Episode 70
· 01:07:32
Everybody, welcome to the Product People Show. Happy Thursday. My name is Justin Jackson. I'm the host, and I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're listening to this right now wherever you are, whether you're in the gym or most likely you are in your car listening to this, maybe headed to work or headed home.
Speaker 1:And if you're like me, you like building stuff. You like making stuff, and you dream at night about building and launching your own products. Well, today's interview is with mister onboard himself, Samuel Hulik of useronboard.com. You've probably seen his onboarding teardowns. He's done them for Instagram and he's done them for Slack.
Speaker 1:And we talked about the experience of onboarding a user for the first time and how important it is and how it's often the thing that we tack on to the end of a project instead of baking it into the whole product itself. You are going to love this episode. He is a super interesting guy with lots of great things to say. So let's take it away. Let's go and talk to Samuel.
Speaker 1:Jackson and I am here with Samuel Hulik of Portland, Oregon and the creator, the host, the what else could we say of useronboard.com. How's it going Sam?
Speaker 2:It's good, how are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well except for these technical issues but I think we're just going to forge ahead and have a great discussion. We've met in person a couple of times which has been fun.
Speaker 2:This is true.
Speaker 1:And we were aware of each other on the Internet before that. For people that are not familiar with useronboard.com, what is that?
Speaker 2:It is a website that wherein I post teardowns, which are annotated slide shows of popular web apps first run experiences. So what it's like to sign up for Netflix, what it's like to sign up for Basecamp, so on and so forth. Maybe mixing in some wry commentary as I go.
Speaker 1:And everybody that hears about this idea thinks, Why on earth did I not think of How this did you think of doing these kind of teardowns?
Speaker 2:Sure. Well, I decided I wanted to write a book. And I put up a landing page with a sign up form to sign up for the email list for the book. And I was like, oh, but then I have to get people to go to this page. What am How am I going to solve that problem?
Speaker 2:And so I thought about guest posting, but it That sounded very hit or miss by a lot of Like even people who are like, you know, you can spend like fifteen hours on it to do a really awesome job and get three email sign ups or something like that. I was like, oh, well that sounds horrible. So what else could I do? And being a UX consultant and designer at the time, I had a pile of products that I had gone through and basically as part
Speaker 1:of
Speaker 2:a user experience design project, I would a lot of times go through and just mark up screens and say, you know, this looks like this could be working better or I would swap this with this or things along those lines or change the wording on this button, stuff like that. And I was like, oh, if only I I bet people would find those valuable if I just posted one of those. But then I thought the people who paid me to do those probably would not want me to post them without their permission, especially. And so I thought, well, of all the companies that I have reviewed, there are untold thousands more companies that I haven't, who haven't paid me to do it, because they don't even know who I am. Why don't I just pick one and just put it out there and see what happens?
Speaker 2:So that was kind of the genesis of it.
Speaker 1:Now how did you know that onboarding was going to be a good niche? It's I turned out that you know, when people think about onboarding, a lot of people are starting to think of you. You've become a domain expert there. Right. So I What made you think of that niche in the first place?
Speaker 2:I would say there's a saying, Even a squirrel will find a nut every once in a while. I kind of just walked into it by accident. And then all of a sudden, I was like, oh, oh, this makes a lot of sense for a bunch of reasons. But yeah, the book that I put the teardowns out to send people to the signup page to sign up for, was initially not even going to be about onboarding. It was going to be about this kind of esoteric philosophical concept of aligning your company's success with your user's success, and things that I really believe in, but it was a book that I wanted to write because I wanted to get the message out, and not a book that people were demanding because it was a problem that they were recognizing they had.
Speaker 2:So after seeing how the teardown started performing I was like, Oh, this onboarding thing. This is what people call the problem that I want to help people solve.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And what do you think, you know, so many people are looking for that idea and what do you think your advice is given that you feel like you kind of walked into it? Know, Rob Walling has that saying, it's not even his, but he always says, The harder I work, the luckier I get. Sure. Were there things that you were doing before that, before you discovered this idea that you think eventually led you to this idea?
Speaker 2:It's hard to say. I mean, felt like for the last several years where I was like, I have these insights and things to say that I want to share, and just nobody was really listening. Because I think in a lot of ways I was just one of thousands of, you a UX dude with an opinion, basically. And so looking at something where there aren't really a lot of There wasn't frankly a lot of people in this space to begin with really helped. And so I think picking something that has sort of the blue ocean strategy, so to speak, of like going out to the area where there isn't a lot of competition can certainly help, or just lower the bar of being able to be perceived as, you know, the blank guy or woman.
Speaker 2:But yeah, as far as identifying what that niche is, it took me a really really long time and eventually just kind of backed into it. So once I realized onboarding was a thing, there was a lot in my background that made it really obvious that it was a good space for me to be in because I've always had like kind of a user experience, customer insights side to me, as well as wanting to be really scientific in measuring the impact of what, you know, those insights will bring. So let's say we go and do a pass on a sign up form or something like that. Well, did it work out better? Did it create more sign ups that, you know, took less time to sign up?
Speaker 2:And then did those people tend to stick around longer, you know, or make it all the way through their trial? Things like that. And so measuring the Or combining the qualitative with the quantitative has always really been a big big priority for me. And something where if somebody's just kind of hiring you to sprinkle UX on top of their product and just kind of make it friendlier or nicer, wasn't really a concern. But when you call it onboarding, it's like, oh of course, that totally comes baked in.
Speaker 2:You would need to look at both. So it was really helpful from that standpoint.
Speaker 1:Now have you known for a long time that onboarding is what you wanted to focus on professionally?
Speaker 2:I would say that I have long held a mentality that I didn't really know what label to put on it or what to call it. And so really for me it was just a matter of being able to be like, oh, so all of this stuff that I wanna share and wanna accomplish, if I call it this, then I get that's that's the that's the area of overlap in the Venn diagram of everything that I'm interested in. Yeah. But my my friend Jane Portman has an analogy that I use all the time, which is like having your suitcase packed but no handle on it. Like you just, you can't use it to get anywhere, you know.
Speaker 2:And as soon as you can put that handle on it, then all of sudden it becomes so much more useful. So I feel like I had a full suitcase with no handle for a very long time and then eventually realized onboarding was that handle.
