Heaton Shaw, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
Welcome to Talking to Me.
And a mailing list and a blog called Product Habits
about being a serial founder instead.
I was just reflecting on the person I knew her as.
And I think there are a lot of folks out there that fall in that camp
of really having the most enjoyment in life by being these choose-your-own-adventure type people.
So that would be the way I've never described it before,
but as you're talking and asking me this question after that wonderful summary about my history,
it just boils down to that and it's amazing how you can also have that experience
and have a normal career.
I think one thing I would point out,
a quick story I've never really told publicly is at one point
there was a company called Cozzes that Sean Parker from Facebook was a part of.
He was a co-founder, I believe.
Him and Joe Green, who was running it at the time, was also a co-founder.
They invited me over to Berkeley to see their office and hang out in the evening
and they were basically looking for someone to head up product.
And this was many years ago, many years ago.
I don't even remember what year.
And it was the only time I've ever met Sean Parker.
And I had met Joe Green a few times before that.
And they literally were explaining to me what Cozzes is and hanging out.
We were talking and then we had dinner.
And at one point, like Sean Parker mentioned,
oh, this would be a great thing for your career.
And I said, I don't have a career. I'm a founder.
And so that's the way I look at it.
And that's my viewpoint.
And I think when you're having a choose your own adventure life
and you get to have that today, I mean, so many of us have that opportunity today.
So many of us.
It's amazing and it's different than a career.
So that would be the first thing I would say is I'm not insulted by the terminology
or anything like that.
But it really clicked at that time with Sean Parker when he was trying to imply
I had a career and I was telling him I don't have a career.
I don't view my life like that.
I think career usually implies you have a job and you're going to go level up
and have more jobs and work for other people, which is totally cool.
If folks didn't want to work for other people or work for companies
and they didn't start more accurately, then I wouldn't be able to build businesses.
So this is out of a lot of respect for those folks too,
which I'm sure we'll get into at some point today in some different ways.
But at the end of the day, I don't have a career.
I'm a choose your own adventure type of person.
And it's what I know. So that's why I do it.
I love that. I've never heard anyone describe it as an adventure.
I hear people talk about freedom a lot,
how they don't really want to be sort of under the yoke of someone else.
But I'm a big believer that you should run towards things, not away from things.
And so having your own adventure really is, I think, a great way to describe it.
And I also like that you're an evangelist for having your own adventure.
You get other people. You got Marie in some respects to sort of quit her job
and join you on this adventure.
I spent a lot of time doing the same thing, trying to convince people,
hey, starting a company is not as scary as you might think.
And it's super fun actually. So why not take that leap?
In her case, she was already out.
I was just like, hey, this is right for you kind of thing.
And I think so.
And what was more interesting was I don't know who convinced who,
but eventually we just started working together and it's been a real adventure.
It's been one of the most fantastic adventures of my life.
One of the things I've learned the most from is by actually working with her
and working on the things that we work on.
What do you think got you started down this path in the first place
before you started your very first company?
What convinced you that you don't necessarily need to be somebody
to have a career in the traditional sense of the word?
I completely blame my father for my existence as a founder.
And the reason is when I was four or five years old,
I think he debates on what age it was.
Well, not we both.
He told me I should work for myself.
He didn't call it founder or entrepreneur.
He said I should work for myself.
His theory was that that's the only way you can maximize
the amount of money you can make, value you can add to the world.
He is a physician. He's an anesthesiologist.
And he also runs free health camps all over the world,
including eye surgeries and really intense procedures
and things like that, but free all over the world.
And he's traveling a lot.
And he's also essentially a full-time physician.
And so he's the one that really not even pushed me,
but basically just straight up told me that.
And there's a lot of reasons for that that are probably personal to him
about what he was unable to do in his life and what he wanted for me.
And also the fact that he kept emphasizing that point
and was just like, look, like, give me all the examples, help me see it.
He even says that, like, as a physician, he doesn't use his brain.
And it's all muscle memory.
And I'm like, that's a really interesting way to look at it.
And I think those things all led up to at least my initial impression
of what I should be doing with my life.
I think the other piece of this is that he was very supportive of that.
There are many folks who are sort of born in India
and have raised kids here in the U.S.
And they tend to have a viewpoint of, you know,
my career or what I'm doing as a physician is great.
My kids should have that opportunity as well and do that.
And they basically give their kids a different sort of experience
that my father gave me. He gave me a very open experience.
I got into tons of trouble growing up, all kinds of things,
partly probably to resist this idea that I should be my own boss
or, you know, do my own thing in ways to basically rebel against him
for convincing me of this or just giving me this impression from early childhood.
So I've never really had a job.
The only job I've had is an internship in high school
at a medical devices company that my father knew the two founders
when they started in the garage, in their garage.
And the company is now a public company. It's called Massimo.
And I was like the intern in the IT department.
And my claim to fame there is it was down in Irvine, California.
And my claim to fame there is I think I took the company picture
when they were much smaller than they are today.
It's like a public company. Yeah. And my dad got some early IPO stock
and then he gifted it to me and, you know, it's just been climbing up since.
And that's my story there. You know, it's like I don't know any better.
Just like many other things in my life, I just don't know any better.
And I don't know if I want to know better because I don't know the other side.
Maybe one day I'll experience the other side one way or another.
But right now, for lack of a better word, I start companies
and I tend to get people to work with me.
You can be so impactful to have somebody telling you that it's okay to be a founder.
They don't even have to be pushing you like your dad was really.
They can just be like, hey, this is a path. Consider it.
And in the absence of that, all you really have is society.
And society is relentlessly telling you one story, giving you one option.
It's sort of an assumption baked into every level of society that you are an employee.
That you have one specialization that you sort of turn yourself into a cog
that's meant to fit into some bigger machine.
You have a boss, you get weekends off, you get granted vacation time.
And it's a shame. The society is so relentless at telling everybody the story
because what if you're a person who likes to choose your own adventure
but you don't even know about this other path?
You're never going to do it. You're just going to be unhappy at work all the time
and wonder why.
That doesn't mean it's easy to be a founder.
Even if you know about this alternate path, it's not really much of a path.
There's not a playbook for how to be a founder.
There's a founder school really.
There are no railroad tracks to guide you.
You're just going to have to figure it out.
Not at all.
How did you figure things out?
I was getting out of college and my now co-founder of a bunch of things,
not Marie but Neil, who at the time wasn't my brother-in-law
but I was engaged to his sister.
I have known him since he was 11 and I was 15.
And we were basically connected because of his sister and she said,
hey, my brother has one customer paying him $3,500 a month to do SEO
and you should probably go work with him or talk to him and see if you two can work together
because you're getting out of college, he's getting into college
and he's kind of serious about doing this.
And I'm like, I don't know anything about the internet.
I know about Kazaa and all those different products, Napster, etc.
that would let you download music and stuff like that.
That was the most advanced I got.
I've had a computer since I was eight.
I was programming using QBasic back in the day.
