Lecture 7 - How to Build Products Users Love (Kevin Hale)

all right so um when I talk about making products users love um what I mean specifically is like how do we make things that has a passionate user base that um our users are unconditionally um wanting it to be successful both on the products that we build but also the companies behind them uh we're going to go over tons of information um try not to take too many notes mostly just try to listen I'll post a link to the slides on my Twitter account and on that uh link there'll be a ways for you to

annotate the slides and you can ask me questions and so if we don't get to them I'll answer them after the talk so you guys have been listening to and hearing a lot about growth over the last several weeks and um to me I feel like growth is usually fairly simple it's the interaction between two sort of Concepts or variables uh conversion rate and churn right and the gap between those two things pretty much indicate how fast you're going to grow and most people especially business type people tend to look at this interaction in terms

of a very calculated and a mathematical sort of way and today I sort of want to talk about these things at a more human scale right because at a startup when you're interacting with your users you have a fairly intimate interaction that you have in the early stages and so I think there's a different way of looking at this stuff in terms of how we build our products and we'll look at a lot of different examples of that and how it's executed well my philosopy behind a lot of things that I teach uh startups is

the best way to get to sort of a billion dollars is to focus on the values that help you get that first dollar to acquire that first user if you sort of get that right everything else will sort of take care of itself it's a sort of Faith thing so uh I came to be a partner at YC by way of being alumni I went through the program in Winter of 2006 it was the second ever program and I built a product called Wu wfu is an online form Builder helps you create contact forms and

online surveys and simple payment forms uh it's basically a database app that looks like it's designed by Fisher Price what's interesting though is that because it was fairly easy to use we um had customers from every industry market and vertical you can think of including a majority of the Fortune 500 companies out there ran that company for five years and they were acquired by Survey Monkey in 2013 and at the time um we're very interesting acquisition uh we were only a team of 10 people at the time and while we acquired funding out here in

Silicon Valley through y combinator um we actually ran the company from Florida we had uh no office everyone worked from home and um we're an interesting outlier so each dot here represents a startup that was that exited through IPO or acquisition and we're this outlier to the left the bottom is the funding amount they took and the vertical axis is the valuation of the company at the time to sum it up the average startup raises about2 5 million and their return to their investors is about 676 per. wuu um raised about $118,000 total and a

return to our investors is about 29,000 per. so a lot of people were very interested in sort of like what makes we feel a little bit different or why how do we run the company very differently and a lot of it was focused on product we weren't interested in building software that I guess uh that just people wanted to use right that reminded you that you worked in the cubicle because it was a database app at it sort of core um we wanted a product that people wanted to love uh that people wanted to have

a relationship with and we were actually very fanatical about how we approached this idea uh at the point where it was almost sort of um in a sort of sciency sort of way so what we said was like okay um what's interesting about startups in terms of us wanting to create things that people love is that love and unconditional sort of feelings are things that are difficult for us to do in sort of real life and at startups we have to do it sort of at scale so we decided to do is start off by

just looking at like okay how does real relationship work work in the real world and how can we apply them to sort of how we run our business and sort of build our product that way so we'll go over basically these two metaphors acquiring new users as if we're trying to date them and existing users as if it was a successful marriage so when it comes to dating uh a lot of the stuff that we uncovered had to do with First Impressions um all of you often talk about your relationships in terms of the origin

story if I should tell me about the first kiss how you sort of met how you proposed these are the things that we say over and over and over again they're basically the word of mouth stories of our relationships and they the same kinds of things that we do with companies human beings are relationship manufacturing creatures we cannot help but create and anthrop mories the things we interact with over and over again so whether it's the cars we drive the clothes we wear the tools and softwares we use we eventually describe characteristics to it a

personality and we expect to behave a certain way and that's how we sort of intera interact with it now first impressions are important for the starting of any relationship because it's the one we tell over and over again right and there's something special about how we regard that origin story I'll give you an example if you're on a first date with somebody and you're having a nice dinner and you catch them picking their nose uh you are probably not going to have another uh date with them right but if you're married to someone for about