Speaker 1:So now you've done it. You've created a following online about a topic you're passionate about. And now you've built your first product for people that are starting out. What kind of advice would you give them? How can they do what you did?
Speaker 2:So I think that the to find a repeatable way to save yourself five years of toiling in obscurity like I did, I think that the two things that really come to mind are one, it was the first time that I ever, like I decided to write a book, which is really different than just writing blog posts, which is like, here's this thing that I've been thinking about or whatever. Like you really have to force yourself to go through the process of how can I even make it something that's like, remotely credible claim of expertise on a subject? And so that really forces you to kind of make decisions about like, what am I going to call this, where am I going to position myself, things like that. So if it hadn't been that, I don't think I would have been forced to really pick a specific niche and go after it. So there's that one thing.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that comes to mind is, at I can't remember, somewhere in the Rob Walling, Nathan Barry, Brennan Dunn continuum, somebody said, like, the whole Or maybe it was even Patrick McKenzie, but like, people feel like, well, I'm not an expert enough to write, you know, about this as you an know, with authority or things like that. And somebody in there said, if people are paying you to do it as a consultant or as a contributor, like a designer developer, then that is a strong enough signal that people are struggling with it and will pay to have you help educate them on how to do it themselves. And so that's something that I would really look at as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah I like that idea of if you're already being hired to do it, if you're already consulting with that, that's probably enough if you've already made money doing it professionally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and don't forget too that, I mean, if you've been doing it for I mean, I've been in the web space for ten years and I've been doing UX full time for five and like, there's a lot that you picked up in year one, or even the first three or six months that just seems like unspeakably boring and obvious to you now. And those are really the areas where when somebody's really got an itch to start learning something, that's probably the level that they're at. And so you can really speak very credibly about that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And that's We always forget about those, don't we?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean if anything, if you feel like I like the idea almost of like picking something that maybe you're not that good at, and then just, you know, documenting all the questions that you have as you go through it, where these are all questions that other people will be having, and just take six months and just do a lot of research and get a you know, get to be like a C level good at it. Not C like grade, not like C like executive. But you know, and just basically say, hey, I just spent six months researching this thing.
Speaker 2:If you don't want to spend six months, you can spend $40 or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now let's talk about the development of your book. So you're doing these teardowns and they're becoming popular. You're growing your mailing list I'm guessing at the same time?
Speaker 2:That is correct, yeah, yep.
Speaker 1:And at what point because you said you wanted you started with the idea of doing a book. At what point did you say, okay, I'm going to scratch that idea and do a book on onboarding? When did you know that this was a good enough idea to do that?
Speaker 2:Well, let's see. Interestingly, from your campfire group, someone in there recommended that he was like, you know, these teardowns are really useful. And that was actually something that stood out to me too. Was like even back then when I would write a blog post and it would happen to get read by you know, a small minority of people and then somebody would say, hey I like what you wrote or whatever. It was always you know, I like this or I agree with this.
Speaker 2:But with the teardowns it was the first time that people said, this was really helpful or this was really useful. And so looking at that, think that that's a real difference in the value that you're providing. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1:a strong signal if people are saying this is really helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So somebody in the in the I guess, was it the the product people campfire room or Yeah. I think Luke was his name, was like, you know, you should just create a site where you do these teardowns. Because I was just posting them to SlideShare and embedding them in my blog at the You know, to begin with.
Speaker 2:He's like, you should just get like, you know, useronboarding.io and just host them there as its own entity. And think that would really work. And I was like, hey, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. And so I think that domain was taken, but I got useronboard.com and, you know, took a weekend and just, you know, did another couple teardowns and then posted, I think, four of them at the same time on the site. Things just kinda kinda went went really well from there.
Speaker 1:And so at what point did you say, okay, this is going well,
Speaker 2:I should
Speaker 1:create a product for this. Why did you know, when did that happen and why did you choose a book?
Speaker 2:Right. So the question that I did not answer. So I decided from the get go I wasn't going to write a book until I got up to a certain threshold of subscribers. Or at least did my best to get that far and then see what would happen if I didn't or whatever. And so the number that I always had in mind was 3,000.
Speaker 2:That I would basically say, hey I'm writing this book and I'm in the process of doing it, but I'm you know, not actually start writing it until I got to 3,000. Because then hopefully I'd be at like five to 7,000 by the time that I, The book was done and I was ready to
Speaker 1:launch. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, I basically had had the name of a book in like, you know, I just typed like customer growth, which was the name of the original idea. And then like put it in like book shape, and then a sign up kind of form underneath it on the landing page. And so as far as like deciding to switch from one to the other, it was really, I mean, basically as simple as just changing the name of the book to it's about customer growth to it's about user onboarding. And then just kinda doing everything that I could to build up that audience to the point where I was like, okay this is a real thing that's gonna have real customers. Should pull the trigger on this and start really writing in earnest.
Speaker 1:And so I like that because a lot of people ask me that question specifically about mailing lists. At what point should you, how big of a list should you have before you start thinking about doing a product? For you that was 3,000.
Speaker 2:Very unscientific by the way. I'm not saying 3,000 is the number, you get that, you're good. Tell them Samuel, That you would set that was just the number that I internally came up with. And it wound up working out pretty well for me but you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that could change. I've often said I think a thousand is a good number but it really depends on the audience and it on what your goals are, it depends on what you're selling, all of those kinds of things. But at a thousand, you could have anywhere from a 2% to 10% conversion rate and that would be pretty good for a lot of products, especially if it's your first product. Okay, so you get the idea for the book, you start writing it as soon as you get 3,000 subscribers, is that what I heard right?
Speaker 2:Pretty much. So I started building up the mailing list like mid November twenty thirteen. And then come early January, that was right around when I hit 3,000. I was like, okay, now it's just off to the races. And I thought, I planned it out and I was like super strategic.
Speaker 2:I'll write it for two months, and then have a month of buffer time to edit and do sales strategy. And like, totally plowed through that. And it was at the last day of the third month, I was like, I have to ship this thing. I've been telling people this is the deadline. I gotta go live.
Speaker 2:And I was still I pulled an all nighter to make edits to the content even up to that point. So I greatly underestimated the amount of time that it would take to write the book. And all of my very, very wise planning ahead of time was very silly in retrospect.
