"For High-intent Customers"

"For Low-Intent Customers"

"1 Produce discoverable Content Ideal for: If the customer is high intent, actively searching the internet for a solution & is frustrated by the lack of a viable solution for their needs"

"2 Create a Super-fan by over-servicing one customer at a time. Ideal for: If the customer is high intent, not actively searching for a solution & requires a complex nuanced solution for their particular use-case."

"3 Hack a distribution channel Ideal for: If the customer is high intent, not actively searching for a solution & the offering is straightforward"

"5 Cold Outreach [w/ a hook] Ideal for: If the customer is low-intent, there are many alternative solutions and adapting a new solution is a pain."

"6 Launch somewhere [& get PR — Optional] Ideal for: If the customer is low-intent (not actively searching for alternatives), the market is dominated by legacy players, and your offering is self-serve."

"8 Embed yourself in the community [authentically] Ideal for: If the customer is low-intent (not actively searching for alternatives), the market is not dominated by legacy players 🦕 and the offering has a niche appeal"

"10 Building in Public Ideal for: If the customer is low-intent (not actively searching for alternatives), the market is not dominated by legacy players 🦕 and the offering has a wide appeal."

"11 Influencers Ideal for: If the customer is low-intent (not actively searching for alternatives), market is not dominated by legacy players 🦕 and the offering has a wide appeal."

"12 Full Blown PR Ideal for: Low Intent customers for products with a strong social mission 🌳🌞."

"Spotify: Founders asked music bloggers to beta test the MVP. The product was impressive enough in one particular aspect: speed. This gave bloggers an interesting angle to write about."

"Canva: Melanie Perkins (cofounder) aggressively reached out to graphic design influencers to find some win-win scenarios to get influencer power behind her design-in-a-box solution"

"Medium: Ev Williams (who cofounded Twitter before Medium) tapped his network to get influencers as early adopters of the product. President Obama was amongst this cohort of influencer early adopters"

"Also Ideal for: If the customer is low-intent and the offering is a consumer product in a new emerging category."

"The work on Notion started in late 2013/early 2014. But, by early 2015 the project was still held at a standstill."

"The move to Japan + slimming down the team gave them some runway to give Notion a fighting chance to make it out into the real world."

"In March 2016, almost a year after they hit the reset button on building Notion, Ivan & Simon launched the product on Product Hunt. The launch ended up being to be one most successful ones in 2016!"

"What Notion did differently from its predecessors, however, was to bundle single-player productivity with multiplayer productivity apps."

"Flexibility & Adaptability: The blocks structure of Notion gives users the flexibility to build powerful tools that adapt to their needs rather than the other way round."

"99% of the growth of Notion is Word of Mouth (WoM) driven."

"Raise Awareness: launch on discovery platforms. Go viral: get those initial users to spread the Word."

"Maximize user commitment to the product (i.e., association) Maximize the positive emotions (i.e., love) users have while using the product"

"Notion did an excellent job here at moving people along this learning/value curve extremely efficiently (without the need of a large CS or sales force) and extremely fast."

"Level 1: Single personal use-case Level 2: Multiple personal use-cases Level 3: Company's source of truth Level 4: Lego blocks for creating productivity apps."

"What they had, was a good product sense that maximized the number of people who reached the highest level of the Notion Value Stack."

"the landing page is optimized to get you to think about what that ideal use-case would be for you by showing you the power of the tool!"

"If Notion's Landing page was about the what, the onboarding process was about the how. Onboarding on Notion was all about showing users how they could use the product."

"Notion's journey starts with a very simple value-proposition that solves users' immediate problems, then guides people towards ""unlocking"" more valuable use-cases."

"Sometimes it is best not to communicate your value proposition! Start small and build it, especially if you build a product with a large surface area."

"To accelerate Word of mouth, help users extract more value from your product as fast as possible. Each product interaction is an opportunity to unlock the ""next"" value level."

"A hypothesis for this disconnect (and the guiding principle behind building Substack) is the shift around how we value attention. Attention quickly went from being one of our most abundant resources to one of the most scarce ones."