20 to 30 years and you catch them on the bark and larger uh digging for gold right you don't immed like call your lawyer right and then say like we have a problem here I need to start drawing up papers for divorce you shrug your shoulders and say at least he has a heart of gold so something about first time interactions means that the threshold is so much uh lower in terms of past fail so in soft Ware and for most products in Internet software that we use like first impressions are pretty obvious and there

are the things that you see a lot of companies sort of pay attention to in terms of what they send their marketing people to work on my argument for people who are very good at product is they discover so many other first moments and they make those something memorable right the very first email you ever get from a piece of software what happens when you first log in the links the advertising the very first time you interact with customer support all of those are opportunities to seduce so how did we think about sort of like

making first moments on there and we actually took this concept from the Japanese uh they actually have two words for how to describe things when you're finished with them in terms of saying like is this a quality item and the two words of quality are at hitsu and medek hitsu and the first one means taken for granted quality basically functionality and the last one sort of means enchanting quality right take for example a pen right something has medchi right if the weight of the pen the way the ink flows out of it the way it's

viewed by the people reading the handwriting from the pen is pleasurable both to the user of the pen and the people who s of going to experience the byproducts of it right taking it to the sort of Next Level start with some examples so this is Wu's uh login link and it has a dinosaur on it which I think is awesome but um if you hover over it the spec has the added benefit of having a tool tip that doesn't explain you like how to log in or what it does but basically ra and what

we noticed about this like in early usability studies as like this put a smile on people's faces like hands down right universally and I think a lot of times when we are assessing products we never think about like hey what is the emotion on the person's face when they interact with this this is viu's login page uh this is actually a couple it iterations go it's one I find to be the most beautiful but it lets you know that when you're starting out on this journey with Vimeo that this is going to be something different

um they do this all over the app if you search for the word fart as you scroll up and down it makes fart noises as you do this right there's something different like this site interacts with you it's a little bit magical it's a little bit different and it's something that you want to talk about you don't have to always do it with design um this is the sign up form for cour which used to be a social network for people who love to drink wine um on it it says email address it's also your

signment and it has to be legit first name what your mom calls you last name what your army buddies call you password something you remember but hard to guess password confirmation think it type it again think of it as a test it's literally a poem as you fill out the form right and this is the kind of like thing where you're like oh I like the people behind this I I'm going to enjoy this experience now what does it say when you fill out a form like this right on Yahoo about what the personality of

this site is going to going to be and what's disappointing to me is like Yahoo forces every product and service under them to use this exact same login form flicker I had thought had one of the best sort of called the actions it was get in there right this is heroku's um sign up page I think this is an older version but what's remarkable about it is that what you start getting a feel for is like oh scaling up my sort of server and backend Services is as easy as just sort of dragging up and

down different sort of knobs and levers it's going to be beautifully used and looks fairly easy to scale since we're in a room full of uh computer science people I think you'll appreciate that this is choc lot this is a a code editor and they only have one call to action when the time limit is up they said everything in terms of all the features are exactly the same except we change the font to Comic Sands and what they're basically saying is like hey we know who our users are who our real customers are and

they're going to be the people who care about this this is hurl this is website for checking HTTP requests and sometimes the places where you get errors or opportunities for first moments um if you hit a 404 this is what you get when when we need help often times what we do is we create like really beautiful um Mar marketing materials but when you actually need like documentation we sort of like skimp out on sort of design features and this is a point that like you see happen over and over again a company that gets

this right is MailChimp and what they did was they redesigned all their help guide so that they look like magazine covers and overnight basically readership goes up on all these features and customer support for these things that sort of helps people optimize emails goes down speaking of documentation stripe what's interesting about an API company is that there is no ux the ux is actually just documentation right and there's opportunities even in documentation sort of the enchant and amaz so one of the things that I love about them is their examples are wonderful but if you're

actually like sort of logged into the app one of the things that is a super pain for most people when you're dealing most people's apis is like grabbing your API credentials and keys and what stripe does is it says oh if you're logged into the app we automatically put your API credentials into the examples so you only have to copy paste once when you're trying to learn their API when Wu wanted to launch the third version of our API we realized like okay that finally this is good enough that we want people to sort of

build on top of it we're trying to figure out like how do we launch this out to the world that sort of has our personality behind it because a lot of people they usually do things like a programming API contest and they give out iPads and iPhones and it makes you look like everyone else and so in our company uh one weird value they have that's a quirk of us is that the co-founders are big medieval nuts and we would take everyone out to Medieval Times every single year on the anniversary of the founding of