Speaker 1:It ended up taking a lot longer than you thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah, way longer.
Speaker 1:And maybe take me through that whole process. While you're writing the book, you're still posting new teardowns.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:You are emailing people regularly?
Speaker 2:Emailing the email list?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, that was the nice thing about the teardowns is at that point I was putting out one a week, and so I was It was never a thing where it's like sign up for updates on the book, and then three months later being like, hey, remember that book that you forgot about? It's it's ready today. So I was always kind of maintaining that presence of mind regardless. But yeah, so as far as like what was on my plate, was getting new teardowns out and just trying to keep continue building the list as much as possible. Also fortunately by that point, it had led to I guess, especially at that point, significant amount of consulting interest.
Speaker 2:So I was able to take on some projects and try to figure out. Like people were like, oh yeah, so you do user onboarding. Do you have like, you know, packages around that? And I was like, wow, sure, yeah, I guess. And so it's just a lot of like talking to people and really quickly trying to figure out what is the the common need there, so I can kinda create a more, you know, formal offering around that.
Speaker 2:Which turned out to be, we like the teardowns that you do. Will you do one for us but not share it? And so that was a service that I could really quickly formalize and I guess turn into something along the lines of a non recurring productized consulting offering. Yeah. So I was doing those and then also writing the books.
Speaker 2:It was January, February, March were a lot of long long long days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we should have clarified during this whole time, what were you doing for work? You were a freelancer, you were working a day job. When you started useronboard.com, what was your professional life like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, interestingly, so I had an apprenticeship with Rob Walling for three months. And that was something that ended at the November 2013. So this was my very next project after that. Interestingly, our savings had kind of dwindled as the apprenticeship game is not a super lucrative one.
Speaker 2:And it was basically something where right at the end of it, our car got totaled. And I was like, well this is terrible timing. But then the insurance company wound up paying out like twice as much as the car was actually worth. And basically bought us one more month of like, you don't have to go back to like just general consulting or look to find another job. Like I have one month to just see how far I can possibly get.
Speaker 2:And then at the end of that month, you know, it's basically you know, credit card time until I find a way to make money. And fortunately from December to January, that was enough to drum up interest to you know, work with some pretty exciting companies on some one off consulting projects and things like that. At a rate that I wasn't used to charging people you know, beforehand because once again you're kind of seen as an expert in that particular field. And so I was able to do a little bit of consulting just to kind of keep things going and keep, you know, not fully max out our credit cards. But it really came down to like, okay, so the car insurance money December to January, and then consulting money bought us January to February, and then it was launching at the March.
Speaker 2:Was like, if this doesn't go well, this might be an interesting experience. But fortunately, the launch didn't go super well but it went well enough where it wasn't like I made a $100 and I had to try to figure out how to borrow money from somebody or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well let's get into the launch then.
Speaker 2:Alright.
Speaker 1:You work all night to get this thing out. You didn't have the buffer that you were hoping for but you get it out, you launch, what happened?
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of confusion I think. I really wish that I had spent a lot more time on the sales page. The packages that I had, people didn't really understand what was included and what wasn't. I didn't want to anchor the value of the book by calling it a book, or anchoring it low, because then people would compare it to like a 14 Amazon purchase or whatever. So I called it like a training package, but then people were like, but it's a book, right?
Speaker 2:Basically calling it something vague to avoid anchoring low essentially just resulted in people not knowing what it was at all, which is worse. And so it took me a while to figure out what the packages should be and stuff like that. So there was that issue. One thing that I really wish I had done, and it's kind of like a pro tip, I really really wish that I had started selling the book in person, like halfway through writing it. Because that would have informed me what people's objections to buying it were.
Speaker 2:It would have informed me what people What value people saw in it. And it also would have informed me about what the subject matter of the book should have been, while there was still time to change it. Fortunately, the book itself is really People have found it really valuable. I feel like I did the subject matter part right, but as far as how to just describe it in sales terms that made sense to people, I was woefully inadequate in. Which interestingly was kind of the point of the project was to just like, I'd never brought a product to market.
Speaker 2:I'd never figured out pricing. I had never built an audience. And I was like, I just want to get my rookie mistakes out of the way now so I can, you know, not screw up a SaaS product that I've been working nine months on or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And really, I mean, the other pressure was that you were doing this all very fast. Like you stopped your apprenticeship with Rob and then like this was the next thing you jumped into and then it kind of took off. You started building an audience really quickly. Yeah, yeah
Speaker 2:I know I super surprised. Sorry, what's that?
Speaker 1:Must have added to the pressure a little bit too.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, very much So yeah. So there was that. One thing that I think I did do well as far as the launch is concerned was I got it out to like advanced copies to a lot of people. I was really very, I guess strategic you could say in that regard. Like I made a list of, I probably got it I probably put it sent it to more than a 100 people.
Speaker 2:Wow. Where and which I think I assumed It's funny because when you're doing it for the first time, you just think that's like normal. And then comparing notes with other people who have self published where they're like, oh, I send it to like 17 maybe or something. Yeah. And so basically I just made a list of a, like anybody who I follow on Twitter that I don't already know who has a big audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And basically, you know, the Venn diagram between that group and the group of people who I've really looked up to for a really long time in the design community or considered heroes in, you know, in product or startup world.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It made it really easy to send out a warm email that wasn't just, hey, review my book please, and maybe tweet about it on the day that it comes out. I could really, you know, come in and say specifics like, I remember this blog post that you wrote eight and a half years ago, and it's informed how I've done x y and z. Know, indirectly has led to me writing this book. If you wanna check it out, please let me know. And like, not even necessarily linking to the book, but just reaching out to people.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, so
Speaker 1:That's awesome. And I noticed, for example, you have Ryan Singer on your books page. I'm guessing that came from an advanced copy that you sent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, and I also reached out to him because I was doing the round of interviews to include in the complete package, And I wanted him to His voice to be included there. And he said he would be open to it, but he didn't want it to be behind any kind of paywall or anything. So I actually was like, Yeah, that's fine. So we had the conversation and then I posted it on the site, which is an audio interview called I think it's called explore What is it?