"The underlying problem wasn't the algorithm not doing its job correctly or that moderation efforts were nascent. It was that they were doing an outstanding job at what they're supposed to: getting users to spend more time on the app."

"To fix the current state of media, they hypothesized, you must change the business model from one that optimizes for your time to one that optimizes for your money."

"thanks to Patreon and a nascent pre-Substack subscription publishing movement, it's also clear that a significant number of people are willing to pay good money for podcasts about war history, YouTube shows about video game critiques, in-depth NASCAR reporting, bodybuilding, and many other niche interest areas."

"A fundamental principle of competitive advantage strategy is new products compete on only two dimensions: Differentiation or Cost."

"For an ad-driven media publication, the lever a publication exercises most control over is distribution cost: how much does $ is spend to generate one article view."

"The bet Substack made was the rise of media businesses competing on the differentiation axis instead of the cost one."

"To maximize value creation for each writer from the very early days, they built the first Product for just one person: Bill Bishop, author of Sinocism."

"Hey Bill, we're making this thing called Substack, it'll be a very simple way to do a paid newsletter, would u be interested in being the first publisher? -Hamish recounts"

"They built a product exclusively for him. Small scope, large impact."

"This approach led to discovering and building features that may have otherwise seemed like a post-MVP thing. A most prominent example of this was building group subscriptions in the very first version of the product."

"Hamish and Chris continued with the same approach, recruiting already established writers and solving the needs of their acute publication in a generalizable manner."

"Substack did not sell a better product. They sold trust."

"Substack’s moat is hard to grasp at first; they built a product that lacks any sort of writer lock-in. The lack of platform lock-in, in fact, is one of the core value pillars of the product."

"the critical value proposition for Substack centers around trust."

"this high degree of trust makes end-readers of a particular Substack publication more susceptible to subscribing to other Substack publications."

"Ben Springwater and Robert Mackenzie met during their time at Nextdoor."

"Tiny Bookstore aimed to improve the visibility of indie authors that he believed deserved a larger audience. While the project never materialized, he embodied much of its ethos in Matter."

"Matter as an idea was born out of casual conversations at Nextdoor between Ben and Rob. Both quickly bonded over their love for reading, being power Pocket users, and their mutual frustration about how basic our current reading stack is."

"One plausible hypothesis why the previous generation of either content consumption or discovery apps didn't have an enduring success is that they were centered around RSS feeds."

"First of all, they emphasize the where, not the who."

"email rose as a new home for content. But, email is not a suitable alternative for many reasons. It was not built for consuming long-form content and offers no mechanics for discovering or retaining information."

"Matter was created to address two broad questions"

"How we read ? What we read?"

"Matter built a network of readers who could curate content and provide social context around their recommendation."

"The validation test they ran was a roundup newsletter curating content recommendations from public thinkers on Twitter."

"99.99% of the best stuff on the internet was not written recently"

"What you read is inconsequential at the moment but has a massive impact on aggregate."

"Trust recommendations are crucial to improving our content filters and information diets."

"People save more content than they can consume."

"Users where the highly-curated recommendations feed- the very first feature they developed -would resonate the most."

"Ben and Rob looked for users who are"

"Power readers Actively engaged in the world of ideas Online and community-oriented Have roughly, as a group, an affinity towards a set of ideas, themes, interests"

"They found their early adaptors on three large online communities and worked with the leaders of these communities to introduce the product to their respective members. Anyone who was not a member of these online communities was not welcome!"

"The Interintellect run by Anna Gat Progress Studies run by Jason Crawford The Long Now Foundation."

"From the community leaders' point of view, Matter was a benefit they could offer their members. The benefit is having early access to valuable content and the opportunity to play a formative role in the design of the product and recommendations engine."

"Curating a feed of people (v.s. websites): In Matter, you follow authors across the web and not the publication."

"The social graph of highlights: You can follow and discover what people you admire find interesting."

"Measuring quality is hard. Insights, information density, and the author can somewhat be proxies to a high-quality piece."

