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

Making Products Users Love

In this section, the speaker introduces the concept of making products that users love and explains how it can lead to a passionate user base.

Introduction

• Making products that users love means creating things with a passionate user base.

• The goal is to make users unconditionally want the product to be successful.

Growth

• Growth is determined by the interaction between conversion rate and churn.

• The gap between these two variables indicates how fast a company will grow.

Human Scale

• The speaker wants to talk about growth at a more human scale.

• Startups have an intimate interaction with their users in the early stages, which requires a different approach to building products.

Philosophy

• The best way to get to a billion dollars is by focusing on values that help acquire the first dollar and first user.

• If startups get this right, everything else will take care of itself.

Wufoo's Success Story

In this section, the speaker talks about his experience as an alumni of Y Combinator and how he built Wufoo into a successful startup.

Background

• The speaker went through Y Combinator in 2006 and built Wufoo, an online form builder.

• Despite being easy to use, Wufoo had customers from every industry, market, and vertical including Fortune 500 companies.

Acquisition

• SurveyMonkey acquired Wufoo when it was only a team of ten people based in Florida.

• Wufoo raised $118 thousand total but returned 29,000% to investors.

Building Products People Love

In this section, the speaker talks about how Wufoo built a product that people wanted to love and have a relationship with.

Fanatical Approach

• Wufoo was fanatical about building a product that people wanted to love.

• They weren't interested in building software that just people wanted to use.

Real Relationships

• Wufoo looked at how real relationships work in the real world and applied them to how they ran their business and built their product.

• They used two metaphors: finding new users as if trying to date them and treating existing users as if it were a successful marriage.

First Impressions

• When it comes to dating, first impressions are important.

The Importance of First Impressions

In this section, the speaker discusses how human beings are relationship manufacturing creatures and how we create personalities for the things we interact with. The speaker emphasizes that first impressions are important in starting any relationship.

First Impressions

• First impressions are important because they set the tone for the rest of the relationship.

• In software, first impressions are obvious and companies pay attention to them.

• People who are good at product discover many other first moments and make those memorable.

Enchanting Quality

• Atarimae hinshitsu means taken-for-granted quality while miryokuteki hinshitsu means enchanting quality.

• Miryokuteki quality is pleasurable to both the user and people who experience its byproducts.

Examples of Memorable First Moments

In this section, the speaker provides examples of memorable first moments from different websites and apps.

Wufoo's Login Link

• Wufoo's login link has a dinosaur on it with a tool tip that says "rawr".

• Early usability studies showed that this put a smile on people's faces.

Vimeo's Log-in Page

• Vimeo's log-in page lets you know that starting out on this journey with Vimeo will be something different.

• Vimeo interacts with users in a magical way which makes it stand out from other sites.

Cork Sign-up Form

• Cork's sign-up form is like a poem which makes users feel like they will enjoy their experience using Cork.

Heroku, Chocolat, Hurl, Stripe and Wufoo

In this section, the speaker talks about different companies and their approach to user experience. The companies discussed are Heroku, Chocolat, Hurl, Stripe and Wufoo.

Heroku

• Heroku's sign-up page is an older version but it shows how easy it is to scale up servers and back-end services by dragging up or down different nobs and levers.

• It looks fairly easy to scale.

Chocolat

• Chocolat is a code editor with only one call-to-action. They change the font to comic sans when the time limit is up.

• This shows that they know who their users are.

Hurl

• Hurl is a website for checking HTTP requests. When people need help with documentation they often skimp out on design features.

• MailChimp redesigned all of their help guides so that they looked like magazine covers which increased readership overnight.

Stripe

• An API company has no UX except for documentation. Stripe's examples are wonderful because if you're logged into the app your API credentials automatically appear in the examples.

• People want to talk about the origin story of how they're interacting with one of our services.

Wufoo

• When launching the third version of their API, Wufoo wanted something unique that reflected their personality. They contacted armor.com for a custom battle axe as a prize for winning their programming contest.

• This resulted in over 25 different applications created for them of quality and quantity that they could not have paid for on the budget and time that they had.

Conclusion

• John Gottman is a marriage researcher in Seattle who has an interesting parlor trick.

Understanding Relationships and Customer Support

In this section, the speaker discusses how relationships work in the long term and how it relates to customer support. They also talk about a broken feedback loop in software development and introduce Support Driven Development as a solution.

