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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Belsky
Sometimes the thing you admire most in your competitor isn’t smart or scalable. They may be doing something that is temporarily advantageous to their interests but, over the long term, unsustainable.
Ultimately, the knowledge around you is greater than the knowledge within you, and your job as a leader is to tap your team’s knowledge as best you can.
Decisions based on consensus typically end up with an ordinary outcome because by seeking to please everyone, you boil your options down to their lowest common denominator: whatever option is most familiar to the most people and therefore gets the least protest and the fastest support.
No answers are obvious or everybody would be doing these things. I am amazed at how some entrepreneurial teams dither. I watch founders who want to get “air cover” for hard decisions by getting too much input from their teams or boards. I watch management team[s] hedge by building multiple products and spreading resources too thinly versus having strong conviction in their core ideas. Often I think this is because poor leaders are too worried about being loved. Respect > Love.
I watch CEOs who know they need to fire senior staff but avoid doing so instead convincing themselves that they need just six more months because this executive or that one is too valuable to lose. This drives me nuts. When decisions are clear—act. You’re a startup, not GE.
I want strong leaders. I want deciders—even if they don’t agree with me. I want “benevolent dictators.”
Sometimes you need to forget everything you’ve learned—all the classes, the “rules of the road,” conventions, what investors are telling you—and just go with your gut. It is your intuition, formed from your entire life’s experiences, revealing something that nobody else can see. Take it seriously!
The journey of building and endlessly iterating a product or service is a field unto itself, flush with best practices in design, product management, customer research, and psychology.
The honeymoon phase at the start of a venture is known not only for its boundless energy but also its remarkable clarity. In the beginning of your journey, simple solutions come easily. But as the middle becomes volatile and more problematic, we have the tendency to add complexity. We solve problems by adding more options, more features, and more nuances to our creations.
Customers flock to a simple product. The product adds new features to better serve customers and grow the business. Product gets complicated. Customers flock to another simple product.
Simple is sticky. It is very hard to make a product—or any customer experience—simple. It is even harder to keep it simple. The more obvious and intuitive a product is, the harder it is to optimize it without adding complication.
Every product or service in your life either helps you spend time or save time.
As I reflect on the new products that have improved my life the most over the years, they ultimately removed a daily friction.
As soon as you are satisfied, you become complacent. Never be truly satisfied. When you’re creating, the current version of your product should always feel underwhelming.
Productivity and performance are too often conflated. Instead, you need to decide what aspects of your team and product distinguish you most—and what you’re willing to be bad at.
Here’s a quick exercise. First, make a list of the key characteristics and values of the major players in your industry. (If you’re a freelancer, this could be other people your clients consider hiring. If you’re a start-up, it could be the industry incumbents or your competition.) Perhaps they can offer a cheaper price to their clients, a focus on customer service, the speed of delivery, or the variety of different services offered. These are the factors that customers and clients weigh when determining who to work with. Now, make the same list for yourself and your business, but focus on the
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The paradox of product success is that when you focus on pleasing your most engaged users, you stop engaging new ones. The sad reality—and the opportunity for start-ups—is that most established products take their large user bases for granted and fail to maintain simplicity over time.
A big part of the problem is that you become intimately familiar with your “power users,” the small number of customers who use your product the most. This group of customers is also often referred to as the “vocal minority.”
Pursuing a few paths in parallel keeps your options open, and it feels safe. But it’s not. The flaw with pursuing and preserving many options is that doing so stunts your progress in any particular direction. When your energy is split, so is your speed and focus, and the resources around you are harder to tap when your narrative is too broad.
We had no problem killing things that didn’t work—and there were many—but we struggled to kill things that worked just well enough.
Looking back, I now refer to years two through four as “the lost years” of Behance. We inched forward too slowly and nearly died trying to preserve more potential paths to success.
Your best chance of succeeding is to consolidate your energy around a singular focus and work like hell to achieve it.
I think the ultimate litmus test is whether you have more or less conviction about the vision than you had at the start. If you still believe that what you’re building needs to exist—and the time you’ve spent on the project only deepens your conviction for the change you will make with your product—then stick with it.
On the most basic level we created our own terminology for things that should have been kept simple. For example, we used the term “realms” instead of the more literal “creative fields” for the creative field users would use to classify their work. Our creative terminology made these features distinct from other online communities, but it also made them less familiar. We learned the hard way that new products are hard enough to figure out as it is without needing to decipher new terminology.
It will be tempting to add your own spin. The more assumptions customers have to make, the less effective a solution is, granted the simpler solution works just as well as the complex one. The best products become more effective over time, not more creative.
At first, his team of industrial designers imagined a wildly different-looking product that totally reimagined what an oven looked like. But eventually they realized that if they wanted the June oven to be considered as a viable alternative to the traditional oven, it had to look like an oven. They were already trying to disrupt a common, familiar action—cooking—so they didn’t need to complicate it even further by persuading customers to place mini spaceships in their kitchens. It’s easier to disrupt the norm by being familiar.
