🌱 5-Bit Fridays: The psychology of Apple packaging, idea size testing, more features more problems, supercharging decision making, and more
🌱 5-Bit Fridays: The psychology of Apple packaging, idea size testing, more features more problems, supercharging decision making, and more
#55
👋 Welcome to this week’s edition of 5-Bit Fridays. Your weekly roundup of 5 snackable—and actionable—summaries from the best operators and experts, bringing you concrete advice on how to build and grow a product.
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Happy Friday, friends 🍻
Hope you’ve all had a wonderful week. I’m busy writing to you from Jamaica, so in pursuit of getting outside ASAP and making my way to the pool bar, let’s get cracking.
Oh, one thing: Does anybody happen to know Diego Saez Gil (the founder of Pachama), and would be willing to make an introduction? Or anyone on their team? Would be super appreciated.
In case you missed it this week:
I wrote about Arc browser. If you missed the deep dive, there are a lot of lessons in there about startup building. And if you’ve never heard of Arc, it may just be your next favorite product. (Read How Arc Grows ↗ )
OpenAI passed $2B in ARR. (Read How OpenAI Grows ↗ )
TikTok is launching a series of local language “election centers” to curb the spread of misinformation ahead of upcoming elections. (Read How TikTok Grows ↗ )
We’re still a long way from the bubble popping. The S&P 500 would need to rise another 25% to reach the levels of “irrational exuberance” that fueled the '90s tech bubble, according to the bear of bears, Société Générale. (Read it ↗ )
And speaking of markets…the total value of Bitcoin surpassed $1 trillion yesterday for the first time since 2021. And that does wonder for the entire space, with overall crypto market breaking $2 trillion in market cap fueled by investor confidence. (Read it ↗ )
NVIDIA overtook Alphabet/Google, now ranked #4 in market cap just 1 day after passing Amazon. NVIDIA, of course, benefiting nicely from OpenAI’s growth and the rising tide of crypto. (Read How NVIDIA Grows ↗ )
Today at a glance:
Generative AI, Bullshit as a Service
The psychology of Apple packaging
Supercharging decision making
More features, more problems
Stop wasting time on unviable business ideas
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(#1) Generative AI, Bullshit as a Service
AI can be awesome yet the majority of people are are using it to spam, fake, and cheat.
In a though-provoking piece by
, he argues that while AI has so many benefits, the main beneficiaries of the gift of AI are precisely the people who don’t respect it.It’s a gift for the undeserving.
A powerful statement.
Key quote
The democratization of creative freedom, although nice-sounding on paper, is the delusion of an idealist. At least for now.
The world is not prepared for it. I dare to say we’re not made for it.
Those who truly, deeply want creative freedom just go for it. They put no excuses. They don’t let resistance get in their way. Those who want to write the book of their dreams will try their hardest to get it done.
Those who are given the gift of creative freedom without wanting it—unwilling to fight to achieve it—will use it for other much less laudable purposes.
I wrote [an essay against elitism] from a “how the world should be” bubble without attending to how it is. How many people want to write the book of their dreams actually? A few people, like West argues, probably want that freedom genuinely but can’t achieve it despite trying hard. Such cases are not unheard of. But fully outsourcing the effort and the experience of writing your dream book to an AI is a maddening oxymoron.
I don’t need to resort to arguments about how these tools are created by stealing the non-credited and non-compensated work of others (which is true), or the limitations of ChatGPT to write novels (which is true), I just have to look at the world as it is.
Even if AI writing tools were created ethically and people could input a sentence and obtain a whole novel in return, most wouldn’t use that superpower to write the book of their dreams. This realization is powerful once you internalize it. We’re just not like that. The majority would use it to earn money quickly or minimize the effort it takes to do their job.
The democratization of creative freedom is an honorable goal. But the people who respect that—who care about democracy and creativity and freedom are those who want to develop the skills themselves—are those willing to fight for them
— Alberto Romero via
Insight
While some folks—like us—are using AI to learn, build things, unlock new creative skills, and work better, that is not the norm.
The most common use case is spamming, cheating, and faking. Why? Because a) twisting information in batches to saturate the channels of distribution is super cheap now, and b) our dumbest instincts still largely drive us
Because of the that, AI is taking to zero not the cost of intelligence but the cost of transforming those instincts into bullshit. “Generative AI is the first technology ever to be used primarily for BaaS: Bullshit as a Service.”