Relationship Dynamics

• John Gauntman's research shows that fighting is normal in successful marriages.

• People fight about the same things: money, kids, sex, time, jealousy, and in-laws.

• These issues are similar to problems seen in customer support for products.

Broken Feedback Loop

• Companies often silo off tasks they consider inferior after launch.

• Technical co-founders want to return to the initial state of bliss before launch.

• This results in people being divorced from the consequences of their actions.

Support Driven Development

• The speaker introduces Support Driven Development (SDD).

• SDD is a way of creating high-quality software by making everyone do customer support.

• Benefits of SDD include responsible developers giving better support and fixing the feedback loop.

The Four Horsemen of Relationship Breakups

In this section, the speaker discusses the four major causes of relationship breakups and their warning signs.

The Four Horsemen

• John Gotman identifies the four major causes of relationship breakups as criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

• Criticism is when people start to focus on overarching issues instead of specific ones at hand.

• Contempt is when someone purposely tries to insult somebody.

• Defensiveness is not taking accountability and making excuses for actions.

• Stonewalling is shutting down and ignoring an issue. It's one of the worst things that can happen in a relationship.

The Impact on Start-Ups

• Stonewalling can be a significant cause of churn in early-stage start-ups.

• Wufoo had about 500,000 users with only ten people dedicated to support. They responded within seven to 12 minutes during business hours and no longer than 24 hours on weekends.

• Airbnb's growth picked up once they figured out how to match capacity to demand by addressing phone calls into their support system.

Experimenting with Support

In this section, the speaker talks about experiments done around customer support.

Emotional State Drop-down Field

• Wufoo added an emotional state drop-down field for technical support issues based on Kathy Sierra's talk about disconnect between emotions and reactions online.

• The hypothesis was that no one would fill it out, but it was filled out 75.8% of the time.

• People were telling Wufoo that how they feel about a problem is just as important as technical details to debug it.

• By adding the emotional state drop-down field, people started being nicer to customer support.

The Importance of Customer Support

In this section, the speaker talks about how customer support can impact software development and growth.

Impact of Customer Support on Software Development

• Metrics such as response time, satisfaction rate, and ticket volume are important indicators of customer support effectiveness.

• Direct exposure to users is crucial for building better software. It should be done every six weeks for at least two hours.

• Neglecting customer support can lead to a decrease in software quality over time.

Focusing on Customer Support

• Wufoo developers spent four to eight hours per week interacting with users.

• Adding new features only increases the knowledge gap between users and the app. Decreasing the amount of knowledge needed to use an application is a better approach.

• Wufoo spent 30% of engineering time on internal tools to help with customer support, including frequently asked questions and tool tips.

• Redesigning documentation reduced customer support by 30% overnight.

Impact of Customer Support on Growth

• Word-of-mouth growth was responsible for Wufoo's growth curve in its first five years without any advertising or marketing spend.

• A 1% increase in conversion rate has the same effect as a 1% decrease in churn on growth. However, decreasing churn is easier and cheaper than increasing conversion rates.

• Keeping the company small and having an awesome culture is something that should be prioritized even more than growth.

Building Relationships with Customers

In this section, the speaker talks about how to build relationships with customers and keep them engaged.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

• In a closed energy system, things tend to run down so you have to constantly be putting energy and effort back into it.

• Many companies try to show they care about their customers by having a blog or newsletter.

The Wufoo System

• Wufoo built a new tool called the Wufoo system that allowed them to time stamp every new feature that was implemented for users.

• When users logged in, they would see a message showing all the awesome stuff that Wufoo did for them since their last login.

• This feature was highly appreciated by users as it made them feel like they were getting maximum value.

Saying Thank You

• Wufoo had everyone support the people who paid their paychecks and say thank you.

• Every Friday, the team wrote simple handwritten thank-you cards to their users.

• This practice helped create a tightly knit team working on something they cared about.

Christmas Cards

• In the early days of starting Wufoo, Chris came up with an idea to write handwritten Christmas cards to all of their users.

• As they gained more customers, they focused on writing only to their highest paying customers.

• They realized that sending cards once a year wasn't enough and decided to make it part of their culture.

The Discipline of Market Leaders

Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema discuss the three ways to achieve market dominance and how to organize a company accordingly.

