Use demos to test ideas and find committed users

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 3:45

   it's not we're launching a rocket you know it's funny i rather call these demos instead of launches and i just love shipping just demos constantly yep um and the more demos we can put as a company the better at my company i'm always like well what are we launching this week that's more the question and we work backwards, always from the launch of whatever we're working on. So for example, I'll give you a small example. If we have a feature we're working on, well, we talk about, sure, we talk about the feature, how it feels, et cetera. But then I ask, well, what's the copy on the Instagram caption? What's the first, what's the hook if we make this a video about this? And not that like it needs to have a good, needs to go viral, but we should talk about it because how we communicate to other people is just as important as what we're building. And so I'm, it's at every part

2. 4:24

   of the process. It's not like we'd make it. And then magically I make a hit video or something. That's never how it works. It's always like, we kind of know it's a hit before we even start like working on it because it just sounds good on paper. Yeah. And so I can show some examples of that. I think a lot of people see videos that you publish that go viral and get a ton of attention. And they almost think that it happens by accident because you just seem, you know, so comfortable and natural and off the cuff.

3. 4:46

   But that's not how you do it at all because you're trying to figure out the hook before you even do the video. So maybe it'd be interesting if you could pull up a video, walk us through it, and then maybe walk us through the process of how you created that video, what goes into it before you've even actually started shooting anything? Totally, totally. My philosophy on a lot of the launch stuff now is just how can we just show like almost like the process of what I'm doing versus show the ending of what I'm doing.

4. 5:14

   I think there's a lot of value to being like, hey, I'm this founder person and I just got this much money and this is my product and this is my fancy DSLR and these are my good, my wonderfully edited video, you know, with me in front of a nice office, you know, but I'm sure we've all seen those. You see those every day. I saw like five today for sure. And those have a purpose. But to me, that becoming like the kind of like thing that people are reaching towards is really annoying.

5. 5:39

   And so I try to always do the opposite and just do what I think is right. Because again, that's a one-time thing. You want a channel, because why are we even launching, Aaron? Why are we launching? What's the reason? We're launching to get users. Exactly. We're not launching to like get a bunch of clout on the internet and make people think that we're smart. we're trying to actually get people to use our thing.

6. 5:56

   And that means having a channel that we can keep on repeating and find users from. And so, yeah, I'll show you one example here. This one's a perfect example. This is like the launch of HeyClicky. So this is Clicky. Clicky is this little blue guy that follows your cursor on as you use your computer. And it's basically an AI teacher that can teach you anything. Honestly, I thought the demo was not that good.

7. 6:18

   I remember I showed it to you in office hours and you're like, oh, you should post this. It's actually kind of cool. and um i think one day you asked me again about it and uh i ended up saying okay yeah fine i'll post this yeah uh because even for me i've been doing this for years like 10 plus years and even i sometimes i'm like oh i don't want to post it it's not good enough but it was so wrong that's so wrong of me for you to even think that and so i record this video in the office five minutes before dinner and i post it and after dinner it's just doing numbers and now this is my company isn't that it's a crazy thing yeah it was just a random side project that i then even just open source because i thought no one would even care about it and uh here i am working on it six months later as a real company right yeah and so this was nearly three million views how how important

8. 7:01

   was this video and actually even giving you the confidence that you should keep working on this i do not care about the traffic at all uh the views looks really wonderful and people will say congratulations but what are the actual numbers and so i actually don't care about this number at all i was like how many people downloaded it and so after this video i think 7 000 people downloaded it and then i looked at who's like retained four days later and if you ask me why i'm working on the product today it's not because it went viral it's because 7 000 people downloaded it and about a hundred people of the 7 000 kept on using it every day for five days straight that got me so inspired i reached out to those hundred people i talked to each of them and i was like oh my god people are using this for things i would have never imagined and the users are what inspired

9. 7:42

   me to keep going forward of course there's so many little things i could talk about things i'm doing just subconsciously at this point maybe you could help me think through it but even just the headline