Sam Schillace: evaluation

Transcript context

…You have this other great quote in your newsletter, "People are lazy. Look beyond cool too, on how much easier new tool or tech makes someone's life. Convenience always wins." Can you talk about that, just this realization people are just lazy and that's the key? Yeah, well I mean that is the thing. I think as product builders, it's hard to not love what you're doing. You build a product because you love it, you build it because you understand some problem, you build it because you want a paycheck maybe sometimes. But we build it for all these reasons that just do not matter to the end user at all. And if there's one thing I've learned about product, particularly in the consumer space, just kind of in general, is people are just lazy about stuff and don't care about anything other than it making their life better. The thing that's complicated with that is there's two things about it that I think are interesting that follow from that principle. One is, I think products almost follow these thermodynamic rules where if you add a little bit of value, your adoption goes slowly and if you add a lot of value, your adoption goes really quickly, right? I think ChatGPT is a great recent example of something that was just added a ton of new value to the world and got this explosive growth, and then you see lots of other AI stuff that people are doing that's just not bad, but not great, and it's sort of kind of adding a little bit of value and slowly lumbering along, or maybe it's going to collapse under its weight. That's one thing about the users are lazy part of this. And then the other one I think is, again, it's almost like physics. I think of this as entropy, or people who are confused about entropy or will be like, "Entropy is not real. Look, it runs backwards all the time on earth. Life gets more complicated. What is the deal with entropy?" And like, "Well no, you have to consider the whole system, right? The entire system of the solar system, including the sun is increasing in entropy all the time. We're just making use of some of it." And I think the same thing is kind of true about user laziness, where people are like, "This tiny thing that I'm focusing on, this feature that I added is better. Therefore, users should adopt it." But you forget all the stuff around it. The user has to hear about it, the user has to remember it in the moment. The user has to learn how to use it, they have to build the habit. That's all effort, right? Not to mention the fact that the actual use of your feature might have friction on the way in, right? It might be hard to sign up for it. When we did Writely at the beginning, we didn't even ask for an email address, because it was such a novel thing. We didn't want any friction at all in the onboarding process. So you could just come in and make a document and start using it without telling us anything at all about yourself. And after about two minutes of typing, if you're still there, we'd very gently just say, "Please give us your email address, no password, no anything. Just give us your email address so we can send you a URL of this document in case you care about it later. Because if you leave, we'll never know where... We'll never be able to find it again." thing. Just give us your email address so we can send you a URL of this document in case you care about it later. Because if you leave, we'll never know where... We'll never be able to find it again." But we were super focused on that, as little friction as possible. And I think it's well known in the consumer space, you don't have... The number of seconds you have is not many. 15 seconds, 30 seconds, right, to convince somebody that there's some value there. They're not going to hang out and grind their way through a bunch of high-friction stuff to sign up for your thing. That's the other part of it is just, users will only adopt what you're doing if that sum total of energy that they have to expend is less than the resulting ease in their life that they get, usually by a factor of at least a couple, right? So it has to make your life a lot better, hopefully a really a lot better, like 10X better than what you spend to use it.…

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