"success for Matter discovery is surfacing insightful content I wouldn't have otherwise discovered- preferably from obscure sources- that is tangential to my core interests and challenges my world views."

"Kevin and Alexis introduce BeReal to the world. The medium of choice? Linkedin."

"Prominent publications became interested in the rise of anti-Instagram social media startups such as Popparazi, ttyl, clubhouse, and BeReal."

"April 2021: Featured on Product Hunt. Founders ask for the post to be taken down."

"May 2021: First significant publication piece, the Financial times gives the nod to BeReal in Lessons for Big Tech from the ‘anti-social’ photo app"

"June 2021: Vogue writes Poparazzi, BeReal: Social media’s new generation"

"For every person an ambassador referred to the app, they would receive $30 for every person who downloaded the app. If they follow up with feedback, the incentive increases to $50."

"The new ambassador program focuses on hosting parties, partnerships with student organizations(& greek houses), as well as placements in various student newspapers."

"On Friday, Feb. 4, the app sponsored a party in the infamous Tasty burger basement and offered free admission to attendees that downloaded the app and added five friends."

"The other big scalable engine for BeReal was TikTok."

"May 2022 - July 2022: Repeatedly going viral on TikTok. 9 TikToks from the official BeReal channel receive 1m+ views."

"September 2022: My mom asks me to explain BeReal"

"What I missed at the beginning of this research was that almost all non social media companies I looked into did not have the social layer until years later in their product journey (somewhere around the 2-3 year mark was the most common threshold)."

"And I found the answer to creating differentiated utility in the go-to-market strategy Strava utilized: the Inch-Wide Mile-Deep go to market."

"The inch wide Mile deep Go To Market strategy is another fancy way of saying build a product that a small number of people find great."

"Small enough that you can become the 1 player within a 18-24 months timeframe."

"Getting accused of being a feature not a product, is a good barometer you are going after a small enough niche."

"Mike preaches Strava’s early singular focus on engagement as being crucial to their success. Because they were fishing in a small pond, every customer mattered, there was only a finite number of people they can acquire and first impressions matter."

"Instead making sure that 5, 10 or 20 people who use the product continue to extract (increasing) value of the product is what one should be striving for."

"A demonstration of motivating people to use Strava in the early days came during the Tour De France when there was a total of 20 users on the app."

"They spent the time pitching mmm(not to be confused with mmhmm) and how they were going to make waiting in line a thing of the past."

"Two hours into their conversation, Paul invited them to interview for the new startup incubator's first-ever batch he was building called YCombinator."

"Paul said, ""You guys need to build the front page of the Internet."" That was all Paul, and that became Reddit."""

"Digg (which had a similar ambition) announced a ""large"" series A of $2.8m (yup, that was considered ""large"" back then) just as Steve and Alexis were getting started on Reddit."

"Steve took the email personally and replied saying he had managed to get the fundamentals to work... and just a few weeks after, PG forced their hand to launch when he referenced Reddit in his famous What I did this summer essay, where he unleashed YC into the world."

"With that unplanned launch, just a day in, Reddit got over their first 1000 user mark."

"""If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You've Launched Too Late."""

"They had no fundamental mechanics to retain or engage that first cohort of users."

"Launching too early might work well when you are testing out a new consumer behavior (as with Airbnb), a new business model(as with Spotify), or where first to market would be a massive competitive advantage to your business (as with Linkedin)."

"In many other cases, specifically when entering a crowded/established space with already established consumer habits...the bar of expectations your initial product needs to meet is high."

"For instance, if you are building a new Fitness app or a competitor to a startup that had more firepower (i.e. 💰), a more established team, and a famous founder (as was the case with Reddit)...take your time building the right product, with the right experience for customers, one that can outshine your competition 😁."

"The best mechanic the founders could come up with- to Bruteforce Reddit to the critical mass- was to create fake users…..lots and lots of fake users."

"1- It set the tone for the website. In many instances of building a company, looking for the unintended use cases of your product can be a powerful signal for future feature and product development. But on a pseudonymous community-first website, you can see how that can be problematic."

