Grant Lee: preference

Transcript context

…The other point here is the power of onboarding, which comes up a bunch on this podcast when you talk about driving retention. So you launched Product Hunt, did great and then started kind of petering out. How much did the product change after things started to work versus onboarding? Just like how important was onboarding? And then just tell us why the first 30 seconds, where'd you come up with that number? Yeah. So for us, the onboarding and the product experience, for us that's intertwined. The analogy I always think about is if you go into a restaurant and maybe the food is good, but when you really think about the user experience, it's like the moment you walk into the door, you get seated, the waitress, waiter comes by, greets you, you can order. And of course the food has to taste good. And then you finally get the bill and you leave. Is that entire experience something that feels delightful? Is it good enough for you to tell your friends about? If someone just came by and dropped the food on your plate on the table, and just left and never came with a bill, I'm like, okay, maybe I'm not going to recommend this to somebody else. And so for us, we thought about, okay, the first moment someone walks through our door, dropping into the product, what is something we can give them? Can we shorten that time to value as much as possible? A lot of this is inspired by Scott Belsky, he talks about that first mile, the first 15 minutes. And I think that's totally right. And I think one approach is you think about new users as you almost have a cynical view of them. You have to think about them being selfish, vain, and lazy, right? They're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them in that first 30 seconds that earns you the next 30 seconds and then the next 30 seconds? And so for us, we knew that if we can't, people's attention span is even shorter to today than maybe 10 years ago, and so what is it in that first 30 seconds, can we actually show you something and earn the right to keep building that relationship with you? We really thought a lot about that, and certainly that's all we could really afford at the time. We only had 12 people building. It's like we couldn't make an entirely revamp the entire product. We knew that we had to least put all of our energy into one spot, and so we made that coming into the door, come through the door, make that moment feel magical so that we can do a little bit more over time. I love your point about how you could think of it as like, okay, it's onboarding versus the product. The lens of how do we make this incredibly valuable and aha-ish for the first 30 seconds almost informs what the product should be.…

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