the company and so we said we have to do something in that flavor and so we contacted the guys at armor.com we said uh can you forge us a custom battle ax and what we said was if you win our programming contest uh you would win one and the result is like people wanted to talk about this it was something that people wanted to work on because they wanted to be able to say like I'm programming for a weapon and um what's cool is we had over 25 different applications created for us of quality and

quantity that we could not have paid for on the budget and sort of time that we had for this we got things like an iPhone app an Android app and WordPress plugins right and all because what we did was we changed how people want to talk about the origin story of how they're interacting with one of our services we can go like all day long I'm going over these examples but I'm going to shortcut this by saying you should just subscribe to little big details it's just basically tons of screenshots of software that's just doing

it right that shows that they're being conscientious of the user and the customers when it comes to long-term relationships or marriages uh the only research that we ended up having to read is the stuff that was done by John gotman uh he's been featured in This American Life and Malcolm gladwell's books uh he's a marriage researcher up in Seattle and he has an interesting parlor trick that he can do he can watch a videotape of a couple fighting about some issue for 15 minutes and predict with an 85% accuracy rate whether that couple will be

together or not or divorced in four years if he increases that video up to an hour and ask him to also talk about their hopes and dreams that prediction rating goes up to 94% they show these same videotapes to marriage counselors successfully married couples sociologist psychiatrists priests Etc and they can't predict with random chance whether people are going to be together or not so John gotman understands something fundamental about how relationships work in the long term and that basically um how we fight even in a short-term period can indicate sort of the whole system and

what going to look like and one of the surprising things he discovered is not that successfully married people don't fight at all turns out everybody fights and we all fight about the exact same things money kids sex time and others and others are things like jealousy and the in-laws to bring this around right you can actually attribute every single one of these to problems that you see in Customer Support when you're building out your products right so this cost too much uh I'm having problem problems with the credit card if you're building a service that

helps people deal with their clients they're very sensitive about anything happening with that performance uh how long you're up and how fast others are I said jealousy and in-laws right so that's competition and partnership so anything weird happening there people going to write to you about and the reason I like to think about this in terms of customer support is that in everyone's sort of processing of like a conversion funnel customer support is the thing that happens in between every one of these steps it's the reason why people don't make it further down there it's

a thing that prevents conversion from happening now as we were thinking through all these ideas and as we're building up the company we realize that there's a big problem about how everyone sort of starts their company or build up their sort of engineering teams and that is there's a broken feedback loop there people are divorced from the consequences of their actions and this is a result of actually the Natural Evolution of how most companies get founded especially by technical co-founders right before launch it is a time of bliss Nirvana and opportunity right nothing that you

do is wrong right by your hand which you feel is like God everything that you write every line of code feels perfect right and is a genius to you the thing that happens is after launch reality sort of sets in and then all these other tasks sort of come into place that we have to deal with now what technical co-founders want to do is get back to that initial State and so what we often do and what we often see is that companies start siloing off all these other things that actually is what makes a

startup or a company sort of real right and have other people do them to in our minds these other tasks are inferior right and we have other people in the company do them and so for us what we're trying to figure out is how do we change software development so that we inject some values um that we don't talk about enough responsibility accountability humility modesty right and we call this um like a lot of other people we we we had an acronym support driven development and basically very similar to T tdd or other agile practice

it's a way of creating high quality software but it's super simple you don't need like a scrum you don't need a bunch of Post-it notes all you have to do is make everyone do customer support and what you end up having is you fix the feedback loop right the people who build the software are the ones supporting it and you get all these sort of nice benefits as a result so one of them is support responsible developers and designers and people build the stuff they give the very best support now we're not the first person

to think of this um Paul English was a big reporter of this at kayak and what he did was install a red customer support phone line in the middle of the engineering floor and it just reading with customer support calls and um people would ask him often times why would you pay Engineers $120,000 or more to do something that you can pay other people a fraction of uh they handle in like a call center and he says well after the second or third time that that phone rings and the engineer gets the same problem they

stop what they're doing they fix the bug and we stop getting phone calls about it it's it's a way of having QA and a sort of nice elegant solution now John gotman talks about the reason that we often break up with one another as due to four major causes and their warning signs he causes them four horsemen right criticism contempt defensiveness and stonewalling now criticism is basically um people's starting to focus not just on the specific issue at hand but on the overarching issues like you never right listen to users or you never think about

