WuASM Episode 8 - "Mistakes Happen"

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 5:57

   hey good morning how's every everyone today uh welcome to another episode of wake up and ship more uh I am your host Joe uh we have a a good topic today I think that is relevant to anyone who is building at any stage really but especially people who are uh ready to go to production and we're going to talk a little bit about uh decision- making especially after you have something in production like what happens after that and I'm going to use a couple examples from my own experience

2. 6:30

   uh that I think are really relevant uh before we get started uh a couple things here um so I put at the bottom here uh if you are looking to join the conversation you're watching the replay and you want to have you have questions that you can't ask uh during the show you can always go to the telegram group and ask there you're always welcome to um have a discussion there so I encourage you to do that uh at any time

3. 6:57

   uh during this episode while it's live you can always ask question any the comments no matter what uh platform that you're on you can certainly uh ask a question uh more specifically if you know especially if you're watching on like uh you know say YouTube or or twitch uh that's an easy place to put something in the comments and you can ask a question there I'm always happy to

4. 7:19

   jump in and take some of those questions as fast as possible uh also if you haven't signed up already so let me pull it up here so you guys can can see it here I have it in I think uh if you're not for the devhub newsletter uh I really encourage you to um check this out uh not only do we have a lot of great resources for developers in the near ecosystem but we also have just you know events that are coming up uh so if you're looking into

5. 7:52

   different hackathons and stuff like that uh I think that's a great place to get some more information from and then uh yesterday if you were following along the dhub uh Twitter account uh you would have saw that uh we did a kind of introduction to the redacted hackathon um so if you need some more information check out that hackathon uh $500,000 in prizes that they're going there so I think that's an awesome opportunity for people to uh build and check things out we talked all about you

6. 8:24

   know what's going on there so you can check out that replay uh it's on the near protocol uh account as well as uh the near devhub uh accounts as well so you can check all those things out so let's get a little introduced into the topic today and let me talk a little bit about like what I mean when I say you know mistakes happen and why this is really relevant for anyone shipping and building and like when you get to that point of I have a product in

7. 8:56

   production I have users using it and and I need to make a decision about maybe growth I need to understand maybe why things are leveling off which happens a lot um so you could even if you start off with like a bang you start to see like this like leveling off that can happen and so I think that's like a I think for myself especially even I I always try to understand it's like not just about having like great growth it's

8. 9:27

   about having you know growth that is sustainable and also that growth that where if I need to Pivot or if I need to make a change I can really understand what that change is so uh a couple couple things there that I think are really worth considering so let's kind of jump into this topic here a little bit and I I'll explain a little bit further so um let me set the stage here a bit so uh I want to use two examples from my

9. 9:58

   previous work that I think are like super relevant to what we're trying to do what we're talking about here um so first is I want to I'm going to talk about an example where we're in production we had made a software choice and by software choice we mean like like how we're going to architect it who our user base is going to be and then we shipped then we're talking about like one that was uh already going and then became kind of stagnant and then we we'll talk about

10. 10:32

    that so the first one here is so uh we had something in production and I'm not I'm not going to name companies or apps but um this one I was uh actively working on myself and we had chosen uh to to ship and so when we were choosing how to ship and how to approach the product uh we had pretty much you know you could argue anywhere between like three and five uh we'll say user types

11. 11:04

    okay and I I don't want to say personas because um you know the term personas is sometimes used in a way that is often used in a way like it's you know this is a a kind of user that's coming in and using it and you know and you could have people who fall into different buckets of your persona that are NE that might be different types these are like explicit types like like for example um so if I'm doing like a healthcare app and I have like doctors and nurses like

12. 11:35

    those are two different types right the so not just and then within them I may have personas like the doctor that is too busy the doctor that doesn't understand technology the doctor that loves technology like those are personas so these are user types and so you could argue that this product had anywhere between three to five user types depending on exactly how you wanted to break things down

13. 12:05

    ah pardon me that's the tricky thing with doing things live is uh there we go anyway so three to three to five user types and really when we shipped again so following the principle that I've talked about on uh previous episode on like MVPs is like I have to really think about from here of like when I'm going to ship my product I can't go to all five like so like that's just not happening right so I really we

