Jeff Weinstein: evaluation

Transcript context

…There's a bunch of stuff I want to follow up here. One is, people may be hearing this and like, "Oh my God, I'd be overwhelmed with feedback and people to fix problems for and bugs and texting of people." They're just like, "There's so many people that potentially I'd have to be interacting with." How do you try to narrow that down? I know Atlas is a very highly adopted product. There's a ton of people, there's probably bugs, often people sending you feedback. How do you pick the people to zero in on? I think there are two parts to this. One, what a problem to have. Of all the problems in the world, "I'm overwhelmed by customer interest," is on the top list of problems I want to have. I think most entrepreneurs would purchase that problem as a state. And so, if you're in it, I think, take a deep breath and look at the sunrise or sunset and just enjoy the fact that you've built something that is meaningful enough that people would spend their time. Again, there are amazing snacks that they could be spending the time on otherwise, so that's a huge deal. And then two, you need the art. There's an art and science to picking where to go deep. I will happily respond to folks with, "I really appreciate that. Do you mind sending me a screenshot or a video?" And some of them don't. Okay, that's fine. You kind of get a sense of quickly looking at how they wrote about it or just pattern matching how detailed they were, or how much they seem that they want to engage and kind of balance it that way. Otherwise, you can tell folks, "This is really awesome. Do you mind sending me an email with three to five bullet points about the details of how you got to this issue?" And that's not a 30-minute meeting. You don't need to blow up your whole life to get on the phone with them. It's not a huge homework assignment to them, but it's enough structure that it will self-select those who want to go deep, and then from there, you really do owe it to them to follow up if they're going to be that detailed. And at that point, you really have made a product friend for life and you'll kind of continuously go back to them. So you have to kind of tune it. I also will bound some of these efforts, so I'll just completely make up one day a program. So, "Hi, Stripe's doing a bug-finder program." I made that up as I was driving to work one morning, tweeted it, was curious if anyone would send anything. "We'll be taking videos for the next three days to go super deep." And people are like, "Oh my goodness, I would love to be part of the Stripe bug-finder program. May I apply?" I'm like, "Oh, it's very selective. But yes, of course for you." It's just giving people permission through a program, even if it is deeply arbitrary, I find helps with bounding it, and then later I can follow up with the world, "Hey, we ran our first program, we got 65 videos," which we did. "We found dozens of issues," which we did. It was an incredibly valuable use of our time and it really came from just a single tweet. Something I saw you mention somewhere is that you only pay attention to feedback from people that are paying customers and ignore everything else. Can you talk about that?…

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