us all the time right contempt is when someone is purposely trying to insult somebody defensiveness is not trying to take um account ability trying to make excuses for the actions and stonewalling is basically shutting down stonewalling to johnas is one of the worst things that we can do in a relationship hold up and often times you know we don't worry much about this in customer sport criticism and contempt right defensiveness you see this all the all the times in companies especially as they get older but stonewalling this is something I see happen with startups all

the time you get a bunch of customer support sort of coming in and you just think I don't need to answer it I don't need to respond right and that act of just not even getting back to them is one of the worst things you can do and it's probably some of the biggest causes of churn in the early stages of startups this is how support worked out Wu um when we were acquired we had about 500,000 users on the system 5 million people used wfu forms and reports whether they knew it or not and

all those people got support from the same 10 people and usually it was only one person dedicated support a day or any any shift resulted in about 400 issues a week it's about 800 emails but a response time from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. was between 7 to 12 minutes right and from 9:00 p.m. to midnight it was an hour and then on the weekend it would be no longer than 24 hours and we carried this up all the way up to the scale what a lot of people forget about and often talk about with

Airbnb is how like oh they did this interesting thing where they had went up to New York and offered like professional photographers and the founders would go out there and actually take pictures of the people's Apartments to help them sell more focusing on the stories around conversion what most people don't realize is a lot of times when I saw Joe in the early days of Airbnb he had a phone sort of headset stuck to his head all the time because he was doing phone support nonstop turn is a story that we don't like to talk

about all the all the time Airbnb sort of growth really started picking up once they figured out how to match capacity to the demand or the phone calls they were getting into their support system at wuu we actually constantly did experiments around support because we were so obsessed with it one experiment we did was we heard Kathy CR do a talk about there's a disconnect between the emotions that we have when we need help and sort of the content and the reactions we get from people when we get help from them especially online because they

just don't see all those um non-verbal cues so she said unless there's face recognition on the web we're just always going to be disconnected from our users our feeling was like well we're not face it recognition experts but I think there's another way of getting empathy so as form Builders we added a drop down and what we said was like hey what's your emotional state and our hypothesis was that no one was going to fill this out we basically thought oh okay you know what um this is going to be pretty uh a lame experiment

but we'll see how it sort of goes and it turned out the emotional state drop down field was filled out 75.8% of the time the browser type drop down field just in comparison was filled out 78 .1% of the time right so people were basically telling us for my technical support issue uh how I feel about this problem is just as important as like all the technical details you need to sort of figure out how to debug it now we didn't prioritize things or triage things by emotion right and for the most part people didn't

gain the system one of the interesting byproducts of it was that we noticed that people started being nicer to us in the customer support it was something sort of subconscious we just were thinking like wow are you users are so much better now what's going on and um we went back and looked at the data and we did some text analysis and we we realized is that oh when it comes to only communicating with people over uh written words like email there's only three ways that you show strong emotions right exclamation marks uh curse words

and all caps and sure enough on all three of those metrics they've gone down in sort of the way people were talking to us and the customer support once people had a simple outlet for their emotions right people will be a lot more rational and made our jobs a lot more pleasant as a result the other byproduct that is awesome is that you actually build better software when you do this far better software this is actually backed up by tons of research Jared spool at user interface engineering which is sort of the big players in

this space says like there's a direct correlation to how much time we spend directly exposed to users and how good our designs sort of get he says it has to come in a specific way has to be direct exposure right it can't be something where someone generates a report or through a graph you have to be interacting them somewhat real time it has to be a minimum of every six weeks and has to be for at least two hours otherwise your software will get worse over time our developers our people who are on on Wu

were getting exposed to our users four to eight hours every single week and what it does is it changes the way you sort of build software jarol has another way of talking about how we build products right and let's imagine that this represents all the knowledge needed to sort of uh use your app on a spectrum right this is like no knowledge right this is all the knowledge needed right and these two lines are pretty much your interaction with users what you're trying to get them to this is currently where their knowledge point is and

this is the target knowledge point that you're trying to get them too to understand and use your app the gap between those is called a knowledge Gap Jared call it's both calls and what's interesting about this is there's only two ways right to sort of fix this that Gap represents how intuitive your app is right you either get the user to increase their knowledge or you decrease the amount of knowledge that's needed to use your application and often times as engineers and people who build and work on products we think let's add new features and