AI, as Alberto says, at the extremes, is either a vector for a post-scarcity world or a vector of catastrophic destruction. Yet, the primary use we’re giving it seems to be for the most prosaic, simplistic, and dumb stuff
Take this stat and chart, shared by
from .
The percentage of frauds which involve deep fakes has risen from less than 1% in 2022 to almost 5% in 2023. The practice of ‘face swapping’ - where users steal someone’s face and swap it for their own - also increased a massive 704% in H2 of last year vs H1.
Take action 🛠️
Don’t entertain unethical AI practices. Certainly not as a builder, but also as a user.
And with product development, use AI where it makes sense and is additive to your solution. Don’t just throw sparkle emojis around your product for the clickbait, and be more like Arc who use AI without mentioning the word.
Let the AI-enhanced product improvement speak for itself.
(#2) Psychology of Apple Packaging
Put your hand up if, stuffed away somewhere, sits the box for your iPhone or your Mac.
That, my friends, is by design. It shouldn’t surprise you that Apple are big on human psychology, and know the power of the first mile when using a product.
As Walter Isaacson wrote in his Steve Jobs biography, beautiful packaging is one of Apple’s key marketing principles.
wrote an interesting piece expanding on this.Key quote
Jobs and Apple’s former head designer (Jony Ive) long understood the value of packaging. As Ive recounts: "Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging. I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater."
As the first stage of the iPhone experience, Apple put in 1000s of hours perfecting the package.
There is literally a "packaging room" where a design employee will spend months opening up 100s of prototypes — with different materials and shapes — to nail the experience (I need footage of the Apple designer making a $500k annual salary, who’s locked up in this room once-a-year opening boxes until the fingers bleed).
What is Apple looking for?
Lux-feeling boxes with the right friction and drag to create a brief pause when you lift the top off (try opening an iPhone box quickly…you can’t because of the drag).
You know that “whoosh” sound when you lift open an iPhone box? It comes from air pockets. Air pockets! Who thinks about making air pockets for electronic packaging? Jobs and Ives! That’s who.
And like the moment before a magician's reveal, they knew the power of anticipation and designed it into iPhone packaging.
— Trung Phan, via
Insight
You probably are not unboxing an iPhone right now, so think back to your last experience. If you can recall, it’s multi-sensory.
You see the box — its slick, minimal, and striking
You feel the opening because of the drag
You hear the whoosh of air rushing out
You smell the material
It really is an experience that at a subliminal level, tells you the quality of what you’re about to start using. Packaging is a leading indicator of what’s inside. And that’s why you pile up the boxes, hesitant to throw them away.
That’s the power of “impute”.
Take action 🛠️
The analogous here for software products is product onboarding. You want to impute quality through onboarding / your unboxing.
So here’s some advice:
Consider the sensory details. We saw in our Arc deep dive how they have multi-sensory onboarding, using sound and visuals to instantly strike an emotional response in you after installation. Consider what details you could add to contribute to a richer, more engaging experience.
Prototype and test your first mile. Just as you would with your product, prototype various onboarding (or packaging if you work on a physical product) designs and test them with real users. For the sake of this insight, just look at how people feel—their emotional responses. Do they smile? Is there anything delightful you’re surprising them with?
(#3) Supercharging decision making with Dory / Pulse
The Dory / Pulse technique (developed at Coda by
) is a great tool for equalizing voices and removing groupthink in meetings.Key quote
We’ve all been in a meeting where it seems like one person dominates the discussion with a low-priority topic, leaving no time for the group to discuss the most important topics.
If there's one meeting ritual used more than any other at Coda, it's what we call “Dory.” It's a simple ranked Q&A tool that allows everyone to add questions and upvote/downvote them so that you focus on the most important topics first.
By the way, the name Dory comes from “the fish who asks all the questions."
While the core concept of “ranked topics” seems simple and universal, it turns out that there are many meaningful variations of the Dory ritual.
— Shishir via
Insight
Dory /Pulse works on two dimensions:
Dory = a question table where stakeholders / contributors can note topics for conversation, and others can upvote questions. It’s ranked Q&A basically.
Pulse = a way to measure sentiment about a proposal from a lot of people at once
It looks like this:
Here’s how Shishir says it can help you (I have yet to use this):
Dory:
Equalizing the audience: You can now run through topics in order of votes, regardless of the seniority or volume of the person, to equalize voices.