Speaker 2:Exploring jobs to be done with onboarding or something like that. Oh cool. And that's been like a pretty popular thing and I think has been a way to kinda show people a sample of what the audio interviews inside the book are going to be like, so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now can you talk a little bit about numbers? How did you do on the initial launch and how have you done since then?
Speaker 2:Sure. I did, I think like 7,000 and change on the launch day. And I also, I think I launched on a Friday, is like super dumb. Oh no no no. I launched on a Thursday, but I had a two day sale to the list.
Speaker 2:That's like a Nathan Barry tactic of like have that like urgent count window to get people to buy. Yeah. But like the sale ended at like 8PM on a Friday Pacific time. So it's like completely irrelevant to it. Like you know, so many people wasn't So I sent out the email like, hey, the sale's ending in an hour.
Speaker 2:And it just went to nobody until Monday morning buried under 30 other emails. So I would recommend launching midweek, especially if you're gonna have a multi day sale. But yeah, so like the launch week, I think I got Man, I don't even remember. Probably around like 10 or 12 k or something like that. So not a huge Not like a super great return for three months worth of really busting my ass to get that out.
Speaker 2:But fortunately, since then because one thing that I've also heard about self publishing is you have like you build up to this launch and then you just kind of assume there'll be just very sporadic sales afterwards. But because I'm continuing to put out teardowns and I'm really just working on I really hate this term, but just driving awareness for user onboarding as a thing, outside of even user onboarding as a property of mine. Sales have been really good ongoing. And so haven't looked it up recently, but I would assume I probably passed the 85 mark within the last week or so.
Speaker 1:Nice. And now So that's how many months since launch now?
Speaker 2:So April It was like March 27 till now. So April, May, June, July, August, September, October. So eight months.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So since then it's continued to do well. You didn't make all your money right on launch. There is hope for people that maybe don't have a perfect launch. You can still, sometimes you can still have a successful product that just burns along at a pretty steady pace.
Speaker 2:I think so. I think that like if you look at something like what Brennan Dunn has done with his products where he, you know, he's His whole ecosystem or like stair step approach, where he has that robust floor or foundation of his newsletter subscribers and then, you know, other things that he's doing for free. And then if they wanna upgrade, they can get the book, and if they wanna go past that, they can go into coaching and consulting and the product and all that stuff. I would say that I'm kinda more along those lines than Nathan Barry, who seems to be a lot more launch centric, and then moves on to launching something else. Or relaunching something that he already had.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's back up just a little bit because I want you to go back to that time where you launched and you were hoping, I'm assuming you were hoping for a big launch, it didn't meet what you were hoping for. You're thinking, Man, that's not a lot of money for three months of work. How did you feel in that moment and maybe just take us through what you did. How did you kind of process that, this idea of maybe feeling like, Ugh, like it wasn't quite what you wanted?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was kind of rough, because I remember because I literally had been up all night the night before. And I was launching at like 8AM Pacific, on I guess it was a Thursday. And at that point, my wife and son had both woke. I have a four year old.
Speaker 2:And so they had both gotten up. And I was like, hey guys, come out. Because I have home office on this property. I was like, hey, come on, come on. And so they like threw on their robes and came out.
Speaker 2:I was like, alright, I'm gonna send the email. And I sent it and I was just like, you know, waiting for the Gum Road announcements to come rolling in about all the money we were about to make. And it was just like, bramp, bramp, bramp. I'm like, it just started tailing off like right away. And I had like three tiers and it was all the lowest tier, which was a real bummer.
Speaker 2:Because I thought especially the people that had been warming up through the list for so long would be, you know, it would have more than just a or a greater than normal split of people getting the highest tier, and it was all lowest tier. Again, I think just because people didn't understand what it was. And so it was something where we kinda sat there and I was like, they were right behind me on this couch. And I was just, I was like, Guys, you might just wanna go. Like apparently this is not gonna be a great celebration here.
Speaker 2:And so yeah, it was frustrating for sure. It was also something where having invested all that effort and having it come down to like, you know, that one particular moment, was just the It was at least something of a relief just to have that pressure off. Where it's like, whatever I make from here, at least I can be looking at moving forward with whatever else I'm gonna be doing. But you kind of feel depressed about that because you're so invested in it and it's kind of exhilarating just to be working on such a tight deadline for such a big project too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, that must have been so hard There's so much that leads up to that launch even if you tell yourself, Well, it's going to be okay. I'm not going to let it affect me too much. It almost always does because there's so much expectation of this thing is going to do well or I hope this thing does well and when it doesn't meet your expectations, that can be hard. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How did you kind of pull yourself up after that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that for me, I'm something of an optimist or I'm always Like whatever happens, can be like, well, maybe it's good for this reason, or whatever. And I think in my case it was something where I was like, fortunately, I'm not going to stop doing user onboarding anytime, because at that point, you know, I was basically As soon as the book launched, all the consulting work that I'd been putting off, because I was so busy writing the book, I was able to take on. And so, like money wasn't going to be an issue, which was a huge relief. And it helped establish me, you know, in the marketplace, or whatever you might wanna call it, as like, you know, someone that's kind of in demand or whatever that might be. And I knew as I continued putting out teardowns I would get I would be able It was a repeatable process.
Speaker 2:And so basically, you know, my sort of glass half full take on it was the launch didn't go well. The point of doing this entire project was to make You know, get my rookie mistakes out with launches early, So that's kind of been accomplished. And fortunately, I'm not going anywhere, and so I can continue to try to You know, now I have a page that I can split test, and now I have a property that I can relaunch down the road, or things like that. And so I think taking that mindset of like, you know I've really been super launch centric just because I'm very learning and iteration centric, where I really like the idea of like, not everything will be completely right the first time, but like get something out, have a repeatable process where you can continue learning and optimizing as you go. And so fortunately, that was the mindset that I took on and that kind of gave me some hope as opposed to like, well, I'll just chalk that up as a loss and move on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think the other thing that you had which is helpful is you had a bunch of experience that told you that people wanted this thing, that they were interested in onboarding, that what you were offering had value. I think sometimes people launch and they don't know whether the thing they are offering has any value, which is hard. And that makes it difficult to know if they should continue or not. In the you already knew.