But I was really great with computers but never really went further than that
in terms of getting deep into it or understanding marketing online or anything.
And so we just started to team up and started working together
and then from there we decided we wanted to build some software products
who were making good money at the time
and we started investing in building products because neither of us are technical.
And so we started hiring a bunch of folks and learning what all that felt like
from an engineering standpoint and things like that.
Tried building about a dozen different products
and got what I would say I keep saying, got lucky with Crazy Egg
that creates heat maps for where people are clicking on a page
and that product launched right around 2005, early 2006.
And it's self-funded as of right now
and will continue to be for the foreseeable future
because it's been going so long this way.
And that's what we basically did with our capital
from the consulting company and we started a SaaS business.
And that was somewhat accidental
but we were definitely trying really hard to build a SaaS business
because we saw that consulting wasn't going to take us as far as we wanted
from a cash flow standpoint as well as valuation and things like that.
Like consulting, someone's spending their time to do the work.
What was it with Crazy Egg that you refer to when you say you got lucky
and why were these other dozen products that you worked on not lucky in the same way?
So many reasons but at the end of the day Crazy Egg really met a market need.
All the other ones didn't meet a strong enough market need.
And we did a ton more research and diligence in the market opportunity
and the differentiation and all those great things with Crazy Egg
that we just didn't do prior to that with our previous endeavors that we tried.
So I call it luck just because I'm not sure how deliberate we were
but we were just getting smarter with each iteration, each thing we were doing.
And this was back in 2003 to 2005, 2006-ish.
And so we were just hammering ideas and seeing what would work.
We even did a few after Crazy Egg's early days
just because we didn't know if it was going to work or not ultimately.
So I find that there's nothing more valuable than building
or trying to build and launch and learn.
And the idea of you just figure out how you want to do it
and how you get to find your special way to do that.
And essentially that's why going back to the whole choose your own adventure,
each time you're choosing an adventure,
you're choosing a market to serve, a customer base to work with
and a product to build with them.
And that whole thing is something that's very individualistic.
And today even with the audience you have and the folks that are listening,
they're builders, they like to build stuff.
So they can just build lots of stuff and learn what they favor,
what they like, what they gravitate towards.
And that experience is I think under...
It's like underappreciated.
This adventure that you go on even if you fail.
And you don't know if you're going to fail when you start.
And in fact, is failure really failure
or is it just a set of experiments and a set of learnings
that you get to look back on and reflect on and say,
oh, I learned this, I learned that and that led to the next thing that I'm doing.
Yeah, I sometimes look at business advice and strategy
and all this information that's out there is kind of like a pyramid.
And at the base of the pyramid you've got advice that maybe applies
to every business everywhere.
And you go up a little higher, pyramids get skinnier.
It's advice that applies to maybe only internet businesses
and then only SaaS businesses and then maybe only, I don't know,
analytics businesses.
And then at the very top you've got you,
which is just your own unique style for doing things
and it has any advice for you because you have to figure it out on your own
and it reflects your personality in the way that you want to do things.
After having this period of really launching a dozen different products
and learning more along the way,
what is the personal style that you would say you came to develop
and inject into the things that you built?
Yeah, this really especially came out, I think, more recently,
especially as I started working with Marie Moore.
We have a lot of complementary values, ideology, and ways to work
that have been really helpful as well as many differences between us
in terms of how we think about the world and our experiences from the past.
And the thing that really hit me and I think is more necessary than ever
is really making sure that the problems you're solving for customers
are related to their top challenges, their priorities.
And that can be in consumer products or B2B products.
You really want to focus in on what are their top challenges,
top problems, and how do you go identify them?
So we spend a lot of time on getting really great at finding the problem
people have, whether it's a problem they have with our product,
our business, our funnels, our user experience, our marketing even,
or even problems they have with products and alternatives
to what we're looking to build or problems that people describe
they have in the market.
And then we get to double down and figure out
what kind of the right kind of solution to build.
And this really hit me many years ago with sort of the lean startup movement
that I was a part of in the early days
as well as the idea of customer development from Steve Blank.
So lean startup from Eric Ries, customer development from Steve Blank,
and a lot of the qualitative analysis that Sean Ellis
would do around product market fit.
These are things I would say that were my teenage years,
so to speak, of the internet and learning how to build products.
This was about 2007 to 2010-ish, so 10-plus years ago.
And that really helped me develop this thesis.
That being said, when there's lots of money flowing into the system
and there isn't like a recession or a crash
or like the housing market crash a while ago,
when there's a lot of money, it's much easier to just not be as disciplined.
And I think now, more than ever, it's so easy to be actually disciplined
because you have to. Customers have so many choices.
You don't actually get to take up their time
unless what you're providing them is really, really valuable.
And so to me, my perspective is research first.
And it's not the bad word research.
It's not the, you know, take six months to do research.
It's the rapid research.
It's the iteration that you can do when you're really focused
on customer needs, customer problems.
And I think the thing I'm really inspired by
is the concept of customer obsession from Amazon.
And that really resonates with me.
And I like to talk about that a lot.
And how can you be obsessed with your customer?
Because if you're not, someone else will be more obsessed than you
and then you are essentially going to lose.
Yeah, that's it. I've had kind of a similar path.
I remember 2012, 2013, reading a lot about the lean startup, etc.
But I wasn't as dialed into it as you were.
I mean, you were intimately involved with creating that kind of stuff.
And I was reading it and then promptly ignoring all of the advice.
Not doing any research, not talking to customers,
just building whatever felt good to me to build as a developer
and then not succeeding.
And then I think when I created NANDiHackers,
I took a more research-based approach.
I spent days just talking to customers
and looking at what they needed and coming up with an idea.
And it worked a lot faster and more successfully
than anything I had built in the past.
So I totally aligned with you on that research-based approach.
Is there anything that happened to you in the past
with your businesses that sort of solidified this in your mind
as the way to go?
Did you ever take an opposite approach and have it not work out?
Yeah, constantly.
One classic example is we tried to build a podcast advertising network
many years ago.
And this was like mid-2000s, a little bit later,
six, seven, or eight.
I don't remember which year.
And it failed.
It failed because we didn't do the research.
And what ended up happening is Michael Arrington from TechCrunch,
when he wrote the post about it,
the product was called Fruitcast.
And when he wrote the sort of write-up,
he basically said our $250 CPM equivalent
was basically more than what radio ads were going for.
We didn't do the research.
We had no idea.
We were so focused on the podcaster.
And this was like 10 years ago, over 10 years ago,
when podcasting wasn't as big as it is right now.
And so that failure was like a big one.
And we just didn't do the research.
We didn't do the homework.
If you don't want to call it research or whatever, it's like,
do your homework.
Figure out what actually matters to customers.
Figure out what they're willing to pay for.
Figure out what they're paying for today.
There's so many aspects of this that you can double down on,
especially now when a lot of things are public.
You can type in lots of things in Twitter.
You can do a lot of Google searches.
You can look at a lot of the review sites.
