The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:05:38 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:05:38] S1: And so that's what matters a lot as a PM. We said there about kind of Bending Spoons creating this incredibly coveted brand. Everyone wants to work at Bending Spoons in Italy if you're in tech. What would you advise someone to get ahead to get a job at Bending Spoons? [00:05:53] S2: I think people generally try to follow the steps that are supposed to lend you a job. So, like, you have a great CV, you're very polite and professional, and that's certainly necessary. But I think that few people try to go the extra mile and try to do something surprising, you know, something creative. I I really love when people come up with something new. I think there are great touches that you can invent. I I mean, I just brought a bottle of liquor, and and it worked. I mean, it wasn't the only thing for sure, but I like to think that it helped make an impression. You know? And and I like to think that it was a a touch of something creative that that not everybody think about... Thinks about. [00:06:31] S1: The importance of being surprising is very Yeah. Significant. I I always actually say, like, you wanna be the purple cow, which is Seth Gooden. You know, you drive past a cow, no [00:06:40] S2: one bothers looking, but then you [00:06:41] S1: drive past a purple cow. Wow. That's a big thing.
00:06:41 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:06:41] S1: drive past a purple cow. Wow. That's a big thing. [00:06:43] S2: Yeah. I I think maybe people out of a lack of confidence, they believe I I I need to look like I'm standard. You know, like, I need to look like I'm... I don't have any rough edge. And I would I would say, try to show your rough edges a bit and and try try to show off a few of your characteristics. [00:07:01] S1: Has what it takes to be good at product changed over the last seven or eight years? [00:07:06] S2: I think that the underlying principle is the same. You have to find out what matters, and you have to make it good. The way you do that evolves in time. I think I think with AI, you can build prototypes faster. And so that allows you to test easily, which is something you couldn't do in the past. But the underlying principle of you need to focus on what matters is still very true today. [00:07:31] S1: I I had this wonderful schedule, and I'm just kinda blowing it up. No. We're Sorry. As I said to you, I like real conversations. I do wanna go through that, but kind of start at the beginning before that testing element, which starts with an idea. How do you determine which ideas to take and run with versus which to discard within Bending Spoons?
00:07:31 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:07:31] S1: I I had this wonderful schedule, and I'm just kinda blowing it up. No. We're Sorry. As I said to you, I like real conversations. I do wanna go through that, but kind of start at the beginning before that testing element, which starts with an idea. How do you determine which ideas to take and run with versus which to discard within Bending Spoons? [00:07:51] S2: Two ways. We try to find the best ideas by, one, analyzing the top line. So how valuable is this idea? How much revenue is it gonna bring? How many more customers is it gonna bring? And we try to be very qualitative about it. Is it a step change compared to the previous way you do things? And these things are generally an alternative because you cannot analyze how much of a step change it is if you don't have a prototype. So for instance, on Evernote, I think building things that are useful is the most important thing, but you can never quantify useful. It's very hard to say this feature is more useful than the other. So generally, way we try to do it is we see how many people might need it. [00:08:34] S1: Surely, can quantify useful. Useful might be DAU over MAU as a metric. [00:08:40] S2: But you can't do it in beforehand. You you can do it before you release it. You can estimate how many people are going to use a specific thing that you're building, and that is a good proxy for it, but you are not sure. [00:08:50] S1: Could you not look at comparables in other products, look at the metrics they have, and then take a bet from there?
00:08:57 · Federico Simionato
[00:08:57] S2: Yes. Yes. That's the way we try to do it. I'm just saying that sometimes it's more of a estimate game and a gut feeling like I think this is going to be more useful. I think that this feature looks a lot like this other feature that we've built, and so it's it's going to be equally successful. But it's... There's still an element of uncertainty. Some other times, you have literally a business case built for a feature. For instance, on WeTransfer, we built a feature that allows you to recover expired transfers, which wasn't available before. We noticed that many people were hitting this page where basically would tell you the transfer is... Has expired. You cannot download anymore because, of course, if we had to keep old transfers forever, it would just make costs skyrocket, and so it's not feasible. And so we thought, well, but if we only allow paying customers to download files after they are expired, then we increase the number of paying customers and we just benefit from it, and so we can afford to keep the files in storage for longer. Right? And so we were able to model this very accurately in numbers. Like, we had a spreadsheet with couple different scenarios, and we saw what the impact of this feature could be based on how many people were hitting that page daily, the the page of expiration. Right? So when you build instead an exploratory AI feature on Evernote, you don't have a business case because you don't know how many people will use it. You you can guess, but it's different.
00:10:20 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:10:20] S1: You said there about modeling what it could be, outcome scenario planning. What have you most mismodeled in the downside or the upside? [00:10:28] S2: Well, I think when you try to launch something new, you always want to look like you're being analytical. And so you try to make it look like, yeah, I've built a business case for this. And there is a scenario in which it it works, but then when you launch this kind of projects that are like greenfield, they they rarely work. And so it's kind of hard because, yeah, I saw a scenario where it could work, but it it didn't. So for instance, we tried to launch during COVID. I had a small team, we were trying to launch a fitness product for people that were training at home. And we were like, yeah, let's build a business case for it. And the business case was good, but then, of course, you just have to look at the reality of do people actually want to use this product? They wanted, but it was very hard to convince [00:11:18] S1: Why did you decide that was a good idea? Just out of interest, like fitness products, there's so many kind of freemium where you then hit a hard paywall, such a saturated market. Why why did you decide that was a good idea?
00:11:29 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[00:11:29] S2: Yeah. A few years ago, one of our biggest apps was called thirty Day Fitness. It... It's still there. It it still works. It's still a very good business, but at the time, it was one of our biggest apps. And one of the things that we noticed is that thirty Day Fitness is a good product because people want it, but it's not it's not great at retaining people. Meaning that after a while, people lose the motivation that they need to show up every day. You know? When you're training, it's it's hard to every day remake the decision of I'll I'll work out today. And so we wanted to solve this. And we were like, can we find a way to get people to be motivated? And the best way to do it is if you have a personal trainer. Right? But a personal trainer is expensive. And so we thought, we make having a personal trainer inexpensive? And since during COVID, people were used to doing things on Zoom or on video calls, we were like, yeah. Let's put a few people in a WhatsApp group and have a personal trainer that is paid by all of them so that they just need to pay one twentieth of a personal trainer. But the personal trainer is in charge of keeping each of them accountable. The idea is good, but it turns out that it's not enough. You you need somebody who calls you out directly. Like, Harry, you're not working out today. Why why are you not here today? [00:12:42] S1: Thirty day fitness, you mentioned that, still being like a a business. How much of a money does a business like that make years afterwards?