new features only means let's increase the knowledge Gap so for us we actually focus a lot on the other sort of Direction and so what that meant is we spent a lot of time 30% of our engineering time was spent on internal tools to help with our customer support stuff but often times it was spent helping people help themselves things like frequently asked questions tool tips um things like if you just click the help link right instead of taking you to the generic help sort of documentation page you go to the specific page where you're

looking at that's going to be most sort of appropriate for what you're working on WE redesigned our documentation over and over again AB tested it constantly one iteration of our documentation reduced customer support by 30% overnight it's one of those things where like overnight all the people that work on the product immediately had 30% less work to do now what happens if you have everyone work on customer support constantly and thinking about it in terms of a remarkable way well I talked a lot about in the very beginning growth is a function of conversion and

churn this is growth curve for the first 5 years right what's interesting is we paid no money on advertising on marketing all of it was done by Word of Mouth growth right and the interaction between like new users and downgrades are this it's so slight what it takes that Gap making that sort of work and what a lot of people keep forgetting is that there's almost no difference between an increase in conversion rate 1% increase and a 1% decrease inurn they do exactly the same thing to your growth however the ladder is actually much easier

to do it's much cheaper to do in your apps and a lot of times we neglect this neglect this to way far along right and we usually have our B Team Works on these sort of products and services this is actually not the graph that we track most of the time at w it's not even the one I'm proud of this is the one I'm proud of because even though we had this sort of nice awesome curve of growth this is what allowed us to scale keep it compan small have an awesome culture and that

required doing a lot of these things to help people sort of do what they need so John gotman noticed there was a different type of behavior for relationships and why people divorc basically there would be some subset of people who would stay together 10 15 years and then all of a sudden they divorce and there was none of the other indicators which sort of show that this is what was going to happen and he was looking through the data and he realized oh there's no passion there's no fire between these people right when it comes

to relationships they kind of follow the second law of Thermodynamics right in a closed Energy System things tend to run down so you have to constantly be putting energy and effort back into it now the way a lot of people sort of think about showing people that I care about you in products and in companies is to do things like let's have a Blog right let's have a newsletter the thing is we look at these rates and basically it was such a small percentage of our active users that it was like most of our users

have no idea all the awesome stuff that we're doing for them so we built a new tool and we called it the Wu alert system and what allowed us to do is just timestamp every new feature that we're building for users and then every time they would log in we would look at the difference between their login time or last login time and the new features that were implemented and we had this message show up hey since you've been gone here's all the awesome stuff that W did for you hands down this was the most

talked about future I've ever had every time I went out to talk to users right they'd say like dude I love that since you since you've been gone thing even though I pay the same amount every single month you guys are doing something for me almost every week and it's totally awesome and makes me feel I'm getting maximum value other thing that we did in addition to having everyone support the people that paid their paycheck is have them say thank you and this was a large part due to us injecting sort of humility and modesty

in into sort of the equation um every single Friday we would get together and we just write simple handwritten thank you cards to our users and I know there's tons of people who would not be sort of excited about doing this but it was a ritual that made sort of all the difference in terms of like having a team that was very tightly neat tightly knit also and working on stuff that they really cared about they always constantly knew what the mission was for and why we sort of did what we did these are aren't

fancy thank you cards right they're just simple like handwritten stuff on an index card we threw in a sticker and slapped on a dinosaur on the front of it and what's interesting is we started this practice as a result of uh the early days of starting wuu Chris Ren and I were talking and we're trying to figure out what are we going to do uh to sort of show us just that we appreciate them around Christmas and he Chris came up with this idea where he said uh Hey guys so a couple years ago my

mom like made me write uh thank you notes to All my relatives for uh my Christmas gifts and I didn't really like to do it but the following year all my presents were super good so I think we should try this for our business and see how it goes so that first year we wrote handwritten Christmas cards to all of our users that first year second year rolls around and we have too many customers like and it's still just the three founders and we were going like uh we're kind of screwed I don't know what

we're going to do and we read a book called the ultimate question and in it he talks about hey just focus on your most profitable users if you just send them and take care of them things will work out so we're like all right that that makes sense that's scalable so that year we only write to our highest paying customers and the January rolls around that second year and one of our longtime loyal users writes us and he's basically like hey guys um I I really loved that Christmas card you sent me the first year