The only time you should force new behaviors or terminology is when they enable a unique and important value in your product. For example, Snapchat was the first social network that would open on the camera view when you clicked on the app instead of other competitive products like Instagram and Facebook that open on a feed of others’ content. This behavior struck new users as foreign, but it retrained users for an entirely different kind of social experience. Snapchat aspired to be more of a camera than an app, and launching the product in camera mode sent a strong and differentiating message
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I’ve come to believe that the most effective designers are always solving a specific problem and seem to do so more by removing than adding.
Whether you’re building a product, creating art, or writing a book, you need to remember that your customers or patrons make sweeping judgments in their first experience interacting with your creation—especially in the first 30 seconds. I call this the “first mile,” and it is the most critical yet underserved part of a product.
A failed first mile cripples a new product right out of the gate. You may get loads of downloads, presales, or sign-ups, but very few customers will get past the onboarding process to start actually using your product.
As soon as you open the product for the first time, you should know why you’re there (to design that cool app you have an idea for), what you can accomplish (the vast array of experiences you can design for, as represented by examples and a list of ways to get started), and what to do next (it should always be clear what your next step is—and the sequence of steps you must take to be successful). Once new users know these three things, they have reached a place in your product experience where they are willing to invest time and energy to build a relationship with your product.
Life has such a steep learning curve as it is with seldom enough time for work, play, learning, and love. So when something entirely new requires too much effort, we just let it pass. Our default is to avoid things that take work until we’re convinced of the benefits.
If you feel the need to explain how to use your product rather than empowering new customers to jump in and feel successful on their own, you’ve either failed to design a sufficient first-mile experience or your product is too complicated.
Often new technology initially engages users through novelty, and then as they become more familiar with the technology, it results in greater levels of utilization.
When it comes to the adoption of new products and ways of working, novelty often precedes utility. As you’re building new products and experiences for customers, consider how they will be novel before they prove useful. Don’t bury a certain feature or functionality merely because it isn’t essential for the intended use of your product. Your most important feature may be whatever gets people through the door. Sometimes the initial reason to use a product, and get through the first mile, is to have fun.
Before underlying assumptions and practices are changed, a team needs to change how they are measured. New goals must be articulated both internally and to external stakeholders, which is no small feat for a public and popular company.
“Just because you have product-market fit doesn’t mean you’re going to keep product-market fit,” he
“We knew what we wanted to do—organize news by interest and eliminate all the noise in the news space—but didn’t confirm whether people were really suffering from this. We focused too much on ourselves, our interests, and our intuition rather than testing the broader market.
Had he spent a couple of weeks focused solely on customer needs and problems first, Clément believes that he would have started something different.
Consider the rise of the popular camera and messaging app Snapchat. There were a lot of start-ups trying to help people share photos and hoping to compete with Facebook. But founder Evan Spiegel recognized the unique insecurities and preferences of its first users: teenagers. At the time of its founding in 2011, teenagers were especially sensitive to leaving a trail of data online that their parents and teachers could see. The idea of ephemeral content that would quickly disappear relieved the anxieties of these teenage users. Snapchat was also empathetic to the fact that many of these
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Having empathy for your customers should come before falling in love with your solution.
As Jerry Seinfeld once explained in an interview with Harvard Business Review when he was asked where his best ideas come from, “It’s very important to know what you don’t like,” he explained. “A big part of innovation is saying, ‘You know what I’m really sick of?’ . . . ‘What am I really sick of?’ is where innovation begins.” What frustrates you likely frustrates many others.
The final filter for an idea is whether or not you are passionate about the solution. I recall a number of on-demand laundry start-ups that had a market opportunity but whose founders realized, a few years into the journey, that they didn’t really care about laundry. Just because you see a market need doesn’t mean you’re the one to solve it. If you’re not willing to spend day and night, year after year, solving the problem, then you’re likely to fall short or quit before you figure it out.
When turning an idea into an active venture, you must seek empathy with your customers and humility in your market. Don’t let your passion drive you too far ahead of where your customer is. Empathy and humility act as powerful filters. The day you lose empathy is the day you lose.
Contrary to logic, you don’t want to attract all of your customers right away. You want your first cohort of willing customers to be quite small so that you can communicate directly and provide an incredibly high level of touch. At the start of your business, you want to iron out the kinks. As you expand, you want to do so slowly.
What makes a customer attractive throughout the life cycle of a company varies depending on the stage of your company and product. Willing > Forgiving > Viral > Valuable > Profitable
In the very beginning, when you’re either testing your product or launching it quietly, your challenge is to find customers who love new things and are willing to engage with your newly launched (or prelaunch) product. At this stage of your project, you will benefit most from customers who expect rough edges and are willing to share feedback, and continually give your product more tries as it evolves.
friend and former Adobe colleague Taylor Barada once said it best: “Product-market fit is a journey, not a destination.” As your customers change and your product changes, you need to constantly question whom to focus on.
Being the first to launch a product and reveal a new solution to an old problem is a thrilling prospect. But over time, being the best in your market exceeds the benefits of being first.
(Meerkat shut down about a year later, and their team went on to build House Party, a live-video application for groups that has thrived since its launch.)