Speaker 1:You knew that people wanted this. You knew that people were interested in onboarding. You just had to figure out what was wrong with my pitch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. The demand was definitely there. It wasn't like I nailed the pitch but nobody cared. I would agree with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah and you're right, that can be another problem, can it? Like you nail the pitch but sorry, no one really wants it. Like you can have the best launch process in the world but if no one wants it, it's not gonna work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So that gave me some confidence for sure.
Speaker 1:Awesome. What did you end up doing? What did you end up doing that kind of turned it around?
Speaker 2:I went from three tiers to two. I had cutesy names for them at the beginning, like this is the time saver package and stuff like that. And I got rid of that. It was like, if you just want the book, just get the book. If you want to get all this other stuff, then you can get what I call the complete package.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, so I think just being able to figure out how to reframe how people were wanting to scratch their itch, and using words that they used to describe it and things like that, was one thing that I did that was helpful. And another thing I did was I had Crazy Egg installed from day one. And you know, with the scroll heat map, I could see like, you know, starting out like white hot and then blue really quickly. And you know, just trying to figure out how should I arrange the content. I'm you know, kinda because it has like a long form sales copy right now.
Speaker 2:So you know, am I starting out strong enough? Am I sustaining people's attention all the way down the page? And just kind of taking a very loosely scientific approach to optimizing it from there.
Speaker 1:That's a great idea actually. That's something that people have forgotten about I think. Especially Crazy Egg because Crazy Egg's been around for a while. That tool can be really helpful especially with the landing page. Trying to figure out what's wrong here because that's really the thing you were asking on that fateful day, right?
Speaker 1:You're like, What's wrong here? What happened? And To at least have some idea must have been helpful to say, Okay, here's some places I can start.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah, like a long form sales page is kind of like a speech or a presentation And you without Crazy Egg, you have no idea like a third of the people just got up and left after the first minute or whatever. So having Crazy Egg in there was super helpful in that regard. Just like, am I even getting people far enough down the page to see the buttons that tell you how to buy it and how much it costs and stuff like that. Super helpful that way.
Speaker 1:So now that you've launched and now that you've I mean you have a product now that is, it sounds like grossing about 10 ks a month, if I did the math right. I'm sure you have other product people that are asking you questions and asking for your advice. What advice are you giving to people these days that want to start a product, that want to become known as an expert in a given field? What do you tell those people?
Speaker 2:For self publishing specifically?
Speaker 1:Maybe just any independent product creator or anyone that wants to be an independent product creator.
Speaker 2:It might sound cliche, but spending as much face time with the people who you think will be buying it as possible. That actually goes for a SaaS product or a I almost hesitate to even differentiate between different kinds of products, because ultimately people are frustrated with their current situation in some particular way, and they might be able to envision a better way of doing it, and maybe they think that you can reliably help get them there, and maybe you have something that facilitates that transition from frustrated to more successful. And if that comes in book form, or consulting form, or SaaS product form, or swallowable pill, like, it doesn't really matter to them. So as far as being able to like basically say, you know, I want to pick this particular problem for these particular people. Their problem is now my problem.
Speaker 2:How am I going to be able to facilitate change in their life in some way? And go from there. Then you know, really understanding what the surrounding context of that problem is, what they're calling it, what parts they recognize as being a problem, which parts they don't. That all, you know, is what I would recommend whether you're writing a book or a mobile app or anything, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is The piece I think we often miss as creators is we love working with the technology so much that we don't do the hard work of actually being with the people. Yeah. At the end of the day, it's all about people, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Well yeah, and it's about people and it's also it's like, it's not just about what your product does, but it's what your product lets people do. Like what can they do with your product? That's the important thing, not just what does your product itself do. And you know, I think that it's easy for us to get caught up in thinking of the products that we create almost like as finished work. Like a musical composition.
Speaker 2:Like we sat down and created this thing, and look at how beautiful it is. But I really, I like to think of them more as like we're creating musical instruments. And which let other people create the compositions that they want to even better. And looking at what's the end result for them, not just what's the end result for what we've created.
Speaker 1:I love how you have all these great metaphors for all of this. For the folks on video, the people who are on audio won't see this, but I'm sharing a screen from Sam's blog. This picture has shown up all over the Internet and I just think it's I love this idea presented here. You can find this on useronboard.com. If you search user onboard and then Mario, you will also find this picture here.
Speaker 1:So Sam, maybe just describe what you were talking about here, because it goes along the lines of what you were just describing earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's a formula, I guess you could say, or a visual analogy. On the left is the Runty Mario, and he encounters the fire flower in the middle, and then becomes the super fireball throwing gigantic Mario. And basically, a lot of times I think that when people think of what your business makes, that they make the product. But really, what people are buying is the experience of being kick ass with your product.
Speaker 2:But your product is just a delivery mechanism for that. And features of your product are not really the most interesting thing. It's the features of the lifestyle that your product affords. And so people seem to kinda get on with the wording underneath it, which is people don't buy products, buy better versions of themselves. So that's essentially what trying to communicate.
Speaker 1:And what are some products that you found are doing this really well? Can you give us some examples of people that are presenting that vision the way you just described it?
Speaker 2:Sure. In my book, there's a product called Oh, what is it called? Pop prototyping on paper. Are you Yeah. Familiar with that
Speaker 1:Yeah. I am.
Speaker 2:Okay. And so like in their scenario, they show you how it works. And it's like one of those typical homepages with like, you know, step one, step two, step three. But it doesn't show you what you're looking at while using the product. It shows you what you're looking like while using the product.
Speaker 2:So instead of like, this is you know, you click this button and then you go to the screen and then you click this button. And isn't that great? Like instead they say, you know, this is what you You write something on a piece of paper, has nothing to do with the product at all. And then you take a picture of it with your camera phone, doesn't even have to do anything to do with the product. And then they're like, you draw hotspots and get to watch people navigate it like it's a digital prototype, but it's just something you drew.
Speaker 2:All of that is like, oh, perfect. I can see how that fits into my life through my eyes. And I can imagine myself doing this. Not one part of it has to do with, and this is how our interface works at all. Because that doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:So that's one example that I think is really good. Another one that I use a lot of times, just as kind of shorthand, is like when Netflix was really DVD heavy and first coming out, and they're like, no late fees, no this, no that. Like people could really think like, oh I can imagine myself, I do whatever I do on the computer. That part I don't really care about. But then I can imagine myself walking to my mailbox and getting a DVD, wouldn't that be amazing?