You can look at reviews on iTunes and the marketplaces,
whether it's Google, Android, marketplaces in the stores,
and really see what's going on.
You can even look at reviews in your category for the topic that
you're, the market that your business is in,
look at book reviews and figure out what people are thinking about
the category.
So there's a ton out there and you kind of don't have an excuse,
even if you're an engineer and you're not necessarily,
you don't gravitate into talking to people.
You can do a ton of research to find their problems online.
And it's very, very, very easy to do.
Absurdly easy to do that.
I would say that you can get a ton of knowledge about what problems
people have just by combing the internet.
And process-wise, I would say just be organized about how you
collect that information and then you can analyze it.
So what we do is we put any of this kind of research,
we call it competitive analysis or market analysis,
or for us, competitors are like alternatives to your product,
not just direct competitors.
And you can just crawl.
Essentially, if you're an engineer,
you might want to go crawl a bunch of these reviews, right?
Pull them in or whatever.
We tend to do it very manually these days.
And just read everything, which I like doing.
I think you should be reading all these things.
And then start categorizing them manually and then start learning,
oh, these are the challenges people have.
Here's how they're describing them.
And using that as your way to think of what are the creative
solutions that you can put together.
And one aspect of this that I just want to double down on before
moving on from this piece is there's a part of Lean Startup
that Eric Ries talks about called basically problem and solution.
And he really calls it like you have a problem team
and a solution team early on in the company.
You can say it's not necessarily a team,
but it's about having the discipline to go just focus
on finding the problem.
And what are the problems people have?
What are their top challenges?
Things like that.
That's essentially what I described.
And then saving all your creative energy, not for that,
not for finding the problem, not for analyzing it,
not for documenting it, but actually for coming up with
the most creative solutions, the MVP, minimum viable product
of that's what you're into or the first pass at solving the problem.
That's a separate endeavor.
That's where you put your creativity.
That's where you should be using your creative energy,
not when you're trying to look for the problem.
And I see people mix this up still.
And those are two very different things.
And you could almost say they use different parts of your brain
if you want to go there.
But at the end of the day, that difference is really powerful
of knowing that, look, I'm looking for the problem.
That's all I'm doing right now.
After I find the problem, then we're going to go talk about
the solution and figure out what are the right solutions
that we want to go after, what are the experiments we can run
that solve that problem better than anyone else.
Or you could do it the way that most people do it,
which is the bad way, which is just start with the solution.
I really want to build this thing.
I really want this to exist in the world.
And you create that and then usually does not go well.
Let's talk about this process that you're describing
as it's applied to your companies.
How many products do you think you've started
in your non-career as a founder?
How many products have I started in my life?
I mean, that's to be dozens by this point.
Well, it was dozens in the early days.
I could easily say you're looking at like 30-plus
if I really want to dig in and consider certain smaller things,
products and things like that.
We built a scheduling product for Twitter before Buffer existed.
And we never really launched it,
but we did a whole bunch of research on it.
It was called ShareFeed.
And then they actually acquired it at some point.
So yeah, we played around with a lot of things back in the day.
And that's just one random one.
We built a product called Twitthis, or Twitthis, T-W-I-T-T-H-I-S.
We partnered with somebody on it and then they took it over.
And that was a Twitter button, a tweet button before they existed.
So there's just a lot of these random things that I could just go off on.
We built a social media buzz tracker called Surf, S-E-R-P-H back in the day.
We built this thing called Product Planner to map out user flows for products.
I could go on.
This list is very long.
And they aren't like the big ones where we try to build a web hosting company
and wasted a million dollars and never launched.
There's a lot of these stories that are out there that we've shared.
My co-founder Neil and I, him and I,
are the ones that were doing a lot of that experimentation.
And more recently, Marie and I have built definitely at least 5 to 10 products.
And not all of them worked.
And now we're consolidated down to having product habits as a sort of brand
and an email newsletter and hopefully more coming soon.
And then have FYI as our course or a business that we work on.
So maybe the best thing to talk about is FYI.
How did you apply this process of really doing the research
and talking to customers and making sure that you're focusing on the problem first
before you start working on the solution?
How did that apply to coming up with the idea for FYI
and getting started building it?
Yeah, FYI is a really interesting one.
We had two different products before we built FYI that basically failed.
We were building at first a product called DoGo
where we let people upload their pitch decks.
So for pitching investors, whether it's pre-seed, seed, Series A, Series B, and later,
and then they could invite their advisors in and advisors could get feedback on the decks.
And we just noticed that that was a problematic process
and we noticed some challenges with it and got some...
We did a bunch of interviews and I would say got some false positives
on the problems that were worth solving.
So then we just built it.
And we were building that because we thought we might raise a fund
and wanted to invest in companies because Marie and I were really good at
and are really good at giving people feedback together
and helping them think through their business problems and things like that,
which we both...
I would say used to love to do and have definitely been doing a lot less lately
because of our shift in focus.
And so we built that and it was in early access.
We never got it out of early access.
And then we decided that that wasn't the top priority for founders.
The top priority when they're raising money
is literally introductions to investors if they don't know them.
That's the top priority, not getting feedback on their pitch decks.
Even though we had built a pretty good product for it,
we had helped like 300 people with their pitch decks.
Not even using just the tool, but we had given that much feedback on pitch decks.
We have a whole storytelling framework for pitch decks that's out there
that we haven't really shared publicly,
but I share it with anyone that needs to raise money.
So we did that at first and came up with...
We even ran workshops on helping people with their pitch decks.
So it was a really interesting time a few years ago when we were doing that.
This was before there were actually as many seed funds as there are today
and things like that.
And we decided to move on because we just didn't want to raise a fund
and get into that market.
And we realized that the software product we had in mind
that would help us in that market wasn't right.
And it wasn't really solving the top priority people had.
And a product that helped you get introduced to investors,
whether it's the AngelList platform or something like that,
was probably way more interesting to build and work on.
Hence why AngelList is pretty massive and worth a lot of money.
And so what we did is we did this crazy thing that I made up
that I still get shipped for it, basically...
Excuse my French.
Which is basically copy and paste do-go
and let's build a new product that's for a wider audience.
And we actually did launch that product.
It was called DraftSend.
And we wanted to let people essentially upload a PDF
and then add audio to it and get this really awesome player
where it wasn't a video.
But as you were moving through the slides,
you were able to hear the audio and it felt like a video experience.
And we had a great launch.
We had a whole bunch of people who made these decks out there.
And the launch was great.
It was number one of the day, maybe the week or the month on product hunt.
But the problem was there was no retention.
And we would have to tweak it a whole bunch
to make it work for sales or marketing use cases.
We had built a pretty generic product.
And there were some real technical challenges
with the audio side of it that we just kept hitting
and also just didn't want to solve at some point.
Because what we learned is we did an initial survey
to analyze what features people wanted with the product.
And it turns out that that was the first impulse that we had
and data point we had for FYI,
which was basically that people wanted to organize their presentations.
And they felt like they were all over the place.
