Grant Lee: recommendation

Transcript context

…Important advice. Okay. There's a couple more elements you've shared that were key to Gamma's growth. One is sharing prototypes with users before you ship. What does that look like? What does that mean? Why is that so powerful? Yeah. I mean, this for us was a huge unlock. Going back to early days, when you're just trying to get your product into anybody's hands, you're getting to your friends trying to use it, and again, they're going to lie to you, tell you how great it is, and then never come back to using the product. I think what you want to be able to do, the ideal situation is, you recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users or customers of your product, but have zero skin in the game. They do not care at all whether or not your product succeeds. They're just in it to test it. And for us, it was people that have made slide decks or make slide decks regularly, let's drop them into Gamma, give them very little context. We just tell you, "Hey, this is an alternative to PowerPoint. Go ahead and try it." And then as you're going through the onboarding flow and testing the product, just tell us everything that's going on in your head, describe what you're seeing, tell us what you're trying to do. We'll give you maybe a few different tasks like, "Oh, create a piece of content." And when you watch them do that and also hear what they're saying, you just immediately feel the pain. All the places they're struggling and all the places are so confused by what they're seeing and you sort of then can internalize that pain and say, "Okay, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is not usable." We, oftentimes, are dog-fooding everything. And so you can get to the point where you're so familiar with your own product, everything feels kind of easy and you know where things are, but when you start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product, that's a gift. You're all of a sudden you're like, "Okay, now I know where to actually spend the time. " People aren't even getting to the third screen. They're stuck on the first screen because they can't even find the button that we think is so dead obvious, and so let's go back and actually re-engineer, re-architect that piece of it. And we've done that for everything: landing pages, onboarding experience, new feature launches, export, sharing, every single piece of that such that we can actually see where things are working or not. And then every time, we'll learn something that's kind of painful, but obvious that we need to fix and we go back and fix it. How do you scale this sort of thing? How do you run every new big idea, new feature change by people? Do you have a closed beta group, a decent platform? How do you actually do this?…

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