Speaker 2:I don't have to go to the video store anymore. So like those are the kind of things where people realize within the grander context of my life, this is how things will be better for me, as opposed to, oh, on Netflix I can click on a video and see more information about it, and then click a button and add it to my queue, and then I can drag and drop to resort my queue. Like nobody cares. That's not what makes Netflix amazing. Or at the time it didn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As soon as you started describing this, I started to think of what makes it just a good advertisement. What came to mind was, you do remember the first time you saw the ad for Paper, the Paper iPad app? I don't know if you ever saw that but I remember that getting passed around. So Paper is the iPad app that allows you to sketch and the whole video is like people walking around with their iPads, stopping at the beach, sketching something, in a meeting, sketching some notes and you're just seeing over and over again people using it in their lives and it gives you this picture, this vision of I could see that fitting into my life kind of like right here.
Speaker 1:A brilliant advertisement. It leaves you wanting to have that product in your life. Yeah. It sounds like you're saying that you can incorporate those elements into onboarding as well.
Speaker 2:I would absolutely say. I think that is what onboarding is really. I think that a lot of people mistake onboarding as getting people set up with a product, or getting people better at using the product. Where really onboarding should be about getting people to be better at doing whatever the product helps them do. So getting better at TaxSlayer is not something that anyone wakes up aspiring to do, but getting better at getting their taxes filed is something that they're very motivated to do.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, onboarding within TaxSlayer shouldn't be let's explain what all of these different parts of the interface do. It should be let's just make sure that we reliably get you I kind of have this thing like, instead of Onboarding isn't getting people from point a to point b in your product, it's getting people from point A to point B in their lives. So however you can reliably get people incrementally making progress on the in TaxSlayer's case, getting taxes filed trajectory is a lot more interesting than getting people to make progress in the understanding how to use tax layers interface trajectory. So yeah, it maybe is zooming out a little bit for onboarding, but that's the thing that I'm most interested in. And unless if you add that context, just explaining how the interface works doesn't really get people very far.
Speaker 1:Man, this is Okay, this is starting to get me fired up a little bit. Ten We've minutes left, but we're gonna Let's dig a little deeper here.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to go a little long too if you want.
Speaker 1:Because the onboarding that we see is about just how to get to A to B in your app. And now that vision you just presented is so compelling to me now, Like people don't really care, do they? Do they really care about all your features? Do they really care? They really want to know what is this going to do for me?
Speaker 1:How does this make my life easier? How does this take away my pain? That's a really interesting concept. When you're doing consulting, how do you get people around this idea? Because part of the idea is we have to show people how to use the app.
Speaker 1:So is it possible to accomplish both? Or do you think it's more important to really say, you know, this is how we're getting you from A to B in your life?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean I would say that obviously people understanding how to operate the product is is a requirement for for making progress in their life. I just wouldn't mistake them understanding how to use the product as well, well I guess we're done. Like that's that's It's on you now. The idea is really just to being invested. Kind of like we were talking before about like whether you're consulting or writing a book or whatever.
Speaker 2:If you're just invested in helping resolve someone's problem and getting them out of a frustrating situation and into a successful one, then Also that really helps put a lot of these questions in perspective. So And people reach out to me and say like I mean literally just the other day somebody was like, how long should my intro video be? And I was like Like I think that there are some way more fundamental questions we should probably be asking than that, you know? Yeah. And so, you know Or, you know, just everything we go back to like whatever gets people further along in the process of doing whatever your product helps them do.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's definitely That's very much how see the world, I guess you could say. But onboarding to me is a much more interesting challenge when you put it in that context.
Speaker 1:Yeah and there's even like what I really like is when my first interaction with a product, whether it's an app or a web application or anything, when it acknowledges where I'm at as a human being. So if it was project management software. If the first screen basically described my problem better than I could describe it, say, You know what? We know you're frustrated. We know you've got tasks in email.
Speaker 1:We know you've got this over here. Let me show you how we bring all of these things together in this software. That acknowledgment is so powerful because now you're speaking human language as opposed to onboarding that's just like a user manual. It just feels like, Well, you're just talking to me like I'm a robot or a consumer. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thinking on that first step of saying, You know what, you're a human being. You've got some frustration. Let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. And also just getting people engaged instead of, you know, somebody's like, Alright, you know what? I'm sick of being a project manager screw up. I'm a sign up for Basecamp today. Like today was their day.
Speaker 2:They had been probably thinking about signing up for Basecamp for weeks, if not months. And today, for whatever reason, they're like, I'm gonna do it. And I mean, how weird would it be for Basecamp to then be like, alright, let's just talk about how to use Basecamp for the next five minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna really do anything. You're just gonna do a lot of reading and then hopefully you will remember everything that you need to know once you dive into the product. Which then that information will never be available again. Like how Like you know, just a total momentum killer. And so I really like the idea of people are fired up, they're motivated, they've made That moment was the moment they signed up.
Speaker 2:Their attention will probably never be like it is right now. How can you really get them engaged and actually scoring quick wins as quickly as possible to get them as successful as early as possible within the product? And so that's something that I look at too. Lot of the research that I did for onboarding, because there just wasn't really a lot out there when I wrote the book, was on video game design. Because it's been around a lot longer, so game design theory is a little bit more evolved, but a lot of overlaps with first level design and tutorial design and things like that.
Speaker 2:And looking at when video games used to come, you know, like a Nintendo game where it come with like a 130 page manual. Yeah. And you never read that. You're like, I would rather just go in there and be confused and have a miserable time and then never play this game again than sit down and read 130 pages about a video game. So, you know, video games becoming a lot smarter and basically saying, okay, let's make the manual interactive.
Speaker 2:So then they would have like a tutorial that was front loaded. But even then it's just like, when you need to jump, press a. And when you need to do this, press b. Or whatever that might be. It wasn't really fun.
