Jake Knapp: recommendation

Transcript context

…That's actually really helpful context. And speaking of the Substack, Recommendations feature was one of the most game-changing features for me with my newsletter because it basically supercharged my growth. So I get why they'd be so excited about bringing this learning to other ideas and to their own startups. So thank you guys for doing that. And I'm even more excited to see what they're building. Well, let's take a look. So this board here that we're looking at, this is like their Miro board. So we've got a big template. And whether you're watching on YouTube or listening to this episode, we'll talk about at the end how you can get access to this template, which will kind of guide you through the process. But what happens in this first step in the Foundation Sprint, in the basics, as we said before, is that we're going through a sequence of questions. Who's the most important customer, for example, is the first question, the very first question that a team needs to answer. And as we do that, just as an important side note, we're using this tactic that we call work alone together. And specifically the note and vote is this method where everyone's in silence, in this case both Chris and James, but if you have a team of seven, it's all seven people be working in silence, writing down their own answers to this question, who's the most important customer or who are all the different kind of customers we might consider? Writing down multiple answers. And then once we've got those answers, the team's going to vote on those. And then one person who's designated as the decider, usually it's going to be the CEO of the startup, but it could be in some cases, maybe it's the chief product officer, whatever, however they decide to do it. But one person's going to say, "Okay, this is our decision for now, and now we're going to move on." And by doing this and using silence and using structure and then having a designated decision-making process, we can move through a lot of conversations very quickly and save some of that energy that it requires to make the decisions that matter most. In this case, what we're really worried about on day one of our Foundation Sprint is differentiation. So we don't want to spend too long on the basics. Anyway, we motor through customer problem, the capability, the insight, the motivation that the team has, those are all advantages, and who are the competition. And we get this sort of one-page sheet, the basics, and it's going to have the answers to all those questions. Who's our customer? In this case, artisans who want to sell online, but they sort of find tech and marketing to be hard. The problem is sales growth. If we jump down to the competition, their number one competitor is Shopify, but Etsy is another way people approach this, as we mentioned. But there's also in-person sales and art fairs or other ways that people try to get at this problem. And realistically, if you're delivering a solution, you need to stand out from all of those. And then there are advantages. We talked about this key one, they built Substack's network growth features, so they know how to do this thing. So now we've established the basics. We're going to move on to differentiation. Before you do that actually, let me ask you a question here. Because I think people seeing this could think, "Oh, this is like... I know all this stuff, it's so obvious." It's like, "Okay, I get it. I have an idea, I don't need to do this." Where do you find people most are often surprised by something that emerges out of this? Is one of these buckets often, wow, this is often not what you expected, or is it generally a lot of surprises? What do you experience there?…

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