Discuss what matters: You can go through questions in order, with high confidence that you’re discussing the topics of most interest to the room.
Pulse:
Avoid group think: In going around a room to hear what everyone thinks, each person implicitly biases everyone who speaks after them. With the pulse check, reflection is done privately first, which leads to more honest and independent thinking.
Equalize hierarchy: A private pulse check allows for everyone to express their opinion at once without influence from the vocal minority.
Contextualize feedback: The pulse check clarifies the difference between "I really love this idea, and I'm asking tough questions to make it better" or "I really dislike this idea, and I'm asking tough questions to expose why.”
Draw out the latent concerns: The pulse check tends to give people space to describe what's on their mind, and I often find that it affects the agenda.
Take action 🛠️
First, I’d go through all the ways you could use these two tools. Like any framework, there is no one size fits all. Your context matters. But there are some common ways teams mix and match these. There are some great ideas in here.
Then, I’d pick one you really like, and put it to action the next time you have a bigger meeting or various stakeholders.
Also, for more on decision making, see:
⚠ This post will soon be cut short if you’re reading it in your email. Click here to keep reading.
(#4) More features, more problems
I think that title is all the introduction necessary.
Key quote
A feature doesn't create value. What a feature makes possible is what creates value.
Read that again and let it sink in.
via
It may seem like a silly distinction to make, but this is the frame of mind you must be in to have a fighting chance of creating value for your users and customers.
All features are innocent of delivering value until proven guilty. Easy to say, extremely hard to do.
—
Insight
More features are meant to solve more problems, but, the inverse can very easily happed too: you make more problems.
This is the complexity tax—both for you building wise, and for your customers. The more features you have, the slower you will deliver new ones (a more complex and integrated code base, with a bigger surface area for bugs), and the steeper the learning curve of your product will be.
Speaking of speed! Quick paid post plug… 👇
Take action 🛠️
The next time you’re working on a feature, make sure you ask yourself this sequence of questions: What will the feature enable our users to do they weren't able to do before? How do we know that? And how will be know if the feature is indeed improving their situation?
Often we just ship and assume that even if the feature isn’t that great, it’s additive. Surely some people love it, right?
We often have a big bias for action when it comes to building and releasing, but a bad one when it comes to pulling the plug and doing spring cleaning of features.
As we spoke about in How Headspace Grows—unshipping features can result in more value for the user.
p.s, If you’re not actively removing features, then you probably don’t know which ones are pulling their weight—because, as Maarten put it, if you’re incapable of figuring out what you have to remove from your product, how can you figure out what has to stay?
(#5) Stop wasting time on unviable business ideas
I was chatting to my friend
on Wednesday about the new project he’s working on—side note, stay tuned for a new project we’re busy working on— and he shared his screen, showing me a near exact approach to validating the size of an idea that we’re about to talk about.Reid knows his stuff, which validated this simple approach to “forecasting” for me.
Why simple forecasting? Because too many entrepreneurs (I too being guilty of this mistake) rush into the building phase, only to realize down the line (after months/years of effort) that they are chasing too small an idea.
The revenue potential just isn’t there for what they hoped to build. For example, if you want to be a venture backed company, then you should have a path to $10M ARR in 3/4 years. Not all markets/biz models are capable of that.
shows us how to quickly and easily test if an idea is worth pursuing before investing months of effort.Key quote
Too many entrepreneurs prematurely rush to launch their product, join an incubator/accelerator, or hit the pitching circuit only to realize months (or years) later that they were chasing too small an idea. They waste precious time, money, and effort -- which could have been avoided if they had sized their idea at the outset.
At the other end of the spectrum, some entrepreneurs create (or are asked to create) fantastical 5-7 year forecasts, which aren't any better. The problem with these spreadsheets is that they have too many numbers that quietly mask the riskiest assumptions in layers of innocent compounding lies.
You end up
creating a fictional model that even you don't believe,
using different metrics with your product team
while defending your fictional model to stakeholders.
— Ash Maurya, via
Insight
That point about overly complex spreadsheets is spot on. I remember when we we trying to get into Tech Stars, and we got asked to put together a forecast by the next day. My co-founder Dani and I spent all night whipping it together, making the numbers do what we needed them to do.
It was total BS and nothing has ever been more off. You just can’t do that without real historical data—which you don’t have early on.