14. 12:37

    really had to pick anywhere between you know obviously like one I mean three is stretching it in the beginning especially as like a MVP so really like one to two is the sweet spot so like that has to come down to that and we made a choice and like we made a real specific choice that out of this like we chose one particular group and we chose one group to go after um because we felt like that was the largest impact for what we were

15. 13:10

    trying to build so we thought that picking a particular user type it was was the path of of success because that user type would have the most success from it and uh I would argue to this day that that concept and that theory for that product was 100% correct except and this is why I think software is hard and sometimes you have to be able to do both the the business part of this and you have to understand what you're building

16. 13:46

    except out of these two groups that we could have the two paths that we could have really went down so if we Cho we'll say we chose path a okay and so a is like uh we'll say this is the like largest you know uh impact okay the problem is is that group two which is like Group B are the ones that actually pay for it okay because this app was actually it was so you may hear this term sometimes right so um you may hear

17. 14:26

    a term called like B to C right which is like business to Consumer so um any consumer based app is is that like right so like your your social media apps those are consumer apps those are B Toc uh this is usually used a lot in like SAS based stuff um there's also B2B where you're like selling to businesses right um you know so business to business uh we had this right B Tob to C so we were selling so this is who was paying for it but this is who

18. 15:06

    was impacted this is who was like one of the main users the challenge became is that we saw this impact we as this first part of this company we were as the main business we saw that the group a was getting the largest impact out of our product but they were not the ones that would pay for it and uh in changing to a a consumer only app uh would not have worked because the data sources that were driving this app uh had to come from the

19. 15:46

    businesses themselves so it was based on business intelligence data and so we really needed to be able to do that so now you know the sales is always going to go to that next step of that other business so when that happens they the PE person who's paying for your product is going to have different expectations of return investment and impact and everything else than you would if

20. 16:18

    again the example would be of like again if we we we know the consumers are are really impacted by it they they're the ones that are maybe using the app the most they're the ones that are more directly uh benefiting from it but since they're not paying for it you know that that there's no like calculated of Roi because they're not paying anything for the ones that are paying for it the business are part of it right

21. 16:50

    so so B2B part of it is they're the ones who are saying well we're not seeing an impact because we're maybe it's not driving more business for them or maybe the you know there's other issues for them in this situation what happened was is that the feature set so when we talked about building out features that okay were not as robust as they needed to be for the group b okay the features

22. 17:22

    were really you know all focused on they were focused on a and we saw that group a had you know like good growth right so like it was you know like that user number kept going up but that growth was not directly translating to B so like B was not seeing like in B's mind like the way that they thought about it was that like group a was always going to be there because group a was was part of B of B so again here's how this goes right so again

23. 18:04

    let's let me let me simplify it already Okay so here's the app okay here's the business that we're selling to okay so here's the biz okay they are then they already have their users their users their their customers right are the ones using the app so here's the customers right so I'm just going to put a c there okay so we're selling to them they already have these these customers so like we're yes again the app was impacting here but this is who's paying so we made the mistake here so going the

24. 18:45

    whole episode's about about mistakes right so we made the mistake we focused here so we started to see this part slow down we started to see even some churn over time because they were like you know well this isn't helping our business necessarily yet it's a it's a nice to have because our users like it and our users are using it but it is not providing correct value for us which is

25. 19:07

    frustrating because we could see the impact we saw directly that this was working and we heard anecdotally and we heard from reviews and from feedback and everything else that like hey this is this is actually really relevant and working well like can we continue to do this and you know and can you expand these features except we couldn't because we couldn't keep spending money on building more stuff for this group because they weren't paying for it and

26. 19:40

    this group that was paying for it wasn't overly enthus they were like this is fine this is great you know we're happy that our our users are excited about it or or using it but it didn't really didn't really move the needle much for them right so what we had to do is we had to then recognize that and we had to Pivot okay so this went out the window and we had to go to focus on B okay and what happened is now all of a sudden that changes the perspective completely of how you start