Three Ways to Achieve Market Dominance

• Best price: focus on logistics, exemplified by Wal-Mart and Amazon.

• Best product: focus on R&D, exemplified by Apple.

• Best overall solution: customer intimacy, followed by luxury brands and hospitality industry.

Achieving Success through Customer Intimacy

• Customer intimacy is the only path that everyone can do at any stage of their company.

• It requires almost no money to get started with, just humility and manners.

• By focusing on customer intimacy, companies can achieve success as any other people in their market.

Building Products Users Love

The speakers answer questions about building products that appeal to multiple types of users.

Balancing Multiple Types of Users

• Focus on the people who are most passionate, especially in the early stages.

• Start with one niche group and eventually figure out universal values that will appeal to a lot of other people.

• Shoot for something witty rather than funny. Get functionality right before adding anything else on top.

Balancing Product Development with Marketing

• Balance working on product development with talking to users. Use customer support as a way for employees to see firsthand whether features work or not.

• Always have time where you work on product and then see what users say to you. Have a virtual feedback loop on there.

Product Direction and Remote Working

In this section, the speaker talks about how to determine product direction and communicate with the engineering team. They also discuss a unique approach to hackathons called "King for a Day" and how remote working can be successful.

Determining Product Direction

• Determine what story people want to tell about your product.

• Look at support issues and feature requests to identify customer needs.

• Solve underlying reasons for feature requests instead of just doing what customers say.

• Make the smallest version of each idea and try them out before committing to a product direction.

King for a Day Hackathon

• The company implemented an internal hackathon called "King for a Day."

• A randomly selected employee would become the "king" and have control over the product direction for 48 hours.

• This approach democratized decision-making and boosted morale by allowing employees to work on things that made a difference in the app.

Remote Working

• The company allowed remote working but most employees chose to work within the Tampa Bay area.

• Respect people's time when remote working by compensating for office efficiencies.

• The company had a four-and-a-half-day workweek.

Three Day Work Week

In this section, the speaker discusses how their company implemented a three-day workweek and how it increased productivity.

Three-Day Workweek

• The company implemented a three-day workweek where employees had three solid days to work on what they needed to build.

• During those three days, everyone's time was respected, and discussions were limited to 15 minutes. If an issue couldn't be resolved within that time frame, it would be tabled until Friday.

• Most problems don't need to be solved in real-time, so focusing on primary tasks during the three-day period enhanced productivity.

• The team's discipline allowed them to accomplish more than many other companies.

Accountability for Employees

In this section, the speaker talks about how they set up accountability for employees at their company.

Setting Up Accountability

• Profit sharing was used as a measure of performance based on customer support duties and goals.

• To-do lists were used as the only tool for managing projects. Each person had their own list shared in Dropbox with updates made daily.

• Every Friday, progress was reviewed based on what was accomplished versus what was planned. This created a written trail of how things were handled and made it easy to correct behavior if necessary.

Assessing Potential Employees

In this section, the speaker discusses how they assess potential employees for their ability to work remotely and handle customer support.

Month-Long Projects

• The speaker prefers to have potential employees work on month-long projects to assess their ability to manage themselves and work on a project independently.

Customer Support Skills

• The speaker screens potential employees for their ability to handle customer support, as not every engineer has the necessary empathy skills.

• To test writing skills, the speaker has had candidates write breakup letters in an interview scenario.

• Customer support involves telling customers bad news, so it's important for candidates to be able to handle that type of communication.

Failed Experiment: Crunch Mode

In this section, the speaker talks about an experiment they tried called "crunch mode" which ultimately failed.

Motivation for Crunch Mode

• The company wanted to build a company vacation into how Wufoo worked as a reward for users every year.

• They decided to have one crunch period before that vacation set up where they would only do customer support that would scale with people.

How Crunch Mode Worked

• The first crunch mode was just between the three founders who drew up ten-item aggressive to-do lists.

• The winner got to choose the next company vacation while the last person became what they called "trippage," meaning they carried other people's luggage and got drinks when on vacation.

Why Crunch Mode Failed

• One founder poorly estimated his items and realized he was going to lose, becoming demoralized and turning crunch mode into "blah mode."

• As a result of this experience, the company decided not to do crunch mode in that similar fashion again.