And so that, and plus us just being frustrated
with two failed products in the document space,
made us step back and actually put out an early access survey
that we shared the whole process we went through
on our product habits email list.
But we put out an early access survey.
One of the main questions was,
what's your number one challenge creating and sharing documents?
And it turns out the number one challenge,
not even with just creating and sharing them,
but in general with documents,
is finding them across all the products that people use.
So now there's so many tools out there
that help you create documents, share them,
and there are new ones coming out every day.
And so we basically learned that and we're like,
oh, this is the problem we want to solve.
This is what we want to go after.
And the reason we want to go after this is because it's a number one problem.
It's a number one challenge people have.
So it wasn't until that point, literally like probably 9 to 15 months in,
I don't remember the exact timeline,
after two failed products, probably more like a year in,
10 months to a year,
we basically finally decided to step back and do some deep research.
And we did that.
And then we learned, oh, that's the number one problem.
And if you fast forward a little bit into that timeline,
we ended up basically building a five-day MVP.
So it was a five-day minimum viable product.
We built it in five days, soup to nuts from start to finish.
And it was basically built a search box that allowed you to search across
multiple tools.
And it had a Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and I think OneDrive in the beginning.
And you just got a search box and you got to type in the keyword
and find the documents across those tools.
There's a bunch of limitations with the APIs because we built it in five days
on purpose.
We handed it over to about two batches of about 20 to 25 people.
And we learned a shit ton about what the product offering should be,
exactly what the problems are with providing people with a search box.
And what we realized is a search box is just not enough.
And if we had built that five-day MVP,
we probably would have spent so much energy building out of back-end
and storing all this data and maybe even doing machine learning and all this stuff.
And we wouldn't have learned the simple truth, which is a search box is not enough.
It is not a product people will use enough.
People will barely use it every week or two.
And most people would use it just once or twice a month.
It's deceptive, too, because you can go really deep on a search box.
You can build a search box, test that on people.
They're like, I don't really need to search my documents that much.
You're like, oh, let me just connect it to a few more tools.
It's more accurate.
You could spend probably months of your time building a search box for documents.
How did you realize that you guys needed to build something different
or you needed to add something to it
rather than just going deeper on the search box concept?
We knew we wanted retention and we were really honest with ourselves
after the first two failed attempts.
And that's me who's done it before and failed a lot.
And we had done research for both those other products.
We were just not focused on the number one challenge,
the number one problem people have.
And so once we realized that this is the number one problem
and because we had already started doing a bunch of interviews with people,
we started really looking at the interview data and the MVP data
and realizing that there are certain ways people look for documents
and we needed to really mimic that behavior in our interface.
So they look for documents by getting in the tool that they use
and type in searching.
So we provided the search box, but we also let you get right in the tool
and see all the latest documents in the tool.
We also knew that people try to find documents
based on what they think in their heads
that they've recently had access to and modified.
And so what they end up doing is we ended up building an activity feed
that showed them all the recently modified documents.
And then the other thing they do is they try to find documents
that people have shared with them
and they know the people that have shared with them
or the people that have created the documents.
So these were all mental models that people used in order to find documents.
And basically they ended up creating this sort of idea in their heads
when they started looking for documents as to like,
what tool is it in? Oh, I don't know what tool it's in.
Have I accessed it recently?
Or, hey, did Cortland share it with me?
And with that whole process, we basically learned that
we need to build an interface and an experience
that lets people find their documents in ways that they already are doing.
And that's, I think, a big thing about research,
which is you're trying to identify the behaviors that people already have.
Because otherwise, you're forcing them to create a new behavior.
This search box, believe it or not,
was a new behavior for them when they were finding documents.
It was the way that they found documents.
It was like the last thing they wanted to do.
It wasn't the first thing they wanted to do when they looked for documents.
It was the last thing.
And so it was used like 10 to 20% of the time
when people were looking to find documents.
So building the search box didn't help.
And the funny thing is in our space with FYI,
there's a graveyard of companies that just built a search box
because of the hype around it.
And like you said, how you could double down on it.
But really, it's the research that helped us get our heads out of our asses,
so to speak, and really look at what's going on and what people are doing
and realize that we were wrong.
A search box is not enough.
And thankfully, we didn't spend any time at all on building it
because we were conscious that, hey, if this solution doesn't work
and the fact that other folks have failed with the solution,
what's wrong with it and what's it missing and what more do we need to do?
That's really all the things that were in our heads.
And it's been really enlightening to think about things like that.
Even today, when I talk to founders,
I try to focus in on what are the knowns and unknowns?
What are the things that have happened in your market
and what are the failures that have happened
and how can you actually assess why those things failed on your own
and figure out what's going on from the user's perspective?
And secondary to that, I'm looking and spending a lot of time in the research
when we interview people or do surveys to understand
what behaviors they currently have.
What are they doing today?
Because what they're doing today is so much more important
than you creating some kind of new experience for them.
Because whatever experience you create for them
has to help them do what they're doing today better.
Otherwise, you're nowhere.
Even when you think about consumer products,
everything you look at with Facebook or Instagram or Twitter,
all those things are things that people want to do.
It's things they're already doing.
These platforms just make it a lot easier for you to do them.
So you've built over 30 different products.
Most people listening who are just considering becoming founders,
they've built nothing.
Or maybe they've built a few side projects.
They haven't had the opportunity to learn as many lessons as you've learned,
the hard way.
You've learned probably through doing it wrong
to keep your MVP to five days.
You've probably built things that took much longer in the past
and you've internalized that lesson.
You've learned that you need to be aware of the habits
that users have today
and not try to change what they're doing too much.
You learned that you need to do research.
You've learned that you need to look at competitors
who've come before you
and try the same thing that you're doing
and learn from their mistakes rather than just repeating them.
You have this whole checklist, I guess,
of lessons that you've learned from building so many products.
How do you think about all that information that you've accumulated?
How do you make sure that when you're going into something that's new,
you're not forgetting lessons that you've learned in the past?
I really love that question, Kortland.
It's so important to learn from the past
and also not get bogged down by it
because we can do that too, right?
Like, oh, I failed, I failed, I failed.
So I'll give a bunch of things.
Well, one, and this is something I really credit to Marie quite a bit
because she's very adamant about this
in the culture and processes internally in our company.
And she's been talking about a little bit around postmortems,
which is basically everything you do, write a review of it.
And we have a postmortem template
and we have a bunch of sections on it.
We do that for everything, marketing initiatives we do,
product initiatives we do.
Sometimes we'll do it for an event that happens in the company.
These are the same as engineering retrospectives
or five whys exercises when something goes wrong.
It's all in the same category of whatever happened
review it, get your lessons out, good, bad, ugly,
and then basically be able to do it better next time.
And so we create templates for things like that.
We have a postmortem template for most of the things we do on product development
because that's really the core of the business right now.
We also do a bunch of marketing stuff.
So we do postmortems on what happens from a product hunt launch
and things like that so we can do better next time.
And that helps us do better next time, right?
So I think that's a big, big, big piece of it that I can't stress enough.