27. 20:20

    to build your feature set because when even though we had features for Group B they were minimal because again the original concept where we saw impact was building around a but as a business if we wanted to keep growing and this is really important to consider if we wanted to keep growing if we wanted to see you know the ability to you know stay open as a business the ability to hey could we me eventually recapture part of this group here then

28. 20:53

    what would happen have to happen then is we'd have to say look you know these new features have to be focused on Group B and that was and that was a huge pivot and that was something that again when when I'm talking a lot about like being reflective right and I showed those charts a couple episodes back of like thinking through your products and thinking through the flow of all that

29. 21:16

    like that's amazing right like that's a great way to look at it but like what happens then from there is like okay you know I that's all well and good if you know you feel like this is making the largest impact but if Group B is the one that's paying for it I have I have to focus on them even if that's not the product that you like and if you really don't want to do it then your business you're going to go out of business you're not going to make money you're

30. 21:40

    not going to have that Revenue so you have to really be conscious so this whole thing really goes back to like and I'll put this here it goes back to the user types I need to recognize and understand like my who my user types are and that's where like again for myself I I'm really trying to best understand when I'm designing a product or I'm I'm Consulting with another group of like who is actually going to use it but

31. 22:11

    secondarily who's the one that's paying for it how are the things getting paid for now if you are an ad base model some of this goes out the window but not really okay so if you're an ad base model it's the same idea here because now I'm still seing serving this is important to recognize for your own behavior when you're using apps that are ad-based is I am building for the ad Revenue so

32. 22:41

    think about social media right so even if if the product is ad-based like where social media wants you to stay on the app wants you to keep scrolling keep looking at content so that way you can actually see more ads so they can make more money right so that's how that goes so your user type there is like hey my user type actually is you know uh you know users who see ads and so I need to

33. 23:05

    actually you know optimize for users who seeing ads it doesn't again it really comes down to as soon as you get out of the experimental phase and as soon as you get out of the phase of like I am not just building an MVP anymore I am actually you know trying to build a sustainable business I have to understand who that user type is and it's not just about the largest impact okay because because that's the mistake that we made that was the mistake that we made we lost

34. 23:37

    probably I would say a year to 18 months maybe more because we were hyper focused on building impact that again we thought was going to continue to drive growth and it was impactful for that group that user group that group a it was impactful for but they weren't paying for it Group B was paying for it and so we had to change our feature set to be focused on you no longer on a on B and that was

35. 24:08

    about again like an 18mon maybe 2year pivot to get to that point and then once we started to focus on that part of it we saw much better growth like that was you know and that's we saw less turn we saw higher engagement from from the other business so again if you're selling business to business to Consumer right so the the the b in the middle there so business to business is what you're concerned about because they're

36. 24:37

    paying the bills they were the ones that were much more satisfied they started to see the return on investment because we were building you know features sets that matched what they needed it it became a tool for them and then secondarily this group a you know had some stuff available to them I will argue that you know in this scenario um group a still had some good benefit from it but it eventually became stale over

37. 25:12

    time it was very limited growth there you know and I I mean almost almost no growth you know at some points because you know really what happens is that you just again it gets stuck because they're not paying so they're not a priority so as long as it's working for them because like they're going to report back to the business saying oh yeah your app was great whatever you know so a lot of

38. 25:37

    times like our reviews we would see consumer reviews and consumer reviews would went from like this is great to like this is fine you know like it wasn't like being rated as poor or you know like a bad experience it's just it was fine and so that's tough and that was not again the original Mission of the business so that made some of that a challenge as well so that's that's example one okay and so I think that's that's a a good lesson there of making

39. 26:10

    that mistake of who your user type is to begin with now example two now example two I I I want to frame a little bit differently so in this example um I am not the direct Builder okay I came in as a consultant I came in to look at where a product was a product had been up and running for I want to say almost almost two years already uh they had Revenue they were sh they were a growing business uh

40. 26:41

    but the actual product itself was somewhat stagnant and they really actually were hitting a wall where they were getting users who were reporting that like so the the the app was built into two parts there was like a like an IRL component and like so that actually involved like you know human interaction and then there was uh the actual software piece of it that was done on their on their own time and a lot of the

