Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:12:48 · Roman Ugarte
[00:12:48] S0: So when we rolled out Grok Bot internally, there was about a week or two where the common pattern of the way people would interact with the product was you would have five to 10 bots and each bot you would give a different scope, a different domain, and it was kind of shorthand for different lanes of work. And then at around the end of week two, we started to see these messages internally in Slack of people promoting one of their bots who is a bit of a standout performer, and it was like their kind of primary personal assistant promoting that to their chief of staff. And then they would actually mostly talk to their chief of staff and the chief of staff would fan out all of these tasks to the other bots and would kind of manage the team. And there are some funny screenshots of people actually telling the bot they're promoting that they're promoted and the bot is asking if they get a raise and is their token budget higher, all of these things. And we kind of took note of that and I think more of the companies started to slightly shift in that direction, but it was not the majority of the company. People use this product in very different ways. And so in some of the onboarding sessions and just from the early access program in general, we really did not want to lead the witness and say, create a chief of staff bot, here's exactly the way that that chief of staff should manage all of the other bots and see if early access users would get there themselves. And we actually did see that many of them did. And so then we had a bit more of an opinionated take in the product of this feels like a pattern that's working, this feels like a pattern that we should slightly encourage, but it shouldn't be a one-way door. And there were a few other examples of internal thesis that we really wanted to make sure would bear out in actual external usage without us imposing that in the product.
00:14:30 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:14:30] S1: Is there anything else there? Any examples come to mind?
00:14:32 · Roman Ugarte
[00:14:32] S0: Yeah, I think another thing we really tried to pay attention to in the early onboardings was just how much users wanted to see. And I think it is something a bit shocking or just different about Grok Bot when you first start using it versus some of the other products that you mentioned, where a lot of the internal mechanics of how Grok Bot works are not shown to the user. And the reason for that is we think as these models get smarter, the same way that your teammate, you wouldn't ask for second by second updates of exactly all the buttons they're pressing and websites they're going to. I think it's too much to ask your bots to do that too. And I think it's honestly just overwhelming and can create more harm than good. And so we moved completely in the other direction of you send a message, you tell your bot to do something, it just starts doing it. It sends you progressive updates as it sees fit, and you just see that typing indicator in the little green active circle kind of Slack-like that it's active, it's doing work, it'll get back to you soon. But you don't see the internal mechanics, you don't see the tool calls, you don't see exactly every little click it's making on its own computer. And we really wanted to take a strong stance that users did not need to see all of those mechanics, and so that's where we started. And we did get some feedback that's like, I would love to see my bot's to-do list. I would love to see roughly how it's prioritizing tasks and what it's doing. And that's great feedback, but it was useful to hear that nobody wanted the long stream of just text streaming out and chain of though sequences. So that also gave us more confirmation that that was the right direction.
00:16:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:17] S1: The fact that you did two to 300 onboarding calls with a small team, I know the team grew over time, but just that is a huge time commitment and you could argue a distraction from the building, clearly not a distraction, clearly a core part of the success. Do you feel like that's the volume people need to do to figure out what actually needs to happen?
00:16:41 · Roman Ugarte
[00:16:41] S0: Well, one thing to emphasize is the early access group is not necessarily just people that are highly influential taste makers.You're in this category, Lenny, and we certainly wanted to get a lot of your feedback just from being very close to many other products on the market and just being a power user of these things. But we also wanted to get early access to more unconventional profiles that we as a company had never really interacted with. So one example is there's a coffee shop owner that was a friend of a friend through the company who had heard about Grok Bot, and one day somebody on the core team had shown them a demo of the test flight and got very excited. And this coffee shop owner ended up being not only amazingly an amazing power user of Grok Bot, but also a rich source of feedback for us. We have a very lively thread with many, many bugs that get identified or feature requests, and it's a completely different use case of running a small business. And so for example, if the Shopify integration was a bit flaky or if it wasn't writing copy for products in a particular way, we would get really rich feedback on that, which is pretty different from the type of feedback we'd get from dog feeding this internally. And so I think it was an important exercise for us to check our blind spots and say, A, this is going to be a very general product that is not just a thing that developers use. In fact, it is likely that this is most powerful for non-developers. We need to understand that group much better. And then B, is we absolutely live in this kind of Silicon Valley AI bubble, which I think is a useful place to be to kind of push the frontier and push the future of how these products are evolving. But we need to actively get out of that because I think a product like this has the chance of really being the way that the mainstream user and the mainstream business customer can interact with AI in a way that's useful.
00:18:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Roman Ugarte
[00:18:41] S1: Let's go back to the timelines real quick just to kind of understand that. So it was a month from first line of code to internal beta, and then what happened after that? [00:18:50] S0: It was about three weeks from internal beta to public launch, and then I think we're about three weeks out from public launch as of recording this. [00:19:00] S1: Wow. Okay. So a month of building the first thing, three weeks only of iterating, and then it's been only three weeks since launch. It feels like it's changed the world from my vantage point. So wow, okay. What most changed in those, I don't know, in those three weeks of internal beta, let's say?