The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:30:12 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[00:30:12] S2: I don't adhere to one of the two schools of thought. I think speed matters when you're trying things and you're trying to find your way and you're you're probing the the area around you, but then it's all about polish when you actually need to build something that that millions of people use. You cannot half ass an experience. [00:30:29] S1: Do you feel that product difference in terms of behavior very much when you are working on a product like Evernote, millions every day, versus a much smaller user base with maybe a less frequent usage? [00:30:42] S2: Well, for sure. You you feel more responsibility. You feel... You also feel like you stand on the shoulder of... Shoulders of giants in in some sense. You know? Like, sometimes I talk to Phil Levin, who was leading Evernote a few years ago, and I don't feel like shipping bad stuff on Evernote just because it's always been such a... An important product and and built in such a caring way that just by comparison, I I don't want to be... I want Bending Spoons to have the name of those who are releasing subpar experiences. I want us to have a good threshold for quality. [00:31:14] S1: So when we have that quality and then we decide launch time. Okay? Gotta release this. What have been your biggest lessons on how to do product launches or feature launch as well?
00:31:24 · Federico Simionato
[00:31:24] S2: When you want to deliver a lot of things to people who need them, I think it's important to show that you are every week delivering useful improvements. So instead of doing a large and fancy launch, you try to do it in a way that feels like, yeah, every week I'm getting something new. You know? It it it really convinces people that you're in for the long run, that you are doing stuff that matters, and especially that even if this week nothing gets built that's specifically useful to me, since I've been here for a while, I know that Evernote updates every week. And so I know that at some point, something will be built that is for me, that I that I need and and I use. Instead, when you want to innovate and you want to to try to, like, do a step change in the way people use the product, then it's important to be very considerate and very clear with communications. So for instance, let's talk about examples. When we build collapsible sections on on Evernote or the slash command menu, these are utility tools that make your product more ergonomic, more polished, more useful. You don't need to be flashy about this. You you don't need to, like, do a huge launch and and to merge them together and to wait six months. You you need them to put them in the hands of customers as soon as possible so that they can start getting utility out of it. Next week, we are announcing Evernote v 11, and it's going to be a significant change compared to what Evernote is today. It's mostly a reflection of all the work that went through in the last three years, but it's also containing three advanced AI features that are not available on Evernote today. And when you do that, it's important instead to, like, kind of make a mess a little bit. Not to necessarily be unpolished, but, like, try to be noisy about it so that as many people as possible see that some drastically new functionality is landing on the product.
00:33:17 · Harry Stebbings
[00:33:17] S1: Totally agree with you there. I love that you say that, hey, it's better to do small weekly improvements communicated well than like, don't hear from us and then a big splash every six months. You do Evernote monthly updates. Can you just talk to me about that, the process of that, what you learn, and how you'd advise other product people from doing that?
00:33:38 · Federico Simionato
[00:33:38] S2: This was born out of necessity. Meaning that when we acquired Evernote, there were a few months in which we made the decision to work very deeply on the technological foundations of of Evernote. Evernote was launched in 2007, I think. So it's it's almost 20 years old. And so it's not full of bad code necessarily, but it's full of old code. And And it's very important that we innovate that and and we make it modern if we want to work on Evernote for the next ten or twenty years. Right? We made the the conscious decision of working on tech foundations. But as we were doing that, we were also communicating the acquisition, and we were raising prices as we were... We discussed earlier. These three things combined for a customer are A lot. A lot to take in. And so I think that we should have instead started allocating some percentage of our time improving the product in very visible ways that basically reassured people, look, we are here for the long run. Yes. We are making drastic changes. Some some of them are uncomfortable right now. We truly believe it's the best outlook in the long run. We need to do them right now, but we are also investing a lot on your user experience. We didn't do it. And so people were were either skeptical. Some were pissed, some were were fine with it, they didn't... They understood. But I started doing monthly updates exactly because we saw that it was important to communicate to people what was changing in the product. Putting a face behind the product, I think, is important. It's not like Bending Spoons as a vague entity that is working on Evernote. It's Federico and and his team who are working on Evernote. What have you
00:35:11 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:35:11] S1: learned from doing those monthly updates, and how would you advise other product owners or or CEOs on doing monthly updates to customers? [00:35:20] S2: I learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly. So when you issue a monthly update full of content that nobody needs, they'll just tell you, this is irrelevant. I don't need this. Why are you working on this? They're very direct in a way that I find motivating, meaning that they're not trying to be kind. They're trying to be truthful. And so they just tell you if you're doing... If you're working on stuff that doesn't matter to them. You can do something very easy. You can you can look at our YouTube videos and look at the comments under the videos and see that when we started, we were learning, and so we didn't get every update right all the time. And people would just tell us, I'm pissed. You raised prices, and now you're bringing this stuff that I don't need. Why? I don't understand. Lately, instead, we've become much better at understanding what people actually need, what they're asking us. And so comments are much more either neutral and like, yeah. Good. Now I need this other thing. Or, yeah. This is finally... I've been waiting for this for years. It's exactly what I needed. Thank you. So it... It's... The learning is if you do the substance right and you communicate it decently, people will tell you. If you don't get the substance right, people will also tell you.
00:36:29 · Harry Stebbings
[00:36:29] S1: People literally, you know, sit down and take notes with these podcasts, which is great, and it's a real compliment to me that we're doing good and valuable things. As granular as possible, how do you record them? How long should they be? Should they include everything or just, like, the big highlight? How transparent should you be? Like, should you really talk about things that are bad? How would you advise me on those?