The idea Ash presents, and the one Reid was using, is called the Rapid Viability Test (RVT). It uses a quick back-of-the-envelope estimation technique devised by physicist Enrico Fermi, famous for making rapid order-of-magnitude estimations with seemingly little available data.
In short, a Fermi Estimate takes a bottom-up approach where you start with a set of inputs, roughly estimate them, and then test the viability of your idea using these input assumptions.
As long as your input assumptions aren’t off by an order of magnitude (power of ten), the resulting estimate will be accurate enough to make an educated go or no-go decision.
Take action 🛠️
The next time you’re evaluating a business idea, apply the RVT. Here’s how:
Set a three-year time box and estimate your Minimum Success Criteria. That MSC being the smallest outcome that would deem your idea a success three years from now. AKA how much money must you be making annually (ARR) for you to keep at it? This is not about asking how big your idea can get—you are not goal sizing.
Estimate your annual revenue per customer/account (ARPA), and round it to the nearest power of ten in order to identify your customer (animal) archetype. How much one customer is worth will help inform your GTM strategy, as well as determine how many of them you need to hit your MSC.
Evaluate whether your very initial market (early adopter / beachhead customer) is big enough to hit your MSC. “The ideal is to achieve your MSC goal with a single beachhead market, so you don't have to cross the chasm before product/market fit.”
To do this, first figure out how many customers you need to acquire to get your MSC. Using the chart below, if you wanted to do $100K ARR (a nice idea for a one person shop) and you were making $10k a year per customer, you’d need just 10 customers.
Then, test if your market has enough prospects in it for you to reasonably win your MSC number of customers. “As a general rule of thumb, your total addressable early adopter market needs to be roughly 100x the number of customers you’ll need to acquire to hit your MSC goal. Here’s why. Most products, irrespective of product type, start with a customer conversion rate between 0.5–3%.”
And with our main 5 bits for the week done...
Chart of the week 📈
A chart on climate change. TLDR: Thanks to big steps in reducing CO2 emission, the US and Europe are no longer the biggest problem. China, India, and the rest of the world on the other hand have been soaring.
China is also the world’s main builder of green energy, especially solar panels and batteries. That’s good. But as long as China continues to burn massive amounts of coal — which is related to its own political incentives and industrial policies — climate change will continue getting worse.
— Noah Smith, via A bunch of handy charts about climate change
Quote of the week 💡
Related to today’s bit #4—removing features—but applicable to all corners of life.
"Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."
— Hans Hoffman
And now, byte on one of these 🧠
Here are some of my favorite reads from this week:
10 Lessons From The Most Underrated Show Of The 2010s, by
High-quality principles to support your Product-Led-Growth, by
Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI, by the WSJ
2024 could be the pivotal year for Cold War 2, by
The Art Of Critical Reading: How To Transform From Reactive Reader To Reflective Thinker, by
And that’s everything for this week, maaan.
My agenda for today: frozen margaritas (who’s to say how many), a scuba dive, and sunburn (just kidding, always lather up folks).
If you learned anything new, the best way to support me and this newsletter is to give this post a like below or a share to help more folks discover HTG. Or, if you really want to go the extra mile, I’d be incredibly grateful if you considered upgrading to paid.
Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️
Jaryd,
Zendesk offers free accounts only to VC-funded startups. They wouldn't take a self-funded startup such as ours. Please note that in your recommendation.
Please consider increasing the contrast of the fonts used in the web version. It's hard to consume a large amount of information with fonts so light, and It may decrease the bounce rate.
Also, please consider dropping animated illustrations because they are distracting and don't add (or undermine) value to your hard work for serious readers, the complete opposite of what you want to accomplish.
...that romero article was excellent thanks for the curation...there is something so poetically pure that the A.I. tools created through the unapproved pilfering of the masses would find most of their use cases worming into further unethical realms...almost like reverse robin hood meets the laws of attraction...but i do also appreciate the optimism for these tools as means to much further/broader potential ends (i keep thinking about space exploration/capitalism)...i'm knocking my head on a wall that so much of modern technology is being built to solve problems we are creating, rather than problems that already exist...vision pro and its infinite screens glued right to my eyes for example...is this cool? sure. are there use cases for it? why not. Does it solve more problems than it creates? I don't think so. VR + Social Media + A.I. "content" is a dungeon for the next generation imo...but hoping i'm surprised by this dim view...
...enjoy jamaica man...one of my favorite places on earth...