Week 1152

I spent some time this week exploring what I want to work on after my current project (multiplayer editing) at Retool. One thing that I’m interested in is growth and activation; I think it would be a fun topic to learn about and can potentially have outsized impact on Retool’s business. I went through some articles and podcasts and here are 2 resources I found most useful:

• YC’s guide on starting and scaling a growth function
• Sri Batchu (Ramp’s head of growth) on Lenny’s Podcast
  • Ramp’s numbers for context:
    • fastest company to reach 100M USD revenue (took 2 years)
    • grew revenue 4x in 2022
    • currently under 500 employees
  • Sri comes from an investing background and takes a very analytical approach to growth
    • Distributes his budget across a portfolio of bets (aka channels)
    • Example channels: paid marketing team, lifecycle CRM team (emails), field marketing team, sales (outbound and inbound), self serve activation, website/SEO
    • There isn’t one specific channel that they have uniquely invested more into; their channel distribution is fairly standard when compared to similarly sized companies
    • They instead focus on optimizing the efficiency of channels by deploying product and engineering resources
    • There is also a cross-functional skunkworks team that tests new channels to see if they are worth investing in

One of the most important parts of activation is user onboarding, and I’ve been trying to develop some intuition on what the ideal onboarding experience should be. I tried the onboarding flows for some other B2B SaaS products such as Airtable, Notion, Linear, Canva, and Figma. Here are some of my general takeaways:

• All of them have a similar sign up flow: user auth, user background form, invite teammates, and sometimes a guided setup process (eg add third party integrations).
• I really like how Linear embedded the onboarding steps into the product itself. Linear displays the onboarding steps as a set of prefilled tasks/tickets so the user would naturally learn how to use the product as they clear those tickets.
• Notion has a similar embedded todo list but also provides templates (customized based on the user background form) to give examples of how a user might use Notion.
• Figma has a guided walkthrough/tutorial but first asks the user for permission before they show it. The tutorial guides the user through a series of tooltips; each of which contains an image, description, link to docs, progress counter, and close button to exit the tutorial early. I like how the tutorial is extremely detailed and thorough but is nonblocking and only shows when the user explicitly allows for it.
• Key takeaways:
  • The goal of onboarding experiences should be to teach the product’s core concepts and highlight the pains that the product can solve for.
  • The main design tradeoff is how much freedom vs handholding to provide. Too much freedom and the user might never figure out how to use the product. Too much handholding and users will get annoyed with the product for being restrictive and wasting their time.
  • IMO onboarding experiences should allow the user to self-explore the product as much as possible and provide prescriptive guidance only when asked for or when it is absolutely necessary (there may be a deeper product issue if too much guidance is needed).

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Books:

I finished reading Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang. I would highly recommend it if you want to challenge yourself to see the world in different ways. It’s a collection of sci-fi short stories and each story presents a new perspective on how to think about our existence.

I started reading The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova. She’s a psychology PhD who became a professional poker player and wrote this book to describe her journey from starting as a noob to becoming a winning tournament player. I read through the first two chapters fairly quickly since they were focused on describing the poker world for the uninitiated.

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Podcasts:

Nuclear fusion discussion at the All in Summit

• My main takeaway is that there are many startups and research labs working on nuclear fusion and there is optimism to start deploying nuclear energy in the 2030’s
• From my current understanding, fusion is better than fission because:
  • it produces more energy
  • produces less radioactive waste
  • doesn’t rely on a chain reaction so is technically safer
  • we have a large amounts of deuterium which is one of the main fuel sources for fusion
• Despite high optimism that we will eventually have abundant and cheap energy due to nuclear fusion, we still need to spend a lot of time and money on other clean energy sources to reduce our carbon emissions during the decades before nuclear fusion becomes mainstream

Colin and Samir Show on AI Youtubers

• They discussed a youtuber Kwebbelkop who created an AI VTuber to replace himself in his youtube videos. As a newcomer to Kwebbelkop’s content, the AI seems to be pretty high quality. He already has several uploads from Minecraft gameplay to reaction videos. There’s been a lot of mixed responses to this change and there’s also a legal gray area in that Youtube doesn’t allow “fully autonomous” channels.
• The key question is whether viewers will want watch AI generated content. As long as there are viewers, advertising money will come regardless of how the content was created.
• How much do viewers care about the “humanness” of content? I personally don’t think the majority of viewers will care about this. The example that comes to my mind is Seraphine, a virtual musical artist based on a League of Legends character. She isn’t a real person but her songs have still garnered millions of listens on Youtube and Spotify. As AI generated content becomes higher quality and easier to produce, it will undoubtably become a large part of our future media consumption. I can imagine a world where content with human aspects will become so rare that they are celebrated for their “humanness.” This is similar to how indie films used to be blockbuster but have been kicked off the pedestal by action and superhero movies.

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Some random stuff:

• I went to the driving range at the Presidio Golf Club for the first time! I got some blisters on my fingers but it was super fun and I will for sure be going back.
  • After golf, we went to this Vietnamese restaurant called Lily (in Inner Richmond district). They had great banh mi’s and even let us try a mock beef banh mi that wasn’t on the menu.
• I started playing a lot of Connections recently. I’m realizing that I have a lot more to learn about the English language than I thought.
• My roommate and I tried Arsicault Bakery for the first time. The wait was 20-30 minutes long but it was definitely worth it. Literally everything we tried was amazing but my favorite was the chocolate almond croissant.
• I experienced hate speech for the first time. My friend and I were taking a walk around a park and some random dude walked up to us screaming “go back to China” and other expletives. We tried to ignore him and speed-walk away. Thankfully, two kind strangers yelled at him to back off and we hurried away from the area. I’m quite shocked at the whole scenario and I’m just glad that no one got hurt. I wonder what type of life experiences can cause someone to exude so much hate. I’m honestly not sure what to think about it or how to approach this situation the next time it happens. All I want is for my friends, family, and myself to be safe and healthy.