and I just wanted you to know I haven't received my second card yet and I'm just looking forward to I know you didn't forget about me um thanks a lot so we're like because best way to sort of exceed expectations is not to send any to begin with so we were like sort of in this Con conundrum and what we decided after thinking about it for a while is that we need to stop doing it you know just one time a year it needs to be something that's part of the culture happens every every every

sort of week even and even though we'll never catch up to all of our customers just the practice of doing it will make all the difference I talked a lot about a bunch of like lovey doy stuff and sort of like touchy Fey things that I think a lot of Engineers don't like to think about too often and so I'll end on some sort of hard business uh data or research there's an article that was put out by the Harvard Business Review several years ago by Michael trcy and Fred wierman and in it they talk

about the discipline of Market leaders they say there's only three ways that you achieve market dominance and depending on how you want to achieve that market dominance you have to organize your company in a very specific way best price best product the best overall solution if you want to be the best price out there you focus on Logistics a Walmart and Amazon if you want to be the best product out there you focus on R&D Apple's usually a quintessential example of that best overall solution it's about being customer intimate and this is the path that

you see followed by luxury Brands and hospitality industry what I love about this path towards market dominance is that the third one is the only one that everyone can do at any stage of their company requires almost no money to get started with usually just requires a little bit of humility and some manners and as a result you can achieve success as any other people in sort of your Market that's all I got thank you very much yeah let's take some questions you guys have any right in the back there products that users love you

might have a multiple different types of users how do you build one product that all users love maybe there's a feature that one really likes but detracts value from someone else all right so what do you do when you have a product with lots of different type of users right some users will love one thing and another will another and I agree there's a interesting fine line for that what I always usually tell people is focus on the people who are the most passionate especially in the early stages right whoever's whatever Niche it's going to

be that's who i' focus on completely things that a lot of different prod products did I think Ben Silman of Pinterest started off with uh design bloggers right curtail your thing for them and eventually you'll figure out sort of universal values that will appeal to a lot of other people so just start one at a time and the a lot of the examples that you see up there a lot of people make the mistake is like oh I'll just make my app funny but humor is like really difficult to do right what you want to

shoot for is something sort of witty and quite honestly you have to get functionality right so like the Japanese quality if you don't have a tame on there right don't try to do anything witty right because it will backfire on you so hands down our number one focus is make it as easy to use as possible for Wu and anything else on top was polish right here so um coer so everybody says that focus on your prod which I'm also de guy I love to BU product and I love to make it the best but

we are at certain point that we are focused on our product but we don't get like custom right so I mean so Ian second thing so how much we should focus on product but because we should do now marketing we should like get some other customers you know like and like start talking to customers but when you are too focused on your product like users are not com right so what exactly do you guys mean when you are saying like Focus fully on your product and give the best so okay so the question sort of

is uh how do we balance this sort of thing where we want to be obsessed with working on product yeah but all the other skills and sort of um tasks that are needed by company like marketing and branding and all that stuff and how how do we sort of balance that and the thing is like when startups you're juggling like tons of things constantly in the air the thing is if you're working on product like you should also always have this flip side is when you're talking to users right and for us inside of wuu

the way we got people to talk to users is they just did customer support and they got to see firsthand right away whether their feature sucked or not and also impacted everyone else in the company because everyone had a customer support shift so you had the sort of social incentive to sort of make everything work and so like I said there there should be no point where you only focus on product you should always have time where you work on product and then you see sort of what users say to you and you should always

have this virtual like feedback loop on there so be careful when you don't have that um usually what ends up happening if if you're lucky um in terms of marketing and sales like usually my feeling is like you having to spend money on marketing and advertising all that stuff it's usually a tax you pay because you haven't made your product remarkable right word of mouth growth is the easiest kind of growth and it's how a lot of the great companies sort of grow so figure out how to wait how to like have a story that

people want to tell about your product where they're the most interesting person at the dinner table right and then that person is your salesperson right that person is your Salesforce for you right here uh like what you define more Crystal Clear customer or user need and the demand is there and is the right solution how do you communicate with engineering and designing team to make sure the execution because sometimes people in the team have ideas and but still at the end of the day you have to make a decision where to go oh so how

