The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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?
00:36:50 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[00:36:50] S2: Yeah. I sit down once a month. I think it's a decent frequency. I think it's enough that people feel like a lot is going on and and not, like, too frequent where you need to be in front of a camera every every day or every week. It should talk about what you're actually doing. One thing that that that we decided early on when when we started doing this is we talk about stuff that either we already shipped or that we are launching right now. We shouldn't talk about plans that we have for the future. Sometime we we break that rule, but it... It's not like reasoning granite. But it's important that you don't just entice people with promises. You just tell people what they can do today with the product so that you build a sense of practicality and trust. And you just tell them, look. Slash comments are available on Evernote today. Just update your app, and you will be able to use it. Here's how it works. The other side is you also need to teach people how to use this stuff. It... It's a complex product. It's it's not a a shallow product by any means. So you need to take a couple minutes to show them if something is very new, here is how it works. So come with me through through the experience. So, yeah, I mean, tell people what you've done. Tell them how it works. Tell them decently frequently, and be upfront about negative stuff as well. [00:38:02] S1: We were talking about kind of the launch itself and lessons from them. What launch was the worst where you expected amazing and it didn't meet expectations? And what did you learn from that?
00:38:02 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:38:02] S1: We were talking about kind of the launch itself and lessons from them. What launch was the worst where you expected amazing and it didn't meet expectations? And what did you learn from that? [00:38:14] S2: It wasn't on Evernote. It's a product that we launched at Bending Spoons that we were really hopeful for. It was called Playyond. It was Apple Arcade before Apple Arcade. It's almost exactly the same product. Right? So a subscription, you can play high quality games as much as you want. You don't need to pay for each individually. You don't need to pay to win. You don't need to unlock in app purchases. You just pay a subscription like Netflix, but for for mobile games. Right? We believe that people would love this, and it failed. We spent, I think, like, 5 or $7,000,000 on on licensing, and and eventually didn't work. [00:38:50] S1: Was it immediately apparent that it wasn't working? And do you think when you have a product that isn't working, you can tell very quickly?