Jake Knapp: belief

Transcript context

…That's an awesome idea. Let's definitely do that. Yeah. Okay. Let's jump in here and take a look at a company again, in our current group of labs teams, Axion Orbital it's called. The founder, [inaudible 01:29:30], is actually running this whole process solo, which is pretty cool too. He's a remarkable guy. We have a couple of solo founders right now who are able to generate ... You can see, just to give a sneak peek, he's generating, when we talk about customers, all these sticky notes himself and making the decisions himself about which is the right one. To ground us in this story, his founding hypothesis is he wants to help geospatial devs solve these sort of complex workflows with a browser-based no-code development environment. We'll take a look just really quickly at what his prototypes look like. In the first week ... I can show you this prototype right here, and it's a marketing page. On this marketing page, there's a link to a video. If I click find out more, I'm going to see this video. This video is going to kind of hear [inaudible 01:30:27] talking over it. It's going to kind of walk through a screen share of a very rudimentary version of what this product might look like. Now, if you're watching on YouTube and you see this prototype, you might think, "Boy, that marketing page and the demo itself, pretty bare bones. Not the most polished-looking. This doesn't look super compelling." He was focusing in that first sprint on the messaging, on finding those people who actually have that role, testing it with them, and he learned a lot. If we sort of go back to his scorecard, we'll see, okay, that was a pretty good one. Actually, a lot of green on his first scorecard, but he also felt like what he tested was pretty incomplete. Now, one thing that's cool here, we saw the big leap with Latchet from one week to another in terms of their learnings and the scorecards. One of the things that's interesting here is to go from [inaudible 01:31:19]'s first prototype here to his second prototype. It's obvious he's been able to just build a ton in the next week. He's using AI-based tools. He's doing a lot of work. He's also just a terrific engineer. Here we've got a much more real-looking marketing page, very detailed. An important thing that he's done here with this is he's built out a lot and created a video of something so that the product, while not fully functional, you can see exactly how it works. If we sort of play this video, he's created this demonstration of what it looks like when you type in a query into the engine and exactly the kinds of results you get. By doing a combination of vibe coding, real coding, all of which is based off of pencil sketches, we can go back and see the sketches he's doing on paper to define this is what I think needs to be in there to make this compelling to deliver on my differentiation, and then he's using a product video so that the entire thing doesn't have to work fully freeform. ne this is what I think needs to be in there to make this compelling to deliver on my differentiation, and then he's using a product video so that the entire thing doesn't have to work fully freeform. That's what it can look like when a team is building something that's more AI-centric, when it's a more sophisticated tool, when people are going to be curious about sort of the ins and outs of it.…

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