Second piece, there's three.
Second piece I would say is just related to that,
it's just lots of documentation.
So we're a remote team and documentation and process
and being able to iterate the process through great documentation,
postmortems, all that good stuff is really important and really key
and gets me super excited because it's how you essentially get better faster
is by actually knowing what you did and why you did it
and then what happened and reviewing it.
So documentation and process I think are a big piece that we think about a lot.
And then the third one is something that's a little different
and I'm actually excited to share it and talk about it a little bit
because I've seen this pattern on the internet for a long time,
especially since the early days of 37signals, now Basecamp,
where they don't quite do it exactly like this
and we definitely do it a little bit differently,
but what we do is we basically, with our product habits brand,
it's a newsletter and we're essentially doing things, teaching them,
and then learning ourselves because we're forced to teach other people how to do it.
It's not forced, but it literally is because we force ourselves to do things.
We have the accountability that we need to tell them what we did
and then even more importantly, we need to tell them how we did it
and then we learn.
So an early access program for a business or product,
we've nailed it and we shared about how we did it for FYI while we were doing it.
And we were using that audience to come on the journey with us
and they helped us with interviews and things like that
because they knew that by doing that, they would learn and they wanted to learn.
So that's one.
We did that with so many other things.
We did that with being able to build a five-day MVP.
We've documented the processes around doing that
and sent emails to folks about it while we were doing it
and used them then, too, to basically have this exchange
where we'd like you to try the five-day MVP
and we want you to come and basically give us feedback
and in that process, you'll learn how we do it, too.
And then we shared back what the results were
and what we learned and all that kinds of stuff.
We did the same with partnering with the folks at ProfitWell,
also known as Price Intelligently, and did a whole bunch of pricing surveys.
So we did a series on pricing surveys for FYI early on before we launched
and explained all that in great detail.
We did it for user testing to explain how we user tested popular products.
The products we user tested were MixMax, Duolingo, and Grammarly
to see how they do onboarding.
And then we wrote all about the onboarding process that these companies had
based on user testing and what we learned from it.
And that was when I was scared to do user testing
because I thought you needed to be an expert,
but then we forced ourselves to do it and we realized
that you can do it without being an expert, and we taught people how to do that.
And there's countless other things we've taught,
including one that's kind of near and dear to my heart.
We had a whole series on engineering estimates
and being able to do hourly estimates on engineering
instead of points and all kinds of things that people do there,
like t-shirt sizing and all that good stuff or not so good stuff.
And we wrote a whole series on that.
So I think the key thing, the third thing there is like
when you force yourself to share with the world,
that helps you get better already.
Then when you take it to another level and say,
we're going to actually share it with the world,
tell them what we're doing, and then also teach them how to do it,
that puts it all at another level, right?
And so that's why I was mentioning 37signals at Basecamp.
Those folks were one of the first to actually share what they were doing.
I'm not sure if I would say they were teaching people.
They were teaching people by example, which is super cool in itself.
We took it to another level and said,
why don't we learn ourselves by essentially teaching people
deliberately step by step how we did it, what we learned, why we did things.
Yeah, that sharing is so underrated.
It's such a good strategy for getting yourself to do what you're saying at first
and sort of like do post mortems on the things that you've done.
If you're accountable to an audience that you've got on Twitter
or a mailing list to really share what you're up to,
then you're going to do it.
And it's so easy to just avoid doing a post mortem.
I think the default is like you just do things that kind of work,
they kind of don't work, and you just move on to the next thing,
which is shiny and fun.
And reflecting on something that failed is really not that fun.
But it's super helpful, like how else you're going to get better
if you don't ever sit down and ask yourself what went wrong,
or even what went right and why did it go right
and why can we do more of that in the future.
I've started doing this actually with my personal life.
We were talking earlier, I've been doing, playing a lot of chess too.
And God, I love playing chess.
It's so fun, but you don't get better if you don't take the time
after you play a game to sit back and analyze your moves one at a time
and figure out why you made that move, what you could have done better.
Otherwise, it's just going to be the same over and over again.
Exactly.
Starting a startup is kind of like playing chess
in that you've got, yeah, I'm bringing out the chess analogies here.
I'm obsessed.
Bring it.
You've got a lot of moves.
What I find challenging, and I'm brand new to chess,
playing for like a week and a half, is that in any position,
you've got a dozen moves that you can make.
And for whatever reason, oftentimes the best move is just really hard to see.
It's really unintuitive.
It's the one you're not considering, considering all these other moves.
How do you, as a startup founder, when you have an equally, if not more,
bewildering array of choices in front of you,
how do you decide what the best next thing to do is?
I mean, with FYI, you sort of identified, okay, the search box is not enough.
You can go in any direction.
You can pivot to a totally different startup.
You can start a different company.
You could add different features.
How do you know where to go?
More research.
I mean, it's great.
Once you have people using a product, you go talk to them again, right?
Talk to the same people, talk to different people,
and really start understanding what problems they have now.
So it's almost like there's a gate.
You solve problem number one, number one challenge people have, right?
You get good at that.
There's enough people that are using your product to solve that problem
for themselves, then you basically figure out what's the next challenge,
what's the next problem I should be solving.
So for FYI, we knew we were going to build a single-player product
where we wanted individuals to love it because we're building a business
where anyone can get started for free.
And now what we know is that we've learned a bunch about how teams want to use FYI
or how teams have different problems around documents,
and we want to solve their problems now.
That's the next step.
That's the next level of FYI.
We really believe actually the product's only half built
and half done until we get there.
And it's never done, but really like the 1.0, so to speak.
And so right now what we're building is FYI for teams
because we saw a pattern.
People would come on and then they would recommend the product
to other people on their team without much prompting from us.
And so if they are in a company, we end up seeing them recommend it
to other folks in the company just for a simple reason,
which is it helps them find their documents faster.
And so we're doubling down on that idea and saying,
well, what are the dynamics behind the teams
and how teams find documents together,
how they collaborate on documents together
and what they're doing there
and what are the things that we can do to make their lives easier
around finding documents when they're doing that
inside of a team construct, inside of a company.
That's sort of the next thing.
And we did that by essentially research
and learning a lot about them.
And our original research also hinted at some of the things
that we could do around teams.
We just didn't want to go build a product
that was just utilized for teams
because we're not a communication tool in the same way Slack is.
In Slack, it's like if everyone comes into the product,
that's when it's going to be valuable.
If only some people in a team come into the product and use it,
it's not really that valuable.
And you kind of are drawn to it
because that's where work happens according to Slack.
That's where communication is, right?
So you're kind of left out if you're not in there.
And so there's a great pull to Slack for people to communicate.
For our product, it's really just about finding documents,
sharing documents, organizing documents,
and being able to basically have a better experience
and make your life easier,
because the knowledge that you need can be found really easily.
And a lot of times that knowledge is not something you created,
it's something someone else created.
And so we're really focused around what do we do there?
And that's what the team and we've been sort of working on for a while now
just to make sure that we're able to build the kind of business we want to
and build a product that teams love.