41. 27:13

    reporting and feedback from users was that I love the IRL stuff the uh software stuff is not as helpful anymore you know it's not as relevant not as helpful um they just kind of again just kind of hit a wall where it wasn't serving what it needs to serve but the software was a large component of the business and really to get growth and to be able to scale because human time is not scalable very well um is was the

42. 27:44

    software so when I came in you know you had a full feature product you know and from there you know that's something that you know I I really I want to emphasize that you know that having a full feature product to start is is a great place because it gives me information so here I am right so here they they're starting and here's their app okay and what was nice is they had almost two years of data okay and that data included and

43. 28:24

    this is why I talked about this in previous episodes if you need to be be able to have collect some of this information of like how is your product being used um again even if you're building in web 3 in in crypto you need to understand it's not enough just look at like transaction data you need to have an understanding of how your app is being used and like when do people come and go and and I'm not you don't have to

44. 28:48

    collect all the same information that they're that comes from like web 2 you don't have to be invasive and you don't have to track users like across other things but like you're within your right to like understand your users and so you have to log some of the stuff you can do it completely anonymously it's not about like who the user is it's the collective of how things are being uh done outside

45. 29:14

    your app so from here right so I have okay I have this two years of data how it's being used and so that was like hugely beneficial and then you know we had though two pieces of this one is the actual interface okay and that's a direct like piece of software that like you can work with like a UI team and and in ux team and you can have your developers build stuff out and address things but then there was also like a second piece of this that was like content right and so you

46. 29:46

    say okay we need to maybe rewrite some of the content things like that and that sometimes a little bit harder so like if you're the if you're on the development side the content piece is a little bit tricky at at times to address but in here and in this example here is that like you know we knew we could cover the content if needed like we knew we could change that so we had to go back and change the interface and what that allowed us to do is actually kind of

47. 30:19

    experiment a little bit here where you know could we serve the same content in different ways so like could you a test okay uh even though we had all this anecdotal data um you know talking to users and actually having you know user interviews was like super helpful and this is I will say it can be timec consuming if you hire an outside service to do it is is wildly expensive um but I don't if you are a

48. 30:51

    startup or a small business uh I highly encourage you not to Outsource this ever and do this yourself because to actually have the conversation with your users and do the user interview yourself especially if you can get them to actually like do a screen share and like walk through the product with you and have a user explain their issues or their concerns or what they like don't like uh it's it's amazingly powerful because you get

49. 31:23

    to get get out of your mindset of like you're just trying to ship a product and you get to see like how people are actually doing things so the the trick here is you know we went through all of this stuff now here's where the mistake was made okay uh in all of the user interviews okay it was that the interface and the process like was not was not engaging enough they never felt like they we're prompted to keep going so again if you have something that's content driven like you start seeing that's why like so much

50. 32:04

    stuff is like game gamified now because users especially want to feel like they're building towards something so we started to design out some parts of this that were more focused on on being gamified right okay and like I I think this is a huge part of it the problem was here okay really the really the the end of the day is that the the content was not strong enough for it was the and this is where the again this is where the mistake was

51. 32:41

    made all of the feedback was here about the gamification and not really about the content and the reason why are in user interviews and getting feedback nobody talked too much about the content per se is because they didn't know any better so so like they were coming to this product to learn something and to gain knowledge and to you know do you know work on on different parts of their life and you know it the app was around like productivity things like that so they

52. 33:15

    didn't most I'll say you 99% of the users didn't know any better of like oh this content isn't strong enough it wasn't until we pretty much had designed all of this out and really I mean spent a good amount of time and effort of looking at these changes that we came to the conclusion that actually like this is part of the problem the content structure both uh you know so and this is was two parts it

53. 33:45

    was both like like like the what it was and then like the structure of it was a big piece of it was a big problem part of it and this was actually harder to address cuz you need to have people who are experts in this to actually write this content and develop it and you know you could knock this out with a few developers you know pretty quickly and we were able to make some pretty substantial changes pretty I would say within a couple months that