do you make a decision on product um and communicate that with your sort of engineering team when there's like lots of different directions to go my feeling thing is that so for us we just looked at support and it was really easy because you often just saw what are the things that people are having the most amount of problems with or people asking you all the time you cannot help but get feature requests from people no matter like whatever opening or orice you have in your product or app right people will like jam feature requests

in there so you're easily going to know sort of what they sort of want your job as a product person an engineer is to not just do what they say because that way you'll just be a slave it's to figure out sort of deeply what are the reasons why underling those things and sort of solve that deep underlying reason the thing is if everyone wants to have a different way of to sort of go then ultimately it comes down to like someone's going to figure something out but also make the smallest version of each little

idea no longer than a week or two weeks to build it out there and then you can try them out and see sort of what works or don't don't work I think it's dangerous to have multiple different product directions that requires lots of time to sort of figure out Sam related to that can you tell a story of the King for a Day thing it yeah okay so um so I don't like hackathons I think they sort of suck in terms of ones done inside of companies because you spend like 48 Hours like working on

something really hard that you're sort of passionate about and 99% of them never make it to production right and it's so sort of like super sad so for us we like flipped it On's head and we came with an idea we call king for a day and it actually worked over the weekend but how it worked is um someone randomly in the company got drawn and they got to be the king and the King got to tell everyone else what to do on the product so everything that that was bothering them about Wu um about

the customer support stuff or some feature they really want to have built they got the engineering resources the marketing res advertising resources of everyone inside of the company to make it sort of happen and of course we'd work with them to figure out like what can be actually done in 48 hours um but we would do this um one to two times a year and it was like a huge kit and it was a boost to morale cuz what people most love is like working on things where it's like oh I made a difference to

the app right and so for us that's one way that we would like sort of divide time for like product Direction it's like sometimes the people that work for you they have a strong opinion about where it where it should go and it's a good way to sort of democratize it a little bit by rotating it around yes uh you said you guys all work from home uh it usually seems like a nightmare know office how did you make that work okay so we all work from home so I we'll tell you this we all

still work within the Tampa Bay area we would allow anybody work from anywhere but usually as we tried to recruit them they sort of meet our team and they just decide okay we just want to come and move here anyway um remote working is ex especially tricky it it a lot of people like to romanticize it especially people who are like employees but the thing is um an office gives you a lot of sort of benefits right and efficiencies that you now have the confid for when you have remote working but remote working also have

these other sort of efficiencies in place for example I don't have to worry about my employees losing 2 hours of their day to commuting for instance so the biggest thing that we had to do for remote working is to respect people's time and so the way we had it set up is we actually had a four and a half day work week at Wu half day on Friday was for all the meetings and stuff we said like no bizde deal meetings no talking with other outside parties they often be done on Friday on that half

day they couldn't be done in the middle of the week and then and also one day of everyone was already dedicated customer support so everyone in our company effectively only had three days each week to actually build or work on whatever they were doing but I actually firmly believe that if you have three solid days right 8 to 10 hours where you're only working on what you need to build you can get a ton of done and so what we said was you have to respect everyone's time during that 3-day period if they're in that

three-day period and what we came up with is a 15-minute Rule and the way it worked is um you can have a discussion like a chat or a phone call or whatever with someone but it could go no longer than 15 minutes so if you have some complicated issue that you couldn't figure out we'd say at 15 minutes you are to immediately table that item right and have us discuss it on Friday and You' move on to the next item on your list right the enhance productivity more often than not I I would say 90%

of the time the item never got brought up on Friday because usually what would happen is people would sleep on it and then they just magically say like hey I found a solution or like hey that's not a big problem what's ever because most problems inside of company they don't need to be solved in real time or right away the only things are when like the site is down or payments aren't working right everything outside of that is basically kind of luxury so focus on your priorities as much as possible and as a result our