That's actually the mantra on our team right now,
which is build a product that teams love.
You're crafting this image here, Heaton, of solving problems on top of problems.
So initially you do your research,
you try to figure out what are users' real pain points?
What are their number one problems?
Then you attempt to solve that with your minimum viable product.
Okay, well now users have new problems, right?
Your product doesn't solve it perfectly.
So you do research, you figure out what those are, you solve those.
That uncovers a new set of problems and so on and so forth.
At what point do you hit the elusive product market fit?
And how do you even define that term with your company FYI?
Yeah, product market fit is really, I think, twofold.
There's a set of quantitative ways to define it
and a set of qualitative ways to define it.
And so to me the qualitative ways are like
now what's becoming popular with Superhuman's product market fit engine
is what Rahul's called it, which is something that Sean Ellis actually worked on.
And it's a question he likes to ask, which is
how disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed?
And you're looking for 40% or more of folks saying they'd be very disappointed
if your product no longer existed.
And so I'm really happy that that's becoming more and more popular.
It's kind of had a resurgence.
It was really more popular in 2007, 8, 9, 10,
and even up till about 2012 and it kind of died down a little bit.
But this qualitative measure is really valuable and important.
I think another qualitative measure people like to use
is net per motor score and having a high customer satisfaction,
which I think is a little different than this sort of specific metric.
I like this metric a lot and net per motor score I use for different things,
but not necessarily product market fit.
But a lot of people will use it for that.
So those are like qualitative measures.
And then there are a few other qualitative measures like just word of mouth.
I think when word of mouth for a product is strong
and people are tweeting about it, people are sharing messages on Facebook,
people are writing very positive reviews about it constantly,
unprompted by the company.
I think that's a really strong indicator as well.
So word of mouth is probably the strongest number one indicator.
If you can have it or see it, but not every market has a bunch of vocal customers
that are on Twitter and Facebook and sharing all kinds of stuff, right?
So that's I think a big piece on the qualitative side
of understanding product market fit.
Then there's a quantitative side where really the most important thing
is your retention rate, period, which is how high is your retention rate?
Are people coming back on a daily basis?
What percentage of people who sign up are still with you 90 days later?
Those kind of things are what really matter
for the quantitative measure of retention.
So we look at it qualitatively by asking people questions
and understanding what kind of sentiment they have
and how they feel about the product.
Then we go a little bit deeper to understand the value propositions
and things like that there just so that we can iterate
and double down on the value that the most satisfied folks are getting.
Then on the other side of it, really look at quantitatively
are we retaining people and what's causing them to retain
and what's causing them to not retain and how can we improve retention?
I would say that you want retention to be as high as possible.
That means you're not looking for a 10% retention rate.
90 days later, you're looking more for a 30%, 40%, 50% retention rate 90 days later.
You want to build a product and a business that can do that.
Yeah, retention is one of the most underrated metrics,
especially for new founders who haven't had the experience
of putting out something that people seem to be excited about
and then they all leave and it's impossible to grow because...
Basically, it's the analogy you're pouring water into a bucket full of holes.
You've got to plug those holes.
It's something I focus on a lot with ND hackers too,
so I'd love to just talk to you about this retention issue for a while
because it's tough.
If you have a product that's not as retentive as you want,
if people aren't sticking around for as long as you need,
you're talking about doing research.
What other tools do you have to figure out
how to make your product more retentive?
What's your mental framework for how you envision this entire process
of improving the retention of your products?
Yeah, there's a number of different things.
I think I will get into research,
but let me give you the other answers first
because I think the other ones can be valuable.
Every product has folks who are actually highly retained.
It's unlikely you don't have some group of people that are highly retained.
What you want to figure out is study their behavior
and figure out what's causing them to stay retained.
What's causing them?
Are they experiencing something that other folks haven't got to
in your product?
Are there certain types of engagement that they have with your product,
like certain features they're using that other folks aren't using?
Are they a specific type of person?
Do they have a certain job title?
Are they in a certain type of company?
Are they working in a certain department?
Do they live in a certain place?
All these things are what will help you figure out basically
who's retained and why they're retained.
Then your goal is to get more people like that
or decide that those people that you have that are retained
are not ideal for your product.
They're not, let's say, a customer base that you can basically grow with
and build a business from.
If that's the case, then you're back to square one
looking for what you can change in your product.
Then there's the folks that are not retained.
My favorite thing to do there is more research
on finding out why they're not retained.
If someone is dropped off and doesn't use your product after they sign up,
like the next day or a week later or whatever,
go email them and find out with a single question.
Ask them a single question and say,
you signed up and you haven't used the product, please tell me why.
Or you signed up and let's say it's a project management tool.
You signed up and you didn't create your first project.
I'd love to learn why because I'd love to help you do it.
Then people respond and you just ask for a response via email
and you just say reply to this email.
Give them a survey.
Don't make them try to get on the phone with you yet.
Just ask a single question in a short email and ask for their response
and they will give it to you.
You get relatively high response rates to that,
especially if you catch them within two or three days of signing up
for your product, if not sooner.
It's really important.
This you can assess based on people not getting through your onboarding
and really hitting them at certain points
in the life cycle of their usage of the product.
More people tend to be dropping off than continue for most products,
pretty much all products.
You're really trying to figure out why they're not continuing
and why they haven't done the key actions with your product that they should.
What's cool about this is you can do this all well before you launch.
A lot of people look at launch as the initial inaugural revealing
of their product to the world.
Ideally, by the time you launch, you've had some people using your product
and you've actually surveyed them or talked to them
and tried to figure out who's sticking around,
why are they sticking around, etc.
Yup, completely agree.
Let's talk about funding because you've been on both sides of the coin here.
You've raised money.
You have self-funded, I think.
Yeah, I have.
If I'm not mistaken, you're the...
Crazy, I get self-funded.
FYI product habits is self-funded.
KISS Metrics was funded and I've invested or advised
about 120 different companies that most of them are funded.
How do you decide what you want to do for a particular project of yours?
I mean, you've briefly referenced the product that you started
and you blew through a million dollars without really launching
or releasing anything successful.
With FYI, I know you've got, I think, at least a dozen employees
working with you at this point.
That's a lot of resources.
That's not cheap.
How do you decide what's worth putting your personal finances into
and when you should raise money?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
The way we think about that is we're looking to focus our energy
on building a product that teams love right now.
Raising money now would be not the right thing to do for us
because we have the capital to keep spending money on it.
Obviously, if you don't have the capital, you've got to find the capital.
You can do consulting or provide services or something
to basically have capital to build what you need to build.
If you're a developer, luckily, you can build stuff.
If you don't know how to design, you can find templates
and stuff that are out there and build out what you need typically.
To me, I like to think about funding as something
where it's best when you essentially don't need it.
I know that sounds weird, but it's true.
Funding is best when you don't need it.
If you work backwards from that, all we're trying to do
and the way we think about it is we're trying to create...
We're not even trying. We're doing this.
