consider that positive strategic validation.
Metrics
All of the broad metrics we track were down this week. The halo we enjoyed from the broad reach of our Equity for Effort post seems to be ebbing this week.
On the bright side, we sent our first broad mailer to nearly 100 folks who opted-in to our work study survey (which resulted in our report Want a better workplace? Go out for coffee.) and enjoyed a 50% open rate and 22.6% click-through rate.
This week we…
…ported Action to the Meatier stack. We’ve been working with the virtuosic matt krick to lend to Action’s technical foundation greater modularity, scalability, and joyful programming. We wrote all about it this week in A Meatier Future. April is transitioning from designing to development:
…on-boarded to eShares. We met with our legal counsel at Gunderson Dettmer to finalize our initial angel funding round and begin issuing convertible notes to our first investors. Contrary to what we would have assumed, on-boarding to eShares takes time: two 30-minute sessions with their on-boarding team, and nearly equal time with our lawyers. We were reminded how technology isn’t a panacea for removing friction from regulated markets.
…continued working on front-end implementation. Terry Acker has digested all of the lovely user feedback we received and has been busy at the keys breaking his designs into stylesheets and components.
Next week we’ll…
…apply to Techstars Barclay’s accelerator.
…reprioritize the Action development backlog and release new public missions. The port to Meatier took care of a number of chores we had on the backlog and now a number of new opportunities for community members to get involved have presented themselves. If you’re interested in writing code or designing with us, please write us a note at [email protected] or join our public Slack community and introduce yourself.