10 person team did far more than many many other companies as a result but it takes extra work to make remote working happen we are an extremely disciplined sort of team and I would have to say there's almost not many YC companies that actually have been able to replicate sort of what we do I think there's only two other companies I think in YC that sort of have a same sort of disciplined working style it takes more work in a very different fashion right an office allows you to be a little bit lazier right in

terms of all these things around productivity okay over here all right um just to build off that question um as the leader of the team how did you manage to um instill a comp culture right um and also like have accountability for your employees especially because in the same working space okay how do we how do we set up accountability for employees as a manager all right so at Wu we were profitable nine months after launch so um we had profit sharing right and so it makes incentives pretty simple and clear um it would be

a multiple of whatever bonus pool that we sort of had and the performance measures would be based on sort of how they didn't cut customer support right on their duties there and sort of what they said they were wanting to accomplish or do I don't like process and I don't like lots of tools to help get people to be productive so the only thing that we had for helping people manage sort of their projects is uh to-do lists and that is like simple text files that we shared in a Dropbox account each person had their

name on it and you got to see every time someone updated their to-do list when we said is every single night you just said everything that you did that day right and then on Friday we would just go over okay this is what you said last week that you're going to do this is what you actually got done or are sort of the problems at hand and it's super simple right it creates this like nice written Trail for how to sort of handles stuff right and I don't have to worry about managing them right they

sort of set the tone for how they want to be sort of assessed and it makes it really simple and for people who are excellent at what they do right it works very very well and then when you actually have problems it's very easy to fire people I was fortunate that I never had to fire anyone at Wu right but we were able to correct a lot of people's behavior very very quickly because we just kind of look at this it's like look this is your pattern of behavior you finish a fraction of the items

on your list you do most of the items at the last second right before Friday that's a problem you've got to manage your time better and this is evidence that you've provided to us all we have to do is sort of describe it back to you and because everyone in the company sort of sees it right there's social pressure that's put into place that helps make it all sort of happen right here um how did you hire people that you know you felt would be able to work remotely and in this kind of environment that's

that's not so how do you hire people that can work uh remotely and then sort of work in this sort of fashion so pretty easily you have them work on a side project for you so you contract them out and they have to work remotely as such usually the projects I like to have them work on is about a month long right I could do things much faster for a week but usually get a good sense of like how well people sort of manage themselves and work on things from a project like that so that

was always the first assessment like we never did anything just by interviews um the other thing we had to sort of screen them for is their ability to do customer Supports because not every engineer sort of has the empathy skills to um handle that stress so um sometimes I would have people write breakup letters to me right in an interview and just like hey pretend like you have to break up with me um you have 15 minutes to write write it on there and you can only write by hand what are you going to say

and so you get a good sense of sort of their writing skills because like 90% of what you do in Customer Support is tell them bad news like uh we don't support that feature sorry that's not going to work or um it's not going to be available and so people have to have sort of tacked at that about one more question one question right here the glasses cool so it seems like you have all these like tricks and experiments that really help the company you me stor ones that didn't work out you have all these

tricks and experiments to help the company are there any ones that didn't work out all right I'll talk about one so one of the things that we did early on to try to motivate ourselves was try to get like we understood this idea of like crunch mode and that it's really bad for people like if you're doing a subscription business you need people to last for the long term and video games a lot of times they like crunch people all the time for like a specific deadline or have multiple Sprints every two weeks and you

have to shoot up to this deadline and just like exhausting and so people because what ends happening is like you might get an increase in productivity but the recovery period that you need for people is always greater right than the productivity you gain and in a company where you need everyone do customer support and being on their game and constantly put pushing out features you don't have time for recovery so um we were thinking about okay we want to build like a company vacation into how wuu sort of works to reward our users every single

year and we said okay if the vacation is sort of built in there for the recovery we can have one crunch period right before that vacation setup and we'll just only do customer support that will sort of scale with people so the way we did the very first um crunch mode is that it was just between the three founders and we had each of us draw up a 10 item to-do list that would be fairly aggressive and the first person to get through seven of their items would win and the last person to get through

seven of their items would become what we called trip and trip meant that you carried the other person's luggage and got people drinks when you're on the company vacation so we did that and during that period everyone was like pretty excited about it and motivated and in the winter got to choose the next company vacation the following year and then all of a sudden Ryan had basically poorly estimated the items on his list and he realized very quickly I'm going to lose and so he was just like uh I give up and he just sort

of stopped so crunch mode turned out to be blah mode for him because he knew he was going to lose it became pretty demoralized so as a result of doing that we decided not to do it in that similar fashion anymore so good idea that we like to talk about but it's one that we we never did again all right guys thanks a lot you can email me at kevinc com.com