We're building for our customers.
We're focused on our customers and we're focused on creating
the best possible product we can for them.
When we get to a certain place where more capital will help us grow,
that's when we would consider raising money.
That's the place we're in because we have revenue sources
and an ability to keep funding the business
until we get to that point or even longer.
To me, it's really about raising money when you're ready
and you should be ready because you know what to do
with that money that you go get.
Otherwise, you'll end up in spots where you have milestones
to hit with your business and you've raised a bunch of money
and you might not hit those milestones
and then raising more money gets really troubling
and you're kind of on this treadmill
and you're in that game once you raise money.
I like telling people that because to me,
getting as far as possible before you raise money is really smart.
I'm not religious either way. I'm good.
Especially after raising a bunch of money
and also helping a lot of people do the same
and also help them scale and watching them scale,
it's really just about raising money once you're ready
and raising money once you know what you're going to do with the money
and spending as much energy as possible focused on your customer
the whole time because that discipline will last forever
if you can get really good at it.
I like that you point out that when you raise money,
you're now on this new track, you're on this treadmill
where there are suddenly expectations of how fast you need to grow
and how far you need to be able to get at a certain point in time.
Some of those are just practical.
You raise money and you basically hire a team.
Once you're out of money, you can't afford to pay them anymore
unless you can raise money again so you actually need
to hit these milestones to be able to raise again.
But a lot of it is psychological.
Your investors really want you to be able to move at a certain speed
and reach a certain level when you've raised money.
I think it's very wise to be aware of that in advance
because if you're not confident,
you're going to be able to maintain that pace.
It's not worth raising money, at least not now.
Most people listening in are people who want to go the self-funded route.
They're not really interested in raising money.
They're not confident that they live near enough investors
or can even pitch investors.
What are some of the decisions that you need to make differently
if you're going to be a bootstrapper, so to speak?
Yeah, I like calling it self-funded, not bootstrapping.
But I can rant on that.
You're the little voice in the back of my head
that makes me feel bad every time I say bootstrapped instead of self-funded.
Heck yeah, don't feel bad. Don't feel bad.
Just say self-funded. Say self-funded.
Hit us with your rant. Go ahead and let it out.
That is just like we're not bootstrapping.
We're not bootstrappers. We don't have boots.
We don't pick ourselves up. Most of us don't have boots.
We don't pick ourselves up, put straps on our boots.
It's literally that image of two hands,
each foot, one foot at a time.
That's not what we're doing. We're self-funding.
We're funding this ourselves in any way possible.
Even the name and the terminology will help you think about it differently.
Think about it.
There are companies out there that were self-funded for such a long time
before they raised money and some that are massive
and have never raised money.
It comes to mind as probably one of the largest companies that's self-funded.
But if you think about how companies were started back in the day,
they were started with loans.
They were started with bank loans and things like that
or started with very little money from the founders
and they just figured it out and they started from scratch.
To me, self-funding is like starting from scratch.
Bootstrapping is something that I don't even know what the word means.
It's my mini rant on it. I can go on for days on that, literally.
I agree with you guys.
We need to use the right words.
We need to use the right words, I think. I don't know.
Maybe I'm a stickler for words and semantics,
but I want to spread the gospel and thank you for helping me do that there.
I don't have too much gospel except self-funding is different than bootstrapping
because self-funding is self-funding.
Someone mentioned to me, oh, then there's customer-funded.
I'm like, yeah, customer-funded is great, but that's also self-funding.
These are all subsets. These are all things that fall under the umbrella of self-funded.
If you want to encapsulate everything, self-funded.
Even bootstrapping, whatever that means.
I think to your question about self-funding and my advice and suggestions,
it's kind of like what I was saying earlier.
You can find a way to spend your time, increasingly spend your time
on whatever you're working on that is your own thing
because this is really just about you doing your own thing
as you're working on something else.
Companies are getting way more open to side projects.
That's an example while you're working somewhere else.
That's one idea. I'm not saying you do that or you don't do that.
I know many folks who work in corporate environments
that actually have two laptops
because they're doing freelancing on the side or something like that
and they don't want to use their company laptop for doing that stuff.
That's totally cool.
I've seen that with two phones as well and that's a very specific reason why.
Then what I've seen also is that there's folks who have agencies
or are doing freelancing and they want to build their own products
and they start with something more lightweight.
They start with a digital book or e-book or a small course or something like that
and they look to market it and sell it
and get that muscle of marketing and sales and things like that.
They usually do that in the category of product that they want to build.
Then there's lots of engineers out there who are going to just build things.
All I would say is do some research first, do a lot of research first.
One other important thing I don't hear enough about self-funding
is make sure you start with something that is designed to make money early.
That is not limiting. That's okay.
Unless you have enough capital to keep putting into something
or you have a way to get that capital without funding,
your own money somehow through consulting or services
or freelancing or whatever it may be that you do
or through savings even if you really want to spend your savings on it
so that you can essentially take your time with it
if it's something that you think will monetize later.
I'd be very careful with some of those ideas when self-funding.
I'd also be very careful with markets
where it's really hard to acquire customers
and really assessing some of those things.
The market opportunities you go after,
I'm one to believe you should go after anything you want.
At the same time, you want to make sure the starting point you have is right for you
and that's something that I don't see enough people thinking about,
which is what's the market that matches with my capabilities
to keep the business alive.
You spent a lot of time helping founders.
You've talked about Product Habits, which is your sort of e-book,
newsletter, and blog.
You've got like a little form on your Product Habits website too
where it's like, hey, sign up for a 20-minute call with Heaton,
which I've done before.
You actually helped me out with Indie Hackers a few months back.
Yeah.
What do you get out of all this help
and how do you manage your time as somebody who's incredibly busy,
who is still the founder of several initiatives?
How do you find the time?
This one's really interesting and I've been talking about it more and more.
For me, it's simply the difference between time and energy.
I want to do things I have energy for
and I worry much, much less about the time I have for things,
especially as I've sort of realized that serendipity is a big part of life
and you can lose out on serendipity if you're so focused on your time.
I really focus on, do I have energy for doing what someone's asking me to do
or what I'm about to do or what I need to do?
It's not to say that if I don't have energy for it, I don't do it.
It's more like if I don't have energy for it, I think twice, three times before I do it.
For example, you emailed me and I think within 30 minutes,
I emailed you back and said, yeah, let's do it.
Within a few more minutes after that, once you sent me the links,
I scheduled up.
You have two calls.
You have a pre-call and you have this call for the actual recording.
You schedule those up and we were on within days.
This is less than a week later, roughly speaking, about a week later
and we're already recording this.
I had energy for it.
I was like, oh, Cortland, yeah, I enjoy talking to him.
I actually haven't listened to a single podcast in years.
I actually spend my time not listening to podcasts until I get on them and episodes,
but I read a lot of the reviews and I read a lot of the show notes and things like that
and that's what I like to do.
If something's really compelling, I will definitely listen to it,
but usually I get a lot out of that.