54. 34:17

    that were that did I will say that did show growth and did show retention but really it still it it instantly hit a plateau again um because the content was the problem the content was causing the issues and so the the mistake again here is so the first time right that first example it's about picking the right user type and here it's understanding your product of what is actually driving your product so let me let me compare this to

55. 34:52

    something maybe a lot of people have used before dual lingo the language learning app right so yes they are like gamified to the max like everything is is gamified it's all to drive you back to using the app every day it will bug you it will nudge you it will do all different things it will you know it gives you those like Casino Vibes at times with the sounds and the the popups

56. 35:16

    and the excitement and everything else but the problem then that would happen for them if the content was terrible again this is argu I know some language people don't love it but um again if the content was really bad then people would just still go because you would feel stuck and if you look at some reviews for people who do not stay longterm at du lingo it's usually because they felt like they weren't learning enough the content wasn't

57. 35:49

    strong enough for them um there something was missing out of that it's not the gamification it's not the user interface it's not any of that necessarily sometimes it might be some people might be put off by that but really ends up being the content it's the same thing here with we what we were facing is like we could do this until you know for the next two years we could just gamify everything everything could feel exciting we could hit the dopamine

58. 36:20

    all day long but until we got to this part then you know address the content we were we were stuck once we did there was a big change and we saw again another growth spurt and we saw people really being able to appreciate and uh understand our product more uh churn went down more signups came in it became something that was again if we had recognized it earlier we could have got to it earlier so again get to this point again like this was recognized

59. 37:01

    within like two months right like and so we were we had changes that out the door within about four months this took almost a year and so you know and if we had be able to recognize that earlier we maybe could have cut a few months off that maybe even more um and so that that could have been you know that would have been interesting to see how uh that went we caught that earlier that all being said um you know I I want

60. 37:33

    to you know wrap up here and just say like I want to encourage you to really think about your product and I want you to understand that when things are not going well if things are problematic if things are stagnant if your feedback is mixed um you know you need to accept that mistakes might have been made you need to look at what You' been building why you've been building it who that audience actually is and what could you do to actually change

61. 38:05

    this and that's where this is I'm hoping if you're following along and you've seen the other episodes like these pieces are all kind of coming together right so like the reflection of like I I'm charting out my features I'm understanding who my user base is I'm pulling all these parts together to actually then I'll build something that is sustainable all together and so today talking about like when you make a mistake and how you then pivot is important if we never recognize

62. 38:35

    those mistakes and both those examples both those businesses are out of business you know within a year or two um both exist today so still so that's something that you know you have to be able to say okay we made a mistake this isn't working the way we expected it to um we have a a problem and we have to address it if you don't want to if you want to be stuck in your way and you say no like

63. 39:05

    this is what I want to build I want I believe this this is what I want to build and you're not making progress like I hate to say it like no matter how cool Tech it is it's going to die because nobody's using it or nobody's paying for it so you have to balance these two things and you have to take that time to understand here's the mistakes that we made it's okay we're going to accept them we're going to remediate them we're going to figure out how to fix them figure out what went

64. 39:35

    wrong and then from there we're going to keep building uh if you you know please ask questions uh in the in the chats uh I really appreciate everyone uh coming by you can always join the group after the show um that's something that you know always happy to answer questions there if you watch any of the recordings if you're watching this on replay uh please join the conversation there uh on Telegram and I think that's a great

65. 40:05

    place to start uh we will be back next week uh with uh some more building stuff I really want to keep focusing on again uh again how do you understand your product and we have some other things I want to dive into some uh examples that I think are really relevant uh if you're watching this today live on Thursday uh later today uh through the near protocol main account uh there's going to be uh a show there so normally we have dehub live uh we're

66. 40:36

    going to combine with near protocol for a a Big Show and announcement so uh follow along there uh but otherwise uh until then uh keep building keep asking questions and uh I'm excited to to you know see what starts to come of this for people so please reach out to me I'm always happy to you know give some feedback or whatever else or see if I can help you out or point you in the

67. 41:00

    right direction uh but until then have a great rest of your week and uh keep shipping bye n