Shishir Mehrotra: prediction

Transcript context

…Awesome. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask. The first is for founder listening to this and they're like, "Oh man, what am I loops? What's my flywheel? How do I think about my business?" Can you talk a bit about how you came upon this way of thinking about the company? And then also how do you structure your teams to work in this way if this is the way you're thinking about growth? Maybe on the first part, and I think you just hosted Casey Winters, he is pretty famous for talking about loops, not funnels. And I do think there's a very natural thing when you're building a product or building a business to think about your funnel and you think about things as being linear, that somebody comes in, they go up to your signup process and then they see your onboarding and then they get exposed to the first magic moment in your product and the second magic moment, so on. But the truth is, it doesn't really work that way. Almost all products have some form of loop. That person turns around and maybe sharing is built right in your product or maybe it's not, or maybe there's a way that it happens through advocacy, but understanding that the way products actually grow and spread happen through some type of loop not funnel, is I think pretty fundamental. So first piece of advice I'd give is you probably do have a loop. Whatever the product is, there's probably something about it that causes that loop and understanding how that works really important. I mean in terms of what it is. In our case, I'd say if you take Black Loop and Blue Loop, the Black Loop is every product in our category has that. We didn't invent it. You build a document, you put a share button on it, every product has that. Sometimes it's just recognizing what's there. It's not that interesting. The Blue Loop on the other hand, is not something that every product in our category has. It's not really a thing that you expect to do with Google Docs or Office or so on. It's our unique take on, "Hey, we're going to build a publishing platform that isn't just for sharing ideas and building things with your team, therefore putting things out in the world." I mean, one of the best compliments we hear about the Coda Gallery is I had this user tell me, this line I really love is said that the Coda Gallery feels halfway between Medium and an app store. And you can come and you can read about anything interesting in the world and you can go shopping and say, "I need one of those. I need one of those and I need one of those." And it's my view that this category, we call the all-in-one doc category, I think this is going to be critical. I don't think that there's enough people out there that are looking for a horizontal new blinking cursor. I mean, they exist and you can get through your first million users that way. But I think to get to the level of impact we want to have, we've got to find this problem, see here. So you probably have a loop, not a funnel, and it might be hiding in plain sight or it might require invention. That's the bounder dance and the fun of it, but finding it, writing it down I think is really helpful. Second part... Oh, how do we organize team? Yeah, but let me ask one quick question. You said this, I think it was a data scientist that first imagined and diagram this out because I'm curious, as a founder listening, they're like, "Oh, how do I find something like this?" I imagined part of this was, "Oh, this person brought you this interesting way of thinking." And there's this process of, "Oh wow, this is cool. Let's think about this." What was that like? Just over high level, that process.…

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