To me, I feel like we spend so much time worrying about time management
and we don't spend enough time worrying about energy management.
Energy management is the idea that, do I have the energy to work on this right now?
Do I have the energy to go do that call?
Do I have energy to wake up today, get out of bed and do what I have to do?
If I don't, it's not about not doing it necessarily.
It's more about figuring out why.
You cannot sustain things that you need to repeatedly do
if you don't have energy for them and if you only make time for them.
Totally agree.
If you're focusing all of your efforts on time management,
if you're just obsessing about your schedule and what time you're going to do things
and you're not really paying attention to the energy
and how you feel when you're doing these things,
then it's kind of productive ultimately because you're going to have to pay that cost later.
You're going to be doing all these things you don't really have the energy to do
and then you're going to run out of energy and you're going to have to recover
and recovery takes time and so you're going to find yourself on the couch
watching TV, eating potato chips and that's time you could be doing things
that you actually have the energy to do.
Exactly.
Really comes back to bite you later on.
I asked some people on Twitter to submit some questions.
I always feel bad doing this because people tweet questions at me
and then I forget to ask them.
Someone asked, how do you figure out early things and ideas that are time wasters?
They said that you've spoken about wasting a lot of time when building Kismetrics,
but you haven't talked about how you sort of thought differently
about the problems you're trying to solve.
How do you avoid wasting time or let's say wasting energy as a founder?
Yeah, I mean, it's really just about working on things that matter.
So you have to figure out your own systems or learn systems
for figuring out what matters.
What matters to your customer?
What matters to your business and how do those two things match up?
I think a good example is FYI.
We know that the problem existed for individuals that they needed to find documents
across all these apps.
So we literally hustled as they say even though the word doesn't really resonate with me,
but we iterated the product every week until we found the interface
and the experience that people love in order to find their documents.
And once we did that, we doubled down on it, built out the backend,
really sorted things out, built out the onboarding and all that stuff
so that it was really great.
And we tested that and then we shipped it and we launched.
And that was May 22nd of 2018, so a little over a year ago.
And since then, we've built a desktop app
and now we've been building a bunch of...
We've been doing a bunch of integrations.
We have about 20 integrations now.
And then the next thing we're doing is basically building a product for Teams
because we heard that that's what we needed to do.
We heard from customers that that's what we needed to do.
And so we just want to work on things that matter.
And if the things I describe don't matter, we shouldn't be working on them.
So I think that's the distinction, which is work on things that matter
and figure out what you're going to do in order to make sure the things that matter,
to identify the things that matter.
And usually it starts with the customer,
which is what matters to the customer.
Sometimes early on in business, it matters to you.
So that's why I said earlier,
what matters is that you can keep investing in what you're doing without stopping.
That's really important.
If you can't invest in what you're doing and continue it, then don't start it.
So then your assessment is,
how can I make what I'm doing something that I can keep doing?
What is the construct I need in my life or my business so I can do that?
Do I need to make money some other way and spend half my time on my product and project?
Or can I spend all my time on it because I have the capital?
Or is it not that capital intensive?
Looking at the market, the players in the market, the companies in the market,
the way to get customers, all those things add up to,
can I sustain what I'm doing?
And I think that that's a really key piece of it prior to getting customers and users
and talking to them is really figuring out the sustainability of what you're doing.
And that's what matters early on.
And then over time, what ends up mattering is customers
and making sure that you're working on the most important things for them.
So right now, we know the most important thing we can work on in the business
is build a product teams love.
I love that answer.
I'm pretty sure that's going to be the title for this podcast episode,
how to work on things that matter.
Love it, Heaton Shaw.
Yeah, that's a pretty good summary.
Nice work.
It really is.
Let's close out with one more analogy from chess here, Heaton.
Like I said, I'm a beginner at chess.
And if you're a beginner at chess, what you find yourself doing
is making what are called blunders.
You might be playing a great game, and then you just lose your queen
because you just made a terrible move that you didn't really need to make.
And what's scary about blunders is even good chess players make them sometimes.
I was just watching a game this morning.
It was between two grandmasters playing and a tournament.
And it got down to the end of the game,
and this one player had two possible moves he could make.
That's it.
There were only two possible moves.
One would win him the game, and one would lose in the game.
And he didn't make either move.
He just resigned because he didn't see the winning move.
He just didn't check it.
So even grandmasters can blunder sometimes.
What are some blunders that founders are likely to make?
Especially first-time founders, but even experienced founders sometimes.
And how can they avoid them?
Yeah, and I've made these a number of times.
We've talked about a bunch of them.
I think the number one problem is you work on something.
You build something that doesn't matter.
You build something that nobody cares about.
And that's usually because you didn't do your homework beforehand.
That's the reason why.
You just didn't take the time to step back and think about it.
And think of it in a way of, what's the problem I'm solving?
Who has that problem?
And is it the most important problem to solve for them?
And those three questions are really important early on,
and that's what people don't do.
So I didn't just tell you what the problem they have is.
I told you how I would solve it.
And every time that I haven't went through those three things,
I've essentially failed because whatever I was building
wasn't aligned with what people really, really needed,
what their number one challenge or problem was.
Even today, I was direct messaging with the founder,
and he was literally telling me,
my product takes two minutes to install.
I'm like, cool.
And he's like, but nobody's installing it.
I'm like, okay.
And then I'm like, is it a priority for them?
Is it related to a challenge they have?
They're like, the founder said, it's not a priority.
They have these three other priorities that he listed out.
And all I replied to him was,
find a way to make what you're doing a priority for them,
or find a way to frame it
so it helps them with one of their priorities
and make sure it helps them with that priority,
or just pivot, as they say,
and change up what you're doing to build something
that actually helps them with the priorities they have.
Because if you're not helping people with what they care about,
then you're not meeting them where they are.
And the key in life in general to have a happy life
and also a successful product is to meet people where they are
and continue to do so as you grow and scale the business.
Great advice.
And it's something I really hope people take to heart
because you're right.
It's one of the biggest blunders you can make as a founder.
And it's something you always have to be on your toes for.
You can never sort of take it for granted
and relax and stop worrying about what matters to people.
Oh, no.
Ian, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's been a pleasure.
Listen to your story.
Listen to some of your semantic rants.
Tell listeners where they can go to find out more about you and FYI.
Maybe I can get in touch if you feel like giving some of this free advice to people.
Yeah, I'm happy to.
I'll definitely be jumping on the Q&A
and we can see if we can do something special if you're up to it.
Basically, I'm at HNSHA on Twitter.
So HNSHAH.
And then I'm at my product, which you can all use
because it's free and it's paid,
but it's freemium, as they say,
is at use FYI.com and it's called FYI.
And then my newsletter is free, completely free,
and it's called Product Habits and it's at producthabits.com.
Those are the three kind of main spots today.
And you'll see me on Indie Hackers as well
whenever Cortland says I should show up.
Anytime, man.
AMA next week.
Awesome.
Okay.
If you want, let's do it.
I'll email you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ian.
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