The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:19:12 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:19:12] S1: Do you think you make it easy enough for people to unsubscribe from your products? [00:19:16] S2: Yeah. Yeah. We we invest a lot. I mean, at the end of the day, being here for the long run... It's not just about Evernote. Right? It's about Bending Spoons, all of our products. We we are acquiring bigger and bigger products. Instead of making a 2% more revenue on Evernote, it's much more important to build a reputation of a company that you can trust. And so instead of, like, some newspaper, I think, famously asked you to call a phone number to unsubscribe, and that was the only way to unsubscribe, and then you had to wait half an hour to unsubscribe. Instead, we we we review the unsubscription process regularly so that it's not too cumbersome, too frictionful. [00:19:56] S1: That's fascinating. So we have the idea process and then we have the, oh, we've got something that could be a good idea. How do we go from idea to early testing in MVP? What does that look like?
00:20:08 · Federico Simionato
[00:20:08] S2: Yeah. It depends a lot product by product. So on Evernote, it's more about sitting down with customers, having conversations with them, showing them prototypes on Figma, for instance. Does this look like something that you think is useful for you, for your use case? And then over time, we've started knowing our customers better. We have a panel of Evernote experts that we know well and we know their use cases. And so we know that we can always count on them on providing feedback on advanced features. When it's a more casual feature, maybe we we will want to talk to a more like average customer. So the way we identify the feature that works on Evernote is we just sit down with people and we show it to them. We show the prototype to them. We show the Figma to them. And based on their feedback, we just tweak it or maybe even discard it. How do you know when to ingest advice and change versus discard it with customer feedback? It's especially important to realize when people are telling you, I don't need this. And people never tell you, I don't need this. They generally tell you, yeah, it looks fine. It looks okay. And so you have to be... There's a great book. It's called The Mom Test that you can read, and it tells you... If you ask your mother, did I do okay? She's always gonna tell you that you did okay. Right? It's... She's never gonna tell you, yeah, you did poorly or this is not good. You should ask questions in a way that forces people to tell you, yeah, I would actually not use this. So for instance, instead of asking you, how often do you work out? You will come up with an ideal version of you that says, like, yeah, I work out three times a week. But then I ask you, how many times have you worked out last week? And you're like, only one, but actually it's because I had a meeting and it was away. Okay. Well, how many times did you work out the previous week? Still one because of this other thing? The previous week. Still one. And and so after a while, notice that the things that people actually do are different from the things that they say. And so you should ask people, instead of do you like this feature or would you use it, you should ask them, what's a use case that you had in the last month for which this would have been useful? And if they can't come up with any, it's it's a red flag. Right?
00:22:12 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:22:12] S1: Any other questions that are very helpful in identifying that? I love that. What's the use case in the last month? Any others? [00:22:18] S2: It depends a lot on who you ask. Like, if we select a user that we know is very active, then what we can ask is more like, how have you organized your system on Evernote, your your hierarchy of information on Evernote, your notebooks, your notes in a way that powers your business or powers your professional life, for instance. Instead, if you are selecting a user that is maybe a bit more casual or newer, then we we should ask more specific questions about, like, recently, what what did you do recently on Evernote? What reasons did you have for taking notes? [00:22:50] S1: It's very difficult when you have a broad set of customers, ones which are incredibly advanced power users and ones which are much more casual. How do you advise people on building products for both without alienating either?
00:22:50 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:22:50] S1: It's very difficult when you have a broad set of customers, ones which are incredibly advanced power users and ones which are much more casual. How do you advise people on building products for both without alienating either? [00:23:06] S2: Mhmm. It's not easy. It's it's not... There's no, like, silver bullet that you can pull that that makes both happy. Sometimes you can find things that are useful to both groups. You should think about your product very specifically, like Evernote. Should we build Evernote for casual users? What would casual users do? They wouldn't pay because they are casual, and so they they wouldn't invest much on a on a product that just gives them, like, basic functionality. They have loads of competing products that they can choose from, Apple Notes, Google Keep, and stuff like that. And so it doesn't look like it's a great arena to fight. You have great competition that's free and that's preinstalled on your device. How can you win that battle? Instead, advanced users, you cannot use Apple Notes if if you're very advanced. If you cannot use Google Keep if you're very advanced. So that's a battle that we can win. So it's very important to realize what arena you choose before you start. It's very much the same for content, by the way. [00:24:04] S1: I mean, you're very kind in saying that you like the show. You know, we very much have this question often of do we go deep for fewer or broad for many? [00:24:12] S2: Mhmm.
00:24:12 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[00:24:12] S2: Mhmm. [00:24:13] S1: And it's very tempting to go broad for many because it's nice and ego flattering in some ways. But actually, we always choose to go deep for fewer, and you get much more product love from a fewer number of people. [00:24:25] S2: Yeah. I I I like to think that Evernote is never going to be as popular as Apple Notes. But at the end of one's life, I think an an Evernote user will remember their experience in Evernote if we've made it delightful enough. And I don't think an Apple Notes user will will care much about it. Not not not because it's a bad product. It's just not as relevant. [00:24:45] S1: Do you compare yourself to others? And how do you advise product leaders to think about competition? [00:24:50] S2: I think you should focus on your customers, to be honest. Unless you're, like, getting started. So you don't have a customer base, and you need to win people's hearts, and you need to win them over. If you're... Already have an existing an existing customer base, I think your number one job is just to make sure that they love being on that on that product. Unless you have some crazy insight for, by doing this, I could 10x my user base. It's very hard. It's very rare. I think you should focus a lot on your customers. [00:25:19] S1: You said, hey. We we get Figma mock ups and then we'll show them to customers. Is the way that you're doing design testing changing in a world of AI? And if so, how?
00:25:19 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:25:19] S1: You said, hey. We we get Figma mock ups and then we'll show them to customers. Is the way that you're doing design testing changing in a world of AI? And if so, how? [00:25:31] S2: When I was working on Evernote, I still am a lot, but but when I was focusing only on Evernote, we didn't have lovable cursor and these tools. And so we were building designs, and we were showing them to people. And we were asking questions like, by looking at this, how would you use it? Now we can build prototypes. And even if they are rough, we can put them in the hands of people, and we can just, like, ask and use it, and and we'll observe. It's kind of different. Like, peep... People tell you that they would do something, and then in reality, when they have a prototype on their computer, they would do something different. So it's it's closer to to the truth. [00:26:10] S1: I'm intrigued. Do you do Figma and Figma make? Do you replace that with a Lovable build? Do you actually just go straight Cursor and Anthropic and Claw code? What does that usage on stack look like? [00:26:23] S2: It depends a lot on the team and the project. Each team decides their own stack, and we don't impose anything. [00:26:30] S1: What do they look like that's different then? If you take one that's, say, Evernote, what is Evernote? And then take a WeTransfer. What is a WeTransfer?