Speaker 2:You were still just kind of trying to memorize things instead of actually getting in and doing things. And then finally, you know, looking at blending the tutorial into the game where you don't even realize you're playing a tutorial anymore is really like the ideal that you want people to have where all of sudden they just learn by doing and there are certain things that are just kind of obvious and instead of pausing the game and saying, okay, this is this kind of villain and watch out for this. It's just certain attributes are really intuitive about that and things along those lines. That's what I really really encourage people to apply to their product design as well. That first five minutes can be highly highly scripted and as full of engagement as the first five minutes of a video game for example.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know what you said? You like this magic moment a couple minutes ago where you said They've been thinking for weeks about this and this is their moment.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:And I instantly thought of this interview my friend Chase Reeves did with
Speaker 2:Uh-huh. Fellow Portlander.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fellow Portlander. He did an interview with a guy that has a fine dining restaurant in Seattle. Okay.
Speaker 2:And if
Speaker 1:you look up this interview, place is called Canless and it's with Chase Reeves on the Fizzle podcast. But this guy talked about the restaurant experience the way you just described coming to a web application. He said, You know, these people have been thinking about this for months.
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 1:their moment. Like they show up at the restaurant and this is your chance to create an experience. And that experience could be very scripted and kind of like fake, like what you might get at a chain restaurant. Or it could be acknowledging them as human beings and acknowledging that this is their moment right now. Inviting them into the restaurant and creating a great first experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Really acknowledging their humanity. Like we've been waiting for you. We know you've been thinking about this. Come on in, like welcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:When you talked about that idea of like this is their moment, like they've been thinking about this forever, Something caused them to say, Okay, this is the day. I'm gonna sign up for this today. And what's their experience like when they come? Do they feel like, Oh, well this is just like reading a Microsoft DOS manual from back in the ninety's Or or it's just like, wow, these people, they've been waiting for me. They're really welcoming me in here.
Speaker 1:Got a plan for how they're gonna help my life.
Speaker 2:Totally agree. That that is huge for me. That the idea Even just a simple thought experiment where if you were if you were serving a customer in person, and then your product was swapped out in your place, would you feel like that said, like your product said the same things that you would say with the same tone? And almost always that is not the case. Especially looking at what are called blank states or null states, which is, you know, maybe you log in and then the dashboard is where you would see all your projects or something, and it would say, you know, you have no projects or something.
Speaker 2:Like that's almost like admonishing you for not having projects yet. Like where it's like, I just filled out three forms. Like I just gave you my email name and password and now I'm here and I'm and I'm being scolded basically. Yeah. This is not going and kicking off on the right foot.
Speaker 2:Certainly it's not something you would say if you were standing in the website's place welcoming a new customer to your company. So I mean, yeah, very very much so. If it can't pass the test of like, this is even remotely the kind of human experience that we want people to have, and these are the words we use and the tone we want to use, and this is how helpful we can possibly be, Yeah. That's easy pickings, I guess you could say.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well and even think about how you would translate that analogy to a restaurant. Like someone shows up Right. And the hostess says, You have no seat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you haven't ordered anything. There is no dinner for you. That's because I have seen it on social, like mobile social apps and stuff where the main thing is adding people you know and the screen will literally say, You have no friends. And it's like, Oh, wow, you're making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside social app. Thank you.
Speaker 1:These are the things that we don't think about though. The human beings aren't right there. If they were in front of us and I was inviting them into my place of business, I would say, Welcome. I'm so glad you're here. Let me talk to you a little bit.
Speaker 1:Why are you here? Oh, that's great. How was the traffic? Well, let me find you a seat. There'd be all these things I would do.
Speaker 1:But when it's these inhuman interfaces that you're just like, you're just programming them with your head down in a cave, We don't always think about those interactions, do we?
Speaker 2:It's also something where so many times, for whatever reason, good or bad, the onboarding part of the product design is tacked on at the very end. It's really, it's not part of the onboarding. Okay. Oh, sorry. You're still Okay.
Speaker 2:You froze for second. Just wanna make sure you're there. And so it's something where it's like, it's probably something that's really rushed and just kind of slapped together at the very end when something's about to ship. Because you're like, oh, right. It has to say something when there's nothing there or whatever.
Speaker 2:And I'm a little biased obviously, but I really like the idea of starting with what is the first thing that someone sees, and before we even start talking about super advanced level, this is what the dashboard looks like when it's got six months worth of activity in it. Like, how do we even just get people into one week of activity? What does it look like then? Or what does it look like after four weeks of activity? And designing it from a standpoint of it doesn't if people you know, if 1% of the people who ever sign up are ever even going to make it six months into the product, why are we spending so much time focusing on that state as opposed to the state when a 100% of the people who sign up are gonna see it, or 50% of the time or 50% of the people who sign up are gonna see it, so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:How can we make those experiences great as opposed to creating this gigantic feature that kind of literally doesn't exist for 99% of the people who sign up because they never even get that far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And if you have an existing SaaS application, one of the things you can do is you can go into whatever your analytics are for in app analytics and you can see, you can do things like filter by has created an account and then has done a certain step. And then you can see how many people, they sign up on this month, by month six, how many people are still doing that? Or what is the success rate if they create three things in your app? Does usage go up after that or does it go down?
Speaker 1:And I think what you're speaking to is that that first experience is so important.
Speaker 2:Totally. And looking at parallels in video game design, you'll find that the endings for video games suck a lot of the time, just because it's like it's a numbers game. Like how many people are even going to make it to the end or whatever? You look at Super Mario Bros, just the original Nintendo game, it starts off gripping, where like, okay, I'm in this new land, gotta I discover all these new things, oh, there's this princess that's missing, alright, you know, is I'm locked into this, and then you get to the end and it's like, oh, okay, you
Speaker 1:did it. You know,
Speaker 2:because like, they didn't need to spend a ton of design effort on that because the entire experience, especially the beginning of the experience was so strong that people were already bought in from the beginning. And it had been really weak upfront, it doesn't matter how great that was because nobody would get there. Yeah,
Speaker 1:yeah. Brings up a good point actually because you just talked about user onboarding but there's also this idea of like the end state. I don't recall that user offloading or user whatever finishing. But there is some, I mean and maybe this all just follows under the umbrella of user experience, but it seems like user experience focuses a lot on the present state and maybe not like the beginning, which is the onboarding phase, and then the ending, like you finished a project, what does that mean? You've successfully organized your life with our calendar software.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? Do you think people need to pay more attention to that?
