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- [00:00]
A
There are two goals that designers almost always group together. One, make a useful product, and two, make it easy to understand. But after interviewing Sam Stevenson, one of the co founders of Granola, I'm now thinking of these very differently, especially as I'm working on an early stage startup myself. And it all stems from a piece of advice that they received from David Lee, a YC partner and one of the angel investors in Granola.
- [00:25]
B
If you just, like give your product to people and watch them try and use it when you're very early, you're actually trying to solve two problems at the same time. You're trying to solve the problem of, have you made a useful product that people pick up and use and get utility out of? And can you solve this problem of making the thing easy to understand and easy to use and to figure out? And those are like independent problems.
- [00:45]
A
If you try to solve both of these problems up front, then you're kind of playing on hard mode. And this is exactly how I was thinking of Inflight before this episode, where instead, Granola focused exclusively on making a useful product, even if it meant that they had to teach each individual person how to use it.
- [01:04]
B
We switched to hand onboarding every user that we gave Granola to, by which I mean we would get them on a video call and they would share their screen, but I would be like, okay, now click the sign in button. Now, when you want to create a new note, go to the top right and click this one and then this and then this. The idea being we just show them how to use it, and even if the thing looks as complicated as hell, they can use it. And then we can get feedback on what it's like to live with.
- [01:28]
A
Sam says they ran that playbook about 150 times, which is no joke. But when you're giving each new user a bespoke onboarding, then you can kind of get by with a slightly less intuitive product, as long as it solves the core problem at the end of the day. Here's Sam describing the early Granola product.
- [01:47]
B
The app started out simple, but basically every experiment we tried, we just added it and added it and added it into the app. And we didn't often take things away. It was kind of a Frankenstein at this point.
- [01:56]
A
When you're bringing a new product to market, there's really only one thing that matters, retention. And if you have that, it's okay. If the product is a bit of a Frankenstein, that part is easy to fix. Once you have product market fit as.
- [02:09]
B
A person building product, it's like, so easy to, like, fall in love with your ideas and think something sounds great and that you've got the right answer. But really the only thing that matters is like, does somebody actually find it useful? And do they pick it up and, you know, pick it up again and again and does it really solve their problem?
- [02:24]
A
Real quick message, and then we can jump back into it. I'm all in on Paper as the next great design tool. And this is coming from someone who's taught figma to more people than just about anyone. But I'm ready. I mean, it's time for a tool that puts creativity at the heart of everything, not systems and processes. And the way that we design and create software is changing faster than ever. And the tools we're using were made for yesterday's tasks. Instead, Paper is putting designers first and building all kinds of features that I've always wanted. So if you want to be one of the very first people to use the next generation of design tooling, then head to Dive Club Paper to get on that list. Early Access launches in May. So that's Dive Club Paper. Look, you know how big of a Jitter fan I am. But their latest release is hands down the best one yet. Now, Jitter has an infinite canvas for animation design. And I mean, within 30 seconds of using it, I knew that this was always the way that it should be for motion design. It makes iteration 10 times easier. Collaborating with team members makes way more sense. And you can scale content across formats using multiple art boards in a single file. Jitter is crazy. Like, this product is so incredibly good. Now you got to try it out. Just head to Dive Club Jitter to get started. That's J I T T E R. Okay, now onto the episode. Once Granola was able to verify that the core product was working and retention was good, then they switched modes to the second problem. Making a product that's easy to understand.
- [03:59]
B
We kind of switched modes to, like, okay, the thing kind of works. I think we just need to figure out how to get some random person on the Internet to figure it out and start to use it for themselves. What that looked like was basically we just stopped holding people's hands on the video calls, but otherwise kept the same thing and, you know, slowly started watching them. You struggle with things, and we could pick away at the problems and what was working or what wasn't working.
- [04:19]
A
The current state of Granola is very simple. I mean, like, so stripped down that it feels obvious. Colin Dunn from Visual Electric calls this informed simplicity.
- [04:29]
C
I think informed simplicity is, you know, when you see it. I think it's a feeling you get when you use a product that has been so well designed and so thoughtfully considered that you look at it and it just seems obvious that it should be that way, that there's no other form that it could take.
- [04:47]
A
So it's easy to look at a product like Granola and miss the winding journey that led the designer to that place. My biggest takeaway from that episode is to separate out making a product that is retentive from making a product that is intuitive. I mean, sure, those ideas are connected, but they are distinct. And once you separate those two goals, it becomes easier to run all of those crazy experiments necessary to find product market fit. So that's my new plan. I mean, my morning tomorrow is full of calls where I'm hand onboarding people to inflight. And you can get on that list too, if you want. Just go to dive dot club, slash inflight. And it's just another reason that having a podcast is kind of a cheat code. I mean, on Twitter, you see the testimonials and $20 million Series A announcements, but what were the steps that a startup had to take to get there? That's what I want to know. And we got another awesome story coming up because we get to hear from the first designer and now head of design at Luma, AI Tuin Kumar. So I will see you on Friday.