"Having the founder DNA firmly embedded throughout the early history of posts set the culture, the unhidden rules, and the expectation of what Reddit is very clearly and powerfully."

"2- Made people feel they were part of something real. With hundreds of (fake) users each having a distinct digital presence, user 003 would feel they were part of something so much bigger than they were"

"we often think about how we can establish Trust, yet what we fail to realize is that we are wired to be trusting as human beings skepticism by nature."

"Re-building Trust is a more appropriate phenomenon for what we see many emerging companies do."

"Users come in with a default trusting instinct. In many ways, those companies quickly erode that Trust by things like slow loading time, aggressive marketing copy, opaque pricing, and asking for private information such as emails, phone numbers, social security numbers..etc. and then attempt to rebuild this eroded Trust via social-proof, case studies..etc"

"They did that by doing two things:"

"Having no censorship."

"Not collecting any identifiable information for new users. No emails, no phone numbers, IP address..etc. If you opt-in to create a Reddit account, then all you needed was a username and password. That's it."

"Tesla's started with the sports car, the high-end complex cumbersome version of what they were trying to do."

"A cult has a shared belief and mission that resonates very strongly with a concentrated group of people. For Roam, that mission was and still is ""building a second brain."""

"They went after the people who loved cars and would appreciate the subtle and nuanced improvements they can bring to the industry, even if, at first, they came at the cost of complexity, price, and other variables."

"Going after people who are willing to learn how to use power tools. Instead of the lowest common denominator. People who may individually exhibit the same characteristics as researches. Those are your ""intellectual athletes."""

"Similarly, when Roam Research started, their quest was to find those same kinds of users. Users with a problem that is so complex that they were willing to learn and adopt new tools and workflows."

"Intellectual athletes are your writers, researchers, and people who ""hacked"" twitter as a medium to express their thoughts and views of different topics and beliefs."

"These were not your ""CEOs"" or ""Twitter influencers."" These were.."

"Intellectual athletes often have a following of people that aspire to think and act like them. They are the so called “thought leaders”"

"AI safety community"

"Intellectual athletes are prone to being power users, and Roam's efficacy in the connecting different thoughts makes them likely to personally drive next-wave customers."

"Rationalist Bay Area thinkers"

"People who think about thinking. They were working on understanding how to process emotions and deal with thinking biases."

"In fact, despite being a ""hyped"" consumer product, their first 1000 or so users came exclusively from enterprise license deals with a handful of these organizations."

"As long as they kept building features, those researchers and philosophers would continue using the product and Roam were able to charge and renew their enterprise license deals."

"Nevertheless it is still an important aspect on how to scale demand once you MOVE BEYOND YOUR FIRST 1000 users. Let’s dive a bit into the phenomena of RoamCult which is their current growth catalyst."

"From a product perspective, Conor describes his Roam as a ""Low Floor High Ceiling"" product. Which means they created a product with a very low entry point and a very steep learning curve."

"Even though it is a lot of effort, that means users can learn it quickly and become that much more powerful and unlock the ""superpowers"" of your product. That is a primary ingredient of making people vocal about your product."

"Conor used twitter like he did roam, creating threads and threads of threads of the philosophy behind the product. Roam and other popular products with cult following had in common a strong belief about how things ""ought to be"" rather than how they are."

"Tweeting abt why Evernote is a terrible second brain"

"Tweeting about the frustration of using tools that force people to think in a ""linear model."""

"Getting into fights with people who like Evernote and explain why they are fundamentally wrong."

"Explaining the science, math, and psychology about how a human brain works."

"Sick of creating 1-page websites, Ivan set his sights on building powerful software that would replace this agonizing task of churning out 1-page websites for his friends. He hoped that said software he was making would unleash the creativity of non-programmers, who had the vision and taste necessary to create self-expressive portfolio websites but lacked the tools to do so."

"Ivan quit his job at the digital publishing company, Inkling, and teamed up with Toby Schachman to pursue this mission. Toby, at the time, had just finished his Master’s at NYU, where he published his entire thesis on visual programming."