Speaker 2:I think so. I mean, on a very small level, just looking at somebody who's completed a task, even a small one, just giving them some sort of positive encouragement and being like, congratulations, you did that. Like, you know, if you're Vimeo or Wistia, like, you just uploaded your first video. You're you're amazing. Like, how much nicer is that than just like video count equals one or whatever they might be having, you know, there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So even just celebrating small successes, especially early on, I think could be really helpful. And then also, especially as time goes by, and especially if you if it's like b to b and you charge for the product, you know, reminding people of how successful they are because of it. So going back to like Rob Walling with Drip, that was something that was baked in from day one, which is like the entire point of this product is to get people to subscribe to increase your your email list. Subscribe subscriber count.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so weekly emails and dashboards and everything was like, this is how much your subscriber account has increased. Not this is how many emails we've sent, or this is how many drip campaigns you've created. Like that stuff wasn't really that important. The end outcome was, I want to do this because I want more people to sign up and then more people to convert.
Speaker 2:Those were really the two things that were designed around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know one thing I think that could be helpful for people just as you're talking, to imagine a person reading your dialogues. Like imagine there's a person standing behind you reading the dialogues that you've written in your software. Whenever you say these things they sound so funny. Just imagine a person standing behind me going user count equals zero.
Speaker 1:Or video count equals one. Know, like that sounds so funny, know, like
Speaker 2:Right. I like your idea of like just pretending you're in a restaurant and that's what the waiter says. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you can literally go through your whole app and read all your dialogue boxes with that in mind. Say, How would you feel if there was a person that was reading those to you? If you had a human being saying, You have no friends. That sounds so foolish when you say it out loud when you kind of personalize
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:love that, that we've kind of, as we've been kind of yapping here, that idea is, there's something about that, about really going through those and saying, What kind of language are we using here? How does this treat people with like, even dignity and respect? Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Humiliating people are new to your product is probably not plan A.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's talk a little bit in the closing moments here. What are you thinking about doing next? I think about your history now. It's a great story actually.
Speaker 1:You were doing this thing with Rob and then you found this thing here and you built up an audience and now you've released a product that's actually doing quite well. Maybe talk to us a little bit about how you're feeling right now. Maybe what are the challenges you're feeling right now. And then kind of what are you thinking about doing next?
Speaker 2:Sure, I would say one of the biggest challenges that I'm working on is just trying to be able delegate things. That, you know, I'm just getting more consulting work than I can take on. There just isn't a whole lot of other There aren't a lot of other people in this space. Like before when I was a UX generalist, I could be like, oh no, but my friend x y or z might be available. Let me introduce you to them or whatever.
Speaker 2:I mean it's it's even harder to just do that kind of stuff. So that's one of the top of my challenges for me. And then also just trying to figure out what the, you know, best best way to apply my time is and trying to invest more in user onboarding useronboard.com, the site itself, because that was really We were talking before, I got the suggestion in that campfire chat. Was like, oh yeah, you know, good idea. And I like literally coded up over a weekend, months almost a year ago.
Speaker 2:And so Well, almost literally a year ago. And so trying to just reinvest in that infrastructure and things like that. As I alluded to I think briefly, the number one thing for me has always been really wanting to take a SaaS product to market. And so fortunately, you know, the audience for the user onboard list is pretty significant now. And there's a lot of opportunity for customer development and kind of coming up with like a beta list audience and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So I'm in the earliest stages of prototyping and researching, getting a SaaS product out as well. So hopefully there will be some interesting news regarding that coming out in the near ish future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. You know, the one thing that you've done well is you've created this content that's pretty interactive. Like you go through your slide decks and at the end get prompted to subscribe to an email list. Your list is What's your list now? How big is it?
Speaker 2:It's like 12,500, something like that.
Speaker 1:12,500. Congratulations, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Thank
Speaker 1:you. That's a pretty unique form of content. Do you think there's some other opportunities that people aren't seeing, other forms of content that are kind of unique like that that kind of have, know, yours has a couple things baked in. You've got this weekly thing, you've got this interactive thing and then you've got this built in call to action at the end. There some other ideas around that space that you think people are missing?
Speaker 2:Like just other alternative forms to blog posting or podcasting or whatever that might Yeah,
Speaker 1:you happened upon anything else?
Speaker 2:No, and I'm not even really sure how I would repeat that for myself if I wanted to pick another thing. I think that, you know, once again, I might sound like I know what I'm doing, but that is definitely not the case. One thing that my mind goes to is video. That looking at YouTube celebrities and the amount of eyeballs that they're getting, or just like some guy who remixes movie trailers and posts them to YouTube and gets just ungodly numbers of attention or user counts, views. That's the word I'm trying to hit on.
Speaker 2:But anyway, if I were to try to do something else, think it would be very much public video oriented. Just because you can let your personality shine, people feel Oh, something like Ran Fishkin's Whiteboard Fridays at Moz, I think is a great example alternative, but it's still a repeating thing, it's not like a podcast or whatever. That's the kind of thing that I would be looking at if I were to try another form of content generation or whatever you might want to call that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cool. Sam, I really enjoyed this conversation. I don't always get fired up like this, but there's something about like, especially what we've been riffing on the last twenty minutes here. Really, really helpful, really enjoy your company.
Speaker 1:I like hanging out with you when I'm in Portland. So thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 2:Justin, the feeling is mutual.
Speaker 1:And let's tell people where they can find all the things you're doing. We said useronboard.com. Is there some other places they should find you?
Speaker 2:Probably but that's really the If you only remember one website that's the one so I would just stick with that probably.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. Thanks again for being on the show.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It was a real pleasure.
Speaker 1:Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I kept wanting to cut this interview down. I I did cut some pieces out just for Product People Club members. If you want to apply to Product People Club, go to productpeople.club. But I ended up keeping a lot of it in just because the conversation, especially near the end there, was so good.
Speaker 1:So I hope you enjoyed that. If you have comments, you can reach me on Twitter at m I Justin. The letter m, the letter I, and Justin. If you want to help the show, you can leave us a review on iTunes. Just search for Product People, and that you'll be able to leave a review there.
Speaker 1:It really helps the show get noticed. And that's it for this week. Thanks for joining me again. Thanks for letting me share your your car ride or your run or your workout or whatever you've been doing. And I will see you next week.
Speaker 1:Talk to you then.
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