"Why stop at building a webpage builder? Why not make a tool to create any generic web app that people can use without learning how to code?"

"The two met up, and after a two-hour conversation, Toby convinced Simon to quit his summer internship and join Ivan and himself on their mission to democratize programming for everyone."

"The problem with Sugarbox, or Concept or the vision of democratizing programming for creative people, was that it was not rooted in any immediate frequent problem that the very same people they targetted (non-programmers) faced."

"So when Chris, Jessica, Ivan & Simon teamed up, they found it sound to wrap their powerful solution in an everyday average Joe problem creating documents."

"The duo then moved to Kyoto, Japan, to rebuild the entire application from the ground up. The move to Japan + slimming down the team gave them some runway to give Notion a fighting chance to make it out into the real world."

"They sublet their San Francisco apartment and lived off the difference between SF & Kyoto rental costs. Being in a new country— where they did not speak the language and did not know anyone— meant Simon and Ivan could spend all their time programming, designing, thinking, and creating Notion."

"The first problem a product like Notion has to overcome is explaining exactly what this tool does!"

"That very same power makes Notion exceedingly challenging to communicate to potential customers. One just “has to try it to get it.”"

"Notion’s wide-reaching bundle was possible because the product's core was differentiated. The two core product differentiations are:"

"A Canvas Structure: Notion steps away from the standard paper-like structure of documents and gives users blocks they can mix and match. All while maintaining consistent styling and allowing for seamless collaboration."

"These features help make explain why Notion chose Word + Confluence + Trello bundle for their 1.0. This bundle strikes a balance between having a low barrier to enter ""low switching cost"" for Docs, having a high utility on single+multiplayer (all three), and highlighting the product block-mixing power (differentiation)."

"On the other hand, Quip, Amuim, Bear, et al. were forced to make a different set of choices. The core value proposition for these bundling solutions was layering in an additional productivity functionality on top of a familiar one."

"Hence, they had to go all-in Multiplayer utility (e.g., combining chat with file sharing is only useful when you have a meaningful number of team members using said software), making it harder to gain mindshare or go all-in on single-player utility, making it harder to monetize."

"how exactly Notion grew through Word of mouth? Especially when they didn’t have an established customer base or a following to lean on to kickstart the process."

"Awareness: launching on discovery platforms"

"Not every launch on a discovery platform end up having the pour-over effect that Notion had. Why exactly this happened is because they were able to get those initial cohort of people to spread the word."

"Virality: getting people to spread the Word."

"Maximize user commitment to the product (i.e., association)"

"Maximize the positive emotions (i.e., love) users have while using the product"

"For the same $4,$8,$12/month, Notion is a better bargain for someone on top of the Value curve than someone just at the start, and those are the people who would be most motivated to spread the word about the product."

"Moving people along the value curve:"

"From a company's perspective, in our case, Notion, we established that the goal is to get as many users to the highest-value level ASAP. By doing so, the user would have invested just enough into being a master of this game that they would be a lot more likely to recruit their colleagues to play alongside them rather than attempt to master a whole new game themselves!"

"Everything pre-sign-up on Notion is focused on teaching people how to use the product. The end-state is left for the users to imagine."

"After showing ""what they can do."" It was time to put some of that learning into action. If Notion's Landing page was about the what, the onboarding process was about the how. Onboarding on Notion was all about showing users how they could use the product."

"First was allowing collaborators to bypass the early-access form. If anyone wanted to an invite to Notion, the path of least resistance is to find someone already using it and collaborate on that workspace."

"Second was showcasing the power of Notion in a company setting. Releasing Notion’s Product roadmap (built on Notion, of course) was how they did that."

"The third thing was templates. The Notion v1.0 came with 30 templates team-ready templates that ranged from a design spec template to a knowledge hub one."

"The first is how Notion's journey starts with a very simple value-proposition that solves users' immediate problems, then guides people towards ""unlocking"" more valuable use-cases."